Description

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Books under Suspicion: Censorship and Tolerance of Revelatory Writing in Late Medieval England examines the censorship issues that propelled the major writers of the period toward their massive use of visionary genres. Kathryn Kerby-Fulton suggests that writers and translators as different as Chaucer, Langland, Julian of Norwich, "M.N.," and Margery Kempe positioned their work to take advantage of the tacit toleration that both religious and secular authorities extended to revelatory theology. The book examines controversial ideas as diverse as the early experimental humanism of Chaucer, censured beatific vision theology and the breakdown of Langland's A Text, the English reception of M.N.'s translation of Marguerite Porete's condemned book, Julian's authorial suppression of her gender, and the impact of suspect Continental women's activism on Kempe.

Kerby-Fulton also narrates success stories of intellectual freedom, tracing evidence of ecclesiastical tolerance of revelation, the impossibility of official censorship in a manuscript culture, and the powerful, protected reading circles for radical apocalypticism and mysticism, such as those of the Austins and the Carthusians. Until now, Wycliffism has been seen as the only significant unorthodox or radical body of writings in late medieval England. Books under Suspicion is the first comprehensive study of banned non-Wycliffite materials in Insular writing during the period of the Avignon and Great Schism papacies.

This weighty, complex, and rewarding book makes use of neglected material in manuscripts and archives to reconstruct new aspects of the history of religious thought and vernacular writing in Ricardian and early Lancastrian England. As such it will interest scholars of late medieval religious history and Middle English literary history.

About the Author

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Kathryn Kerby-Fulton is Notre Dame Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame. She is the author and editor of a number of books, including most recently Voices in Dialogue: Reading Women in the Middle Ages (University of Notre Dame Press, 2005), co-edited with Linda Olson.

Praise For…

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“Kathryn Kerby-Fulton’s Books under Suspicion is among the major books of the decade in medieval English studies. In this monumental volume on academic freedom and its discontents, Kerby-Fulton has given us nothing less than a new intellectual history of theological pluralism, dissent, and the limits of tolerance in the late Middle Ages. . .”. —The Catholic Historical Review

“With Books Under Suspicion, Kathryn Kerby-Fulton has accomplished something remarkable. This far-reaching study does nothing less than shift the paradigms with which we think about such fundamental categories as heterodoxy, orthodoxy, theology, and revelation in relation to fourteenth- and fifteenth-century English religious cultures. Her original, painstaking study of manuscripts also leads us to revise our thinking about major canonical English writers including Chaucer, Langland, Julian of Norwich, and Margery Kempe . . . No scholar or student of Middle English literature, or medieval English religion, should be without this sophisticated, groundbreaking volume.” —Church History

“Books Under Suspicion is an enormously learned and important book that promises to decisively change the traditional story of religious censorship in pre-Reformation England. . . . This is a book to be read slowly and often. It will change the landscape of late medieval spirituality in England and provides a new, richer, and more dangerous context for many of our best-loved authors.” —The Medieval Review