ANDREW COLE Literature and Heresy in the Age of Chaucer

Abstract

Andrew Cole's Literacy and Heresy in the Age of Chaucer is an important contribution to the vigorous reassessment of orthodoxy and its relation to heterodoxy that has been going on for the past decade or more. Cole explores the profound effect of Wycliffism on English literary history as evinced not in the writings of the overtly heterodox, but principally in the writings of the orthodox—Geoffrey Chaucer, William Langland, Thomas Hoccleve, John Lydgate and Margery Kempe. ‘Wycliffism’, he claims, ‘in its own right and by its influences, is one of the central forces that shaped English literary history’ (p. xiii). That Wycliffism should have such an influence, Cole argues, owes everything to the anti-heretical crusaders of the late fourteenth century. Archbishop William Courtenay deliberately misconstrued Wycliffism not as a strain of thought among Oxford theologians but as a broad-based heresy whose preachers were ‘spreading doctrinal depravities’ throughout the land (p. 6), thereby seeking, Cole hypothesizes, to bring it under his own jurisdiction and thus make it easier to suppress. At the 1382 Blackfriars Council, Courtenay and his episcopal colleagues succeeded in making Wycliffism ‘infamous’ and in generating ‘cultural hysteria about the ubiquity of heresy and the multitude of heretics doing illicit things anywhere and everywhere’ (p. 20). But they failed to channel that hysteria into an effective programme of control. Quite the contrary: ‘Manufacturing and ballooning evidence that [Wycliffism] existed outside the university led to the exodus of Wycliffites from the university and into the broader realm’ (p. 19). Instead of squelching Wycliffism, Courtenay and his cohorts made it ‘an item of great and lasting interest’ (p. xvi).