Tolerance Of Revelatory Writing Research Articles

:Books under Suspicion: Censorship and Tolerance of Revelatory Writing in Late Medieval England

:<i>Books under Suspicion: Censorship and Tolerance of Revelatory Writing in Late Medieval England</i>

Kathryn Kerby-Fulton. Books Under Suspicion: Censorship and Tolerance of Revelatory Writing in Late Medieval England. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006.

Kathryn Kerby-Fulton. Books Under Suspicion: Censorship and Tolerance of Revelatory Writing in Late Medieval England. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006.

Book under Suspicion. Censorship and Tolerance of Revelatory Writing in Late Medieval England. By Kathryn Kerby-Fulton

Book under Suspicion. Censorship and Tolerance of Revelatory Writing in Late Medieval England. By Kathryn Kerby-Fulton

Books Under Suspicion: Censorship and Tolerance of Revelatory Writing in Late Medieval England (review)

Kerby-Fulton, Kathryn. 2006. Books Under Suspicion: Censorship and Tolerance of Revelatory Writing in Late Medieval England. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. $50.00 hc. iii + 562 pp.Kathryn Kerby-Fulton's latest book will rapidly become essential reading for scholars of medieval literature. In her study of reception history of various prophetic and visionary writings, she has provided thoroughly revisionist account of theological politics in England in late medieval period. The generation of scholars since Anne Hudson's TTie Premature Reformation (1988) have largely come to imagine an insular English church, largely untroubled by continental heresies, but which faced solitary challenge to orthodoxy in last decades of fourteenth century with rise to prominence of Oxford theologian John Wyclif and his followers, Lollards. With their calls for disendowment and for lay access to translated Bible, and their questioning of fundamental theologies such as transubstantiation, Wycliffites, in Hudson's parlance, represented the English heresy. In Books Under Suspicion, traditional binary of proto-Protestant Wycliffite heresy josding with institutional Orthodoxy is replaced by much more rich, colorful and complex English theologico-political landscape. In study that largely focuses on English reception of writings between reigns of Edward III and Henry IV, Kerby-Fulton argues persuasively that idea of an insular England untroubled by, and largely unaware of continental heresy and speculative theology is untenable. This is an England that is acutely aware of Papal inquisition and academic controversy concerning alternative revelatory-inspired salvational doctrine, an England that-depending on readership-simultaneously appropriates, repurposes, tolerates or nervously censors suspect theologies and revelatory writings. Knowledge of such theological controversies, Kerby-Fulton tells us, is an essential, yet largely untapped means for contextualizing writings of authors including William Langland, Geoffrey Chaucer, Margery Kempe, and Julian of Norwich.The study opens with chronology of what Kerby-Fulton terms NonWycliffite cases of heresy and related events, which serves to demonstrate plethora of competing theologies, eschatologies, and divisive sectarianisms that have been too often ignored by scholars of religious literature. It is interesting, however, and perhaps to detriment of this chronology, that it does not integrate Wycliffite and non-Wycliffite cases in order that relative weight of ecclesiastical concern with various brands of heresy might be gauged. Obviously it raises suspicion that in Ricardian and Lancastrian England, cases of non-Wycliffite heresy might be buried amongst disproportionately represented cases of suspected Lollardy. Nevertheless, chronology, as microcosm for entire book, allows reader to develop a more pluralist view of unorthodoxy (396).Once again Kerby-Fulton has provided research of utmost interest to scholars of Piers Plowman, text most regularly contextualized against social and political turmoil that followed Black Death, which would eventually result in cataclysm of 1381 Peasants' Revolt. Books Under Suspicion offers reader three fascinating case studies that introduce us to refreshingly diverse spectrum of politically motivated readers of Piers Plowman. Other than Langland's appropriation by various readerships, salvational and revelatory theologies are juxtaposed with Langland's own frequent slippages into pseudo-prophecy. Kerby-Fulton addresses author's (and his presumed coterie's) own negotiations with suspect eschatology and salvational doctrine in his attempts to respond to horrific severity of predestinar ianism (344). …

Books under Suspicion: Censorship and Tolerance of Revelatory Writing in Late Medieval England. Kathryn Kerby‐Fulton. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006. Pp. viii+562.

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewBooks under Suspicion: Censorship and Tolerance of Revelatory Writing in Late Medieval England. Kathryn Kerby‐Fulton. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006. Pp. viii+562.Paul StrohmPaul StrohmColumbia University Search for more articles by this author Columbia UniversityPDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 106, Number 1August 2008 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/597236 Views: 7Total views on this site © 2009 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Books Under Suspicion: Censorship and Tolerance of Revelatory Writing in Late Medieval England

Books Under Suspicion: Censorship and Tolerance of Revelatory Writing in Late Medieval England

Books under Suspicion: Censorship and Tolerance of Revelatory Writing in Late Medieval England (review)

Books under Suspicion: Censorship and Tolerance of Revelatory Writing in Late Medieval England. By Kathryn Kerby-Fulton. (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press. 2006. Pp. lii, 562. $50.00.) Kathryn Kerby-Fulton's Books under Suspicion is among the major books of the decade in medieval English studies. In this monumental volume on academic freedom and its discontents, Kerby-Fulton has given us nothing less than a new intellectual history of theological pluralism, dissent, and the limits of tolerance in the late Middle Ages. Challenging received wisdom, she shows that medieval England was not nearly so insular as scholars have supposed. While exquisitely attuned to the rise of Wycliffite heresy, medievalists tend to write as if unruffled orthodoxy prevailed until 1381, treating the English intellectual scene as exempt from such Continental currents as Joachimite apocalypticism, Free Spirit heresy, intra-Franciscan quarrels, the beatific-vision controversy, and even schism politics. Against the grain, Books under Suspicion speculates richly as to how all of these influenced the writings of Chaucer, Margery Kempe, Julian of Norwich, and above all, Langland: Piers Plowman scholars will find lush grazing for their oxen. What is incontestable, however, is the new evidence Kerby-Fulton provides to revitalize turf one might have thought worked to exhaustion. Since England had no papal inquisitors and no orchestrated royal campaign against heresy before Henry IV's assault on the Lollards, it is understandable that the Orthodox/Lollard binary has dominated English studies for the last generation. But England's decentralized approach to the repression of heresy does not imply the absence of either heresy or repression. Drawing on bishops' registers, university records, patent rolls, and other sources, Kerby-Fulton prefaces her work with a thirty-three-page chronology of non-Wycliffite cases of heresy and related events in England and Ireland from 1161 to 1457, although the bulk of her analysis focuses on the fraught decades of the 1380s and '90s. The work ends with an index of no fewer than 119 manuscripts consulted-many containing texts by Joachim of Fiore, Olivi, Rupescissa, and other suspect writers traveling incognito, often in bowdlerized or mutilated form. Kerby-Fulton's category of writing includes both women's texts laying claim to visionary inspiration and their male counterpart, exegetical works claiming intellectio spiritualis. Both strategies, she argues, offered a theological refuge for optimistic eschatologies and salvational generosities-a more precise term than universalism.Though academics distrusted revelatory writing, they were compelled by Scripture to admit at least the possibility of authentic revelation in both forms, thus providing a fragile safe-conduct for many texts that might otherwise have been censured. And in times of trial, even hardened skeptics could seek reassurance from revelations. Thus Books under Suspicion becomes a study in strange bedfellows. Wycliffites, for example, shared the general skittishness about revelatory writing, but at times, their interest in disendowment led them to make common cause with Joachimiteleaning Franciscan Spirituals. Two of the most interesting Lollard texts, the testimony of Walter Brut and the anonymous Opus arduum (Kerby-Fulton proposes Nicholas Hereford as its author), prove to have been influenced by Continental apocalypticism. …

Kathryn Kerby-Fulton.Books under Suspicion: Censorship and Tolerance of Revelatory Writing in Late Medieval England.:Books under Suspicion: Censorship and Tolerance of Revelatory Writing in Late Medieval England

Kathryn Kerby-Fulton.<i>Books under Suspicion: Censorship and Tolerance of Revelatory Writing in Late Medieval England</i>.:Books under Suspicion: Censorship and Tolerance of Revelatory Writing in Late Medieval England

Books under Suspicion: Censorship and Tolerance of Revelatory Writing in Late Medieval England. Kathryn Kerby-Fulton

<i>Books under Suspicion: Censorship and Tolerance of Revelatory Writing in Late Medieval England</i>. Kathryn Kerby-Fulton

Books Under Suspicion: Censorship and Tolerance of Revelatory Writing in Late Medieval England. By Kathryn Kerby-Fulton. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006. lii + 566 pp. $50.00 cloth.

Books Under Suspicion: Censorship and Tolerance of Revelatory Writing in Late Medieval England. By Kathryn Kerby-Fulton. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006. lii + 566 pp. $50.00 cloth. - Volume 77 Issue 1

Books Under Suspicion: Censorship and Tolerance of Revelatory Writing in Late Medieval England (review)

Books Under Suspicion: Censorship and Tolerance of Revelatory Writing in Late Medieval England (review)

Kathryn Kerby-Fulton. Books under Suspicion: Censorship and Tolerance of Revelatory Writing in Late Medieval England. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006. Pp. lii, 562.

Kathryn Kerby-Fulton. Books under Suspicion: Censorship and Tolerance of Revelatory Writing in Late Medieval England. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006. Pp. lii, 562.

Books Under Suspicion: Censorship and Tolerance of Revelatory Writing in Late Medieval England by Kathryn Kerby-Fulton (review)

Books Under Suspicion: Censorship and Tolerance of Revelatory Writing in Late Medieval England by Kathryn Kerby-Fulton (review)

Books under Suspicion: Censorship and Tolerance of Revelatory Writing in Late Medieval England. Response: Books under Suspicion and Beyond

Books under Suspicion, as the full title of my book announces, is about the reception of revelatory writing, that is, writing that lays claim to revealed origin. Revelatory writing comes in myriad genres (listed on 20–29), ranging from literature through theology, and it has provoked a spectrum of attitudes from tolerance to anathema, plus a full range of censorship types (15–20, 205). Since Wycliffism did not much foster revelatory genres, apart from the evidence of two early maverick writers, my aim was to get at questions of pluralism and non-Wycliffite dissent in late medieval England, a subject hitherto not really studied. I am honored that the historians assembled in this panel took the time and trouble to read a book that is not short and particularly that they welcomed it as new intellectual history. I am also a tad relieved that not one of the four respondents has added unnoticed information to the sources I knew. They have, however, set the material in exciting new contexts: in relation to earlier medieval English history (Elliott), to Europe (Arnold and Elliott), and to Reformation England (Lucas). Anne Hudson offers a selective reading of some sections on Wycliffism, mainly raising small queries, though I had hoped, with her participation, to have Wycliffism emerge as the fourth large context. None of these queries touches the book’s main arguments, however, and overall I am grateful for the enthusiasm with which those arguments were received. My goal here is both to review the larger points in the responses briefly and, more important, to offer some new directions and material for future research on non-Wycliffite censorship issues in England. Writing history involving literary sources is not easy (I particularly admire Lucas’s agility in this regard), and I am especially grateful to Elliott for her generous comments on literary and historical dexterity—dual magistrationes she herself commands. As a lifelong inmate of English departments, I am humbled, and most especially by Arnold’s comparison of Books under Suspicion to Robert Brentano’s Two Churches. If so, it rests only dwarflike on the shoulders of that gentle giant. But like Brentano, I have tried to do something here that has not been done before; I have tried to survey (because one volume would be inadequate to fully study) how revelatory writing was received in late medieval England and how it might have influenced our poets—two different topics that sometimes overlap and very often do not. The question of the elusive relationship between self-censorship and poetic revision raised by Hudson, I did actually take up at length in the Introduction, noting that self-censorship is only one possible reason that poets revised their work or used dream vision to disguise it (I list six reasons in total, among which escaping censorship is only the last [21]). Central to the book is the challenge to the “doxy” that, as Elliott amusingly puts it, could “allow reform thinking of whatever persuasion to share center stage with dear old Wycliffe” (754). Wyclif was not even first; not even Father Sheehan’s English Templars were the first. But, as I am very careful to say in the Introduction,

Books under Suspicion: Censorship and Tolerance of Revelatory Writing in Late Medieval England. Introduction

Books under Suspicion: Censorship and Tolerance of Revelatory Writing in Late Medieval England. Introduction

Books under Suspicion: Censorship and Tolerance of Revelatory Writing in Late Medieval England. Comment: The Visionary Genre and the Rise of the “Literary”: Books under Suspicion and Early Modern England

Books under Suspicion: Censorship and Tolerance of Revelatory Writing in Late Medieval England. Comment: The Visionary Genre and the Rise of the “Literary”: <i>Books under Suspicion</i> and Early Modern England

Books under Suspicion: Censorship and Tolerance of Revelatory Writing in Late Medieval England. Comment: Social Contexts of Censorship and Power

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Books under Suspicion: Censorship and Tolerance of Revelatory Writing in Late Medieval England. Comment: Senses of Censorship

Kathryn Kerby-Fulton has written a challenging study—one that seems likely to provoke further research and discussion. The core term in her investigation is “censorship.” This, especially as it has come to be used in contemporary historical and literary criticism, is a capacious and somewhat slippery term. In reference to an age of manuscript circulation rather than print, it is used in a variety of ways that arguably could helpfully be differentiated. This claim is illustrated by some specific examples: when, during the investigations against sympathizers of the heretic John Wyclif (d. 1384), Archbishop Chichele’s officials in 1415 ordered the scrutiny of books owned by the Londoner John Claydon, a list of seventeen reprobated opinions was compiled from Claydon’s copy of The Lanterne of Light. Following Claydon’s affirmation that he agreed with these opinions, and his admission that he had abjured heresy once before, he was condemned, and he and the book were consigned to the fire. The case is well documented, and here censorship cannot be doubted: the ecclesiastical and civil processes of inquisition and execution are plainly located, and the copy, along with its owner (who had commissioned and paid for it), was destroyed in pursuance of those authorities’ edict. The authorities were only sporadically effective: two other copies of the work survive, though from these it is possible to verify all but one of the seventeen opinions. It is interesting to set alongside this a couple of cases discussed by KerbyFulton (Claydon is only mentioned, perhaps inappropriately, in the prefatory “Chronology of Non-Wycliffite Cases of Heresy and Related Events”). A notebook put together by Peter Partridge and mostly in his hand begins with a list of its contents; among these contents are “Epistole multe Iohannis Wytcliff,” but at the point where, according to that list, these should occur, two leaves have been cut out. But when? By whom? And why? Kerby-Fulton (175–80) assumes that their inclusion dates to Partridge’s early academic career, when, as other evidence suggests, he was not entirely hostile to Wyclif, and that the excision reflects Partridge’s later apprehension that it was imprudent for one who was rising in the established ecclesiastical hierarchy to be associated with such material; to her this is equally censorship, albeit self-censorship. This provides answers to my three questions, but only by hypothesis. A number of alternative answers could be formulated—at an extreme is the possibility that a sixteenthor seventeenth-century Protestant antiquarian extracted the leaves as a memorial to an admired predecessor. The other case concerns two poems, one English, the other Latin (this is also included in Digby 98), that have been roughly crossed through, leaving the texts legible. Kerby-Fulton (162–64) again sees this as censorship, though she explains the continuing legibility as a deliberate ploy to allow for the apprehension

Books under Suspicion: Censorship and Tolerance of Revelatory Writing in Late Medieval England. Comment: English Exceptionalism Reconsidered

During my graduate days, I remember asking my thesis supervisor, the late Michael Sheehan, about the activity of the heretical inquisition in England. He was clearly taken aback, instantly responding that there was no was such activity. The sole exception was the Templar arrests, clearly ensuing from a Continental swell so vast that it could not but fail to trouble the waters of even that serene island. I felt duly chastised. Now, however, anyone who has read Kathryn Kerby-Fulton’s groundbreaking Books under Suspicion would have to acknowledge that my question was dismissed too quickly. But lest historiographical hindsight knock too loudly, I hasten to add that Father Sheehan was simply enunciating the reflexive but seemingly impeccable and, until now, virtually unchallenged orthodoxy of late medieval historians. The vigilance of England’s monarchy and the competence of its episcopacy not only kept the heretics out but saw to it that England was spared the kind of heretical and mystical excesses that had been destabilizing the Continent for centuries. This is why the “sudden” appearance of Lollardy, England’s only homegrown heresy, took everyone by surprise. Moreover, I was inclined to accept this answer uncritically because it corroborated everything that I knew and had internalized about the British Isles, generally, and England in particular. These different “doxies” are as familiar and wellfingered as the beads of a rosary. First, the Irish “saved” Western civilization with their pure Latin, beautiful manuscripts, and introduction of word separation (thank God), all in blessed readiness for their eventual conversion of Scotland and Northumbria and the subsequent reformation of the hopelessly corrupt Continental church. English monasticism would, in turn, offer up Bede, who stood head and shoulders above the other plodding historians of barbarian nations. It furnished Boniface, that timely papal legate who, lucky for the Carolingian wannabes, was in the right place at the right time to anoint Pepin. Then there was Alcuin, the intellectual motor behind the Carolingian renaissance. England, first in the development of an estimable vernacular literature, produced Alfred, a king remarkable enough to foster English precocity in his own renaissance, despite the unfavorable climate of Viking (read Continental) madness—until English letters were eventually snuffed out by more Continental interference in the form of the Norman Conquest. (And Alfred was undoubtedly more learned than Charlemagne!) Yet once planted on sane English soil, these Continental marauders did quite well: they introduced a singularly rational form of feudalism buttressed by a common law “with legs,” managed to keep out the Cathars, and still had time to take over much of the Continent. Even a rotten king like John proved but a fortunate fall. The disaster at Bouvines eventuated in Magna Carta, Europe’s first charter of rights, in addition to providing France with its first taste of a decently run bu-