Books under Suspicion: Censorship and Tolerance of Revelatory Writing in Late Medieval England. Comment: English Exceptionalism Reconsidered

Abstract

During my graduate days, I remember asking my thesis supervisor, the late Michael Sheehan, about the activity of the heretical inquisition in England. He was clearly taken aback, instantly responding that there was no was such activity. The sole exception was the Templar arrests, clearly ensuing from a Continental swell so vast that it could not but fail to trouble the waters of even that serene island. I felt duly chastised. Now, however, anyone who has read Kathryn Kerby-Fulton’s groundbreaking Books under Suspicion would have to acknowledge that my question was dismissed too quickly. But lest historiographical hindsight knock too loudly, I hasten to add that Father Sheehan was simply enunciating the reflexive but seemingly impeccable and, until now, virtually unchallenged orthodoxy of late medieval historians. The vigilance of England’s monarchy and the competence of its episcopacy not only kept the heretics out but saw to it that England was spared the kind of heretical and mystical excesses that had been destabilizing the Continent for centuries. This is why the “sudden” appearance of Lollardy, England’s only homegrown heresy, took everyone by surprise. Moreover, I was inclined to accept this answer uncritically because it corroborated everything that I knew and had internalized about the British Isles, generally, and England in particular. These different “doxies” are as familiar and wellfingered as the beads of a rosary. First, the Irish “saved” Western civilization with their pure Latin, beautiful manuscripts, and introduction of word separation (thank God), all in blessed readiness for their eventual conversion of Scotland and Northumbria and the subsequent reformation of the hopelessly corrupt Continental church. English monasticism would, in turn, offer up Bede, who stood head and shoulders above the other plodding historians of barbarian nations. It furnished Boniface, that timely papal legate who, lucky for the Carolingian wannabes, was in the right place at the right time to anoint Pepin. Then there was Alcuin, the intellectual motor behind the Carolingian renaissance. England, first in the development of an estimable vernacular literature, produced Alfred, a king remarkable enough to foster English precocity in his own renaissance, despite the unfavorable climate of Viking (read Continental) madness—until English letters were eventually snuffed out by more Continental interference in the form of the Norman Conquest. (And Alfred was undoubtedly more learned than Charlemagne!) Yet once planted on sane English soil, these Continental marauders did quite well: they introduced a singularly rational form of feudalism buttressed by a common law “with legs,” managed to keep out the Cathars, and still had time to take over much of the Continent. Even a rotten king like John proved but a fortunate fall. The disaster at Bouvines eventuated in Magna Carta, Europe’s first charter of rights, in addition to providing France with its first taste of a decently run bu-