Literature and Heresy in the Age of Chaucer
Andrew Cole’s Literacy and Heresy in the Age of Chaucer is an important contribution to the vigorous reassessment of orthodoxy and its relation to heterodoxy that has been going on for the past decade or more. Cole explores the profound effect of Wycliffism on English literary history as evinced not in the writings of Thomas Sabo Bracelets the overtly heterodox, but principally in the writings of the orthodox Geoffrey Chaucer, William Langland, Thomas Hoccleve, John Lydgate and Margery Kempe. ‘Wycliffism’ he claims, ‘in its own right and by its influences, is one of the central forces that shaped English literary history’.
That Wycliffism should have such an influence, Cole argues, owes everything to the anti-heretical crusaders of the late fourteenth century. Archbishop William Courtenay deliberately misconstrued Wycliffism not as a strain of thought among Oxford theologians but as a broad-based heresy whose preachers were ‘spreading doctrinal depravities’ throughout the land, thereby seeking, Cole hypothesizes; to bring it under his own jurisdiction and thus make it easier to suppress. At the 1382 Blackfriars Council, Courtenay and his episcopal colleagues succeeded in making Wycliffism ‘infamous’ and in generating ‘cultural hysteria about the ubiquity of heresy and the multitude of heretics doing illicit things anywhere and everywhere’. But they failed to channel that hysteria into an effective programme of control. Quite the contrary: ‘Manufacturing and ballooning evidence that existed outside the university led to the exodus of Wycliffites from the university and into the broader realm’. Instead of squelching Wycliffism, Courtenay and his cohorts made it ‘an item of great and lasting interest’. Cole argues that the tendency to use ‘lollard’ as a synonym for ‘Wycliffite’ has kept scholars from appreciating what a contested term ‘lollard’ actually was Thomas Sabo Charms during the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. The participants at the Blackfriars Council did not refer to Wycliffites as ‘lollards’, though the term was projected back on the Council by later chroniclers. Indeed, Cole contends, the term lollard was not invented until 1387. By the end of the 1380s lollard was being used as a pejorative, but it was also being used by orthodox and heterodox writers in a positive sense, to refer to an alternative but not Wycliffite Christianity. Cole uses Chaucer and Langland to illustrate the term’s multivalence. Langland, whom Cole claims was instrumental in the invention and reinvention of ‘lollard’ writes of ‘good’ lollards and ‘bad’ lollards, the latter emphatically not Wycliffites but rather wastrel friars. His ‘lunatyk lollares’ on the other hand, embody a lay apostolic piety that is indebted to, but by no means identical with, Wycliffism.
Assuming that ‘lollard’ is always pejorative leads readers to miss crucial nuances, Cole argues. The epilogue to Chaucer’s Man of Law’s Tale is for him a case in point: Cole contends that when the Host says that he smells ‘a Lollere in the wynd’, he is in fact being sympathetic. Harry Bailly’s ‘seemingly fond usage’ of ‘lollard’ angers the Shipman represented as a frivolous and impious pilgrim, ‘a figure Wycliffites love to hate’ whose vitriol leaves no doubt that he equates ‘lollard’ with ‘heretic’. The Man of Law’s Epilogue demonstrates, for Cole, Chaucer’s ‘interests in Wycliffism’ and ‘his proximity to Wycliffite ideas’. Wycliffism, Cole argues, suggested to Chaucer ‘ways of fashioning himself as a vernacular author’. He points to ‘parallels in association, arrangement, and purpose’ between Chaucer’s Prologue to the Treatise on the Astrolabe and the General Prologue to the Wycliffite Bible as evidence of Wycliffite influence on Chaucer’s writing.
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