"Noble Preaching": The Wife, The Lollards, and Chaucer's Retraction (The Canterbury Tales Part 3.5)

Have you ever wondered if Chaucer's satirical broadsides against the Church could get him into trouble?  Well, seems he may have thought so . . . . or maybe not.

Transcript

Hi, it’s me, I’m back with another quick bonus episode of material that didn’t quite fit the script for my last episode on Chaucer’s Wife of Bath.  I won’t take too much of your time and I’ll move on from the Canterbury Tales after this, I promise.

Historian Will Durant, among others, has called the European Middle Ages “the Age of Faith.”  And that is a pretty fair way to sum up how most modern people think of medieval Europe.  We tend to think of religion in the Middle Ages, if we think of it at all, as pretty homogenous: everyone was a Christian, followed the teachings and rules of the Catholic Church.  Judaism and Islam provided an “other” that bound the medieval Catholic identity together – no questions asked.  

But there were certainly people who questioned the Church’s teachings, people who identified as Christians, but who felt the institutional Church of Rome had erred in many of its teachings and actions.  Maybe you’ve heard of the Cathars or the Albigensians, or of the Waldensians, or other communities of believers that the medieval Church branded as heretics.

The group I’m interested in today is called the Lollards.  Also known as Wycliffites, as followers of Oxford priest John Wycliffe, they were an active community in England from the late 14th century until the Protestant Reformation in the 1530s, though they were driven out of Oxford in 1382.

They were, in fact, a proto-Protestant sect whose intended reforms anticipated many of Martin Luther’s own in the century to follow.  Indulgences and simony corrupted the Church, its worldliness betrayed the Gospel, clerics had no real authority.  A doctrine of “sola scriptura” – meaning “only scripture” – began to develop, meaning that the Bible was the sole repository of God’s word, not Church tradition or rituals.

As such, they advocated for a Bible in English, believing that every person should be able to read and understand God’s word for themselves without the intervention of an earthly, institutional, and corrupt Church.  Wycliffe oversaw one of the earliest English vernacular translations of the Bible, with John Purvey, and we’ve heard a few modernized samples of this version in previous episodes.  Of course, the Church opposed vernacular Bibles fearing the chaos and instability which would follow such populist access to Scriptures without the necessary hermeneutical training.

Furthermore, the Lollards denied the doctrine of transubstantiation – the Catholic belief that when blessed by a priest, the bread and wine of the communion ceremony literally turn into the body and blood of Christ.  Even though they still look and taste like bread and wine, they have been fully transformed.  Lollards tended toward a view called consubstantiation – that the bread and wine are mostly symbolic, that they contain the real presence of Christ, but remain bread and wine.  Many Lollards went to the stake for refusing to give up this belief.

OK, fine, you say, thanks for the little bit of history, but what has this to do with English literature?  Well, there’s a line in the Wife of Bath’s Prologue, when the Pardoner interrupts her flow, to say, “That’s noble preaching no one could surpass!”  Yeah, it could be that Pardoner is being a bit hyperbolic about Alison’s somewhat bawdy rant, but it could also be that the Pardoner recognizes in her arguments some Lollard teachings and by identifying her as a preacher, might he obliquely recognize her as a Lollard?

Because the Lollards believed in a universal priesthood – that is, that anyone can be a priest, that the Church doesn’t have any special power or authority in this regard.  Why not female priests?  It follows logically.  One of the main reasons the Catholic Church, even today, denies ordination to women is based on an interpretation of Aristotle’s “substance versus accident” idea.  So the substance of a thing is what it really really is.  An accident of a thing is just an incidental detail about it.  A tree is substantially a tree.  That is has broad leaves, or green leaves, or needles are accidents.  Take away the leaves and its still a tree.  Take away its treeness and you ain’t got no tree.  The communion wafer is the body of Christ substantially; it accidentally still looks like bread.  Get it?  Anyway, the Church says that women are not substantially able to perform the rites of priesthood.  But Lollards have a different view of substance/accident, so why not women priests?

Now, I don’t think the Wife of Bath is actually a priest in the Canterbury Tales.  But she certainly has much to say about Church hypocrisy, corruption, and the suppression of women.  Sounds kind of Lollardy.

And much ink has been spilled over whether Geoffrey Chaucer himself was a Lollard.  Literary scholars and historians have looked over “The Monk’s Tale” and the Prioress, as well as the Wife and the Pardoner to see if any autobiographical details could be gleaned, but this is, of course, mostly speculative.  Chaucer’s particular patron, the Earl of Lancaster John of Gaunt, certainly had pronounced anti-clerical leanings and almost assuredly favored the Lollards.  Of course that doesn’t necessarily mean that Chaucer felt the same way – I’ve lived with a broccoli-loving wife now for over a quarter of a century and I still believe that broccoli tastes like the contents of a diaper.  Proximity does not imply complicity.

But there is the pesky little detail of Chaucer’s retraction.  Facing the end of his life, Chaucer essentially “takes back” all the bad things he said about the Church.  He writes:

And if there be anything that displeases them [my readers], I beg them also to impute it to the fault of my want of ability, and not to my will, who would very gladly have said better if I had the power. For our Book says “all that is written is written for our doctrine”; and that is my intention. Wherefore I beseech you meekly for the mercy of God to pray for me, that Christ have mercy on me and forgive me my sins; and especially for my translations and editings of worldly vanities, which I revoke in my retractions.

Sure seems like, on his deathbed, Chaucer is afraid that his anti-clerical jokes and criticisms and the flirtations in his writing with heretical sects might actually send him Hell.  Seems like he’d rather not take the chance.  Many read the retraction as Chaucer’s cowed return to orthodoxy, bending the knee in hopes of achieving salvation.

But there’s something a bit strange in his retraction.  Later, he says, “I thank our Lord Jesu Christ and his blissful Mother . . . beseeching them that they henceforth, to my life’s end. send me grace.”  I sense your befuddlement: how is that strange?  He ‘s directly appealing to Jesus and Mary for their help.  Sounds pretty devout to me.

But that’s the strange thing, the direct appeal to God for forgiveness.  According to Catholic tradition, one must confess to a priest to receive absolution – the priest must intercede with God for your forgiveness.  Chaucer skips the middleman here, goes right to the boss.  Like a Lollard might.

OK, that’s all for now.

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