The Antichrist and the Lollards: Apocalypticism in Late Medieval and Reformation England.

Jeffrey, David Lyle

The Antichrist and the Lollards: Apocalypticism in Late Medieval and Reformation England. By Curtis V. Bostick. Studies in Medieval and Reformation Thought 70. Leiden: Brill, 1998. xii + 229 pp. $81.00 cloth.

The study of Wycliffites or Lollards (the terms are now largely accepted as interchangeable) has until recently been one of the more contentious areas of medieval studies. This is in part because for many historians and literary scholars not only did their preoccupation with a "normative" medieval Catholic culture marginalize, of necessity, such dissenting movements, but the essentially fundamentalist character of the Lollards was too reminiscent of modern fundamentalism not to be repugnant. Those who have actually studied the Lollards directly, J. A. F. Thompson (The Later Lollards, 1414-1520 [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965]), Gordon Left (Heresy in the Later Middle Ages, 2 vols. [Manchester, N.Y.: Manchester University Press 1967]), K. B. MacFarlane (John Wycliffe and the Beginnings of English Nonconformity [New York: Macmillan, 1953]), and in her early work even Anne Hudson (Lollards and Their Books [Ronceverte, W. Va.: Hambledon, 1985] and The Premature Reformation: Wycliffite Texts and Lollard History [Oxford: Clarendon, 1988]), reflect this view. In the postmodernist context marginalized groups are of much more fashionable interest; this alone would be sufficient to make the Lollards more prominent. Furthermore, as the study of late medieval apocalypticism generally and the intellectual ferment in and around Oxford University more particularly have shown the Lollards to have been much closer to the religious center than previously thought, there has been a double impetus to study their role.

The Lollards' fin de siecle apocalyptic urgencies were a strongly recurrent and, increasingly it appears, influential element in their writings. Curtis V. Bostick's The Antichrist and the Lollards both codifies and advances research and opinion in this area. In a careful taxonomic study done under the guidance of Heiko Oberman, Bostick shows how the Lollards were far closer to the mainstream of English religious culture than previously understood and, in particular, that their apocalypticism differed from orthodoxy more in the degree of its anticlericalism than in the scope of its theology or range of its exegesis. Much if not most of what the Lollards preached, it appears, found a sympathetic hearing because it was not very novel.

If Lollardy can be said to "presage the Reformation," it is largely because, like the later movements of reform, it connected the papacy with that corruption in the church foretold for the last days. As Bernard McGinn (Visions of the End: Apocalyptic Traditions of English Nonconformity [New York: Columbia University Press, 1979]) and others have demonstrated, apocalypticism in this period is so tied in with antipapalism that it forms in respect of apocalyptic exegesis a chicken-and-egg conundrum. For his part, Bostick distinguishes between the sociological models of millenarianism and chiliasm (Karl Mannheim, Idealogie und Utopie [Bonn: F. Cohen, 1929] and N. Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millenium: Revolutionary Millenarianism and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages [New York: Oxford University Press, 1970]), with their preference for sociology of knowledge, and the more theologically informed medievalism of McGinn, Richard K. Emmerson (Antichrist in the Middle Ages: A Study of Medieval Apocalypticism, Art, and Literature [Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1981]), and Marjorie Reeves (The Influence of Prophecy in the Later Middle Ages: A Study in Joachism [Oxford: Clarendon, 1969]), all of whom focus on the central contention of medieval apocalypticists themselves that history is finite and seeks closure. Bostick further distinguishes between "reformist" (Joachites) and "subversive" apocalypticism, the latter of which has both "secessionist" (Lollards) and outright "abolitionist" (Taborites in Bohemia) expressions. As for the Lollards themselves, Bostick's method is to focus on the rhetorical strategies of apocalypticists and the internal as well as "public logic of apocalyptic advocacy." While one could wish for much more analysis of Lollard rhetoric, Bostick's appreciation of the special logic of apocalyptic Lollardry is insightful and coherent.

In a chapter on the exegetical tradition of apocalyptic scripture, Bostick reviews Tyconius, Rupert of Deutz, the Tiburtine Sibyl, Pseudo-Methodius, and Adso (the futurists) as well as literary adaptations such as the twelfth-century Latin Play of Anti-Christ, thirteenth-century Cursor Mundi, fourteenth-century Pricke of Conscience, fifteenth-century Chester Domesday play and the Antechryst printed by Wynkyn de Words (ca. 1510). More substantial is his review of John Wyclif's own apocalypticism in chapter 3--a balanced and judicious account--and his genunely useful analysis of the Lollard opus Arduum (1390) in chapter 4. These chapters alone justify the book for historians. As well as confirming (contra Katherine Firth, The Apocalyptic Tradition in Reformation Britain, 1530-1645 [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979]) that apocalypticism in the English Reformation was by no means a Lutheran import, they show something of the sophisticated literacy necessary for Lollardry to have made so much progress in England even in the fourteenth century.

Chapter 5 is concerned with the dissemination of Lollard apocalypticism and briefly treats the Lanterne of Light, the antitransubstantiation pamphlet, Wycliff's Wycket, and a few of the more than three hundred extant vernacular Lollard sermons. Chapter 6 used the heresy trials of Brut and Oldcastle to confirm the essentially biblicist or fundamentalist character of Lollardy (the sayings of Jesus trump the dictates of the Roman hierarchy), as well as to demonstrate Bostick's earlier contention that almost all of those tried for heresy had, in their study of the vernacular Bible and Lollard texts, acquired "exceptional intellectual and theological acumen."

Chapter 7, on the "legacy of Lollard Apocalypticism," is a coda designed to finalize Bostick's contention that "the Lollard role in the formation of English apocalyptic thought has been ignored by some, minimized by others, underestimated by all. An appendix offers a good text, well annotated, of the "Antichristus" entry in the Floretum, a valuable resource good to have available in this form.

This solid little work is not without dissertation-style flaws; there are one or two vivid nonsequiturs, some needless repetitions, and an example of perilous punctuation that makes (inadvertently I am sure) Robert Grosseteste appear as a "Wycliffite apologist" (124). But these are merely regrettable distractions in a work whose usefulness and general reliability--right up to the solid bibliography--commends it to anyone interested in this flourishing subject of inquiry.

David Lyle Jeffrey Baylor University