Introduction: Gnosticism and Late-Medieval Literature

Abstract

This study explores the question of whether and how elements and residues of what I call “the gnostic paradigm” appear in key English literary works of the late Middle Ages; it also tries to show the importance of such an exploration for understanding how these well-known literary expressions of Christianity are in part driven and complicated by these gnostic features. In certain ways this is an unexpected premise. Gnosticism was an ancient religion stressing the special status of the illuminated few and the basic corruption of the material world that was crushed by those early orthodox Fathers who, like its major antagonist Augustine,1 supplanted its terms with a theology in which materiality is ultimately from God and a sense of a “universal” (literally, Catholic) church in which salvation was not necessarily the measure of special illumination but unknown divine grace after death.2 By the later fourteenth century, Gnosticism and its influences seem to have dispersed almost completely, at least on the surface. Certainly the late-medieval church was vigorous in its efforts to teach orthodoxy to the laity.3 Yet a sense of simmering continuation, and outright reemergence, has figured in a number of studies of late-medieval literature.4 These studies have produced important results in how medievalists appreciate the religious outlook and the cultural interconnections of the period.