John Wyclif: Myth and Reality.
Jeffrey, David Lyle
John Wyclif: Myth and Reality. By G.R. Evans. Downers Grove, Ill.:
Intervarsity, 2005. 320 pp. $25.00 cloth.
One would not expect that a scholarly book, likely to become the
standard biography of a notable medieval academic theologian, should be
as entertaining as usefully informative. Yet this is the case with
Gillian Evans's biography of John Wyclif.
Wyclif is a notoriously misunderstood figure in English church
history. In part this occurs because, as Evans shows, Foxe's Book
of Martyrs (1554) put Wyclif first in its list, despite the fact that he
was never martyred, and John Bale, in his A Brief Chronicle concerning
the Examination and Death of Sir John Oldcastle (1544) calls Wyclif
stella matutina, "Morning Star" of the Reformation. In many
ways more Catholic that proto-Protestant in his sensibilities and a
supporter of Pope Urban VI against the Avignon papacy, Wyclif
nevertheless appealed to the early Reformers for his resistance to
abuses such as the sale of indulgences, his disdain for what he regarded
as the opprobrious power-wielding of the Church as a political
institution, and especially his conviction that everyone should study
the Bible "in the language in which he understands it best"
(205). But Evans is at pains to show that Wyclif had little or nothing
to do with the Middle English translation of the Bible that bears his
name, and that where biblical exegesis was concerned (for example, his
Opus Evangelicum), he was actually conventional rather than innovative.
Further, in Evans's view, Wyclif was in his theological work
perpetually academic in the scholastic sense and, so far from being
accessible or popular, was too opaque in his sermons to have had much
impact on his hearers.
This is in many ways effectively a book about Oxford, and for those
who want a lively introduction to life in the medieval university
generally, it provides excellent fare, offering well-informed insight
into matters of curriculum, university life and customs, matriculation
procedures, and the academic habitus through to the life of the
magister. Evans is an acute student of historical as well as fictional
Oxford, and even draws on the university novels of J.J.M. Stewart,
Francis Cornford, and even Anthony Trollope to spice up her narrative.
While this can lead to tenuous analogies, as when Wyclif is said to
resemble "Trollope's nineteenth-century Mr. Arabin" (92),
Evans's keen attunement to the politics of the university, then and
now, allows her to present us a Wyclif who was more a victim of politics
than he needed to have been. Had he been less obdurate and maladroit,
she suggests, more aware of academic sensitivities and heightened
self-consciousness where reputation is concerned, then he might not have
become nearly so controversial.
When it comes to the matter of university biblical exegesis, the
role of the Glossa Ordinaria, the evolution of postills from the
thirteenth century onward, the rise of university sermons and their
relation to biblical exegesis, Evans is reliable if cryptic (one wishes
for much more attention to Wyclif's remarkable De Veritate Sacrae
Scripturae [1378], by all odds his most challenging and important work
in hermeneutics). Evans places Wyclif's intellectual evolution in
this context, showing how he begins with a desire for ethical reform and
a sound exegesis, but then, as he meets with political opposition
becoming more and more opinionated, engaging in personal attacks and
vilification of his enemies both actual and imagined. Finally, he ends
his Oxford career in a welter of diatribe and polemical writings that
betray a strong sense of psychological isolation. Evans suspects that
his late-in-life opposition to the doctrine of transubstantiation was
for polemical reasons made more extreme, accordingly. After he was
finally condemned for nineteen of his opinions, and eventually told by
his sometime patron John of Gaunt to leave Oxford for the parish of
Lutterworth, he was, in effect, quite beside himself with frustration
and, one infers, paranoia. For Evans, Wyclif can best be understood as
an academic who, had he been possessed of a different temperament, might
have negotiated a better career for himself, and who failed even in his
attempts at self-defense because he habitually "made the classic
academic mistake of overcomplicating the argument, making it more subtle
than it was wise" (190).
Evans has written an engaging biography, if that is the genre, and
it is well documented. Yet some readers, even while persuaded of
Wyclif's political ineptitude, may suspect that there was a bit
more to his trials than is accounted for in this narrative. Herbert
Workman's biography (Oxford: Clarendon, 1926) is in many respects
superseded by Evans's, but it offers a more sympathetic view of
Wyclif's intense theological agon that, because it makes sense of
the man in terms of his principles and virtues, is still needed to
complement Evans's account.
David Lyle Jeffrey
Baylor University
