Royal Patronage and Anti-Papalism from Ockham to Wyclif

Abstract

Oxford scholarship in the fourteenth century, focusing on Ockham and Wyclif, is a topic which might have been ideally chosen to appeal to the late and much lamented Beryl Smalley and, had she lived to participate in the Oxford Conference proceedings, it is hard to imagine that this would not have been in a very real sense her conference. Regretfully however, it had to become the occasion for the publication of her volume of memorial essays, to which the present collection must appear in some sense as a sequel. I hope that the following pages can be seen as my own personal tribute to a great scholar who, unlikely as it may seem, I was privileged for a quarter of a century to be able to regard as a friend and correspondent. Her immediate and instinctive kindness to a very awkward young student is something to be remembered with very warm personal gratitude. I had been working on the publicists of the first half of the fourteenth century, and had been inclined to draw a line after Ockham: she encouraged me to continue into the later part of the century and attempt to deal with Wyclif. He became a common bond between us, despite the great differences in our particular interests, attitudes and approach. She would occasionally remind me that someone whose working life was spent in Cambridge and London had no business to be dealing with Oxford scholarship and had little hope of understanding it properly. This is, of course, very true. Oxford philosophy tended to be Aristotelian and nominalistic: its theology, we are told, neoplatonic, Augustinian, realist. Yet when they left Oxford to find positions at the royal and papal courts, the Aristotelian nominalists might end up as exponents of papal supremacy, whereas it was the allegedly Augustinian realists who are to be found maintaining the rights of the crown. It is all very mysterious, very Oxford, and I shall not attempt to solve these problems here. Instead, I shall turn to the safer prospect of comparing and contrasting an aspect of the political theory of the more mature Ockham and the not so young Wyclif.