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

Abstract

Kathryn Kerby-Fulton has written a challenging study—one that seems likely to provoke further research and discussion. The core term in her investigation is “censorship.” This, especially as it has come to be used in contemporary historical and literary criticism, is a capacious and somewhat slippery term. In reference to an age of manuscript circulation rather than print, it is used in a variety of ways that arguably could helpfully be differentiated. This claim is illustrated by some specific examples: when, during the investigations against sympathizers of the heretic John Wyclif (d. 1384), Archbishop Chichele’s officials in 1415 ordered the scrutiny of books owned by the Londoner John Claydon, a list of seventeen reprobated opinions was compiled from Claydon’s copy of The Lanterne of Light. Following Claydon’s affirmation that he agreed with these opinions, and his admission that he had abjured heresy once before, he was condemned, and he and the book were consigned to the fire. The case is well documented, and here censorship cannot be doubted: the ecclesiastical and civil processes of inquisition and execution are plainly located, and the copy, along with its owner (who had commissioned and paid for it), was destroyed in pursuance of those authorities’ edict. The authorities were only sporadically effective: two other copies of the work survive, though from these it is possible to verify all but one of the seventeen opinions. It is interesting to set alongside this a couple of cases discussed by KerbyFulton (Claydon is only mentioned, perhaps inappropriately, in the prefatory “Chronology of Non-Wycliffite Cases of Heresy and Related Events”). A notebook put together by Peter Partridge and mostly in his hand begins with a list of its contents; among these contents are “Epistole multe Iohannis Wytcliff,” but at the point where, according to that list, these should occur, two leaves have been cut out. But when? By whom? And why? Kerby-Fulton (175–80) assumes that their inclusion dates to Partridge’s early academic career, when, as other evidence suggests, he was not entirely hostile to Wyclif, and that the excision reflects Partridge’s later apprehension that it was imprudent for one who was rising in the established ecclesiastical hierarchy to be associated with such material; to her this is equally censorship, albeit self-censorship. This provides answers to my three questions, but only by hypothesis. A number of alternative answers could be formulated—at an extreme is the possibility that a sixteenthor seventeenth-century Protestant antiquarian extracted the leaves as a memorial to an admired predecessor. The other case concerns two poems, one English, the other Latin (this is also included in Digby 98), that have been roughly crossed through, leaving the texts legible. Kerby-Fulton (162–64) again sees this as censorship, though she explains the continuing legibility as a deliberate ploy to allow for the apprehension