Rhetorical Iconoclasm: The Heresy of Lollard Plain Style

Abstract

In this essay I analyze the plain style as conceived of and used by the Lollards, a late fourteenth-century religious group. I argue that the same practices that set Lollard reading and writing apart from orthodox discourse were foundational to the Lollards' departures from orthodox belief, theorizing language and style in such a way that meaning was free from priestly mediation. This demonstrates the importance of the Lollard plain style as both a marker of heresy and a precursor to subsequent notions of plainness.

Notes

¹Sincere thanks to Ryan Stark and Cheryl Glenn, who offered thoughtful responses, encouragement, and advice at every phase of this project's growth. I also thank RR reviewers Philip Eubanks and Andrew King for their excellent suggestions for revision.

²I use the term heresy not as a judgment of a belief system's validity but rather as a marker of departure from dominant theological practice. In the case of the Lollards, I use heresy because the alternative appellation, “nonconformity,” belies a trait of the Lollard movement (specifically in its later manifestations): the trait of conforming as much as theologically possible to the mainline church to avoid conflict and confrontation (Catto 143; Aston, “Sect” 164; Hudson, Premature 149). It could be argued that the Lollards were (or were trying to be) “conforming heretics”; thus, the implications of the adjective nonconformity do not fit what is known of the Lollard movement.

I use the adjective orthodox to refer to the Christian church in England in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, not the Eastern Orthodox Church. Like heresy, this word can be a value judgment, and it is worth noting that believers in most religions consider themselves orthodox in the word's original sense of “right belief.” However, applying the label orthodox to a culturally dominant theology rather than a right theology allows conversation about the late medieval period that does not entail personal theological judgment.

³Some historians of Lollardy (most notably K. B. McFarlane) argue that the equation between Lollardy and Wycliffism is misleading because Wyclif had political disagreements with certain individuals identified as Lollards. Both modern scholars and Wyclif's contemporaries, however, undeniably associate him with the movement despite in-group political disagreements. For more on Wyclif and his associations with the Lollard heresy, see Hudson's Selections, Ghosh's The Wycliffite Heresy, and Aston's Lollards and Reformers.

⁴It is in this period before persecution began in earnest that Lollardy was most coherent. Though the heresy continued to grow throughout the following centuries, the forced privacy of Lollard texts and worship led to a wide span of beliefs under the umbrella of Lollardy (see, for examples of these beliefs and for discussion of characterizations of Lollard group identity, Jeremy Catto's “Fellows and Helpers”). The bulk of the following discussion, then, pertains to the unified beliefs of Lollards at the time in the decades after Wyclif's death when the heresy was making its transition into the popular realm.

⁵The authorship of the Wycliffite Bible is widely debated: Most scholars agree that the translation was a communal effort and that Wyclif instigated the project either theoretically or actually. See Deanesly, Lollard Bible 252–54; Hudson, Premature 238–43; Fristedt 4–7.

⁶This text is also sometimes called the General Prologue. It has no title in many early manuscripts and is simply called “Prolog” or “Prologe on the Bible” in others. The authorship and exact production date of the Prologue are not known with certainty. It is clear that the translation and revision of the Wycliffite Bible and other Lollard texts were collaborative, and this suggests that it is possible for the Prologue to have more than one author (Hudson, Premature 242; Catto 150–51). Due to dated references in the Prologue and analyses of handwriting, however, scholars commonly agree that the main author of the Prologue was John Purvey, one of Wyclif's secretaries and an early disseminator of Lollard belief (Deanesly, Lollard Bible 254; Hudson, Selections 173–74). The same scholars also date the Prologue's production to 1394–95.

⁷With belief in such an extralinguistic reality, Wyclif clearly aligns philosophically with realism rather than nominalism. Indeed, Gordon Leff argues that a combination of Wyclif's realism and evangelicalism is foundational to the heretical theologies espoused by the Lollards. Wyclif's metaphysics essentially rendered the church unnecessary and the Eucharist impossible due to his determined belief in the unity and reality of created being (231). For more on Wyclif's realism and its influence on his theology, see G. R. Evans's “Wyclif on Literal and Metaphorical” and Anthony Kenny's “Realism and Determinism in Early Wyclif.”

⁸This Lollard attitude is obviously simplistic compared to modern beliefs about the nature of interpretation, but it is important nonetheless: Wyclif clearly places great faith in the ability of rhetorical tropes to contain meaning and truth, his oversimplification of nuanced metaphorical meaning notwithstanding. For more on this question, see Evans, and for a modern discussion of these same issues see Max Black's “More about Metaphor.”

⁹The Lollard literal interpretation of scripture, then, requires some previous knowledge of the nature of the Bible and of Christian belief to determine what the actual meaning of figurative language could be (one has to know that Christ was not a cannibal to interpret the eucharist passage correctly). The Prologue author justifies this prerequisite knowledge by explaining that “almest no thing is seyn in tho derknessis, which thing is not founden seid ful pleynly in other placis” in the Bible (50). In other words, having read larger parts of the Bible, any person could conclude that cannibalism is not a part of Christianity and is, therefore, able to read the eucharist passage “literally.”

¹⁰Some historians assumed due to stylistic similarity that all Lollard texts were written by the same author, generally either Wyclif himself or John Purvey (Hudson, Lollard and Their Books 159). Although this assumption no longer stands, linguists are still interested in the stylistic similarities across the canon of Lollard texts and what deviations from that uniform style can tell us about individual pieces of writing (see Matti Peikola's “The Catalogue: A Late Middle English Lollard Genre?” and “Individual Voice in Lollard Discourse”).

¹¹Thus the Lollards can be seen as precursors to numerous later adherents to the plain style. For example, Ramus similarly dismisses scholastic language and argumentation, and in the first English rhetoric, Thomas Wilson defines plainness in opposition to “straunge ynkehorne terms”—a phrase clearly equated with scholastic obscurity (Y2r).

¹²Copeland sees this heterodox pedagogy in comparison to later “liberationist pedagogies” (21). She suggests that “one might look at [Paolo] Freire's writing and almost see a blueprint for the Lollards’ dissenting pedagogy” that levels distinctions among adult and child, student and teacher, and elementary and advanced education (Copeland, Pedagogy 22).