Kantik Ghosh. The Wycliffite Heresy: Authority and the Interpretation of Texts.

(Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature, 45.) Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. xiii + 296 pp. $65. index, bibl. ISBN: 0-521-80720-4.

Kantik Ghosh explores the hermeneutic complexity of the writings of John Wyclif, his followers, and his opponents, considering the ways in which Wycliffite thought profoundly changed English intellectual culture. Ghosh focuses on three historical moments to make his case that Lollardy not only brought sophisticated intellectual discourse into the "domain of the non-clerical and the vernacular" (210) but also "half won the battle of ideas" (212). He first considers the Latinate scholastic debates of Wyclif and his Oxford contemporaries in the 1370s and 1380s, then turns to the Oxford translation debates in the 1390s and 1400s, and finally moves on to the civil and ecclesiastical repression of Lollardy in the 1420s and later.

In his study of Wyclif's writings and those of his followers, Ghosh finds a fundamental opposition between "a dialogic, interested, and, by implication, corrupt 'glossatorial hermeneutics'" practiced within the church and the universities and a theoretically "monologic apprehension of the divine mind through a transparent 'open' text" (7). Behind this seemingly absolute distinction lie, however, much more messy hermeneutic complexities. Ghosh notes, for instance, that in De Veritate Sacrae Scripturae Wyclif embraces an apparently sciential hermeneutics while preserving the interpretive freedom enabled by a traditional sapiential model. Similarly, the English Wycliffite sermons exhibit a tension between "theoretically determinate scriptural meaning" and "a practical utilisation of scriptural polysemy" for polemical ends (115). Ghosh finds further conflict in the hermeneutics of the sermons, noting their vacillation between the hermeneutics of textual openness and obscurity as well as their disjunctions concerning the locus of textual authority.

The earliest of the anti-Wycliffite texts that Ghosh examines is that of William Woodford's Quattuor determinationes in materia de religione. Ghosh argues that Woodford opposes Wyclif's "monologic idealism," embracing instead "a pronouncedly dialogic, contingent, relativist framework of analysis" (17). Wyclif privileges authorial intention in his readings, but Woodford prefers readings that cite interpretative traditions, a preference grounded in his stance that authority is contingent and changeable. In a characteristic move, Ghosh perceptively calls attention to what Woodford does not consider in his critique of Wyclif, noting that Woodford fails to address Wyclif's rejections of the use of scholastic logic.

Similarly, in his reading of Richard Ullerston's pro-translation determinatio, Ghosh points to the ways in which Ullerston misses or misunderstands key issues in the debate over vernacular translation of the Bible. Whereas the anti-translation proponents William Butler and Thomas Palmer emphasize in highly polemical fashion the inevitability of interpretation in translation as well as the absolute nature of ecclesiastical authority, Ullerston genuinely wants to explore the implications of vernacular translation. However, he "never seriously addresses the central Lollard involvement with the definition of valid religious authority" (87).

Ghosh sees both Nicholas Love's Mirror of the Blessed Life of Christ and Thomas Netter's Doctrinale Antiquitatum Fidei Catholicae Ecclesiae as reflecting Lollardy's important achievements in breaking down the barriers between the worlds of academia and lay devotion. Both of these anti-Wycliffite texts share or accommodate Lollard hermeneutic emphases and principles. While the Mirror exhibits an essentially conservative hermeneutics that upholds the authority--political, textual, and hermeneutic--of the ecclesiastical establishment, Love self-defensively co-opts vocabulary strongly identified with the Lollards and mobilizes "ideas about textual authority akin to those of the Lollards" (172). Thomas Netter, writing in the 1420s, inhabited a far less secure political environment than Wyclif's earlier critic William Woodford. Woodford embraced the contingency of authority, opting for a dialogic approach contrary to Wyclif's monologic one; Netter, however, "shares ... in the hermeneutic world of his opponent," arguing, like Wyclif, for "determinate religious truth" (175)--albeit a different version of such truth. Netter attempts to render tradition monologic, conceptualizing a "unified tradition, in which ... 'the holy doctors meet in one faith'" (201).

Ghosh's book is highly readable, and he presents his argument lucidly. One of the most interesting sections is his comparison of textual presentation in manuscripts of Love's Mirror and those of its source, the Meditationes vitae Christi. The comparison raises such fascinating issues that I would have welcomed greater attention to manuscript traditions of other texts under consideration. I would also have liked to have seen Ghosh pay greater attention to the effects of Lollard hermeneutics in the political realm, which was so interested in, and intimately tied to, the other spheres to which he addresses himself in making his case that Lollardy destabilized not only the church and contemporary academe but also "late-medieval religiointellectual mentalites" (212). All in all, though, The Wycliffite Heresy is a valuable addition to Wyclif/Lollard studies.

NANCY BRADLEY WARREN

Florida State University