Licensing the word in late-medieval England: Strategies of censorship and evasion.

摘要

This study addresses how both orthodox and Lollard writers responded to the censorship arising from Arundel's promulgation of the 1407 Constitutions. Scholars have generally limited their studies of censorship's effects on the production of literature to the age of print. However, the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries too witnessed authors who created rhetorical strategies of evasion in answer to the English Church's repression of independent theological discussion and interpretation.; Wyclif's followers were the first to recognize the invidious strategies by which the Church regulated biblical interpretation. I examine their hermeneutics to show how they restored the original contexts to biblical passages which churchmen had misinterpreted. This practice of textual recovery became a theme among contemporary writers; William Langland structures Piers Plowman to demonstrate how his simple narrator, Will, is enabled by his own spiritual intelligence to properly recontextualize texts misread by his earlier guides.; Once the Wycliffites had characterized themselves as independent interpreters of sacred literature, orthodox writers began to employ fictionalized Lollards in their texts. In Dives and Pauper, Jack Upland, Upland's Rejoinder, and The Plowman's Tale, characters of ambiguous orthodoxy voice actionable criticisms of the ecclesiastical and royal hierarchies. The anonymous authors thus are empowered to address tabooed issues through their scapegoated personae.; My study concludes with an evaluation of the methods used by Margery Kempe and Reginald Pecock as they attempted to circumvent the bishops' strictures on vernacular theological literacy. Margery Kempe understood that the Church's new ritual of heresy prosecution ironically provided suspect heretics with a freedom of speech denied to most people. By submitting herself as a potential heretic to episcopal correction, Kempe gained a public forum. In contrast, Reginald Pecock failed to realize that there was an avenue of strategic textual negotiation between the Church and its objectors which permitted expressions of dissent. Because of this failure, he would be tried for heresy and defrocked.