Kathryn Kerby-Fulton's magisterial Books under Suspicion takes up the bold task of retracing the contours of late fourteenth-and early fifteenth-century non-Wycliffite English heterodoxy (on a continuum spanning from "official" heresy to...
moreKathryn Kerby-Fulton's magisterial Books under Suspicion takes up the bold task of retracing the contours of late fourteenth-and early fifteenth-century non-Wycliffite English heterodoxy (on a continuum spanning from "official" heresy to "left-wing orthodoxy") to redress what the author sees as the long-standing overemphasis in literary scholarship on Lollardy's cultural legacy. Dilated in scope far beyond what the author considers a narrowly insular vision, Books focuses on the single yet capacious genre of "revelatory writing, " which for Kerby-Fulton includes "visionary experience, mystical theology, and apocalyptic theology" (9) as well as "speculative academic thought" (8). The intellectual freedom that safeguards the latter (and constitutes the topic for the book's valuable preface) was matched, the author controversially contends, by "a surprising degree of tolerance" in the late-medieval English reception of revelatory texts, a claim she supports by attending variously to taxonomies of visionary experience (from Joachim's intellectus spiritualis to Uthred's visio clara), the versatility of literary technique (Annabel Patterson's "functional ambiguity"), codicology (especially compilation and provenance), and official articulations of inquisitional procedures for determining the validity of revelatory experience (discretio and probatio), pre-and post-Arundel. In the process she discloses a new frontier of unedited and mostly anonymous Latin texts that respond to or revise Continental heresy, persuasively suggesting
