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doi:10.1017/S0009640710001721 What Is a Lollard? Dissent and Belief in Late Medieval England. By J. Patrick Hornbeck II. Oxford Theological Monographs 13. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. xxiv + 241 pp. $125.00 cloth.
This book is a model of how to write a monograph; it is also one of the best books on medieval heresy to appear for some time. The author may belabor Wittgenstein's "family" model a bit, but it is a useful angle of approach nonetheless. The idea is that connections are more important than logical categories: lollardy reflects "broad attitudes rather than narrow theological propositions" (204). Lollard views varied according to webs of relationships: blood ties, neighbors and friends, exposure to particular clergy, readings, discussions in what we would call house churches, geography, and time. There was a natural difference between the subtle theological arguments of the Oxford scholar John Wycliffe and his intellectual followers on the one hand, and popular anticlericalism on the other, yet the two interwove.
The book shines in a variety of aspects. Most importantly, it takes the beliefs and teachings of the lollards seriously in themselves rather than relegating them to epiphenomena of supposedly "more real" economic and political milieus. It attempts to "rehabilitate doctrine as a locus of scholarly enquiry" (204), Yet it takes worldly matters seriously too, the result being as 3-D a picture of the heretics as possible. For example, the author cites evidence that although the movement tended to be more radical...