Confession and Resistance: Defining the Self in Late Medieval England.

Confession and Resistance: Defining the Self in Late Medieval England. By Katherine C. Little. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. 2006. $27.50. vii + 196 pp. isbn: 978-0-268-03376-7.

Scholarship on the nuances and ideological implications of Wycliffite writing proceeds apace, and Katherine Little's book is a distinctive contribution to it. She suggests that because scholars have concentrated on doctrinal emphases in Lollardy, they have not thought enough about the consequences of those emphases for subjectivity, or 'selfdefinition' as she prefers to call it. Her premise is that 'to reform the language of lay instruction is to reform the self-understanding that language makes possible' (p. 2). She is particularly concerned with confession, because confessional examination required individuals to define themselves with reference to categories of sinful or virtuous living as well as to the narrative models offered in associated exempla. Since the Wycliffite movement challenged confessional practice and the use of exempla, it generated new possibilities of self-definition.

A first chapter demonstrates how 'orthodox' sermons fostered processes of biblical and exemplary 'recognition', through which laypersons identified themselves and their role within the practices of the church. The disruption wrought by Wycliffite polemic was that Wycliffite polemic disrupted this process because it downplayed the value of analysing individual sin and focused more on the 'structural sin' of the allegedly corrupt church, and of allegiance to it (p. 37). Thus, Wycliffite homilists ask their listeners to identify themselves not so much as moral agents in personal battles with sin, as participants with Christ in a collective struggle against persecution and for institutional reform. In fact (as Little cogently shows), for Wycliffites the interior person has a quality of uncataloguable 'hiddenness' (p. 43) not amenable to the conventional categorizations by which confessional literature had proposed to disclose it.

Chapter 2 first explores further that mechanism whereby penitents were to elicit their inner 'identity' through the vocabulary of vices and virtues. Then, Little uses Wycliffite objection to auricular confession to offer a thoughtful reading of the Testimony of William Thorpe. Does Thorpe attest a Lollard concern with subjectivity, notably a doubt whether any person can truthfully speak their interior state within the context of formal confession? Little provides interesting evidence that Nicholas Love is already reacting to these concerns in his contemporary Meditations.

A third chapter aims to situate Chaucer's Parson as a response to the same interpretative concerns. However, the author's determination to make the Parson contribute to the theme of her book (now headlined as 'a late medieval crisis in the language of selfdefinition', p. 79) results in a forbiddingly convoluted discussion of the Parson and his tale, which perhaps only an aficionado would appreciate. Finally, the status of 'confessional self-identification' in Gower's Confessio is set in antithesis to that discerned in Hoccleve's later Regiment of Princes. Where the Confessio is still able to 'retreat' from its Prologue's riven world of contemporary England into a confessional world where identity can just about be secured, the Regiment frames a markedly 'laicized' confession within threats of heresy and despair, and eventually abandons the mode as if it were contaminated.

Katherine Little's book proposes a heady confluence of ideas, and presses details of large texts relentlessly into service to underpin a completely speculative thesis. Among the serendipitous victims are Piers Plowman, whose device of confession by a personified sin is subjected to an analysis that seems insensitive to Langland's loose technique with personification; and the conclusion of the Regiment, whose humility tropes are read as a 'miring [of the poem] in despair' (p. 127). Confession and Resistance is an initially absorbing but eventually overwrought experiment in charting intangible evidence of how the understanding of identity formation evolved among writers responding to Wycliffite polemic. The book's underlying thesis, notwithstanding, deserves the attention of medievalists.

Alcuin Blamires

Goldsmiths, University of London