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INTRODUCTION

Authority and Fallibility in Medieval Textual Culture

“We elected a president, not a pope,” Barbra Streisand is reported to have said of Bill Clinton, when the allegations about his sexual escapades were flying thick and fast.¹ Betty Friedan agreed: “It is of no consequence to me what Clinton does in his private life. . . . All that is important is his public policies.”² Other voices condemned him for falling beneath “the standard of behavior we expect from Presidents,”³ for having brought the high office of the President of the United States into disrepute. “Though elected by people and filled by men,” this “office has a sacred quality,” wrote Hugo Young.⁴ “The most powerful democracy in the world invests its leader with a special eminence as head of state as well as head of government.” And yet— though Clinton “set a bad example” and “certainly [is] not a man of character,” his “lies weren’t about public business.” Young continues: “He wasn’t caught knowing from the start that the Sudan factory he bombed had nothing to do with lethal weaponry. In a quotidian matter, he lied.” Moving from 1998 to 2005, and to another president, the situation seems to have been reversed. A major cause of then-current anxiety was whether George W. Bush, marketed to the American people as a “man of character” (with the probity of his personal life apparently unassailable), knew from the start that Saddam Hussein had little if anything to do with the perpetrators of the 9/11 terrorist attacks—and hence lied about “public business.”

Such distinctions between the awe-inspiring office and the fallible office-holder, between a person’s authoritative public position and his or her private peccadilloes—indeed between transgressions perpetrated within “public business” which affect whole nations as opposed to those committed within the “quotidian” space occupied by a few individuals whose feelings have no wider consequence—would have been familiar to the medieval poet Geoffrey Chaucer. But of course we must be attentive to the considerable cultural differences which determined their specific meanings in time and history. I have attempted to pay such attention in focusing on the apparent division—sometimes it looks like a wide gulf—between the two facets which, following medieval culture’s dualistic categorization, came to constitute an “authority.” On the one hand, the authority was a figure worthy of respect, belief, and obedience; on the other, the authority was a mere mortal who was capable of much stupidity and sin. This crucial binary was constructed through late-medieval discourses of office versus man (and, in special circumstances, woman), of public versus private, and of the ways in which these twains met. Or failed to meet.

My interest, then, is in the array of “official” requirements and restrictions which the embodiment of authority entailed, and the ways in which mere fallible mortals were presented as failing to live up to those de-mands—whether because they committed high (or low) crimes and misdemeanors, or failed (whether openly or secretly) to practice what they preached. The problem is perennial: how can authority be invested in a corporeal being that is so resistant to rule, to the bridling of its desires? In Chaucer’s day the matter was further complicated by the ubiquitous belief in the inferiority of women. Half of the human race was deemed fallible because its members lived in the wrong kind of material body, the inferior female rather than the superior male form. Despite the constant medieval elevation of spirit over flesh, biological sex was a crucial factor in determining whether a person could hold public office or exercise authority over others.

Such fallibilities could be seen as deficiency, whether due to some lack on an individual’s part or to a general condition which affected an entire sex, as in Aristotle’s claim (frequently reaffirmed during the later Middle Ages) that a woman was a “deformed male.”⁵ Or they could be taken as an affront to culturally sanctioned codes of behavior—perhaps judged a failing with specifically religious implications, identified as sin which demanded punishment in this life and/or in the next. Or, indeed, condemned as deviancy. That last term needs careful definition, given the use of “deviancy” in contemporary parlance to designate specifically sexual behavior. Such a use pervades recent literary criticism of Chaucer’s Pardoner in particular, his (allegedly) homosexual preferences being presented as a challenge to the heteronormative principles endemic in late-medieval culture. The matter of whether the Pardoner’s body and behavior are “deviant” in this way— or in some other (can he be seen as some sort of “eunuch,” for instance?)— is certainly important, and so I have treated it at some length. But it does not fill all the available ethical space; there are other kinds of sin in question, and on public display. The broader moral purchase of the term “deviancy” will therefore be reclaimed below, in light of the standard meaning of the medieval Latin verb devio: “to turn from the straight road, to go aside, to deviate.”⁶

That is the sense present in Boethius’s De consolatione philosophiae, Book III, met. viii, when Dame Philosophy laments how ignorance leads wretched men astray on a devious path:

Eheu quae miseros tramite devios

Abducit ignorancia! (1–2)⁷

More specifically, a person who fell into heresy was deemed to have deviated from true Christian doctrine, as may be illustrated by a passage from the first of Simon of Cremona’s Disputationes de indulgentiis (c. 1380), a work to be discussed in Chapter 1 below. Anyone who advocates an “indiscreet indulgence” is a heretic, Simon declares, for heresy involves two things, an error in reasoning and a stubbornness of will, blatant deviation from the truth (a veritate deviare). Moving on to examples in Middle English, Thomas Usk’s Testament of Love (c. 1385) describes the period from the beginning of the world to the advent of Christ as the time of “deviacion, that is to say, goyng out of trewe way.”⁸ And in the A-fragment of the Romaunt of the Rose the lover tells Dame Resoun that he is “so devyaunt” from her “scole” that he has not been helped at all by her doctrine (4787–91).

Chaucer translates the abovementioned passage from De consolatione philosophiae as follows, in his Boece: “Allas! Whiche folie and whiche ignorance mysledeth wandrynge wrecchis fro the path of verray good!”⁹ This idea of “wandrynge” reappears in Chaucer’s initial description of the Wife of Bath, who has been to Jerusalem three times—“She hadde passed many a straunge strem”—and also visited Rome, Boulogne, Compostella, and Cologne. The narrator concludes that “She koude muchel of wandrynge by the weye” (I(A) 464–67); presumably Chaucer was influenced here by the common understanding of deuius as “extra viam ire.” Apparently Alisoun’s enthusiasm for pilgrimage has not kept her on the straight and narrow path of Christian morality. The same could be said of her sparring partner the Pardoner, also a keen pilgrim. We may recall that he embarked on the Canterbury pilgrimage shortly after returning from Rome, and has the veronica badge—along with a “walet . . . / Bretful of pardoun”—to prove it (I(A) 685–67).¹⁰ And little good has it done him: he is, quite shockingly and scandalously, not a “man of character.” In the Wife of Bath’s case, her moral lapses are exacerbated by the fact that she was born into an inferior, female body—of which she seems belligerently proud, while struggling to cope with the fact that it is now past its physical prime.

These complexly “deviant” and mobile characters, the most blatantly fallible of Chaucer’s “authors” in the Canterbury Tales, are my chosen subject. Of course, the Pardoner and Wife of Bath are not “authors” in the sense that they have inscribed their doctrine textually, for within the frame of Chaucer’s fiction the narrations for which they demand respect remain oral, unrecorded. My point is rather that they are the bearers of authoritative materials and methodologies, and perform certain official functions (sometimes going far beyond what was deemed permissible). Here one should recall the crucial interconnection in medieval culture of the concepts “author” and “authority.” According to the common etymology, the term auctor was related to the Greek noun autentim (“authenticity,” “authority”). ¹¹ It designated at once an agent and a person of gret auctorite, not necessarily in the realm of “literary” production. To appropriate a comment by John Guillory, “Canonical authors are not markedly different . . . from their contemporary workers in the medium of power; they have only chosen a strangely durable medium, the text.”¹² My ambition is to place Chaucer, as a maker of texts, alongside his contemporary workers in the medium of power, thereby relating his discourses of authority and fallibility to the larger ideological sources and structures that gave them meaning.

A related concept which requires initial definition is that of “publication.” As a quaestor,¹³ Chaucer’s Pardoner collects alms for a hospital and dispenses “pardons” or indulgences (which were generally believed to relieve purgatorial punishment for sin); the “publication” of the origin and value of the indulgences was regarded as an essential part of this process. Here I use the term in the common late-medieval, and pre-print, sense of “making public” or “proclaiming” information, announcements, edicts, and the like.¹⁴ The Latin verb publicare and its Middle English cognate publishen also feature in relation to (for example) an act of preaching¹⁵ or a sinner’s public revelation of his sin.¹⁶ Such activities could involve publicacioun understood as transmitting information in and through writing—but not necessarily so, as may be illustrated with reference to Chaucer’s most famous use of the concept, when he declares the bad name of Criseyde is “publysshed so wide / That for hire gilt it oughte ynough suffise” (V, 1095–96).¹⁷ Here the poet has in mind the spreading abroad of Criseyde’s guilt in general, a process in which textualization is not deemed essential and is certainly not specified, though it may be assumed to have played some part. Both the Pardoner and Alisoun of Bath “publish” (in this broad sense of the term) their faults, failings, and limitations along with their moral lore, in ways which—I will argue below—set major medieval discourses of authority and fallibility in sharp, compelling contrast.

Chaucer was particularly attracted to such discourses, for reasons that can only be guessed at. Perhaps there is a connection here with his interest in the writer not only as auctor but also as fictor, i.e., an inventor, maker, or liar, to follow the ubiquitous medieval etymology: “the fables ( fabulae)of the poets are named from fando, because they are not true things (res factae) but only spoken fictions (loquendo fictae).”¹⁸ We may recall how, in the House of Fame, Chaucer reduced Homer—Dante’s philosopher-poet par excellence—to one who “made lyes, / Feynynge in hys poetries” (1477–78), and went on to suggest that textual fame itself may be a pack of lies, or at the very least “compouned” of “fals and soth” (1029). The written record’s apparent inability to give people what they deserve licensed Chaucer to reverse the fate commonly endured by women, as the regular victims of masculinist history. Hence in the Legend of Good Women he is ostentatiously “favorable”¹⁹ to the female sex, in Troilus and Criseyde resists producing yet another book which will “shende” (ruin, disgrace) the heroine (V, 1060), and in the Wife of Bath’s Prologue has Alisoun confront the truism that the lion is painted by the hunter, i.e., women are textually depicted by misogynistic male clerics (III(D) 688–92). Boccaccio had devoted much time in his Genealogia deorum gentilium to the argument that the poets are not liars because they do not intend to deceive;²⁰ Chaucer, I suspect, was intrigued by fiction’s power to deceive—or, at best, to offer alternatives to what, in his culture, passed for truth. This would explain his evident fascination with the moral disquisition of a character who is set up for condemnation in the strongest terms (the Pardoner), and his willingness to put words of the most profound wisdom into the mouth of a character who embodied some of the most virulent antifeminism of his time (the Wife of Bath).

But guesswork this must remain. And, to borrow a passage from Chaucer’s friend John Gower,

I may noght strecche up to the hevene

Min hand, ne setten al in evene

This world, which evere is in balance:

It stant noght in my sufficance

So grete thinges to compasse . . .

Forthi the Stile of my writinges

Fro this day forth I thenke change

And speke of thing is noght so strange . . . (Confessio amantis,I.1–10)

Henceforth I will investigate the discourses of authority and fallibility without which those characters could not exist, seeking insight into the forces that drive them.

Writing around the middle of the 1390s, Chaucer had the most offensive character on his Canterbury pilgrimage present the case that an immoral man can tell a moral tale: “For though myself be a ful vicious man, / A moral tale yet I yow telle kan” (VI(C) 459–60). Many two-faced figures exist in anticlerical satire, of course; the Pardoner’s descent from Faus Semblant in the Roman de la Rose is well known. But Chaucer is, I believe, unique in the way that he pushes such duplicity to extremes: the Pardoner is an exceptionally “vicious man”; his narrative comprises an exceptionally powerful “moral tale.” A sharp distinction is being made between reliable words and unreliable speaker, between the truth of what is said and the falsity of the person saying it. Several decades earlier, in a different country and within a very different society, Francis Petrarch had made a similar distinction. Writing to his long-dead correspondent Cicero, he explains: “It was your life (vita) I criticized, not your ingenuity (ingenium) or your eloquence, for I admire the first, while the second strikes me dumb with wonder.”²¹ Cicero’s vita was marred by weakness in adversity and inconstancy, Petrarch believed. Yet the achievement of the “great founding father of Roman eloquence” was considerable. These statements by Chaucer and Petrarch belong within a sophisticated matrix of ideas concerning the relationship between authority and fallibility (ranging through various sorts of errant or “deviant” behavior). Its distinctive discourses are evident in many spheres of social, political, and ecclesiastical/theological theory and practice.

In the first instance, Petrarch’s segregation of Cicero’s dubious vita and wonderful ingenium may be seen as a move away from some of the values of the medieval “ethical poetic,” to use the late Judson Allen’s felicitous term.²² In the accessūs or “academic prologues” to glosses on the Latin canonical texts studied in the grammar schools, the “branch of philosophy” to which those books belonged was regularly discussed, to establish their ideological credentials and justify their inclusion in a Christian curriculum.²³ In the case of a wide range of syllabus authors (Aesop, Ovid, Horace, Juvenal, Virgil, etc.) the subject-matter treated was usually identified as moral philosophy or ethics, and so those authors became regarded as authorities in the study of human behavior. By these means such texts were “authenticated” in the medieval sense of the term, their prestige and auctoritas being secured. The concomitant was that the poets had to be of good character, men—for men they invariably were—worthy of respect and belief. Hence the learning and prophetic powers of vatic Virgil, and the social outrage of satirists like Horace and Juvenal at the evils of their age, were emphasized. Ovid, the expert on sex and seduction, was a particularly difficult case, but a measure of moral conformity was imposed on his poems. The Amores and Ars amatoria remained resistant, but their damage was limited through the construction of a vita Ovidii which claimed that the poet, exiled by the Emperor Augustus on account of his scurrilous verses, had repented of what he had written and produced other texts (particularly the Remedium amoris) which asserted his change of heart.²⁴ According to this interpretive model, Ovid had left his youthful misdemeanors behind him, and attained that wisdom which age (and painful experience) brings.

Fascinating problems arose when, in the later Middle Ages, certain vernacular writers sought to locate and empower their writings, and those of distinguished contemporaries, in relation to the systems and strategies of textual evaluation which academia had produced. Their sense of the worth of the vernacular in general and their own writing in particular impelled them irresistibly in that direction. But there was a major stumbling block; the shade of Ovid, as it were, haunted such attempts at valorization. Vernacular secular literature had human love as a major subject, and how could a poet who wrote about love, and/or expressed his own (limiting and probably demeaning) emotional experiences, be trusted as a fount of wisdom, accepted as a figure worthy of respect and belief? An auctor amans was an utter paradox, almost a contradiction in terms.

Dante met the problem with typical vigor. His Convivio, which is ostentatiously based on the medieval genre of the commentary on an auctor, elaborately brings out the profoundly scientific subject-matter of three of his canzoni. The point is being made that Dante’s vernacular works merit the full scholarly apparatus of commentary which for generations had been reserved for Latin auctores. Moreover, given that a (would-be) auctor has to have an impeccable character, Dante is anxious to emphasize that his life is not letting down his lyrics. The reader of these canzoni may have formed the impression that he had pursued a great passion of love, Dante admits. But in fact the motivation (or “moving cause”) was virtue, as, he promises, the subsequent expositions will make clear.²⁵ Any potential threat to the authority of the text or the good character of its author is then refined out of existence by the techniques of allegorical exegesis.

However, in his Trattatello in laude di Dante Giovanni Boccaccio chose not to adopt such a defensive strategy. Instead he flatly declares that all his life Dante suffered from licentiousness: “Amid such virtue, amid such learning as we have noted there to have been in this magnificent poet, lust (lussuria) found most ample space.”²⁶ “But who,” Boccaccio asks, “among mortals can play the just judge in condemning it? Not I.” The attractions of the female sex are very powerful, as is proved by both secular and sacred literature. No reasonable person can gainsay the testimony of holy Scripture, which offers the exempla of Eve’s persuasion of Adam, David’s adultery with Bathsheba and murder of her husband, and the story of the wise Solomon who, “to please a woman,” kneeled down and worshipped Baalim. Dante, then, may not be excused, but some comfort may be found in the fact that many other great writers experienced similar difficulties. The clear implication is that amor need not necessarily destroy auctoritas; the moral virtue of a text may survive the lapses of its author.

Those “sinful authors” Solomon and David are invoked to similar effect in what is probably the most daring defense of Jean de Meun to figure in the querelle de la Rose of the early fifteenth century. Pierre Col went beyond all analogies with Ovid—a major strategy in the querelle—to appeal to the precedent of Biblical lovers.²⁷ Chancellor Jean Gerson had attacked the Rose on the grounds that “he who made it was a foolish lover.” Why then, Col retorts, does Gerson not make similar charges against Solomon, David, and other foolish lovers, who lived long before Jean de Meun, and “whose books are made a part of holy Scripture and their words a part of the holy mystery of the Mass”? It was “a foolish lover” (David) who “caused Uriah the good knight to be killed by treachery in order to commit adultery with his wife.” It was “a foolish lover” (Solomon) “who caused the temples with the idols to be built for the love of strange women.” If they are not to be condemned, neither should Jean de Meun.

Col raises the stakes even higher by comparing Jean de Meun’s situation to those of Saints Peter and Paul. Those revered auctores were more firm in the faith after they had sinned, he declares; similarly, Jean de Meun, because he had been a foolish lover, was very firm in reason, for the more he knew by his own experience the folly of foolish love the more he was able to despise it and praise reason. When he wrote the Rose he was no longer a foolish lover, and had repented of having been one—as is evident from the fact that he speaks so well of reason. The voice of “Raison,” it would seem, is in large measure the voice of Jean de Meun.²⁸

The ingenious appeals to the Bible by Giovanni Boccaccio and Pierre Col echo a long-running controversy in Biblical exegesis, over how the fallibility of major Scriptural auctores could be reconciled with their undeniable authority. For generations theologians had attempted to cope with harsh historical facts concerning the lives of Kings David and Solomon.²⁹ Here the strategies of allegorization were invaluable, David being interpreted as Christ, Bathsheba as the Church, and Uriah as the devil. Alternatively, the literal sense could be confronted, with David, Solomon, and (in a very different capacity) St. Paul being deployed as exempla of what to do and what to avoid. St. Bonaventure, writing c.1254–57 in his commentary on Ecclesiastes (then supposed to be by Solomon), affirmed that this work was written not by a sinner but by a penitent man who regretted his sins.³⁰ This is in response to three powerful counter-arguments. First, when a carnal man preaches spiritual things, he scandalizes rather than edifies; therefore this book is likely to cause scandal rather than edification.³¹ Second, in Psalm 49:16 we hear God saying to the sinner, “Why dost thou declare my justices?” a dire penalty being threatened for such presumption (cf. v. 21. This auctoritas was to resonate through scholastic discussions of the immoral present-day preacher, as discussed in Chapter 1 below).³² If Solomon was a sinner, therefore he sins by declaring the divine justice. Third, a good author builds up faith, promotes trust and confidence. But an evil one does not—in conflict with the aim of holy Scripture, which is to generate faith. Bonaventure responds by affirming the opinion of Jerome that Ecclesiastes was the work of a repentant man. Because God does not cast away those who are repentant, it follows that Solomon was not in a reprehensible state when he wrote this book. Furthermore, Bonaventure continues, it may be argued that the holy Spirit speaks what is true and good not only through the good but also through the evil. Hence our Lord advises that we should “do what they say, not what they do” (cf. Matthew 23:3). He prophesied most clearly through the problematic Balaam (cf. Numbers 23 and 24); likewise, God said many good things through Solomon, although he was a carnal man. Solomon’s sin had nothing to do with his teaching, but everything to do with his failure to behave as he ought.

Arguments like this were probably in Col’s mind when he challenged Gerson’s reading of the Rose. Its implication seems to be that a writer’s amatory experience does not necessarily invalidate his work—providing that he has put his amours behind him (like David, and indeed like the chastised Ovid). But what if a writer does not leave his love behind? If, as in the case of Dante as described in Boccaccio’s Trattatello, the emotion persists? That is a far more difficult proposition to defend. But Col, to his intellectual credit, tries to do just that in a later part of the letter quoted above.³³ First he argues that in itself to be a clerk, a philosopher, or a theologian is not irreconcilable with being a foolish lover—witness the examples of David, Solomon, and others. Indeed, he adds, some clerics even say that Solomon wrote the Song of Songs on account of his love of Pharaoh’s daughter. Why, one could bring forth “more than a thousand examples of people who were clerks and at the same time foolish lovers”! These roles are as compatible with one another “as being at once clerk and knight,” as were Pompey, Julius Caesar, Scipio, and Cicero.

Col then proceeds to taunt Gerson by suggesting that the Chancellor should not judge others by himself. Because he is a clerk, philosopher, and theologian without being a foolish lover, he assumed that all men behaved similarly. Which is manifestly not the case. Moreover, even if the great Gerson were, in the future, to become a foolish lover, that would not make him any the less a clerk—at least, not at the beginning of this passion.³⁴

This vacillation is fascinating. On the one hand, Col does not want to set aside the argument that Jean de Meun composed his poetry not as an actual lover but as a repentant one. On the other, he is tempted to go for the more daring proposition that even if Jean had written the Rose while under the influence of foolish love, this would not have interfered with the text’s clerkly, philosophical, and theological achievements. And here perhaps he comes close to Petrarch’s attitude regarding Cicero, as described above. A man can do his job and exercise his professional skills whether or not he is weak in adversity, inconstant in his loyalties, or in love/lust. On the same argument, the intellectual and rhetorical skills necessary to produce brilliant poetry or prose are not destroyed by an author’s moral deficiencies. It seems that we can trust an author’s text, even though in certain cases we cannot trust the author himself. The inference could be drawn that, if we cannot trust the teller, at least we can trust his tale.

The significance of this and related issues can be appreciated better if we move beyond the specifics of textual authorship and authority to consider the wider context in which they belong. For medieval auctor-theory did not occupy some sort of autonomous, specially privileged site of its own (“aesthetic,” literary-critical/theoretical or whatever) but rather partook of discourses which feature crucially in accounts of the formation of the king, the pope, the priest, the preacher. . . . This point may be substantiated in the first instance with reference to the “political theology” behind the notion of “the king’s two bodies.” Here, of course, I am indebted to Ernst H. Kantorowicz’s brilliant study of that subject (originally published in 1957), which retains much of its original challenge.³⁵

Writing around 1100 in his De consecratione pontificum et regum, “the Norman anonymous” speaks of the “twin person” of the king, “one descending from nature, the other from grace.” In one sense, he was, by nature, an individual man (individuus homo); in another he was, “by grace, a Christ-like figure, that is, a God-man (Christus, id est Deus-homo).”³⁶ To put it another way, in terms of his officium (“office,” public role, vocation) the king is the very image and figure of God.³⁷ Such a “yoking of two seemingly heterogeneous spheres” had “a particular attraction for an age eager to reconcile the duality of this world and the other, of things temporal and eternal, secular and spiritual.” Unfortunately, in certain formulations the two spheres seemed to be too heterogenous to yoke together. The “danger of a royal Nestorianism” was “great at all times” in discussion of the king’s two bodies, Kantorowicz admits,³⁸ here drawing an analogy with the way in which the Nestorian heresy had put asunder the two persons of Christ, His divine and human natures.

Subsequently the relevant discourses pulled in two directions: on the one hand a “more theocratical-juristical idea of government” emerged within the political sphere, while on the other notions relating to the “quasi-priestly and sacramental essence of kingship” evolved into the late-medieval theory of kingship by “divine right.”³⁹ Future formulations are intimated in the Policraticus of John of Salisbury (c. 1115–80), who held the view that “Not the Prince rules, but Justice rules through or in a Prince who is the instrument of Justice.”⁴⁰ “The prince is the public power and a certain image on earth of the divine majesty,” argues John, and “in all matters” he “prefers the advantage of others to his private will (privata voluntas),” and indeed “in public affairs” he is “not permitted his own will unless it is prompted by law or equity.”⁴¹ As the bearer of the persona publica the prince “punishes all injuries and wrongs, and also all crimes,” not incurring individual blame for the blood which is shed in the process.⁴² Similarly, in his Summa theologiae St. Thomas Aquinas O.P. (c. 1225–74), argued that a private person (persona privata) has no authority to compel right living; rather the power of compulsion belongs either to the community as a whole or to its persona publica, i.e., its ruler, who has the duty of inflicting punishments.⁴³

The risk of anachronism in interpreting such material is great. Kantorowicz has rightly cautioned us against inferring from it the existence of the concept of the “king as a purely private person” in the modern sense of the term. The crucial line of distinction, he believes, should be drawn “between the king alone in his relations to individual subjects, and matters affecting all subjects, the whole polity.”⁴⁴ And the persona privata considered as a body should not, of course, be confused with the king’s material body; that entity is not specifically covered by the discourse of “the king’s two bodies”—one good reason for not employing that discourse as a crucial analytical paradigm throughout this book.⁴⁵ Of course, the material body did matter, and could impact on the metaphoric “two bodies” in crucial ways.

With this caveat in mind, we may turn to consider briefly the distinctions between “public” and private,” the “official” and the “individual,” which emerged in medieval valuations of the figure of the pope. Walter Ullmann has investigated how Leo I (who died in 461) used Roman law to clarify the issue of papal power, identifying as a major change “the separation of the (objective) office of the pope” which originated with St. Peter “from the (subjective) personality of the pope.” For governmental purposes, Ullmann continues, “it was the office of the pope, the papacy as such, which mattered”; the issue of whether someone was a “good” or “bad” pope was not crucial. “The pope as office holder was conceived to be an instrument to execute the office, that is, to translate the abstract programme of the papacy.”⁴⁶ Thus, “subjective standards and personal qualifications were irrelevant as far as the scope and extent of the office were concerned. In other words, within the terms of papal primatial doctrine the validity of a papal act or decree or judgment did not depend upon the morality or sanctity or other subjective-moral standards applicable to the person of the pope, but solely upon whether or not the judgment or decree was legally valid. . . . The office, in a word, absorbed the man.” Here there is, perhaps, a tendency toward a sort of Monophysitism. On the analogy with the heresy which denied human nature in the person of the incarnated Christ, it might be said that this view of the officium papae tends to have the higher, divine element subjugate the lower, human one. However, in the later Middle Ages there were substantial challenges to this tendency. The “intellectual revolution” (as Ullmann terms it) of Aristotle’s teachings, particularly on ethics and politics, contributed to the emergence of “the conception of the individual as a citizen” with specific rights and responsibilities rather than as a mere “subject” who received “doctrine clothed in the law” which had to be obeyed.⁴⁷ At the end of the thirteenth century a “subjective point of view” regarding the papacy became clearly visible. The distinction “between office and person was now beginning to be reversed”: “What began to matter was the personality of the pope, was whether he was a morally ‘good’ or ‘bad’ pope.”⁴⁸

The significance of that disassociation is richly problematic—not susceptible of generalization but rather to be sought in specific times, places, people. To take one particularly telling case, Pope Clement VI (1342–52) was adamant that “the personality of an individual office-holder could not change the nature of the office,” as Diana Wood puts it.⁴⁹ Thus he “strained every nerve to convey a sense of the vast abyss which separated the heavenly office from the earth-bound man.” It is quite true that Clement frequently described himself as unworthy. But such self-abasement may be read as a strategy of self-aggrandizement—behold the frail shoulders on which such a heavy burden of responsibility rests! In other words, “the separation between the person and the office was simply a device to enable the Pope to stress his sovereign status.”⁵⁰ One among many exercises of that sovereign status was the bull Unigenitus Dei filius, promulgated in good time for the Roman jubilee year of 1350, which lent papal authority to a doctrine of indulgences or “pardons” from the punishment of sin, as developed by the major schoolmen of the thirteenth century. Here Clement consolidated the papal claim to dispense merit to sinners from the vast spiritual treasury which had been filled by the surplus or supererogatory merits of Christ and his Saints—a point to which we will return in our discussion of Chaucer’s Pardoner qua pardoner or “publisher” and distributor of indulgences.

On the other hand, the disassociation of office and man could be deployed to diminish rather than aggrandize the papal office—as often happens in the writings of those who dissented from what the Church was defining as orthodoxy. For example, in his polemical treatises the Franciscan William of Ockham (c. 1288–1347)—a vociferous critic of Clement VI—deduced various radical consequences from the principle that the power which God had given to men was crucially limited. Certain restrictions had been imposed on the power of St. Peter, which should not be transgressed by his successors. As a mortal man and hence imperfect, there is no way in which the pope can possess all the power which Christ, even as mortal man, possessed.⁵¹ Far from being infallible, the pope “may not add any ‘novelties’ to the evangelical law, especially such as would be grave or onerous.” Indeed, “without the consent of the faithful he cannot regularly command any special fast or abstinence.”⁵² Ockham goes so far as to say that, in the interests of the greater good of the universal Church, circumstances might arise whereby it was better for it not to be ruled by any pope—or, alternatively, to be ruled by many popes.⁵³ Such remarks are devoid of any belief in the mystical inevitability of the figure and office of the pope.

Remarkably similar discourses and dilemmas characterize the late-medieval construction of priestly power and responsibility, as may be illustrated with reference to scholastic discussion of the ministration of the sacraments. Can the sacraments be conferred by evil ministers? Thomas Aquinas puts forward three powerful arguments against this proposition— arguments which we find reiterated, again and again, in academic affirmations of the unsubjective authority of ordained ministry.⁵⁴ First is the challenging question posed by Ecclesiasticus 34:4, “who can be made clean by the unclean?” When ministers lack grace themselves, surely it is impossible for them to confer grace on others? Second, the power of the sacraments derives from Christ, but if the wicked are cut off from Christ, surely they have lost the power of conferring the sacraments? Third, the minister required for a sacrament is one who lacks the stain of sin, as Leviticus 21:17–18 indicates (“Whosoever of your seed throughout their families has a blemish, he shall not offer bread to his God, neither shall he approach to minister to him”). But against all these arguments, Aquinas continues, stands the authority of St. Augustine, who claimed that “the ministry was destined to be transmitted in full to both good and evil. What difference does a bad minister make to you when the Lord is good?”⁵⁵

Aquinas resolves the issue by applying the principle of instrumentality. A minister may be seen as a sort of an instrument, and an instrument acts not of its own accord but through the power which moves it. True, it may possess some other form or power in addition to that which it needs to function as an instrument. But this is irrelevant to its instrumentality. For example, a physician’s body is the instrument of a mind which possesses certain skills: and it makes no difference to those skills whether the body is healthy or infirm.⁵⁶ (In other words, a physician who is himself sick can make others well.) According to the same principle, it is unimportant whether the channel “through which water is passed is made of silver or lead.” Hence, Aquinas concludes, “the ministers of the Church can confer the sacraments even when they are evil.” They do not cleanse men from their sins, or confer grace upon them, through their own power; the power involved belongs rather to Christ, who works through them as His instruments. But is not the evil minister cut off from the power of Christ? He may be, explains Aquinas, but good effects can be produced through an instrument which itself is lifeless. “Therefore Christ works in the sacraments both through the wicked as through instruments lacking life and through the good as through living members.” Finally, he argues, the minister of the sacrament should indeed live a life which is free from the stain of sin, because that is appropriate and fitting behavior for such a person—but personal goodness is not essential for effective conferral of the sacraments.

What, then, of preaching the word of God, another major aspect of the priest’s ministry? This was not in and of itself a sacrament, but ordination was, and in the later Middle Ages the ordained priest had preaching as one of his crucial responsibilities and prerogatives. And here again the issue of whether the human agent was a mere instrument or something more important—and potentially more problematic—troubled the schoolmen. Is preaching while in a state of mortal sin itself a mortal sin? How much bearing on this issue has the fact that certain individuals are obliged to preach by dint of their priestly office? Or that, in one case, the preacher’s sins may be public knowledge to his congregation, while in another case they may be secret? Is it permissible for a priest to preach if his sinful state is concealed and private? If, however, his sin is public knowledge, then, irrespective of whether he is preaching ex officio or not, surely he sins mortally on account of the scandal he creates?

Some of the answers offered to such perplexing questions will be discussed below in Chapter 1. The Parisian theologian Henry of Ghent (d. 1293) will receive special attention, since his distinction between what might be termed “public” as opposed to “private” sin is one of the most elaborate of its kind.⁵⁷ But his treatment of the problem did not meet with universal approval; in particular, he was criticized by the Carmelite theologian Gerard of Bologna (d. 1317),⁵⁸ another figure whose views feature prominently in our first chapter. The very fact of such a lack of consensus may serve to indicate to us the somewhat tentative nature of scholastic speculation regarding the “non-public” (to use the safest term) ethics of the public man. Moreover, such disagreements mark (yet again) just how important it is to avoid anachronism in seeking to interpret what, in medieval terms, belongs to the “public” and “private” spheres. When medieval writers spoke of the performance of the officium praedicatoris as a public duty⁵⁹ they had in mind matters relating to location (preaching as an activity conducted in church) and audience (preaching as a performance which was, in theory, open to all, whatever one’s status, sex, or ability, offering instruction of a kind which was necessary to help all Christians toward salvation). This contrasted with “private” or “extra” teaching in special circumstances, which could involve one-to-one instruction or addresses to small groups, and did not always require the services of an ordained priest.

Examples of “private” instruction included an abbess teaching her nuns, a layman instructing his wife or familiars in the rudiments of the faith, and a mother educating her children in like manner. These activities were confined within the supposedly “private,” domestic, or reserved (because removed from public view) spaces of family home or nunnery, with proper hierarchical relationships being maintained within each sphere. Women could teach other women or children; it was not permitted for them to teach mixed audiences which included men, due to the perils of sexually provocative female speech. Besides, so the argument ran, men would regard it as unseemly and shameful to be instructed by women. They lacked the authority to preach on account of their inferior subject-position; their bodies were blemished with natural weakness and impurity, and besides only the male form could image Christ sacramentally: hence the ordination of women was deemed to be impossible. Aristotle had described a woman as a “deformed male,” as already noted, and medieval medicine commonly held that male semen naturally tended to produce males, the female being procreated only through a hindrance of this process. For its part, medieval theology held that the sexus or gender of women was, in effect, a deficiency which constituted a categorical impediment to female ministry, as our discussion in Chapter 3 will attempt to explain. Even if a bishop attempted to ordain a woman, declared John Duns Scotus O.F.M. (c. 1265–c. 1308), the imprint or character would simply not work on her female body.⁶⁰ Caroline Walker Bynum’s highly influential Holy Feast and Holy Fast suggests that, through passionate identification of their bodies with the crucified body of Christ, some exceptional Christian women sought, maybe even attained, a “quasisacerdotal” role.”⁶¹ But no matter how much suffering the consuming and consumed female body could achieve, the facts of its biological markers ensured that its possessor could get nowhere near the site of institutional clerical power and authority—the priesthood.

What about those female prophets referred to in the Bible? Did they not constitute a precedent and model for contemporary female preachers? The orthodox answers tended to emphasize that those (very special) women were given their gift for private rather than public instruction, and if men were taught thereby this was by a special dispensation, wherein divine grace did not respect sexual difference.⁶² Such answers will be discussed fully in Chapter 3, with reference to the contributions made by Thomas Aquinas and Henry of Ghent, particularly since this material was drawn on by English theologians in their battle against Lollardy in the early 1390s. It was generally conceded that women can teach privately, in the sense of “familiarly conversing” with a few others (to follow Aquinas’s formulation),⁶³ but not publicly, in church. Within their own religious houses, abbesses and prioresses can instruct their nuns and reprehend vices, explains Thomas of Chobham (c. 1158/68–c. 1233/36), who was appointed sub-dean of Salisbury sometime between October 1206 and circa 1208.⁶⁴ But it is not licit for such women to expound holy Scripture by preaching. They can read from the Apostles and from legends of saints, and at their matins read from the Gospels. However, they are not allowed to put on sacred vestments or read from the Epistles or the Gospels at the celebration of the mass, on account of the impurity of their menses and because of the danger of concupiscence, for priests or other clerics upon seeing them would be inflamed with lust.

By the same token, a layman could teach his servants and family, but (unless specially licensed) not a gathering of all-comers in a public place, far beyond the walls of the house wherein he ruled as paterfamilias. Every good man should “preach” in his own home and in private places, to his family and neighbors, explains Thomas of Chobham. He may do this by recalling what he has heard in good sermons—thus, by reporting and repeating, he can expound holy Scripture. However, he most certainly may not expound holy Scripture in church or in other public places. Georges Duby is quite correct in saying that “the opposition between private life and public life is a matter not so much of place as of power,”⁶⁵ but in view of the testimonies here quoted I myself would wish to emphasize the conjunction rather than the disjunction of place and power.

When the schoolmen spoke of the “secret” sins of priests they usually did not have in mind the notion of misdemeanors perpetrated within the boundaries of what we might call “personal” or “private” morality, but rather sins of which a priest’s congregation was ignorant. Of course, the schoolmen’s treatment of sins which are perpetrated in the very act of public teaching (including vainglory and flattery) as opposed to those which are not (including covetousness and lust) raises larger issues. But no-one actually said that it is worse for a preacher to be vainglorious than to be lecherous; neither does the notion of “privacy,” as invoked in attempts to defend President Clinton’s rights as a private individual and citizen, actually apply here. For if the lecherous behavior of a preacher were to become known, it would scandalize the members of his congregation, who would justifiably feel that he was failing to “practise what he preached.”⁶⁶ And in the eyes of his superiors and ultimately of God a sinful priest was just as culpable for his “private” failings as for those committed in the exercise of his office. In short, here we are dealing largely with matters relating to public and private places, information and power, rather than to public and private life as envisaged in later centuries.

In public places, when a priest preached it was deemed crucial that he enjoyed the confidence of his audience. True, it could be (and often was) argued that his personal fallibility did not damage his authoritative message; there was widespread acceptance of the notion that a clever sinner could well make an excellent teacher. But that missed the crucial point, as developed in scholastic thought concerning the officium praedicatoris, that a good pastor owed his flock his devotion; rhetorical skill and intellectual competence alone were simply not enough. In practical terms, the sight of an immoral priest exhorting his listeners to moral behavior, or daring to consecrate the sacraments, could cause them deep offense—as when the Viennese Beguine Agnes Blannbekin (d. 1315) records with horror how a congregation recoiled from a priest who, having “deflowered a young virgin,” presumed to celebrate Mass the very next day.⁶⁷ Acutely aware of this problem, the schoolmen put themselves in a difficult (if not ethically dubious) position by promoting a policy of “Don’t ask, don’t tell.” My review of the abundant evidence has indicated a frequent concern, which sometimes smacks of obsession, with official secrecy. If the preacher’s sins become known publicly, he may prove a source of scandal. Better to maintain silence, then, and keep the congregation in the dark, if at all possible or for as long as possible. Thomas of Chobham’s comments on this matter are illuminating, indeed surprising. His Summa de arte praedicandi includes a lively attack on those who have proclaimed abroad or “published” (publicauerunt) their “sin as Sodom, and they have not hid it” (cf. Isaiah 3:9).⁶⁸ A man can, quite commendably, hide his wickedness out of reverence for God and benefit to his neighbor, thereby avoiding the scandal which “publication” of his wicked works would cause. Thomas excels himself by illustrating this point with reference to the story in Genesis (see especially 31:34) of how the godly Rachel hid the idols of Laban in camel dung (fimus camelorum), that being how Chobham interprets the Vulgate text’s stramen cameli—actually a reference to a pack-saddle (or “camel’s furniture” as the Douai translation puts it).⁶⁹ According to the narrative, Rachel hides Laban’s idols under the stramen, “and sat upon them,” informing Laban that she cannot get up because “it has now happened to me, according to the custom of women” (i.e., she is menstruating).⁷⁰ Chobham ignores that last detail, interpreting Laban’s gods as customary or habitual sins of the kind attacked by St. Paul when he condemns those “whose end is destruction: whose God is their belly: and whose glory is in their shame: who mind earthly things” (Philippians 3:19). Yet—and here is the main surprise of Thomas’s excursus—such sins should be hidden from those “many plotters and spies who inquire into the sins of preachers.” The prudent preacher should deceive those who inquire into his misdeeds, so that they may be addressed within himself, so to speak; thus, rather than being gloried in, his sins will rot and stink in his heart. And since they should be covered up in this way, a man must, as it were, sit upon his sins and hide them under his posterior regions, ensuring that they do not appear to the sight of men. Just as no-one should bare his bottom in public, neither should he reveal his sins to others!⁷¹

It was not, of course, that any medieval moralist wished to condone a priest’s immoral life. The divine punishment which such a sinner would ultimately suffer was imagined with some relish.⁷² And there are treatises aplenty which describe the purification process through which a priest should pass before presuming to serve his flock—especially before administering holy communion, “confecting” (cf. the Latin verb conficere) the sacrament of the Eucharist. The traditional position was that priests who failed to live up to such (fittingly) high standards should be left to God, and hopefully their fallibilities would not become known to their congregations. For, if so, layfolk might presume to judge their superiors, thereby threatening the jealously guarded hieratic relationship between shepherd and flock.

Chaucer’s Pardoner, however, makes no secret of his moral deviancy. Indeed, he positively revels in exhibiting it to the audience of Canterbury pilgrims; given this ostentatious public display, the risk of scandal is great. If the standard scholastic critique were applied, it could be said that the effect of his preaching is thereby destroyed, since the pilgrims are bound to take more notice of his bad personal example than of his good narrative exemplum. It is hardly surprising, then, that after his tale is told he should receive insults rather than alms. Moreover, the Pardoner sins in the very act of preaching (in the sense explained above), due to his vainglory and greed for gain—here we are dealing with deviancy appertaining to his relationship with God rather than that with his audience. Of course, he sins in other ways as well, his lechery being evident (though defining the precise form or forms it takes has proved controversial in current scholarship). Complexity is heaped upon complexity when we realize that pardoners were generally not licensed to preach. Therefore it is possible to argue that— quite apart from his moral unworthiness for the task—Chaucer’s character has usurped an office to which he has no legal right. To make matters even worse, he exceeds his brief as a distributor of pardons, claiming far more for them than his license allows. And could it be that at least some of those pardons—like all of his relics—are fakes? Indeed, is the Pardoner himself a fake, not a properly licensed quaestor at all?

These interpretive challenges are further complicated by the fact that, in Chaucer’s day, not everyone was prepared to endorse orthodox attempts to contain the immoral preacher and/or priest. The schoolmen we have cited had carefully demarcated the qualities of the office and the qualities of the man—Lollard theology brought them together with a vengeance. Above, the possibilities of latent “Monophysitism” and “Nestorianism” were tentatively explored in various late-medieval attempts to reconcile abstract authority with human fallibility. Now we may add that certain statements by John Wyclif’s followers shaded into “Donatism,”⁷³ a heresy generally believed to include the belief that, if ministers are unworthy of their ecclesiastical offices, the sacraments they perform are thereby devalued in some way.⁷⁴ The Wycliffite treatise Of Prelates claims that “a prest may be so cursed & in heresie þat he makiþ not þe sacrament”;⁷⁵ a Lollard sermon suggests that, because of their evil life; priests may lose “uertu to mynystre ony sacramentis” or to do anything medefuly;⁷⁶ and the third of the Lollard Twelve Conclusions claims that the Holy Spirit and His noble gifts “may not stonde with dedly synne in no menere persone.”⁷⁷ According to the record of his second trial, William Swinderby (first charged with preaching heresy in 1382, in Leicester) believed “that a priest being in mortal sin cannot, by the power of the sacramental words, confect the body of Christ, or perform any other Church sacrament whatever or minister to members of the Church”—a charge he vehemently denied.⁷⁸

Similar attributions of Donatist views occasionally appear in the Norwich heresy trials of 1428–31, as when Hawisia Moone is quoted as saying that “oonly he that is moost holy and moost perfit in lyvyng in erthe is verry pope, and these singemesses [‘mass-singers’] that be cleped pretes ben no prestes, but thay be lecherous and covetouse men and fals deseyvours of the puple.”⁷⁹ This brings out well another crucial aspect of Donatism (essential for this, our initial, definition of the term): “sacraments derive their validity from the holiness of him by whom they are conferred.”⁸⁰ In other words, the best men consecrate the best sacraments. Such doctrine was quite contrary to the ideals of Christian unity, since it held out the (highly divisive) possibility of different individuals ministering and receiving different types of sacrament. St. Augustine, who in the fifth century labored long and hard against the original Donatist sect, was acutely aware of this,⁸¹ and sought a solution in the principle that ordination confers a supra-human authority on any duly appointed clergyman, which keeps his sacraments safe and secure, despite any human fallibilities he may have.⁸² But Wyclif’s supporters chipped away at this principle,⁸³ developing the view that every member of their “true church,” being one of the elect and a recipient of divine grace, “was ipso facto more priest than layman, ordained of God.”⁸⁴ Therefore a righteous layman had just as much right (or indeed more right) to administer the sacraments than had an evil, albeit formally ordained, priest. To take one example from many such statements, the Lollard John Skylly “held and afermed that every trewe man and woman being in charite is a prest, and that no prest hath more poar in mynystryng of the sacramentes than a lewed man hath.”⁸⁵

To what extent was John Wyclif himself responsible for such latter-day Donatism, if so it may be called? He definitely was the main target of the London Blackfriars condemnations of May 1382, which included the proposition, “if a bishop or a priest is living in mortal sin he cannot ordain, or confect, or baptize.”⁸⁶ But Wyclif never defended himself against this particular charge (in marked contrast to his prompt reaction to other items on the list), which leads Ian Levy to suspect that the schoolman did not accept the doctrine as his own.⁸⁷ However, his followers Nicholas Hereford and Philip Repingdon, confronted with the same proposition, were obliged to renounce it.⁸⁸ Wyclif’s De apostasia (usually dated 1379) does contain the view that the priest who is “foreknown” as eternally damned lacks the spiritual presence (modus essendi spiritualis) necessary to confect the sacramental presence (modus essendi sacramentalis); this and other passages from the same treatise also appear in the text known as Wyclif’s Confessio (usually dated 1381).⁸⁹ On the other hand, elsewhere Wyclif asserts the (basically orthodox) view that the sacraments of a priest who is “foreknown” and living in moral sin are useful to his subjects.⁹⁰ And yet, in a sermon of 1382 he suggests that “foreknown” priests administer beneficial sacraments only secundum quid (i.e., in a relative and therefore perhaps inadequate fashion).⁹¹ Even more daringly, in his De antichristo (1384) Wyclif says that there is nothing in the Bible to support the belief that God must assist every faithless prelate in consecrating the sacraments.⁹² Most radical of all is the statement in De Eucharistia that one mass may be despised and condemned by God while another is deemed meritorious; the host consecrated by the good priest, who best signifies Christ’s union with the Church, must be better than the host consecrated by the bad priest, who impedes that signification.⁹³ Levy seeks to explain such apparent contradictions by positing a crucial development in Wyclif’s thought, a “discernible movement in the direction of Donatism” which was “closely linked to his rejection of the doctrine of transubstantiation.”⁹⁴ “Perhaps scholars will have to be content to say that there were times when Wyclif had been orthodox, times when a Donatist, and other times still when he had walked a perilous path between.”⁹⁵ While Wyclif was not constructing a position “he was prepared to defend obstinately,” Levy further suggests, nevertheless he was quite willing to engage in “provocative speculation.”⁹⁶

Many examples of such “provocative speculation” (on this as on so many other matters) may be found in Wyclif’s writings. One must suffice here, a passage from his Responsiones ad argumenta RadulW Strode, Strode having been a Fellow of Merton College, Oxford, before 1360 and probably to be identified with the “philosophical Strode” who is one of the addressees of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde (V.1856–57).⁹⁷ Wyclif declares that the faithful who by true belief and love are members of Jesus Christ (who is the archpriest) are themselves sacerdotes, thanks to the spiritual oil of predestination. The implication is that in this respect they do not need to receive the material oil traditionally used in the ordination service. The officium of priest is often bestowed on those who are unfit for it, continues Wyclif, and it may be right for the true sons of God to perform that office, even though they may not have been consecrated by a bishop, and lack the priestly tonsure and the character (or sacred imprint) which ordination imposes. Now, while this certainly does not go so far as to say that the sacraments ministered by such unfit priests are useless or at least dubious, it does raise the specter of valid ministration by non-ordained individuals who derive their authority directly from God. Perhaps Wyclif rather enjoyed going so close to the brink of Donatism. Some of his followers may have gone over it.⁹⁸

Another Wycliffite doctrine which threatened to drive a wedge between authoritative officium and fallible office-holder was the theory of dominion.⁹⁹ According to Wyclif, dominium meant divine right of possession: the right to hold power, whether spiritual or secular, depended on grace.¹⁰⁰ No pope, bishop, or king had true dominion over his subordinates while he lived in a state of mortal sin.¹⁰¹ One of the 1382 Blackfriars propositions took the form, “if the pope is foreknown [to be damned eternally], and a bad man, and consequently a member of the devil, he has no power over Christ’s faithful.”¹⁰² By the same token, the status of the deviant priest, one who failed to “lyuen wel in clennesse in þout & speche & dede & good ensample to þe peple,”¹⁰³ was highly suspect, and the value of all his works questionable. The most crucial priestly office, according to Wyclif and his followers, was “trewe preching”: “rit preching of goddis word is þe moost worþy dede þat prestis don heere among men.”¹⁰⁴ Therefore anything which interfered with it came in for the most stringent of criticism: “þis synne þat lettiþ þis gendrure crye to god to be a-vengid.”¹⁰⁵ Traditionally, the mercenary preacher was to be tolerated; the office should be respected even if the office-holder cannot be. But according to Wyclif, such a man should be shunned by his congregation and be subject to punishment—by the secular authorities, if necessary. In De veritate sacrae scripturae, for example, it is argued that prelates who live an ungodly life forfeit their sacerdotal privileges.¹⁰⁶ Similarly, John Purvey (reportedly) held that anyone holding the office of priest or bishop who did not set a good example in his life, incurred excommunication by God.¹⁰⁷

A particularly worrying implication of the abovementioned doctrines, as interpreted by at least some of Wyclif’s followers, was that personal righteousness transcended the boundaries and barriers of gender. If a woman is in a state of grace that is what empowers her rather than an official dispensation of the Church hierarchy; in such a state she has as much right to preach and to administer the sacraments as has a similarly disposed man. “Donatist (or near-Donatist) denials of the validity of the sacraments administered by unworthy priests led to claims for a lay ministry,” Margaret Aston has written, “and these in turn opened the way to further claims,” including the argument in favor of women priests.¹⁰⁸ The Dominican inquisitor Bernard Gui (c. 1261–1331) complained of the Waldensians’ belief that “the consecration of the body and blood of Christ may be made by any just person, although he be a layman” (providing of course he was a member of the sect), adding that “they even believe the same thing concerning women.”¹⁰⁹ Here, as in many other respects, the doctrinal trajectory of Lollardy may be said to parallel that of Waldensianism. But did Lollard women priests actually exist? This is a matter of modern scholarly debate, though the balance of opinion would seem to be against the hypothesis. Of course, a lot depends on what is meant by “priesthood” within a theology which devalues the sacraments (as traditionally understood) in general. It would seem that the theory had great potency and challenge even if the practice was minimal, particularly in view of the strength of the establishment’s response to the views of Walter Brut, a Welsh Lollard who dared to argue that women could preach and (at least in certain circumstances) administer the sacraments, including the sacrament of the altar. But there is a twist to this particular tale. As I demonstrate in Chapter 3, much of its theory was generated by the team of expert theologians recruited by John Trefnant, Bishop of Hereford, to refute Brut’s views; in the process of building up the Lollard’s views in order to knock them down, they canvassed opinions which were far more radical than anything that Brut himself had held, inasmuch as we can judge from the records of his trial.

At any rate, the orthodox view persisted that a woman could not be a doctrix, auditrix, or praedicatrix (“teacheress, studentess, preacheress”) except in the most exceptional of circumstances; those bizarre Latin forms, coinages redolent of a tiresome academic humor, point to the monstrous nature of any such creature. Because of her natural and legal inferiority, and possession of the wrong type of body, woman could scarcely ever be an auctrix (“authoress”). The Wife of Bath’s Tale may be read as offering a tacit comment on this status quo. Therein a physically repellent old woman, her body disfigured by old age and the ravages of poverty, teaches quite irreproachable doctrine. If the female form is incapable of authoritative character-ization then it must be de-formed in order that its possessor may become an acceptable medium for the transmission of a high message.

There is, of course, much more to Chaucer’s creation of the Wife of Bath, including a bold eroticism which owes much to Ovidian realizations of gender and sexuality. But Dame Alisoun cannot be contained within discourses which would serve to limit her potency, write her off as yet another Dipsas or duenna-figure whose expertise is confined to stereotypically female skills. So blatantly does she confound such expectations that another of Chaucer’s fictions, the Friar, is moved to advise her to leave authorities to preaching and to the schools of the clergy. In his view, her discourses of authority are unfitting in the mouth of a woman.

Ye han heer touched, also moot I thee,

In scole-matere greet difficultee.

Ye han seyn muche thyng right wel, I seye;

But, dame, here as we ryde by the weye,

Us nedeth nat to speken but of game,

And lete auctoritees, on Goddes name,

To prechyng and to scoles of clergye. (Friar’s Prologue, III(D) 1271–77)

The sources and significance of the Friar’s unease will be sought in Chapters 3 and 4. Suffice it to note here that, in the tale which the Wife tells, a romance text is turned inside out to present an ugly old woman as the intellectual and moral superior of a rapist-knight. Thus the conventional dictum that “gentle is as gentle does” is given new life, the claim that nobility of soul is to be valued over nobility of birth becomes more than a pious cliché. Moreover, women may be valued for their wisdom rather than their beauty; the repulsive (to the male gaze which, predictably, is the dominant viewpoint of the text) body of the old woman fades into insignificance as her voice utters the most authoritative and compelling of statements, Dante, both poet and sage, being ostentatiously cited as a major source. One of the most repulsive bodies in the Canterbury Tales houses a mind and soul which are in possession of an impressive body of doctrine. And she is the creation of an aging woman who, in her own self-portrayal, professes corporeal appetites of a kind which had been zealously condemned by generations of clerics. On the same argument, the possibility that the Pardoner’s body—whether physically imperfect, effeminate/feminized and/or sullied by lust (heterosexual or homosexual?)—may be militating against his presumption of authority serves to problematize even further an already fraught depiction, offering the prospect of even deeper deviancy.

Archbishop Arundel’s Constitutions of 1407/9 sought to eradicate all the dangerous Wycliffite opinions which had been circulating at the time when Chaucer was creating those perplexing “fallible authors,” the Pardoner and Wife of Bath. The Constitutions denounced unlicensed preaching, banned mention of the sins of the clergy or anything which might undermine orthodox instruction on the sacraments in sermons aimed at the general public, and forbade all other teachers from concerning themselves with disputatious matters of theology. Unlicensed translation of Biblical passages into English was also forbidden—and this applied not only to the “Lollard Bible” in whatever version, in part or entire, but also to extracts from the holy Scriptures as included in vernacular books and treatises, and indeed those vernacular books and treatises themselves. Moreover, the ownership of an English Bible translation made in the time of Wyclif or later was prohibited, except in the case in which special diocesan permission had been given.¹¹⁰

In the Oxford translation debate of circa 1401 scholars had clinically debated if knowledge of God should hierarchically proceed from the Latinate clergy to the laity, if layfolk could cope with a text so stylistically difficult as the Bible, and if the barbarous English language was capable of serving as a vehicle for the communication of divine truth.¹¹¹ When issues of social control impinged on the consciousness of the Church authorities, however, the situation acquired a new urgency. They “came to see that the vernacular lay at the root of the trouble,” “that the substitution [of English for Latin] threw open to all the possibility of discussing the subtleties of the Eucharist, of clerical claims, of civil dominion, and so on.”¹¹² In such a climate, all English writings, no matter how much or how little theology they contained, no matter how unimpeachable their orthodoxy may have been, could fall under suspicion. In the later fifteenth century a copy of the Canterbury Tales was produced for the prosecution during a heresy trial. As Anne Hudson says, if this manuscript “had included, for instance, the Pardoner’s Tale, or, even more, the Parson’s Tale, it could on a rigorous interpretation” of the relevant Constitution have been “regarded as indicative of heresy.”¹¹³ One might also mention The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale, which features a woman who is highly competent in the academic discipline of disputation and adept at deploying authorities from the Bible and the writings of the Church Fathers. Writing in 1415 in the wake of the Oldcastle rebellion, which was seen as a consequence of Lollardy, Thomas Hoccleve warned women to keep to their station in life. Given that they are weak-minded and uneducated, “lewed calates” [i.e., strumpets] should confine themselves to spinning and traditional sources of gossip rather than vainly attempting to construct arguments based on the Bible and to engage in disputation on topics from which God has barred them.

Some wommen eeke, thogh hir wit be thynne,

Wold argumentes make in holy writ!

Lewed calates! sittith doun and spynne,

And kakele of sumwhat elles, for your wit

Is al to feeble to despute of it!

To Clerkes grete / apparteneth þat aart

The knowleche of þat, god hath fro yow shit;

Stynte and leue of / for right sclendre is your paart. (144–52)¹¹⁴

Alisoun of Bath has done all this, and more—for she tells a tale in which the social order is challenged inasmuch as a poor woman of low birth manifests moral dominion over a churlish aristocrat. Nicholas Watson makes the point well that the Canterbury Tales, “playing, as they so disruptively do, with the most important contemporary arguments over teaching and religious authority,” are “a product” of “a world which is crucially pre-Arundelian.”¹¹⁵ The post-Arundelian world was very different—a narrower, more repressive one.

And yet—as already noted, Chaucer’s Friar does voice his concern about the Wife of Bath making arguments in holy writ and engaging in the “aart” of disputation which is the prerogative of “clerkes grete”: his admonition to leave the auctoritees “to prechyng and to scoles of clergye” probably had as much resonance in the 1390s as it would have had in the early 1400s. The contrast between these two eras should not be made too sharply. It would be imprudent to exaggerate the scope of Chaucer’s intellectual freedom and the extent to which he could safely play with “important contemporary arguments,” make game out of earnest, and/or say true words in jest. Take, for instance, Harry Bailly’s reaction to Chaucer’s “povre Persoun of a toun,” a man “riche . . . of hooly thoght and werk” (I(A) 478–79). When this highly idealized figure takes Harry to task for his virulent swearing, he exclaims, “I smelle a Lollere in the wynd,” and warns the Canterbury pilgrims that this “Lollere” is going to “prechen us somwhat” (II(B1) 1173–77). Harry seems to be in a jocular mood. He is not saying that the Parson is an actual Lollard, merely that right now this man is talking like one (the reference being to Lollard contempt for oaths).¹¹⁶ And he is perfectly happy to introduce the Parson’s “predicacioun” rather than making any move to censure or curtail it. The Shipman, who now insists on telling his own tale, continues Harry’s highly reductive comparison by imagining that the Parson will preach exclusively from Biblical quotations and introduce “difficulte” (hard and/or controversial material), sowing cockle (a weed) “in our clene corn” (1180–83). In other words, if the Parson continues to act like a Lollard they can expect the clean corn of orthodoxy to be infiltrated and sullied with the weeds of heresy. Here, then, two inveterate swearers join forces to combat what they construct as excessive religiosity, their weapon being ridicule—the Parson is being put down by having his religious zeal insultingly likened to Lollard extremism. But deadly earnest may be seen as underlying this game—an argument which may be supported by a complaint in Alexander Carpenter’s Destructorium viciorum (1429) about how those “who hear cursed transgressors of God’s commandments daily blaspheming God with lies and horrible oaths” are “ashamed to silence them and refrain from such transgressions themselves, lest they be called Lollards and heretics, or of the Lollard sect.”¹¹⁷ A more comprehensive protest had been made a little earlier, shortly before 1426, by John Audelay, priest to “þe lord Strange” (presumably Lord Strange of Knokin, in Shropshire).¹¹⁸ In the second of the poems which survive uniquely in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 302, Audelay objects to the way in which poor devout priests can be branded as Lollards and hypocrites, their ardent devotions and unceasing work for Holy Church being valued as nothing.

if þer be a pore prest and spirituale in spiryt, And be deuoute, with deuocion his seruyse syng and say, Þay likon hym to a lollere and to an epocryte; if he be bese in his bedus þe Prince of heuen to pay, And holde hym in hole cherche dule vche day Oute of þe curse of cumpane, and kepe his concyans clene, He ys a nyþyng, a not, a negard, þai say. (Poem 2, 131–37)¹¹⁹

Of course, the remarks by Audelay and Carpenter are unequivocally serious, but the similarity between the contents of their texts and Chaucer’s, the level of intellectual consensus which they share, is quite remarkable. Devout and devoted priests can all too easily have their piety misrepresented by their opponents, devalued through glib accusations of heresy—and that is a chilling prospect in any circumstances. These passages seem equally aware of that prospect, despite the differences of date.

All the essential constituents of Wycliffite thinking were in place during Chaucer’s period of literary productivity, and their dangers had been broadcast within the élite group of which he was a member. While attempts to procure Wyclif’s formal condemnation in England were unsuccessful until the Blackfriars Council of 1382,in 1381 John of Gaunt—Chaucer’s patron as well as Wyclif’s—had disassociated himself from the schoolman due to his radical views on the Eucharist.¹²⁰ Indeed, 1382 is a crucial year in the history of Lollardy for many reasons. Three of Wyclif’s major academic supporters, Nicholas Hereford, Philip Repingdon, and John Aston, publicized their similar eucharistic views in London by means of vernacular handbills and posters, and one of the greatest of the early Lollard evangelists, William Swinderby, had charges brought against him by Bishop Buckingham of Lincoln.¹²¹ Swinderby has been credited with converting Sir John Oldcastle to Lollardy. Another of his converts—or at least a person whom he influenced highly whilst proselytizing in western Herefordshire—was Walter Brut, whose heterodox views on women performing priestly functions will be discussed fully in Chapter 3 below. Brut was tried by Bishop Trefnant of Hereford during the period 1391–93.In 1395 a party of Lollards pulled off a major publicity stunt by affixing their Twelve Conclusions to the doors of Westminster Hall and St. Paul’s.¹²² According to the Annales Ricardi Secundi, among this group were four of the “Lollard Knights” as named by the chroniclers Thomas Walsingham and Henry Knighton: Richard Sturry, Thomas Latimer, Lewis Clifford, and John Montagu.¹²³ The poetic texts on which this book focuses, the prologues and tales of the Pardoner and Wife of Bath, are generally believed to have been written in the mid-1390s. It is impossible to prove how much Chaucer knew or cared about historical events of the kind I have been illustrating, but the supposition that he was unaware of all of them strains skepticism too far. His friendship with at least some of the “Lollard Knights” (an exceptionally literate group) is surely significant, though the caveat must be entered that the extent of the Lollardy of such figures as John Montagu and John Clanvowe, impressive poets both, is debatable, and the slipperiness of what the authorities deemed to constitute as Lollardy in this period should also be recognized.¹²⁴

Furthermore, the great appeal of early Wycliffism to the English aristocracy should not be underestimated. Indeed, according to Michael Wilks, Lollardy started out as a court-centered movement, Wyclif having “from the beginning considered himself to be the spokesman par excellence for the king and the court” in their fight against papal lordship.¹²⁵ Or,to be more precise, the schoolman grafted “an appropriate theology” onto the existing “anti-papalism” of “the families who administered the king’s government as a court party.”¹²⁶ Wyclif’s teachings on civil and ecclesiastical dominion had much to offer those families.¹²⁷ In material terms, they would be the beneficiaries of the disendowment of church property, and in moral terms, they would serve as the guardians of the English church, ensuring that its officials did their job properly and that a stringent reform program was implemented.¹²⁸ But this alliance of mutual self-interest between Wycliffism and state power was not to be. Seeking the support of the hierocratic clergy in a time of need,¹²⁹ Richard II bit the hand that would have fed him. Thomas Walsingham recounts how, “inflamed by the holy spirit” and judging it more necessary to give succor to the imperiled church than pursue his temporal affairs to their end, the king returned home early from Ireland (in 1394), following a plea by the Archbishop of York and the Bishop of London.¹³⁰ The Lollard Knights soon felt the force of the new policy. Richard set about rebuking certain high-ranking individuals, “threatening them terribly” if they gave aid or comfort to the Lollards. He seems to have made an example of Richard Sturry, who was one of his chamber knights—at least, Walsingham singles Sturry out as having received a severe dressing-down from the king himself. On this occasion Sturry was ordered to renounce his heterodox views, and threatened with “a most horrible death” if he ever violated this judgment. It seems reasonable to suppose that Chaucer’s friends among the Lollard Knights (perhaps even Sturry himself )¹³¹ would have told him something about this traumatic event—which may have come as quite a shock to the old retainer, particularly if Wilks is right in supposing that hitherto royal servants had got the message that protecting Wycliffites and expressing sympathy with Wycliffite views (perhaps even holding them) was what their lords and masters expected.¹³² Long before Archbishop Arundel published his infamous Constitutions, Lollards and their supporters could feel— with good reason—in grave danger.¹³³

Sturry’s indictment is dated 1395 by Walsingham. That was also the year in which, on a much happier occasion, Froissart presented the king with a luxuriously bound volume “about love.”¹³⁴ Sturry had played a major role in organizing this audience, as the Frenchman gratefully acknowledges.¹³⁵ But Froissart is silent on the subject of his patron’s supposed heresy, and of the specific views Sturry actually held, or is supposed to have held, we know nothing. We do know something about the (alleged) Lollard views of another chamber knight, Lewis Clifford, although the record is deeply frustrating because it leaves so much unexplained. When Clifford (again, according to Walsingham) recanted in 1402, he sent Archbishop Arundel a list of conclusions which, he claimed, were held by the Lollards.¹³⁶ They include the propositions that the seven sacraments are only “dead signs” (the sacrament of the altar being a mere “morsel of dead bread”), that purgatory does not exist, that clerical celibacy was not ordained by God and hence all in religion can marry, and that consent alone is required for marriage (without any role being played by the church). K. B. McFarlane found this account slightly “fishy,” feeling that “the views Clifford is made to ascribe to the Lollards are wilder than usual.”¹³⁷ Could it be, then, that, under duress, Clifford exaggerated such Lollard views as he knew of, in an attempt to distance himself far from them and impress upon Arundel the strength of his repudiation? Perhaps, but it should be noted that all the Clifford conclusions may be paralleled (in some shape or form) in other records of Lollard belief (and indeed can be traced back, however circuitously, to the thought of the arch-heresiarch himself ).¹³⁸ For example, those relating to marriage find clear and substantial parallels in the Norwich heresy trials of 1428–31, and in the few surviving testimonies to the views of William White, a Lollard evangelist in that region who had practiced what he preached by taking a wife—quite illegally, since he was an ordained priest. Such beliefs will be discussed in Chapter 4 below, as part of a review of the (actually quite tenuous) Lollard theology of marriage, which was undertaken to ascertain whether or not any analogies may be found with Chaucer’s own treatment of the subject. Clifford’s conclusions indeed seem “wild,” but they may be deemed as being, in large measure, representative of certain strands of Wycliffite thought, and it is quite possible that Clifford himself once held views like that. Or something like that.

Clifford brought from France to England a copy of Deschamps’ poem in praise of Chaucer, wherein Clifford himself is named. Elsewhere Deschamps calls Clifford “amorous,” which presumably means that the Englishman is being complimented on his knowledge of the then-fashionable doctrine of fin amor.¹³⁹ This seems very far from Lollard attacks on the use of “fables of the poets” in sermons,¹⁴⁰ or the complaint of “William Thorpe” against those pilgrims who, en route to Canterbury, listen to pipes and bagpipes, sing loudly, ring their bells, and generally make more noise than if the king himself were passing through with his trumpeters and “manye oþer mynystrals.”¹⁴¹ Give them a month “oute in her pilgrimage,” complains Thorpe, and for as long as half a year afterward many of them will be “greete iangelers, tale tellers and lyeris.” Thorpe’s interlocutor in this self-aggrandizing account, Thomas Arundel himself, promptly accuses the Lollard of being a “lewid losel” who has not considered the matter sufficiently. It is a good thing that pilgrims should have with them both singers and pipers. If one of them should hurt his toe and make it bleed, why should he or his companion not begin a song or produce a bagpipe to drive away “þe hurt of his sore” with such “myrþe”? “Wiþ siche solace þe traueile and werinesse of pilgrymes is litli and myrili brout forþ.” Here, then, Arundel plays the role—a highly unusual one, according to the tenor of much recent scholarship—of defender of appropriate forms of recreation and artistic “solace” (albeit of a highly practical kind).¹⁴² At this point Thorpe (assuming that he is indeed the author of this narrative) is seeking to present Arundel in an unflattering light, but one may easily envisage Deschamps’s admirer Richard Sturry, “amorous” Lewis Clifford, and that great teller of Canterbury tales, Geoffrey Chaucer, siding with the archbishop in this instance at least. Many of the tales told by Chaucer’s pilgrims would have been deeply offensive to Wycliffite sensibilities. Indeed, many Lollards would have condemned the very basis of Chaucer’s fiction—the pilgrimage itself—and much that went with it.¹⁴³

In the light of all this, several general caveats may be offered. The first concerns the danger of making totalizing statements about Lollardy, particularly Ricardian Lollardy, given the range of beliefs which were tarred with that same brush. A movement or sect which could include Lewis Clifford and William Thorpe had to be capacious indeed. Second, demotic Wycliffism—to coin a phrase—was alive and well in Chaucer’s day; we do not have to await the early fifteenth century to see its emergence.¹⁴⁴ Wyclif and his most ardent academic supporters had addressed themselves ad populum, preaching in vulgari far beyond Oxford (London, Leicester, Bristol, Northampton, etc.),¹⁴⁵ and the populus made of this doctrine what they would, accommodating it to their specific and sometimes conflicting interests, material as well as religious. Hence it is misleading to view William Swinderby as an individual “portent” of a future dumbing-down of Lollardy—little else being expected of “half-educated and usually unbeneficed mass-priests,” the unprepossessing “channel by which Lollardy was to be transmitted to future generations.”¹⁴⁶ Such condescension obscures the point that “watery and simplified version[s]” of Wyclif’s “novel doctrines”¹⁴⁷— a quite inadequate way to characterize views which often have their own robust logic—are to be found in such Lollard testimonies as the Twelve Conclusions, Walter Brut’s cedulae and The Examination of Sir William of Thorpe, in chroniclers’ reports of views (supposedly) held by the Lollard Knights, in developments of Wyclif’s thought (insofar as they can be constructed) by close associates like Nicholas Hereford, Philip Repingdon, John Aston, and John Purvey, and indeed in the lists of condemned propositions extracted from the teaching of Wyclif himself. For Wyclif’s opponents, as much as his followers, sometimes made blunt instruments out of the theologian’s subtle and shifting speculations. The range and variety of views possible within Lollardy, and/or the range of views which could pass as Lollard,¹⁴⁸ must be recognized and respected, for example, when we seek to discover Lollard sympathy, or the lack thereof, in the work of those most elusive and tantalizing of thinkers, Chaucer and Langland.

By the same token, in the house of orthodoxy there were many mansions. It is all too easy to discover heresy, heterodoxy, subversion, and so forth if one is unaware of the intellectual leeway which was possible within orthodoxy, or fails to recognize the range of disagreement which orthodoxy could accommodate, even in the time of Wyclif. Those trends have been all too common in criticism of Middle English literature. That is why much space has been devoted in the present book to developments in theology which pre-date Wyclif and which continued to inform English Catholicism during, and long after, his controversial career. My critical judgments remain my own, of course, and there is no necessary causal link between an abundance of information and an appropriate interpretation. Suffice it to hope that even those who disagree with me may find some material in this book which will further their own research. My final (and deeply personal) caveat: we should be wary of reconstructing 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 in the same way within orthodox promotion of a transfer of learning and power as expressed in works written in the vernacular. The translatio studii topos had been tainted by the Lollards, a fact of far greater cultural weight than the celebratory comments which John Trevisa¹⁶⁶ and Geoffrey Chaucer had made concerning the transference of learning from Greek into Latin and from Latin into English. “God woot that in alle these langages and in many moo” the scientific conclusions transmitted in his Treatise on the Astrolabe have been “suffisantly lerned and taught,” asserts Chaucer, adding that “diverse pathes leden diverse folk the righte way to Rome.”¹⁶⁷ However, subsequent political events in England were inimical to the promotion of such a positive view of the relationship between learning and linguistic diversity. There seemed to be one straight and narrow road to Rome, and anyone who wandered by the way could be at risk. The fate of Reginald Pecock did not bode well for any ambitious attempt to reclaim the vernacular for orthodoxy. It is not surprising, then, that there is no affirmation of the translatio auctoritatis from Latin into English of the type which, most memorably, Dante had been able to make for his own “illustrious vernacular.”¹⁶⁸

In France and Italy, discourses concerning the intersections of authority and fallibility sometimes Wgured within sophisticated discussions of the ethical credentials of vernacular authors and their texts. In England they manifested themselves in a particularly dangerous way, within a dialectic that (in its most extreme form) questioned the efficacy of the teaching and sacramental actions of a man of great authority if his life did not accord with his official status, and countenanced the possibility of women claiming some of the prerogatives of the doctor, praedicator, and lector. These crucial differences may be seen as both causes and effects of the very different textual cultures of England and of continental Europe. The following book’s identification of the peculiarities and problems of the English scene will, I hope, throw light on the ideological conflicts which underpin Chaucer’s two most problematic authority-figures, the Pardoner and Wife of Bath.