Confession and Resistance: Defining the Self in Late Medieval England.
Blamires, Alcuin
Confession and Resistance: Defining the Self in Late Medieval
England. By Katherine C. Little. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre
Dame Press. 2006. $27.50. vii + 196 pp. isbn: 978-0-268-03376-7.
Scholarship on the nuances and ideological implications of
Wycliffite writing proceeds apace, and Katherine Little's book is a
distinctive contribution to it. She suggests that because scholars have
concentrated on doctrinal emphases in Lollardy, they have not thought
enough about the consequences of those emphases for subjectivity, or
'selfdefinition' as she prefers to call it. Her premise is
that 'to reform the language of lay instruction is to reform the
self-understanding that language makes possible' (p. 2). She is
particularly concerned with confession, because confessional examination
required individuals to define themselves with reference to categories
of sinful or virtuous living as well as to the narrative models offered
in associated exempla. Since the Wycliffite movement challenged
confessional practice and the use of exempla, it generated new
possibilities of self-definition.
A first chapter demonstrates how 'orthodox' sermons
fostered processes of biblical and exemplary 'recognition',
through which laypersons identified themselves and their role within the
practices of the church. The disruption wrought by Wycliffite polemic
was that Wycliffite polemic disrupted this process because it downplayed
the value of analysing individual sin and focused more on the
'structural sin' of the allegedly corrupt church, and of
allegiance to it (p. 37). Thus, Wycliffite homilists ask their listeners
to identify themselves not so much as moral agents in personal battles
with sin, as participants with Christ in a collective struggle against
persecution and for institutional reform. In fact (as Little cogently
shows), for Wycliffites the interior person has a quality of
uncataloguable 'hiddenness' (p. 43) not amenable to the
conventional categorizations by which confessional literature had
proposed to disclose it.
Chapter 2 first explores further that mechanism whereby penitents
were to elicit their inner 'identity' through the vocabulary
of vices and virtues. Then, Little uses Wycliffite objection to
auricular confession to offer a thoughtful reading of the Testimony of
William Thorpe. Does Thorpe attest a Lollard concern with subjectivity,
notably a doubt whether any person can truthfully speak their interior
state within the context of formal confession? Little provides
interesting evidence that Nicholas Love is already reacting to these
concerns in his contemporary Meditations.
A third chapter aims to situate Chaucer's Parson as a response
to the same interpretative concerns. However, the author's
determination to make the Parson contribute to the theme of her book
(now headlined as 'a late medieval crisis in the language of
selfdefinition', p. 79) results in a forbiddingly convoluted
discussion of the Parson and his tale, which perhaps only an aficionado would appreciate. Finally, the status of 'confessional
self-identification' in Gower's Confessio is set in antithesis
to that discerned in Hoccleve's later Regiment of Princes. Where
the Confessio is still able to 'retreat' from its
Prologue's riven world of contemporary England into a confessional
world where identity can just about be secured, the Regiment frames a
markedly 'laicized' confession within threats of heresy and
despair, and eventually abandons the mode as if it were contaminated.
Katherine Little's book proposes a heady confluence of ideas,
and presses details of large texts relentlessly into service to underpin
a completely speculative thesis. Among the serendipitous victims are
Piers Plowman, whose device of confession by a personified sin is
subjected to an analysis that seems insensitive to Langland's loose
technique with personification; and the conclusion of the Regiment,
whose humility tropes are read as a 'miring [of the poem] in
despair' (p. 127). Confession and Resistance is an initially
absorbing but eventually overwrought experiment in charting intangible
evidence of how the understanding of identity formation evolved among
writers responding to Wycliffite polemic. The book's underlying
thesis, notwithstanding, deserves the attention of medievalists.
Alcuin Blamires
Goldsmiths, University of London
