Rethinking the Lollardy of the Lucidarie

Abstract

In the course of the ongoing enquiry into the nature of Lollardy and the relationship between orthodox and heterodox thought in late medieval England, the accuracy of the designation ‘Lollard’ as a descriptor of various texts, many of them revisions of existing works, has been called into serious doubt. This is partly, and increasingly, a result of unease with use of the term ‘Lollard’ as a synonym for ‘Wycliffite'. As Andrew Cole has recently observed, contemporary usagesuggests that ‘Lollard’ was a multilayered and contested term describing “complex, contradictory” but not necessarily Wycliffite “identities.” Even if a connection between Wycliffite thought and Lollard identity is assumed (as it is in the work of scholars like Anne Hudson, Fiona Somerset, and Andrew Larsen ) and a Lollard is defined as one who holds “a significant number of beliefs associated with John Wyclif and his identifiable followers,” the assumed Lollardidentity of certain texts needs to be reassessed when core Wycliffite beliefs turn out to be absent or when the text contains teachings that contradict these beliefs. As Hudson points out in her 1985 article on the so-called Lollard revision of the Lay Folks’ Catechism, the Lollard appellation can be nothing more than a critical commonplace" which does not stand up to careful scrutiny of the evidence. The editors of the Lollard Lay Folks' Catechism ascribed the text to Wyclif himself because of the presence of Wycliffite ideas and the text’s connections with other works assumed to be by the reformer; the connection to Wyclif was later rejected, but the Lollard association remained, despite the fact that aspects of the text are clearly incongruent with Lollard beliefs. As Hudson shows, the text is theologically far too inconsistent (indeed, confused) to be categorized as Lollard, and the designation is therefore a “simplification.” This tendency to gloss over variations in late medieval belief by labelling all religious texts either orthodox or Lollard is, Larsen argues, a consequence of the myth, pervading “English historiography” for much of the last two centuries, that Lollardy was the only heresy in late medieval England. Larsen’s brief survey of examples of non-Lollard heresy in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and Kathryn Kerby-Fulton’s careful documentation of many more in her Books under Suspicion indicate a variety of “radicalisms” in Ricardian and Lancastrian England, rendering any neat distinction between Lollard and orthodox inadequate. Trial testimonies, written texts, and anecdotal reports reveal a broad spectrum of religious opinion, some of it idiosyncratic and much of it potentially shaped by several different ideologies. The mixture of orthodox and heterodox material found in many texts and manuscript collections can be “regarded as a barometer of the cultural context that [they] existed to serve.” The doctrinal flexibility of these works suggests that the boundaries between heterodoxy and orthodoxy had yet to be tightly drawn and points to the complexity of religious belief in the later Middle Ages. An increasing awareness of this complexity is changing the way in which scholars of late medieval literature are responding to heterodox material in religious texts and is prompting a reassessment of the texts’ connections with Lollardy. Removing the Lollard label from works where it is not only inadequate but actually incorrect allows for both a more accurate understanding of religious writing and a clearer understanding of the Lollard movement.