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 in England of a vigorous tradition of vernacular textual commentary. What happened to Bishop Reginald Pecock was hardly encouraging: even a prominent anti-Lollard polemicist could suffer the same treatment as his opponents. In 1458 or 1459 Thomas Bourgchier, Archbishop of Canterbury, instructed rectors and preachers in the province of Canterbury to hand over any of the bishop’s books in vulgari Anglico compositos which they might possess.159
Little wonder, then, that there is no fifteenth-century commentary on Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls of the type produced by Evrart de Conty, even though the mythography in that English poem merited exegesis every bit as much as that presented by the Eschez amoureux. In the prologue(s) to his Legend of Good Women Chaucer has the God of Love complain that the Roman de la Rose is a heresy against his law—in other words, it supposedly functions as a remedium amoris rather than as an ars amatoria. Here is the key argument which Jean de Meun’s supporters were to deploy in the querelle de la Rose. But, Thomas Hoccleve’s translation of Christine de Pizan’s Epistre au dieu d’Amours apart,160 that controversy found no English campus duelli.161 Furthermore, we have no response to Chaucer’s Wife and Bath and Pardoner (neither commendation nor condemnation) to parallel those written during the querelle about Jean de Meun’s La Vielle and Amant, and no-one questioned Chaucer’s moral probity because of his creation of dubious personae in the way in which Jean was taken to task by Jean Gerson and Christine de Pizan. When the Wife of Bath is mentioned by fifteenth-century writers, she is placed firmly within the limiting, normalizing bounds of antifeminist satire from which Chaucer had done so much to free her, her subversive elements being (perhaps deliberately) omitted from the recollection. Clearly Hoccleve felt more comfortable with Alisoun as a mock-authority (or “auctrice,” as he patronizingly calls her)162 within the typically feminine territory of love and marriage rather than as a “lewed calate” who “wold argumentes make in holy writ,” just like those Lollard women whose gender-defying disputation was the butt of invective in his poem against that latter-day Lollard Knight, Sir John Oldcastle (as quoted above). Then again, there is no evidence whatever of a querelle de Criseyde, despite Chaucer’s attempt to provoke one by questioning his own construction of a faithless woman (cf. Troilus and Criseyde,V.1772–85; Legend of Good Women, F Prol. 332–40, substantively expanded in G Prol. 264–316). And when that extraordinary instance of Italian self-commentary and self-promotion, Dante’s Convivio, impacted on Middle English literature it was as the source for quite traditional teaching on true nobility (Chaucer could just as well have drawn on Boethius), as featured in the Wife of Bath’s Tale, rather than as the model for autoexegesis by Chaucer or any of his English contemporaries or successors. (The significance of Chaucer’s assignment of this prestigious material to a virtuous vetula will be discussed in Chapter 4.) As part of the same pattern, when crucial implications of the interaction of authority and fallibility show themselves in Chaucer’s work, they do not appear within an apologia for some auctour newe in the vernacular, of the kind which had been devised by Dante, Evrart de Conty, and Jean de Meun’s supporters in the querelle de la Rose. Rather they feature in relation to two extraordinary “fallible authors”—one who has appropriated the auctoritas and the methodology characteristic of the preacher’s role (the Pardoner), and one who has appropriated the auctoritas and the methodology characteristic of the lecturer/disputant’s role (the Wife of Bath).
The “English Heresy,” then, served to set England apart, in respect of vernacular hermeneutics.163 Chaucer’s French contemporaries spoke a very different language. Nicole Oresme stated that “matters which are weighty and of great authority are delightful and agreeable to people when written in the language of their country.”164 Christine de Pizan, commending Charles V’s translation program, declared that “it was a noble and perfect action” to have such works “translated from Latin into French to attract the hearts of the French people to high morals by good example.”165 She then develops the translatio studii theme, to make the point that France has now taken possession of a heritage which in days of yore had passed from Greece to Rome. But in Lancastrian England, the English language could hardly function
