Reginald Pecock and the Religious Education of the Laity in Fifteenth-Century England

Abstract

Reginald Pecock and the Religious Education of the Laity in Fifteenth-Century England Kirsty Campbell In late medieval England, the production of religious literature in the vernacular constitutes a massive transfer of clergie—of knowledge and learning—from the clergy to the laity. Vincent Gillespie writes, “the fifteenth century witnessed an extensive and consistent process of assimilation by the laity of techniques and materials of spiritual advancement, which had historically been the preserve of the clerical and monastic orders.”1 Over 250 copies of the Wycliffite Bible, mostly in fragments, are produced during this period. This is a time when, as Sarah Beckwith notes, “the mechanisms for the transmission of ‘theology’ were expanding, and conventionally theological questions, or questions hitherto restricted to a clerical milieu, were being disseminated beyond the clergy in the vernacular, and hence understood and received in different ways.”2 The significance and the extent of this transmission of religious culture are witnessed by the term vernacular theology, used by Nicholas Watson to characterize ambitious works like Piers Plowman, which grapple with complicated questions about salvation, divine justice, and divine mercy in a language that was accessible to lay readers.3 [End Page 48] Works of religious instruction, like manuals of pastoral theology, commentaries on the Decalogue, the deadly sins, and the Pater Noster, and other didactic compilations form a large part of these “materials of spiritual advancement” that moved freely between clergy and laity in the fifteenth century. Scholars such as Vincent Gillespie argue that these kinds of works—particularly pastoral handbooks and manuals like John Mirk’s Instructions for Parish Priests, and the Speculum Christiani, a work that “enjoyed enormous popularity in the fifteenth century”— provide us with an important source of information about the religious education of the laity in late medieval England.4 Indeed, Gillespie suggests that though “there has been an understandable tendency to concentrate on the pulpit as the cornerstone of the didactic edifice,” it is just as important to pay attention to the “developing lay taste for manuals” of religious instruction and to the “increasingly varied demands made upon their resources.”5 Alexandra Barratt concurs that much more work can be done (particularly on questions of audience, purposes, and uses) on didactic poems and prose works that “in their various ways, cover— fully or partly—the official teaching curriculum for the laity of the medieval Church,” which included the Lord’s Prayer and Creed, the fourteen articles of faith, the Decalogue, the two evangelical commandments, the seven works of mercy, the deadly sins, the principal virtues, and the sacraments.6 In his study of medieval education, Nicholas Orme has suggested that religious instruction in the late Middle Ages was imparted through the religious and moral literature that “gave knowledge of God, narrated Christian history, taught virtues, and censored sins,” as well as through sermons and any other public opportunity at which the priest gave public instruction, and through the informal education of young children in the principles of morality and the basic Christian prayers and precepts.7 Didactic works that modeled themselves in various ways on the “standard instructional programme” of the Church helped readers—both clerical and lay—to learn and memorize basic [End Page 49] doctrine, perhaps providing a resource for teaching others as well as a tool for private meditation.8 The writings of Reginald Pecock are an important part of this picture, because he made it his task to expand mechanisms for the transmission of theology to the laity by writing books of religious instruction and by devising innovative plans for lay education. Indeed, what is extraordinary about Pecock’s involvement in the transmission of religious culture to a lay milieu is both his participation in this transmission—i.e., the production of sophisticated, challenging religious writings in the vernacular—and his ideas about the need for this transmission to be more regulated, systematic, and universal. In short, Pecock envisioned the religious education of the lay members of the Christian community in ways that had never been imagined before. In this article, I examine this vision of Christian pedagogy; elsewhere, I investigate the tools— Pecock’s books—and what they can tell us about Pecock’s...