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Preface

One read black where the other read white, his hope

The other man’s damnation:

Up the Rebels, To Hell with the Pope,

And God Save—as you prefer—the King or Ireland. . . .

And each one in his will

Binds his heirs to continuance of hatred. . .

—LOUIS MACNEICE, Autumn Journal, XVI

I grew up in Northern Ireland, a land where the scars of the Reformation were still prominently on display. Born on the Protestant “Scots Irish” side of the religious divide, I knew hardly any Catholics, and certainly had no Catholic friends, until in 1966 I became a student at what was, at that time, the only integrated educational institution in the province, the Queen’s University of Belfast. There my fascination with medieval Catholic thought began—fostered by the unique Department of Scholastic Philosophy (which taught Thomism rather than the fashionable existentialism on offer in the Department of Philosophy just up the street). I must be one of the few people on the planet for whom reading Aquinas and Ockham was an act of youthful rebellion.

My own family, thankfully, was full of people who had little fear of the unconventional. Part of their take on their Protestant dissenting tradition was the conviction that one had to make one’s own life, through faith and works. My grandfather was a striking case in point—and a forceful, though hardly straightforward, influence. Following a disillusioning involvement with the private army which Sir Edward Carson illegally recruited to resist Irish Home Rule in 1914, he settled into an existence wherein pugnacious piety easily coexisted with contempt for many actual clergymen of our acquaintance, together with admiration for the life and works of Joe Stalin, “man of steel” (whose atrocities in the name of social revolution were as yet unknown). Another of his heroes was local author Alexander Irvine (1863–1941), now commemorated with a drab little square in the town of Antrim, where the hovel in which he lived as a child is preserved as a tourist attraction—somewhat implausibly, given that Irvine’s gospel of Christian trade-unionism (the care of fellow-workers in this world and in preparation for the next) is hardly popular nowadays. Originally an uneducated working man like my grandfather, Irvine worked as a newsboy, miner, boxer, and soldier before emigrating to the United States, where he studied theology at Yale University, became a friend of Jack London’s, and served as both missionary and union organizer among the poor in New York’s Bowery. Here was socialist nonconformity at its most complex—and its best.

Irvine further embodies the complexities of Northern Ireland inasmuch as he was the product of a mixed marriage between an illiterate Protestant shoemaker and a clever Catholic farm girl. In My Lady of the Chimney Corner (1913) Anna Irvine is presented as a madonna of the hearth who gains wisdom through the suffering brought about by abject poverty. Her simple but sage pronouncements would not look out of place in Piers Plowman.

The present book may be seen as the outcome of an intellectual mixed marriage, what happens when a product of a Protestant dissenting tradition (which proudly traces its origins back to Lollardy) enters into a relationship with the Other of Catholic orthodoxy in its late-medieval manifestation. In particular, it goes back to my original wonderment at the Catholic location of authority in institutional hierarchy rather than individual state of grace, the power and prestige of the office being supposed to transcend the fallibilities of the human being who holds it. Hence, for example, an immoral priest can (in certain circumstances at least) preach and administer the sacraments without detriment to his congregation, his sin being a private matter between him and God. To which the Protestant response would be that immorality deprives the clergyman of his right to officiate in any such way.

A more recent impetus was provided by the extraordinary events in the United States during late 1998 and early 1999, which saw the publication of the Starr Report on President Clinton’s dubious conduct and the subsequent impeachment proceedings against him. Here the relationships between the authoritative office and the fallible office-holder, between the public man and what he tried to withhold as his private life, were raised and debated as never before. Clinton himself deployed the discourse of “public and private” in his television broadcast to the nation on 17 August 1998. Some of the questions put to him by the Office of Independent Counsel and the Grand Jury had, he said, concerned his “private life,” and hence these were “questions no American citizen would ever want to answer.” Having conceded that he “must take complete responsibility for all [his] actions, both public and private,” Clinton went on to emphasize the hurt he had caused “the two people I love most,” his wife and daughter. “I intend to reclaim my family life for my family. It’s nobody’s business but ours. Even presidents have private lives.”¹ Gabriel García Márquez wrote a powerful defense of this position, declaring that “At the end of the day, his personal drama is a private matter between him and his wife. . . . It is one thing to lie to deceive, it is something quite different to protect one’s private life.”²

To judge by the opinion polls, a majority of Americans thought so too. And yet, the next president they (marginally) elected, George W. Bush, could hardly be more different in self-image. In Bush country, the private is the political and vice-versa; the same faith that sustains the president’s soul is offered to voters as ensuring their nation’s salvation (in moral, monetary and military terms). During the 2004 presidential election those who took up that offer professed themselves drawn to Bush by his “morals and his character”; the interrelated values of “faith, family, integrity and trust” which the Bush campaign consistently projected proved unbeatable.³

As I write, Bush is halfway through his second term and the jury is, so to speak, still out on the success or failure of his presidency. However, at the beginning of a book which will spend so much time with Chaucer’s Pardoner’s Tale, it seems appropriate to recall how Senator Robert Byrd used this very text as he urged the U.S. Senate to handle the Clinton impeachment investigation in a reasonable and consensual manner. He reminded his colleagues of how, in that tale, three men find a pot of gold only to kill one another to get it all.⁴ Leaving aside the obvious quibble over whether a “pot of gold” was an appropriate metaphor to apply to Starr’s findings, one might suggest that the senators could have noted another major aspect of Chaucer’s text: its claim that an immoral man can tell a moral tale. Or, as in the case of the morally flawed but highly professional Bill Clinton, preside over a successful economy and pursue policies at home and abroad which history may appraise with respect and sympathy, particularly when viewed in relation to those of a successor whose supposedly sound “morals and character” were made the basis of his fitness to lead. To quote a bumper sticker I see frequently in New Haven, “nobody died when Clinton lied.”

Continuing this move from presidents to poets, the truism inevitably follows that many of the most creative of people have sometimes acted in the worst of ways. The list is a long one, and multiplication of cases would be tedious: suffice it to mention the appeal which Nazism held for many artists and intellectuals of the mid-twentieth century, most obviously Ezra Pound; the anti-Semitism and/or racism of T. S. Eliot, George Orwell, and Graham Greene; and the appalling ways in which the likes of Thomas Hardy, Bertrand Russell, Pablo Picasso, and Philip Larkin treated their womenfolk. Then there are the allegations of rape brought against Arthur Koestler—and indeed, Geoffrey Chaucer. In the later Middle Ages, the problem presented itself in a particularly acute way, given that the auctor was held to be not only a writer but also an “authority” in the sense of a person whose words were judged worthy of imitation and belief. An “immoral author” was therefore an oxymoron. Yet, in that period, many churchmen—and indeed many of their secular counterparts—displayed a disturbing number of shortcomings. Did such fallibilities devalue their authority, compromise their power, render their sacraments worthless, set their preaching at naught?

There was a name for the belief that the effectiveness of the sacraments depends on the moral character, the state of grace, of the minister: Donatism, after the controversial fourth-century bishop of Carthage, Donatus. The initiating cause seems to have been Bishop Felix of Aptunga’s collusion with the Emperor Diocletian’s persecution of Christians. This raised the question of whether the sacraments of one who had sinned so greatly against his fellows could possibly be valid, including his consecration of Donatus’s predecessor, Bishop Caecelian. Donatus won many adherents for the view that Caecelian’s consecration was invalid, and a schism developed in the church, the matter not being resolved until the Council of Carthage of 411, when Donatism was definitively hereticated. Approximately a thousand years later Chaucer’s contemporary John Wyclif fell into a version of that heresy—or, at least, was accused of having done so. (The nature and extent of Wyclif’s “Donatism” is a matter of some scholarly controversy, as my subsequent discussion will acknowledge.) His contemporary Geoffrey Chaucer created a character who declared that an immoral man can tell an effectively moral tale—a position that, inter alia, may be seen as a reflex of an orthodox reaction against Donatism. Or perhaps against that staple of Wycliffite thought, the conviction that power of any kind, whether spiritual or secular, depends on divine grace. Put simply, no pope, bishop, priest, or prince has true dominion (dominium) over his subjects while he lives in a state of mortal sin. It could be inferred that any spiritual authority which the Pardoner claims (whether rightly or wrongly, according to canon law) is devalued by his self-confessed viciousness. Herein lies the text’s major challenge.

Chaucer created another character, the Wife of Bath, who presents what was, by the standards of his day, an even greater challenge. A woman who displays in sensational form so many of the fallibilities then deemed endemic to her sex, dares to quote the Bible, bandy about authoritative documents just like a schoolman, enthusiastically defend female sexual desire, and tell a moral tale which suggests that true nobility comes from God alone and is unaffected by class or gender. And all this in an age in which Wycliffite nonconformity was developing the proposition that virtuous women had more right to preach than vicious men, and (in certain situations) could administer the sacraments—even that most controversial and contested sacrament of all, the Eucharist. Chaucer lived in interesting times.

This, inevitably, raises the issue of the poet’s attitude to Wycliffite thought. I certainly believe (I could not have written this book otherwise) that Chaucer was fascinated by ideas which, during his lifetime, became more and more dangerous to discuss, and which (in certain distinctive and extreme forms) were deemed heretical.⁵ But that, of course, does not make him a Wycliffite sympathizer, and the elusive figure who flits behind his works seems an unlikely victim of the repressive forces unleashed by Henry IV and Archbishop Arundel in their attempt to crush Lollardy.⁶ I fully support the claim of Alan J. Fletcher, who has done more than anyone else to theorize the question of Chaucer’s relationship with Wycliffism, that the poet “enlisted . . . ‘the culture of heresy’ in his writing.”⁷ But sometimes we disagree on the details of how this was done and the significance of that enlistment. My main general reservation concerns Fletcher’s adoption of the compound “radical/heretical discourse,” which, he explains, “attempts to contain the complex and shifting status of reformist ideology c. 1380–1420, a period during which many positions within that ideology, though originally orthodox, increasingly lost their orthodox respectability as they became characteristically colonized by the heretics.”⁸ That is well said, but we need not suppose that any apparently “radical” discourse inevitably became appropriated by heresy (and therefore, tout court, must be seen as heretical). The Lollards never gained a monopoly on (for example) criticism of deviant clergymen (especially with regard to preaching, pardons, and relics), unconventional deployment of auctoritees, outlandish treatment of marriage lore, or subversion of traditional gender-roles (not that Wyclif’s own theology gave any real encouragement to that, as I shall explain below). The fact that Chaucer was interested in such issues need not mean that he advocated them in some distinctively Lollard form, and the ways in which the poet chose to manipulate certain sensitive ideas is far removed from the uses to which they were put by Wyclif’s followers. (Besides, Chaucer merely glances at, or chooses to ignore, many of the matters that Lollards held most dear.)⁹ I would argue, furthermore, that the poet can be radical in ways which are either (broadly speaking) supportive of orthodoxy or according to its lights scandalous and maybe even subversive, without in any way entering the ideological empire of the heretics (whether their heartland or their colonized territories). The terms “radical” and “heretical,” as brought together in Alan Fletcher’s compound, are not inseparable companions.

Therefore I find highly appealing the model for reading dissent recently offered by Rita Copeland, which builds on Michel de Certeau’s recuperation of those materials (“resistances,” “survivals,” “delays,” etc.) that are held to be “irrelevant” to normative “understanding of the past,” or indeed threatening to the uniformity that such understanding imposes.¹⁰ Copeland emphasizes the possibility of “ideological difference and dissent within the ‘official’ domains of academic or clerical discourses as well as [emphasis mine] the more commonly recognized conflicts between the ‘official’ and the ‘heterodox.’” I too wish to resist the temptation to collapse the former into the latter, being eager to see restored “to the notion of dissent its dynamism and elasticity as a gesture of difference.”¹¹ Many such gestures were never named as heterodoxy, sedition, or heresy. While “the ‘habit’ of dissent” certainly “found expression through the vehicle of popular heresies,”¹² this was far from being its only (or necessarily its most culturally significant) vehicle. Dissent, difference, radicalism—call it what you will— existed far beyond the boundaries of juridical denunciation, whether religious or secular. It frequently resisted colonization by “heretics”—or “heretics” did not deem it worthy of their colonization. The radicalism of Chaucer’s Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale and Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale is, I believe, of that order: not a determinate of Lollard heresy but rather an array of gestures of difference which is uniquely Chaucer’s own.

I dedicate Fallible Authors to my daughters: to Sarah and Katherine, with love from your fallible father.