In the light of all this, several general caveats may be offered. The first concerns the danger of making totalizing statements about Lollardy, particularly Ricardian Lollardy, given the range of beliefs which were tarred with that same brush. A movement or sect which could include Lewis Clifford and William Thorpe had to be capacious indeed. Second, demotic Wycliffism—to coin a phrase—was alive and well in Chaucer’s day; we do not have to await the early fifteenth century to see its emergence.144 Wyclif and his most ardent academic supporters had addressed themselves ad populum, preaching in vulgari far beyond Oxford (London, Leicester, Bristol, Northampton, etc.),145 and the populus made of this doctrine what they would, accommodating it to their specific and sometimes conflicting interests, material as well as religious. Hence it is misleading to view William Swinderby as an individual “portent” of a future dumbing-down of Lollardy—little else being expected of “half-educated and usually unbeneficed mass-priests,” the unprepossessing “channel by which Lollardy was to be transmitted to future generations.”146 Such condescension obscures the point that “watery and simplified version[s]” of Wyclif’s “novel doctrines”147— a quite inadequate way to characterize views which often have their own robust logic—are to be found in such Lollard testimonies as the Twelve Conclusions, Walter Brut’s cedulae and The Examination of Sir William of Thorpe, in chroniclers’ reports of views (supposedly) held by the Lollard Knights, in developments of Wyclif’s thought (insofar as they can be constructed) by close associates like Nicholas Hereford, Philip Repingdon, John Aston, and John Purvey, and indeed in the lists of condemned propositions extracted from the teaching of Wyclif himself. For Wyclif’s opponents, as much as his followers, sometimes made blunt instruments out of the theologian’s subtle and shifting speculations. The range and variety of views possible within Lollardy, and/or the range of views which could pass as Lollard,148 must be recognized and respected, for example, when we seek to discover Lollard sympathy, or the lack thereof, in the work of those most elusive and tantalizing of thinkers, Chaucer and Langland.
By the same token, in the house of orthodoxy there were many mansions. It is all too easy to discover heresy, heterodoxy, subversion, and so forth if one is unaware of the intellectual leeway which was possible within orthodoxy, or fails to recognize the range of disagreement which orthodoxy could accommodate, even in the time of Wyclif. Those trends have been all too common in criticism of Middle English literature. That is why much space has been devoted in the present book to developments in theology which pre-date Wyclif and which continued to inform English Catholicism during, and long after, his controversial career. My critical judgments remain my own, of course, and there is no necessary causal link between an abundance of information and an appropriate interpretation. Suffice it to hope that even those who disagree with me may find some material in this book which will further their own research. My final (and deeply personal) caveat: we should be wary of reconstructing the Lollards as avatars of religious freedom and free expression (or indeed as prototypical sons and daughters of trade unionism or the Marxist revolution). There was a grimly puritanical strand in Lollardy (or at least in certain branches of Lollardy) with the potential to annihilate sacramental beliefs and devotional practices which had been in place for centuries—a taste of which may be gained from the systematic material destruction which followed Henry VIII’s breach with Rome.
It just might be added, in Richard Rex’s words, that “the scattered and sporadic burning” of Lollards was “hardly a reign of terror: it never even approached the scale of the 1530s or the 1550s,149 let alone that of the Spanish Inquisition under Ferdinand and Isabella.”150 But I am uneasy with Rex’s overall conclusion that “the Lollards were neither numerically significant in their own time nor of great importance for the course of English history.”151 Significance cannot be determined by body count alone, and the consequences of Lollardy for English history cannot be dismissed with the claim that we have been beguiled by “the romantic appeal of the Lollards as a criminalized minority.”152 While it may be admitted that “the distinctive features of late medieval English Catholicism were not shaped to any great extent by Lollard pressures,”153 there are numerous proofs of the impact of Archbishop Arundel’s Constitutions, and the fears which they fostered had ample precedent in Ricardian England.
One of the major victims of this cultural climate was, I believe, vernacular hermeneutics. An atmosphere wherein just about any Middle English text, however innocuous its use of theological and philosophical doctrine, could be cited as evidence of heterodoxy, was hardly conducive to the emergence (on the continental model, the apotheosis of which was Dante’s Convivio) of an orthodox and officially sanctioned tradition of commentary, in both English and Latin, on texts which had either been translated from Latin or written originally in the vernacular. That point is given more force by the fact that much of the Middle English Biblical exegesis actually produced in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries was Wycliffite in origin (including the “Glossed Gospels” and the prefatory material included in the various versions of the Lollard Bible, particularly the “General Prologue”). The contrast with the situation in France in the age of Charles V is most telling. Charles enlisted ancient traditions of learning to enhance the prestige of the new Valois dynasty by commissioning over thirty translations of authoritative texts.154 Most notable among the chosen secular treatises are Nicole Oresme’s vernacular versions, including commentary, of Aristotle’s Politics, Nicomachean Ethics, and On the Heavens, along with the pseudo-Aristotelian Economics.155 Le Livre des problèmes d’Aristote, a translation of the Latin text accompanied by an extensive vernacular commentary (based on Peter of Abano’s Latin exposition), was contributed to Charles’s translation program by his physician, one Evrart de Conty (c. 1330–1405).156 To Evrart we also owe a long exposition of an anonymous poem on “The Chess of Love” (the Eschez amoureux),157 which appears to be the first full-scale French commentary on any new French text. Here the move has easily been made from translating existing academic commentary on an authoritative Latin work to providing academic-style commentary on a work written originally in the vernacular.
The progress Evrart made toward a “secular” mythography is especially intriguing. He drew selectively on Pierre Bersuire’s Ovidius moralizatus (a work which Bersuire had justified in terms of its usefulness to preachers), with the allegorical material which refers to prelates or prelatical theology being systematically reduced.158 In similar vein, though far more adventurously, those most innovative of medieval literary theorists, Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, drew on religious hermeneutics as they forged their secular apologies for poetry. However, such practice was scarcely credible in Chaucer’s day, and quite incredible in the England of Thomas Arundel and King Henry V. The then-prevailing climate of repression of theological and philosophical thinking and writing in vulgari was inimical to the emergence