Books under Suspicion: Censorship and Tolerance of Revelatory Writing in Late Medieval England. Response: Books under Suspicion and Beyond

Abstract

Books under Suspicion, as the full title of my book announces, is about the reception of revelatory writing, that is, writing that lays claim to revealed origin. Revelatory writing comes in myriad genres (listed on 20–29), ranging from literature through theology, and it has provoked a spectrum of attitudes from tolerance to anathema, plus a full range of censorship types (15–20, 205). Since Wycliffism did not much foster revelatory genres, apart from the evidence of two early maverick writers, my aim was to get at questions of pluralism and non-Wycliffite dissent in late medieval England, a subject hitherto not really studied. I am honored that the historians assembled in this panel took the time and trouble to read a book that is not short and particularly that they welcomed it as new intellectual history. I am also a tad relieved that not one of the four respondents has added unnoticed information to the sources I knew. They have, however, set the material in exciting new contexts: in relation to earlier medieval English history (Elliott), to Europe (Arnold and Elliott), and to Reformation England (Lucas). Anne Hudson offers a selective reading of some sections on Wycliffism, mainly raising small queries, though I had hoped, with her participation, to have Wycliffism emerge as the fourth large context. None of these queries touches the book’s main arguments, however, and overall I am grateful for the enthusiasm with which those arguments were received. My goal here is both to review the larger points in the responses briefly and, more important, to offer some new directions and material for future research on non-Wycliffite censorship issues in England. Writing history involving literary sources is not easy (I particularly admire Lucas’s agility in this regard), and I am especially grateful to Elliott for her generous comments on literary and historical dexterity—dual magistrationes she herself commands. As a lifelong inmate of English departments, I am humbled, and most especially by Arnold’s comparison of Books under Suspicion to Robert Brentano’s Two Churches. If so, it rests only dwarflike on the shoulders of that gentle giant. But like Brentano, I have tried to do something here that has not been done before; I have tried to survey (because one volume would be inadequate to fully study) how revelatory writing was received in late medieval England and how it might have influenced our poets—two different topics that sometimes overlap and very often do not. The question of the elusive relationship between self-censorship and poetic revision raised by Hudson, I did actually take up at length in the Introduction, noting that self-censorship is only one possible reason that poets revised their work or used dream vision to disguise it (I list six reasons in total, among which escaping censorship is only the last [21]). Central to the book is the challenge to the “doxy” that, as Elliott amusingly puts it, could “allow reform thinking of whatever persuasion to share center stage with dear old Wycliffe” (754). Wyclif was not even first; not even Father Sheehan’s English Templars were the first. But, as I am very careful to say in the Introduction,