In Rita Copeland’s book Pedagogy, Intellectuals, and Dissent in the Later Middle Ages she examines the way Lollards taught the Bible and Christian morality in contrast to the way those things were taught in the Church ordained scholastic and university systems. Her objective in this book is two-fold: to show that Lollards appropriated ancient anti-intellectual ideas about teaching that had been rejected by the Church and to save these ideas from the obscuring power of history. As she puts it, “Modernity hardly recognizes itself in the Middle Ages . . . What this book offers, however, is a study of issues that were of profound importance for the Middle Ages and that will disappear from our historiographical map if we do not recognize them as being important to ourselves.”[1]
Copeland’s argument is composed of two basic parts. In the first she discusses Lollard pedagogy, focusing on the idea of teaching the “literal sense” of the Bible. She reconstructs the Lollard pedagogy in three ways: through examining court documents of heresy trials which discuss how accused and professed Lollards disseminated their beliefs, by looking at anti-Lollard polemics—most notably those produced by Thomas Arundel, archbishop of Canterbury—which attack Lollard methods of “corruption” and from referring to research published by other historians, particularly that of Anne Hudson. In the second part Copeland analyzes two Lollard prison narratives written by Richard Wyche and William Thorpe and shows the way they use the methods of the Lollard pedagogical model.
The pedagogical model that Copeland reconstructs employs several methods of instruction. The first and the most important to Copeland is teaching what she calls the “literal sense” of the Bible or stressing what happens in the text on the literal level as opposed to the allegorical level. This relates to the Wycliffite call for translating the Bible into the vernacular; the complaint was that the Vulgate served to mystify the word of God and render it as a tool of hegemony. Similarly, allegorizing the Bible implied that only certain, properly trained people could understand its true meaning. This establishes an intellectual hierarchy within society, one that was threatened by teaching the “literal sense.”
The picture that I present here of lay textuality in the Lollard movement is not framed primarily in terms of Latin and vernacular, but in terms of a structure of dissenting pedagogy . . . Lollard pedagogy was dissenting from ancient traditions of intellectual hierarchy, and especially representations of elementary teaching, traditions that carried with them deeply engrained assumptions about the borders between childhood and adulthood, as these conditions stand for states of political disenfranchisement and political agency.[2]
The point here is that teaching to read for the literal meaning was traditionally the domain of childhood education and thus reading for the literal sense marked one as socially inferior, as having the mental faculties of a child. The Lollard emphasis in teaching the literal sense became a means of challenging that intellectual hierarchy by employing the rejected methods of that hierarchy. To teach the literal sense was to subvert the educational values of the intellectual elite. “. . . [I]t is the work of a dissenting community to challenge the common sense of a naturalized order. The success of Lollardy’s radical pedagogy is that it refused to reproduce the fundamental distinction between childhood and adulthood which had been served, traditionally, by identifying childish reading with the literal sense.”[3] The Lollard heresy therefore was as much a class struggle as it was a spiritual one.
Copeland makes several interesting points in her book. For one thing she makes it clear how the medieval educational model parallels our modern one. We still consider people who are formally educated as being somehow better or more qualified. We mandate that students receive a college education in order to “make something of themselves.” In this sense Copeland succeeds in showing how “issues of profound importance to the Middle Ages” apply to ourselves. “The relevance of modern radical pedagogies to thinking about Lollard models of learning is in fact striking. One might look at [educational theorist Paolo] Freire’s writing and almost see a blueprint for the Lollard’s dissenting pedagogy.”[4] By examining the Lollard model we can see just how modern the Middle Ages were and perhaps even learn ways to shape and not shape our own educational systems.
Underlying Copeland’s argument is another idea that is equally intriguing. The Lollard community, and presumably other movements deemed heretical, was not merely an expression of religious discontent. The Lollards embodied multiple heterodox ideas.
Pedagogical orthodoxies, whose filiations need to be traced through their own long history, were thoroughly naturalized in the environment of late-medieval culture and politics, so much so that they were virtually homologous with religious orthodoxies. In other words, I am suggesting that there are several axes of orthodoxy and heterodoxy that meet in the Lollard movement.[5]
The dissenting philosophy of the Lollards was actually a nexus, a complex network of ideas and social anxieties that converged in the figure of the dissenter.
There are two potential flaws in Copeland’s argument. For one thing there is a danger, if it can be called that, of projecting modern ideas onto the Lollard movement. Although Copeland avoids this issue for the most part, she does hint at it. “The concerns of postmodern educational theory should be of no less relevance or value to our investigations of medieval culture than the concerns of other arenas of postmodernist debate, such as literary theory, gender studies, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and materialisms.”[6] The problem here is that the Lollards did not leave behind a statement of their pedagogical theory. What we can know of it is necessarily imprecise since we have to reconstruct it as Copeland herself does from exterior sources and analysis. We therefore run the risk of filling in the gaps in our knowledge by imputing our own biases to it. The other weakness in Copeland’s argument is that it does not acknowledge a distinction between thought and act. Just because the Lollards valued literalism and expected their members to live by the letter of the Gospels does not mean we should believe they behaved accordingly. As Copeland points out regarding the prison narratives of Wyche and Thorpe, these two men drew attention because they represent “the intellectual who has taken his project of producing knowledge extra muros.”[7]
It is this disparity between thought and action that Katherine Little takes up in her article “Chaucer’s Parson and the Specter of Wycliffism.” Whereas Copeland discusses specifically Lollard ideas of education Little examines Lollard ideas of language reform particularly as they were perceived in the popular imagination. She focuses on the figure of the Parson in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales as a contemporary representation of the Lollard preacher. The point that she sets out to make is that the apparent disjunction between the way Chaucer constructs the Parson and the seemingly antithetical message of “The Parson’s Tale” reflects the Lollard’s fundamental inability to match word to deed.
Before Little can begin her argument proper she has to acknowledge the debate amongst Chaucerian scholars over whether or not the Parson is actually a representation of a Lollard. Since this issue is not central to her argument she dismisses the debate ultimately as “a relatively fruitless exercise”[8] but not before pointing out that Chaucer wanted his readers evidently to connect the character to Lollardy. Some copies of the Tales contain an “Epilogue to the Man of Law’s Tale” in which the characters of the Host and the Shipman accuse the Parson of being a “Lollere” because he seems to have a predilection for preaching. As Little says, “In this exchange between the Host and the Shipman, the term ‘Lollere’ is so clearly defined in relation to preaching that we can be sure that Chaucer knew what he was about in using it. While this use certainly does not establish the Parson as a Lollard, it should suggest that Chaucer wanted his readers to think of the Parson in relation to Lollardy.”[9]
Having established this point Little goes on to present her argument which is based primarily on a synthesis of a close reading of “The Parson’s Tale” in relation to other manuals on penance of the period, a comparison of the Parson to other representations of reformed preachers in the contemporary literature—notably John Gower’s Confessio Amantis—and references to the work of other scholars both of literature and history. From all of these sources Little concludes that “The Parson’s Tale” is a record of Lollard anxiety over traditional religious language and the need to have a language for religious purposes. As she explains, “the two versions of the Parson [as he’s constructed by his tale and by the rest of the Tales] reflect an uneasy and unresolved dialectic within lay instruction between, on one side, the demands for reform and, on the other, the limits of clerical language to enact that reform.”[10]
Perhaps the most interesting point that Little makes concerns the Lollard discomfort with the sacrament of confession. According to her the Lollards did not object to confession on doctrinal grounds but because of the language used to articulate confession. As seen from Copeland the Lollards called for a plain-spokeness that emphasized literal meaning. In the case of confession this plainness of speech works to the detriment of the speaker. “Wycliffites systematically point out that confession has been corrupted by the improper use of language: the penitent’s confessional language is forced or seduced from him or her or silenced altogether.”[11] This idea highlights the Lollard problem of thought and act. If a Lollard is to strive for a union of speech and deed, to practice what he preaches, then confession which “generates sinful narratives of desire”[12] becomes a form of sinning in itself. To say it is to do it. Chaucer’s “Parson’s Tale,” presenting the “proper” way to confess, thus reflects the Lollard anxiety of clerical language and represents a resolution of that anxiety.
The obvious weakness of Little’s argument lies in the fact that Chaucer’s Parson is a fictional construct. Despite how realistic the character seems or whether or not the character is based on a real person the most we can hope to reconstruct from analyzing the character as a Lollard is Chaucer’s views on Lollardy. We cannot even say with any certainty that Chaucer was a Lollard himself since the explicit references to Lollardy that occur in his work were expurgated from later copies of his manuscripts. Chaucer seems to have gone out of his way to distance himself from the Lollards. However, based on what we know of Lollard ideas regarding language and religious speech and the fact that Chaucer would have known these ideas very well, Little’s argument seems sound. It is also intriguing to consider the Parson as a representation of Lollardy in the popular consciousness and to view the Parson and his tale as a happy medium between orthodox and heterodox language.
Finally, Lollard ideas about language, particularly poetic language, are explored by Ritchie D. Kendall in his book The Drama of Dissent. To be sure, Kendall does not limit his examination solely to the Lollards but discusses later reformist movements as well. As he says, “This is a study of the aesthetic convictions of a diverse group of religious dissenters active in England between 1380 and 1590.”[13] However Kendall presents Lollardy as central to his argument, treating it as the genius loci to those later movements.
Unlike Copeland and Little whose arguments were in the vein of other contemporary research and furthered that research Kendall argues against contemporary research. As he puts it, “I would like to position this work vis-à-vis several areas of current scholarly inquiry that intersect with my own concerns and views.”[14] He presents his book as a response to literary critics, namely Jonas Barish, Russell Fraser, and Richard Lanham, whose work he seems to feel was too biased and which he regards as a “revisionist assault.”[15] Whereas these other scholars Kendall claims collapsed distinctions between the heterodoxical communities, he sets out to show that they developed independently along the same lines and from the same source. This common development is reflected in the groups’ poetics or the way they produced literature.
The main focus of Kendall’s argument is on the Lollards’ and later dissenters’ Platonic disdain for drama. Even though the Lollards strove to practice the values of the Gospels, in effect reenacting the Acts of the Apostles, they disliked drama—i.e. miracle, mystery, and morality plays—because of the drama’s allegorical nature and function. The threat of drama is that people could confuse it for reality, accepting the imitation in place of the real thing. As Kendall puts it, “In the fusion of a transcendent truth to a temporal signifier, the artist seduced his audience into loving the human over the divine.”[16] This disapproval of drama reflects the Lollard disapproval of “dressing up” the Bible in Latin and through exegesis. It also reflects the Lollard disapproval of orthodox ceremony and ritual such as Communion which are essentially little allegorical dramas with the priest playing the role of Jesus.
The important point that Kendall sets out to prove about the Lollards is that they practiced self-definition through negation, defining the self in opposition to the other, which in this case is orthodoxy. They disclaimed the obfuscating power of drama but had to appropriate the tools of drama in order to articulate themselves and their beliefs. “In its early stages Lollardy was forced, like primitive Christianity, to draw much of its theoretical and practical machinery from the work of its enemies. Never allowed to reach its full maturity, Lollardy failed to outgrow its early dependence on the language and instruments of orthodox Christian worship.” [17] This idea dovetails interestingly with that presented by Little that the Lollard call for language reform had to be expressed in the language of the orthodox. Kendall’s point is that for the Lollard to practice his beliefs he had to assume the role of an apostle, thus falling into drama. To make this point Kendall marshals a great deal of evidence from primary sources such as Lollard sermons and prison narratives including that of William Thorpe which Copeland also uses.
Kendall’s argument is compromised ironically by a tendency toward preachiness. In formulating the argument as a response to other scholars there is a persistent danger of it falling into polemic. Kendall acknowledges this tendency, stating, “Although I have attempted to be always cognizant of that dangerous impulse, and have perhaps overreacted with paroxysms of citation and qualification, distortions remain in my treatment of the Lollards—both in terms of the perceived unity within the party itself and between that party and later reformers.”[18] The danger however does not lie in the presentation of his argument but in the way he presents dissenting opinions. It is difficult to see which argument is orthodox and which is heterodox, which provides an odd illustration of Kendall’s point. Nevertheless much of what Kendall has to say about Lollard poetics seems valid.
It is clear from each of the these texts that much is known about what Lollards thought. What is frustrating however is that we do not and cannot know much else about them. Our image of the Lollard is at best a patchwork reconstruction as artificial as Chaucer’s Parson, comprised of documents left by both themselves and their enemies. But based on the extant information and the tantalizing clues that we have we get a fascinating picture of medieval life and can see much of ourselves reflected back to us.
[1] Rita Copeland, Pedagogy, Intellectuals, and Dissent in the Later Middle Ages: Lollardy and Ideas of Learning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 1.
[2] Ibid., 4-5.
[3] Ibid., 24.
[4] Ibid., 22.
[5] Ibid., 6.
[6] Ibid., 21-2.
[7] Ibid., 144.
[8] Katherine Little, “Chaucer’s Parson and the Specter of Wycliffism,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 23 (2001), 228.
[9] Ibid., 225-6.
[10] Ibid., 229.
[11] Ibid., 233.
[12] Ibid.
[13] Ritchie D. Kendall, The Drama of Dissent: The Radical Poetics of Nonconformity, 1380-1590 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), 3.
[14] Ibid., 9.
[15] Ibid., 3.
[16] Ibid., 62.
[17] Ibid., 20.
[18] Ibid., 11.
