6 - Lancastrian reformist lives: toeing the line while stepping over it

Summary

Despite John Wyclif's radical, unprecedented conversion of fraternal correction into a tool for disendowing the English Church and despite the grounding of Wycliffite anticlerical polemics in the key Gospel texts (Matthew 18 and Luke 6), non-Wycliffites continued to advocate the practice of fraternal correction. Between Pope Gregory's branding as erroneous Wyclif's teaching on fraternal correction (1377) and Archbishop Thomas Arundel's Constitutions of 1409, pastoral literature and sermon cycles present discourse on fraternal correction in the usual places and in the usual ways. (New manuscripts of pre-1375 preaching materials, exegetical works, and sermons promulgating fraternal correction as part of the pastoral program of reform also appeared in these decades, of course.) For example, in the entry on fraternal correction in his Florarium Bartholomaei, the Augustinian canon John of Mirfield proclaims repeatedly that subjects are bound to admonish their disciplinary superiors, although he insists that such speech always be delivered in private – a fairly restrictive position. Throughout these years, exegesis of Jesus' metaphor of the mote and beam – in sermon and biblical commentary, in Latin and English – argues that sinners may correct others' sins if they examine themselves, correct their own sins first, and admonish others mercifully. Even the much studied quaestio “Whether it is fitting for women to teach men gathered together in public” resorts to fraternal correction as a work of spiritual mercy required of all Christians in order to refute the claim that women may preach and teach publicly.