Forrest Review

Detecting Lollards and sniffing out sympathizers are favourite scholarly pastimes, and few of us are immune to their charms. This proclivity among historians and literary scholars alike makes all the more welcome Ian Forrest’s stimulating work, which eschews the allure of detecting Lollards in order to focus on the phenomenon of detection itself. Much contemporary scholarship regards heresy as a social (often in contradistinction to a creedal) category, and while acknowledging this social aspect, Forrest reminds us that 'heresy' and 'heretic' were no less legal categories of some precision. His study begins with the 1382 Blackfriars condemnation, when detecting Wycliffism first became an issue of public urgency for both church and crown, and he then tracks the development of legal and social practices aimed at detecting possible heretics up to the mid-fifteenth century. Forrest is primarily interested in the pre-trial phase of identifying potential heretics, and much of his evidence is carefully gleaned from traces of that process in bishops’ registers, non-registered materials such as the few surviving court-books, and records of the branches of royal justice such as the Chancery and the court of King’s Bench. What results is a book not so much about 'heresy' as about the legal frameworks and corresponding social networks developed to garner as well as manage reports of heretics.

Forrest’s account of anti-heresy legislation begins with the legal definition of heresy according to canon law: 'a moment in a judicial trial when a suspect had to decide between returning to the church, or perversely turning his or her face against God' (p. 15). Heresy was, however, also regarded as a hidden danger that was difficult to discern and to which no one was wholly immune. Consequently, uncertainty, careful interpretation, and pastoral care lay at the centre of canonical jurisprudence in matters of heresy. Late medieval English canonists were aware of this, but had little practical experience applying these principles in an English context, and no experience doing so on the scale demanded by a widespread popular heresy. As a result, Forrest argues, responding to the dangers of popular Wycliffism was a gradual learning process for church, crown, and laity alike, as they negotiated overlapping jurisdictions and responsibilities for detecting heresy. While drawing on the common legislative culture of the church, England’s anti-heresy activity was both recognizable to European outsiders but also unique to peculiarly English circumstances and relationships. Forrest argues that the key moment in this development was the episcopal legislation promulgated in the wake of the 1414 Oldcastle Rising, when the church under the leadership of Henry Chichele, a lawyer by training, abandoned its reactive posture for a set of proactive policy ideals.

A prominent theme of Forrest’s book is the collaboration that anti-heresy activity required between church and crown, parish and village, clergy and laity, a theme he pairs with a strenuous rejection that such activity proceeded only 'top-down' from powerful to powerless. As Forrest puts it, 'The detection of heresy was one of the areas of canonical jurisprudence where the theorizing of academics and the legislating of the episcopate met popular participation head on' (p. 76). Such collaboration introduced a public education agenda for the detection of heresy: for the legal system to work, the laity had to be sufficiently knowledgeable about heresy to make reliable reports. In the central section of his book, Forrest turns his attention from legislation to the communication, both amongst the episcopate as well as to the laity, of the legal categories and procedures under development. The account of the processes by which information, resources, and procedures for detecting heresy were increasingly centralized is very much indebted to Forrest’s close attention to the minutiae of record-keeping and copying in the chancery and amongst episcopal staffs. He excels at teasing out the two-way dynamic between local circumstances and national policy, a dynamic that re-emerges also in his discussion of the communication of anti-heresy information to the laity. He emphasizes the role of legal proclamations, public judicial citations, and orchestrated public rituals such as excommunication, abjurations, penances, and processions in communicating to and with the laity about what heresy was and how to discern it in oneself and others. Forrest convincingly argues that the laity were understood as necessary to the detection of heresy, asserting that 'complaints about the misidentification of people as lollards should not be read as evidence of the failure of heresy reporting, but as evidence of the active engagement of people with this new aspect of public life' (p. 167). Warnings about the uncertainties attending knowledge of heresy were meant to focus and restrain lay reporting: the church needed reliable reports of suspicion and an impetus to self-examination, not a free-for-all of groundless rumours and defamation. He demonstrates that lay heresy-reporting, this 'new aspect of public life', prompted a new understanding of one’s place in society: 'Inquisition and the detection of heresy provided opportunities for the individual to become more involved in public action than he, or to a lesser extent she, had been before….In this sense heresy detection was one of a number of areas in which the persons defined as trustworthy or substantial members of various legal communities—parish, manor, vill—were increasingly being drawn into much larger political and conceptual communities—diocese, county, province, and realm—as active participants' (p. 234).

In the final part of his book, Forrest shows how the knowledge of heresy and its relevant legislation were implemented in the processes of detection, and it is here that the reader finds a goldmine of information, the result of Forrest’s scrutiny of unpublished episcopal records. He first discusses how reports of suspicion were made, tested, found legally valid, and used as evidence. His discussion of the role of fama publica within legislative procedure is particularly helpful. Although our own legal categories do not include a valid role for public reputation, the legal structures of late medieval England and elsewhere relied on it and on the network of local social relationships that created and legitimated it. Contra the concerns of Paul Strohm and Anne Hudson that heresy trials relied on unsubstantiated rumours or gossip, Forrest explains that fama publica was a species of canonically valid legal knowledge pertaining to all sorts of crimes and was necessary for the initial stages of an inquisition, though not capable of procuring criminal convictions without further proof that one’s fama publica was true. 'Testing fame' was in fact a means of managing lay reports of suspicion. From this general discussion, Forrest moves to a detailed case study of Bishop Philip Repingdon’s visitation of the Leicester archdeaconry in 1413, in which ordinary visitation provided the context for heresy detection and prosecution and later may have become a paradigm for national policy. With this narrow focus, Forrest is able to trace the startling correspondence between heresy reporters, suspected and even formerly convicted heretics, and local office holders, who were responsible for monitoring customary relations and obligations for a wide variety of activities.

Although engaged in a project of institutional history, Forrest does not fall into the trap of presuming that the institution unfailingly dictates practice. Rather, Forrest brings out with great clarity how we have underestimated the legal aspects of heresy in medieval society, and in this clearly written and well-structured account he shows how the interconnected social and legal facets of heresy must both be understood on their own terms as well as in light of each other. His concluding insights into the language and social practices of anti-heresy as a sort of public discourse that alters the possibilities for social relationships are well worth pondering at some length: '[T]he creation of a new community of the orthodox in the fifteenth century did not primarily mean new social alignments, but the creation of a new way of thinking about belief and one’s place within the Christian community […]. Reporting heresy was then both the social consequence of orthodox identity, and one of the most important means of its creation' (p. 235). It is not too much to say that with this book, too, Forrest has also created a powerful new way of thinking about what sniffing out Lollards meant to late medieval England, both as a social practice and a juridical reality.

Diane Vincent, U. of Cambridge