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After Wyclif: Lollard Biblical Scholarship and the English Vernacular, C.1380-C.1450

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After Wyclif: Lollard Biblical Scholarship and the English Vernacular, C.1380-C.1450 After Wyclif: Lollard Biblical Scholarship and the English Vernacular, c.1380-c.1450 by David W. Lavinsky A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (English Language and Literature) in The University of Michigan 2009 Doctoral Committee: Associate Professor Karla T. Taylor, Co-Chair Associate Professor Theresa L. Tinkle, Co-Chair Professor Thomas A. Green Professor Michael C. Schoenfeldt © David W. Lavinsky _______________________________________________ 2009 In memory of Anne E. Imbrie ii Acknowledgments Inspired by Mike Schoenfeldt’s work, I came to Michigan intending to write a dissertation on Milton. Mike was an exceedingly generous and energetic mentor from the beginning—and no less so after I changed my focus to late medieval literature. Even in the midst of a deanship and numerous committee assignments he somehow always made time to talk. Our conversations would range from medieval to early modern contexts and back again, a salutary reminder that no student of English religious culture can afford to draw strict periodic boundaries or rest complacently in a single archive. His intellectual companionship over the years has made me a better medievalist. Tom Green brought the full scope of his interdisciplinary background in law and history to bear on this project, encouraging me to ask questions I had not thought to ask and thereby to see familiar material in new and exciting ways. I also thank Tom for inviting me to present early chapters of the dissertation at the Premodern Colloquium, of which he is the longtime organizer. It is through his collegiality and dedicated service to intellectual life at Michigan that I was introduced to a community of graduate students and faculty whose insights have vastly enriched my scholarship. I am indebted most of all to the tough- minded and erudite guidance of my co-chairs, Terri Tinkle and Karla Taylor. Their creativity and enthusiasm in the classroom cultivated my interest in Wycliffite material. Their insights sustained me throughout the project, especially during the difficult early stages of drafting, and brought clarity to my thinking when I needed it most. From start iii to finish, they have made the labors of scholarship genuinely pleasurable. To call myself the student of such inspiring teachers and scholars is a tremendous privilege. I would not have been able to complete this project without generous funding from the University of Michigan. I am grateful, first of all, for several Rackham fellowships which enabled uninterrupted writing time and travel to overseas archives: the Rackham Dissertation/Thesis Grant, the Rackham One-Term Dissertation Fellowship, the Rackham International Travel and Research Award, and the Rackham Humanities Research Candidacy Fellowship. These fellowships also allowed me to attend the Summer School of Manuscript Studies at the University of London, where I had the pleasure of studying paleography with David D’Avery. I am especially grateful to have received the Rackham Humanities Research Dissertation Fellowship, which provided me with the time and the resources necessary to finish the project. The English Department also offered crucial support in the form of travel grants and research awards. I thank Jan Burgess for all her kind help in these and so many other matters, administrative and otherwise. As chair of the department, Gregg Crane also provided wise counsel on several occasions. At Michigan, I have had the good fortune of working with a welcoming and dynamic community of medievalists. Sasha Pfau, Stephanie Batkie, Chris Palmer, and Joe Creamer made the Medieval Reading Group a space for questions and interests of all kinds; I thank them for helping sustain it when I was the sole organizer and often overextended. I would especially like to thank Andreea Boboc for her friendship and advice, and for providing an example of what university service means in practice. Among faculty, Scott DeGregorio’s good humor, sensible professional advice, and iv unmatched knowledge of patristic exegesis proved indispensible. I have enjoyed many fruitful conversations with Peggy McCracken, George Hoffman, Martha Vicinus, John Knott, Lincoln Faller, Barbara Hodgdon, Louise Stein, Gillian White, Cathy Sanok, and Julian Levinson. And it is a special pleasure to thank Bill Ingram, who kindly invited me to co-teach English 370 with him and from whom I have learned more about pedagogy than I can possibly relate here. Many scholars at outside institutions have generously commented on various stages of this project, including Theresa Coletti, Marcia Colish, Gabrielle Spiegel, Richard Firth Green, Patrick Geary, Michelle Warren, Fiona Somerset, Michael Kuczynski, James Simpson, Gillian Evans, and Anne Hudson. To these last two I owe a special debt of gratitude for taking the time to meet with me in Oxford and share their thoughts on my research. The errors, misconceptions, and inconsistencies in the following pages are exclusively my responsibility. I want to thank the Lollard Society for hospitality and helpful feedback at Kalamazoo, and Derek Pitard in particular for maintaining extensive on-line bibliographies. I thank Amy Rodgers, Gavin Hollis, Chad Thomas, Kentston Bauman, Lamont Egle, and David Ruderman for their steadfast friendship and intellectual generosity. That many in our cohort have now defended is in part due to Amy’s diligence in organizing the dissertation reading group and keeping us focused on moving forward. I am very lucky to have shared this experience with such wonderful people; they are a credit to Michigan and academia itself. I thank my parents; their education has been my own, and for that I will always be grateful. My disputatious and brilliant brothers, John and Alan, contributed many ideas v during late night calls on my way home from the graduate library. And to Ashley and Samuel: I cannot imagine having been able to do this without you, and look forward to our future projects together. vi Table of Contents Dedication ii Acknowledgements iii Introduction After Wyclif: Lollard Biblical Scholarship and the English 1 Vernacular, c.1380-c.1450 Chapter One “Subtle Theology”: Wyclif’s Scriptural Logic and the 29 Discourse of Universals Chapter Two “[O]f harde wordis, and harde sentencis”: Translation, 68 Scriptural Authority, and the Wycliffite Bible Prologue Chapter Three “We speke not of enke and parchemyn”: the English 129 Wycliffite Sermon Cycle Chapter Four Rolle’s “blessyd boke”: The English Psalter and its Wycliffite 178 Readers Chapter Five “De ore dei”: Wyclif, Affectivity, and the Hermeneutics of the 229 Literal Sense Bibliography 278 vii Introduction After Wyclif: Lollard Biblical Scholarship and the English Vernacular, c.1380-c.1450 “This book seemeth to have been made by John Wickliffe.” So reads an inscription on the fly leaf of the manuscript known as University College Oxford 96, a compilation written around 1435 containing a copy of the Wycliffite Bible Prologue and selected lections from the Gospels.1 The remark, in an early modern hand, captures a perspective that has become familiar in studies of Lollard biblical scholarship, imputing to Wyclif the qualities of an entire interpretive community and its texts. At the same time, the word “seemeth” registers uncertainty about the textual boundaries of this community and its relationship to “John Wickliffe,” a reminder that Lollardy’s transformation into a popular heresy reframed the movement’s underlying theological premises in complex and problematic ways. These different possibilities are legible in the Prologue itself, for as this anonymous reader seems to have realized, there is no reference or allusion in that text to Wyclif. In this, University College Oxford 96 is not alone: while the Wycliffite Bible survives in no fewer than 250 partial and complete copies, none cites or even incidentally mentions its namesake, either in the lengthy and wide-ranging Prologue affixed to several recensions of the translation, or in marginal 2 glosses accompanying the translated scripture itself. 1 University College Oxford 96 disrupts our assumptions about Wycliffite texts in other ways as well. For instance, it places the Prologue, which contains an extensive and controversial discussion of vernacular hermeneutics, alongside liturgical features such as Gospel lections for Easter day and Palm Sunday.3 And while most of the manuscript is in English, there is also a Latin table illustrating the genealogies of the Old Testament, an unexpected inclusion given the association in Wycliffite thought between Latinity and clerical power. Among these various compositions, however, it is the Prologue which is directly implicated by the comment that the manuscript merely “seemeth” to be Wyclif’s, for the English scriptural versions that it accompanied were often thought to be the theologian’s own work.4 Both John Bale and John Foxe, writing in the wake of opposition to Archbishop Cranmer’s Prayer Books, credit Wyclif with the translation, and for liberating the authentic English text from the artificial accretions of Latinity; it was Wyclif, Foxe wrote, “through whom the Lord would first waken and raise up again the world.”5 These and other evangelical reformers envisioned Wyclif as a kind of prophetic translator, architect of the preeminent English book. And even if our early modern annotator predated such remarks, similar attitudes regarding the significance of Wyclif could be found in the work of Henry Knighton, the Augustinian canon whose chronicle surveys the years during which Wycliffism took hold in England. He writes in a well known entry of The Gospel, which Christ gave to the clergy and the doctors of the church, that they might administer it to the laity and to weaker brethren, according to the demands of the time and the needs of the individual, as a sweet food for the mind, that Master John Wyclif translated from Latin into the language not of angels but of Englishmen, so that he made that common and open to the laity, and to women who were able to read, which used to 2 be for literate and perceptive clerks, and spread the Evangelists’ pearls to be trampled by swine.
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