Although the story of the nun of Watton by Aelred of Rievaulx was published by Twysden in the seventeenth century and reprinted by Migne, it has never been studied in detail for the light it throws on religious life and attitudes in the twelfth century and on the history of the order founded by St Gilbert of Sempringham. This neglect has been the result less of ignorance than of the nature of episode, which was described as ‘disgraceful and fanatical’ by Dixon, ‘distressing’ by Eckenstein and by Graham, ‘painful’ by Powicke, ‘strange’ by Knowles, ‘of almost casual brutality’ by Nicholl, and as ‘curious’ and ‘unsavoury’ by Aelred Squire.

Fifty years ago it was possible to write with a good conscience about relations between pietism and enlightenment; everyone knew what these spiritual entities were, and knew also that it was not proper (in the German-speaking world at least) to talk of religious revival until the enlightenment was almost spent. It is only in the historiography of the German Democratic Republic that any of these certainties seems to remain; there the enlightenment retains pride of place as the progenitor of progress and human liberation, with an honourable pedigree extending deep into the middle ages, its relations with ständisch politics or with pietist religion capable in principle of rational discussion. Contrast with this the sneer of A. J. P. Taylor in England that the enlightenment is now only of interest to those who are still worried about Christianity, and with the problems of definition encountered by historians in America and West Germany. To Henry May, the enlightenment in America is capable of structural analysis which reveals stages of development, each with its own objectives. The notion that enlightenment was a simple concept, patient of blanket condemnation, was a calumny put about by frightened conservatives, including many of evangelical views at the end of the eighteenth century.

St Clare died on II August 1253, and the celebration of her seventh centenary in 1953 was accompanied by a revival of scholarly interest in her life and work scarcely to be paralleled since the Bollandists passed through August. Grau established the canon of her writings and published an annotated German translation: Hardick fixed the chronology of her life—born in 1193-4, received into the religious life at the age of 18 in 1212; from 1212 to 1253 head and leader (from 1216 abbess) of the community in San Damiano. Much else occurred besides in 1953 in scholarly publication and popular festivity; and little perhaps remains to be discovered about her life and works.

John of Salisbury long has drawn the attention of scholars as a representative of medieval humanism. Many studies have been devoted to his allusions to the literature of pagan and Christian antiquity. But these studies necessarily have remained somewhat inconclusive because of our ignorance about the nature of John’s exemplars of his authors. Assessment of such matters as his interests and tastes, his working methods, his dependence on his authorities, and his originality and independence requires precise knowlege of the nature of his exemplars.

The monastic cathedrals of England had for centuries led a double life. On the one hand, each was the seat of a bishop, and the centre of a diocesan administration. On the other, it was the home of a cloistered community, usually Benedictine, which was in theory withdrawn from the world. In principle, the community, which actually owned the cathedral and its precincts, should have elected the bishop, in which case he would probably have been one of their own number, and relations could have been expected to be harmonious. However, in practice, bishops were royal servants, and were appointed by the king with papal connivance. There were numerous quarrels between kings and popes over such appointments, but disagreement never resulted in a canonical election, which would almost certainly have produced a candidate acceptable to neither. In consequence, the bishops of monastic cathedrals were almost invariably outsiders, and usually seculars.

In May 1955, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Geoffrey Fisher, visited Fort Hall in Kenya’s Kikuyu native reserve. The colonial government had declared a state of emergency nearly three years before in response to a secret and violent Kikuyu anti-colonial movement which it knew as Mau Mau. In the ensuing guerrilla war several thousand were killed, almost all of them Africans, and some eighty thousand Kikuyu were held in detention camps.

THE historian chips eagerly in search of veins of psychological truth behind the autobiographer’s polished facade. But the latter’s Roman art held little appeal in the medieval west. Medieval autobiographers had no generally favoured literary stereotype on which to model their fragments of experience. Familiar with confessional practices, and with preachers’ fabliaux, they often wrote with a frank, engaging air. Yet, since they were inclined to conform to what they considered seemly for exempla, the historian needs to be as much on his guard against seduction by their apparent artlessness as by the polished suavity of the antique self-portrait.

The comparison of the State with an animate organism was of outstanding importance in the political theories of the Middle Ages. Despite all its various forms of appearance this comparison always served to define the place and function of each individual in particular, as well as in relation to a superior whole. John of Salisbury deserves the credit for having helped this organological view of the State to breakthrough in writing the Policraticus.

Wyclif found certain scholars of his time ‘in full cry against the unlogical, imprecise language of the Bible and the liturgy’. No commentaries written in that spirit survive, but traces are abundant in contemporary writings of aggressive talk in the schools and disputatious questioning along these lines. The challenge was not in its essence a new one. It is an episode in a series of encounters which had taken place between secular learning and Christian learning from the beginning; and more recently between grammar and logic and the difficulties presented by the Bible’s language. But it was perhaps new in degree. These critics of Wyclif’s day, it seems, said that the Bible was not logical and found in that a reason to question its truth, rather than to look to their logic for faults, as had been the traditional way.

As has been remarked often enough, Lollardy was the first real English heresy, and its progenitor, John Wyclif, inspired what Anne Hudson has so rightly termed a ‘premature Reformation’, a reformation which had far more immediate impact in Hussite Bohemia, but in England left Wyclif for a century and a half as a voice crying in the wilderness, a prophet without honour in his own country. Since history is usually studied backwards, his name is most commonly associated with the alleged eucharistic heresy condemned at the Blackfriars Council of May 1382. This was more significant for its timing than its substance. The actual charges were not only a distortion of Wyclif’s theory, and Wyclif himself was never specifically named, but any reasonably intelligent scholastic could have worked it out from Wyclif’s philosophical principles at least ten years earlier. But the eucharist had the great advantage of being a theological matter, which no one could contest the right of bishops and masters to deal with, and this made it a far more effective stick with which the papalists could belabour their lay opponents—and by 1382 the times were far more propitious. The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, an event with which Wyclif’s name was quickly linked, had thrown the regency government of the young Richard II into turmoil: and Lollardy, newly introduced as a term of abuse, could be represented as a recipe for any number of horrors, not least the assassination of bishops. The murder of Archbishop Sudbury in 1381 had opened up the way for his replacement by Wyclif’s leading opponent, the very vigorous bishop of London, William Courtenay. All this was however simply the culmination of a long process against Wyclif which had resulted in two abortive heresy trials in 1377 and 1378. In both cases Wyclif was rescued by royal intervention, by John of Gaunt. Wyclif, as he had proudly proclaimed, was a dericus regis, a king’s clerk, a member of the royal household: and as Christopher Given-Wilson has recently shown, king’s clerks might be few in number (and exceptionally cheap to maintain, since they could—as Wyclif was—be paid out of normal pluralism), but they wielded a degree of influence out of all proportion to their numbers.

La Publication parmi les fascicules de la Typologie des sources du moyen âge occidental du volume de Cl. Bremond, J. Le Goff, et J.-Cl, Schmitt sur l’exemplum montre les progrès qui ont été faits dans ce domaine depuis 1927, date à laquelle était parue la thèse de J.-Th. Welter du même titre. Si ce dernier reste encore un remarquable instrument, toujours utile et sou vent nécessaire à consulter, c’est dans le récent livre collectif que l’on trouvera désormais des définitions plus élaborées et des études plus précises sur la place et le rôle de l’exemplum dans le sermon, des analyses plus affinées de sa structure, des appréciations plus fournies et plus nuancées sur la portée historique et sociologique de ce genre littéraire.

[The] persecuted Church though it hath bene of longe season trodden under foote by enemies, neglected in the world, nor regarded in histories, & almost scarce visible or knowne to worldly eyes, yet hathe it bene the true Church onely to God … continually stirring up from time to time faithfull Ministers, by whome alwayes hath bene kept some sparkes of his true doctrine and religion.

This article is dedicated to advancing three propositions, all in elaboration of research by Beryl Smalley:

• (1) that the Revelation exegesis of Hugh of St Cher, O.P. (c. 1195-1263; regent master at St Jacques, 1230-1235) can be securely located;

• (2) that much of the content of this exegesis is extraordinary; and

• (3) that Hugh of St Cher the great Dominican commentator on Scripture is a figment of bibliographers’ imaginations.

Strype tells the story of how Henry VIII is said to have remarked, on being given a copy of Tyndale’s Obedience of a Christian Man by Anne Boleyn, ‘For this book is for me, and all kings to read.’ Whether or not the story is true—and it is perhaps safest to regard it as apocryphal—it has generally been held to be ben trovato in the sense that Tyndale’s teaching on authority and obedience was such as would have had an obvious appeal to Henry VIII, and it has frequently been assumed that Tyndale’s doctrine anticipated the legislation of the reformation parliament. But what precisely was Tyndale’s political teaching and where does he stand in the history of sixteenth-century political thought? It is a curious fact that although Tyndale’s importance as the first English protestam political thinker of the sixteenth century has been widely recognised, there has been little detailed investigation of his political thought and no attempt to set it in the context of contemporary continental protestam thinking. By and large, Tyndale has been accepted simply as an extreme exponent of Luther’s teaching on non-resistance and the divine right of authority, or as a precursor of the royal supremacy, without any effort being made to analyse the precise character of his views.

Medieval biblical commentators traditionally interpreted the Bible in terms of the ‘four senses’ of Scripture—the literal-historical and the three ‘spiritual’ senses, the allegorical, the tropological or moral, and the anagogical. Recently attention has been focused on the use of a variation of the allegorical sense, namely, political allegory. This was the application of a biblical text to a current political situation or argument. The Roman revolutionary Cola di Rienzo, after hearing Pope Clement VI preach in consistory, gave it another name altogether—sensum adulterum. Clement had apparently delivered the customary papal allegorization of the two-swords passage (Luke, xix. 38), according to which both swords, that of spiritual authority and of physical power, were in the hands of the priesthood.

One of the very noticeable features of John of Salisbury’s later letters is the frequency with which they refer to the affairs of the empire and its ruler Frederick Barbarossa; indeed, they are an important source for the history of the empire in the 1160s. There is no mystery about why this should have been so. The papal schism which broke out in 1159 and which was sustained by Barbarossa was of great importance for John and his circle, both in itself as a matter of great concern to those who cared about the church, and in particular because its progress often affected the course of the dispute between Becket and Henry II.

Historians should not need Wyclif to alert them to the dangers of words. Even if our professional futures are unlikely to be threatened, as his was, by the challenging of accepted terms, the words we use can lead us into false positions, and we sometimes need, like Wyclif, to probe the historical dimension of our terminology. What exactly do we mean when we call Wycliffites or Lollards a ‘sect’? How does our word relate to contemporary usage? Do we import alien interpretations by failure to recognize semantic change? If ‘sect’ is a word that leads us into something of an impasse, this paper does not attempt the impossible of pointing to a way out; my aim is merely to indicate some of the hazards of the linguistic terrain and to suggest that looking at the term may itself tell us something useful about Wycliffites and contemporary attitudes towards them.

IN his treatise on civil lordship, written a few years before the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, Wyclif raises, incidentally, but in a particularly challenging way, the central problem of political philosophy. The problem is to work out a consistent idea of authority and subordination as reciprocal—in the biblically extreme terms of WycliPs formulation, a consistent idea of reciprocal lordship and servitude or mastery and slavery. It is unclear what part, if any, his brief discussion of reciprocity plays in the rest of Wyclif s thought. There are echoes, but nothing like the elaboration the idea might seem to deserve, and authoritative recent studies raise doubts even about the echoes. Still, if we are willing to interpret Wycliffian reciprocity for ourselves, the idea may prove a fruitful one.

One of the most immediately striking features of all of Wyclif’s major writings, whether philosophical, theological, or polemical, is the frequency with which cross-references are found both between different chapters or parts of the same work and between works other than the current one. The frequency of cross-referencing is variable. In the philosophical works and the intermediate tracts traditionally placed before the twelve-part Summa theologie, links are not enormously numerous. The first text to show a plethora of them is De civili dominio: here on average one instance occurs roughly every other page, more frequently in parts I and III, in other words some 600 in all. This habit continues with slight abatement in De veritate sacre scripture, and into De ecclesia. Thereafter the remaining parts of the Summa show a diminishing number, still further reduced in the De eucharistia. Cross-referencing is relatively common in the three long sets of sermons composed after Wyclif’s retirement to Lutterworth, and in the Sermones quadraginta written dum stetit in scholis. The device is obviously in origin an academic one, and it is worth observing that some of the major works which were written after Wyclif left Oxford have few if any: in the Trialogus the virtually complete absence of internal Unkings could be explained as the result of a perception that the orderly organization of the whole obviated the necessity for such an aid, but this explanation does not seem relevant to the final Opus evangelkum. Cross-referencing has previously been observed by students of Wyclif, and has traditionally been used in the attempt to order his vast output chronologically, and to put dates to individual works. But this is to jump to conclusions – to assume that the references are authorial and that the works in which they occur were composed as a whole at one time. The discussion here will suggest that there are questions to be answered in regard to the former assumption, and substantial objections to the latter. More modestly, I hope here to use the cross-references to throw light on the ways in which Wyclif’s works were written, put together, and ‘published’.

Parmi les apports majeurs de Beryl Smalley à notre connaissance des études bibliques au moyen âge ne figurent pas seulement la redécouverte d’André de Saint-Victor et la mise au jour de son influence considérable dans la seconde moitié du Xlle siècle et au début du XIIIe; c’est aussi par elle qu’a été révélée l’importance de l’oeuvre exégétique de Pierre le Chantre.