Introduction

Summary

‘Non est finis potencie sic glosantis’ (‘There is no end to the power of glossing so’), says John Wyclif disapprovingly in his De Apostasia of a particular interpretation of a biblical passage relating to the Eucharist. His statement invokes the twin counters of the following study: ‘power’ and ‘glossing’, ‘authority’ and ‘interpretation’. The ‘text’ to be glossed or interpreted is of course the Bible. Wyclif, and the heresy which arose from his dissident thought, placed the notion of an unglossed, indeed deglossed biblical text at the centre of both academic and popular politics. Such a gesture both was premissed on and implied various startling radicalisms. Preeminently, it involved the notion of reclamation: the Bible had to be reclaimed from the discourse of glossing. For Wyclif, this primarily signified a reclamation from contemporary academia and Church and the hermeneutic practices institutionalised therein. Equally importantly, such a reclamation would only be the prelude to the liberation of the deglossed text into discourses other than those traditionally empowered to deal with the Bible, discourses outside the institutionally demarcated ones of Church and University with their attendant mechanisms of control and security. Such a liberation is simultaneously also a reclamation: this was what Christianity had been like ‘originally’, the fides antiqua scripture referred to in De Apostasia.