Late Medieval Heresy: New Perspectives. Studies in Honor of Robert E. Lerner, ed. Michael D. Bailey and Sean L. Field. Heresy and Inquisition in the Middle Ages Series. Woodbridge, Suffolk: York Medieval Press and Boydell & Brewer, 2018, xiii, 267 pp.

This highly readable Festschrift provides new insights into “the staggering variety of things a person could believe or do” in order to be persecuted as a heretic in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Western Europe, as noted by Barbara Newman (248). The author-editors chose to focus this wide-ranging volume on relatively neglected figures, largely passing over the well-cultivated field of Wycliffe and the Hussites (4–5). Contributors have honored Professor Lerner’s example by their choice of a focused theme for the collection (11): the emphasis on manuscript sources (9–13), and a recognition of historiography as inevitably entwined with contemporary issues (vii, 11).

Voicing Dissent: Heresy Trials in Later Medieval England*

Recent work on medieval heresy has emphasized the ‘constructedness’ of heresy by orthodox power, thus undermining the coherence of heretical sects and tending to suggest that those tried as heretics were essentially unwitting victims. This article examines the evidence from the entire range of surviving Lollard trials, and argues that we can see consciously ‘dissenting’ speech alongside the standard theological positions associated with (and perhaps imposed upon) Lollardy. In each area of dissent anticlerical, sceptical, disputational and rebellious a wider cultural context is explored, demonstrating that the language of dissent is not limited to ‘Lollardy’; at the same time however it is argued that it is precisely through the voicing and reception of such wider referents that a heretical movement comes to exist. The article traces trends in medieval speech through which specific opinions and beliefs are voiced as a challenge, and the linguistic and social contexts within which they give rise to wider meanings—including collective identifications. Thus, whilst we may wish to foreground the impositions of power and orthodoxy that ‘made’ heresy, we should not make ‘heretics’ disappear completely. Through the records of prosecution, we can still hear something of the voices of those who chose to voice dissent; and we can give recognition to that choice as a form of dissenting agency—dependent also however on the reception and interpretation of those voices by neighbours, witnesses and inquisitors.

Persons

This chapter, after some initial remarks about the legal status of women, aliens, and monks, is concerned with the history of personal liberty. Early law recognized the unfree status of villeins, but numerous means of escape brought villeinage to a de facto end by 1600. The law relating to imprisonment became controversial with the development of habeas corpus, relying on Magna Carta, as a remedy against arbitrary imprisonment under the royal prerogative. The controversy culminated in the debates on the liberty of the subject in 1628 and the Petition of Right. Religious freedom is considered next, beginning with the intolerant medieval heresy jurisdiction and its virtual extinction under Elizabeth I. But freedom of thought was not the same as freedom of worship, political expression, or assembly, which were constrained in various ways. The final section examines how far the English courts accepted black slavery, and how slavery was eventually abolished.

Heresy and Hermeneutics

The two most important factors for the development of the Eucharistic controversy were medieval heresy and the application of humanist biblical hermeneutics to passages concerning the sacraments. John Wyclif’s criticisms of transubstantiation were further developed by Hussite theologians in the fifteenth century and spread into Germany in the early 1520s. The inner-evangelical debate over the sacraments grew from the different understandings of the sacraments expressed in Erasmus’s devotional and exegetical works and in Martin Luther’s alternative to the medieval sacramental system. A comparison of the exegetical works of Erasmus with Philipp Melanchthon shows that the former emphasized affective piety and the Christian life, while the Wittenbergers highlighted justification by faith and the assurance to consciences given by the sacraments. By 1524, both Johannes Oecolampadius and Ulrich Zwingli had rejected belief in Christ’s corporeal presence.