Wycliffite Controversies, ed. Mishtooni Bose and J. Patrick Hornbeck II

Abstract

This collection of articles owes its existence to a conference held in Oxford in 2008 on ‘Lollard Affiliations: Historical, Literary, Theological’. As the theme of the conference would suggest, this has produced a multidisciplinary volume which explores a variety of subjects within the broad field of Wycliffite and lollard studies. Many of the leading lights in the study of Wyclif, Wycliffism, and lollardy have contributed articles (16 in all), and Fiona Somerset concludes affairs with a challenging afterword that throws down the gauntlet for several new lines of enquiry. Controversy is certainly at the heart of this volume. As the editors, Mishtooni Bose and Patrick Hornbeck, note, nomenclature is perhaps the most obvious initial point of divergence, with idiosyncratic authorial preferences for ‘lollard’, ‘Lollard’, ‘Wycliffite’, ‘dissenter’, and ‘heretic’; likewise, the distinction between ‘orthodoxy’ and ‘heresy’ remains problematic, both helped and hindered by Anne Hudson’s identification of a ‘grey area’ between the two. The lack of terminological consensus reflects the persisting difficulties of defining what exactly Wycliffism or lollardy were. (By favouring the lower-case ‘lollardy’, this reviewer is apparently revealing his opinion that ‘religious as well as social distances’ separated non-conformist individuals [p. 2].) Kantik Ghosh provides a characteristically elegant definition, which is worth quoting in full: ‘By “Wycliffism” I mean that body of thought and writing clearly identifiable as related to the ideas of John Wyclif, which are themselves of great, and developing, complexity and amplitude; by “Lollardy” (or “lollardy”) is indicated that more nebulous domain of religious nonconformism, whether in ideology or practice, with varying degrees of affinity to Wyclif’ (p. 13, n. 1). This is probably as close to a working definition as one could hope for, but Ghosh cautions that the value of such a distinction between Wycliffism and lollardy is in its utility as a conceptual tool rather than its reality. Indeed, the increasing awareness that there may be a conflict between heuristic scholarly devices, on the one hand, and the reality of Wycliffite and lollard experiences, on the other, is a faint but perceptible anxiety running through many of the articles. With a field of study based to a considerable extent on polemical works written by ‘the enemy’—episcopal trial records, for example—scholars of Wycliffism and lollardy are sensitive to the possibility that what traditionally have been posed as the concerns of dissenters were, rather, the concerns of their persecutors. Rob Lutton’s ambitious interdisciplinary article, ‘Lollardy, Orthodoxy, and Cognitive Psychology’, highlights just such issues. Applying a theoretical model for the psychological interpretation of religion developed by the anthropologist Harvey Whitehouse, Lutton argues that the thrill-seeking element of dissent—reading prohibited books, critiquing orthodox practice, belonging to a select and secretive community—possessed a powerful attraction. This may have been equally, if not more, attractive than any specific Wycliffite or lollard doctrine (eucharistic, anti-clerical, or otherwise) regardless of what trial records claim to be the key concerns of dissenting individuals or groups.