This admirable volume is innovative in that it presents all the premodern records of Lollard trials for a given region and span of time. These range from ecclesiastical records (excerpts from the episcopal registers of John Hales and Geoffrey Blythe, the whole of the Lichfield Court Book recording Blythe's examinations of heretics, and an excerpt from Blythe's visitation book) through Foxe's martyrologies (drawn from the 1559, 1563, and 1570 versions) to civic annals (from versions now in the Bodleian Library and in the Birmingham City Archive). The volume is extraordinarily welcome, too, in that one of the sources included, making up the bulk of the book, has been largely inaccessible to scholarship. The editors have worked together to glean all the sense possible from the scarcely legible Lichfield Court Book, one of only two surviving notebooks containing records of an extended series of examinations for Lollardy (the other is Bishop William Alnwick's record of trials in Norwich between 1428-31, already published as Norwick Heresy Trials, ed. Norman Tanner). Since the entries in the Lichfield Court Book are no longer in their original order in the present binding, the editors have chosen to present them in chronological order, interspersed as necessary with Blythe's other records. This strategy has the additional advantage that where there are records of a given proceeding in multiple sources, these appear next to each other and can readily be compared. A headnote to each entry pinpoints its location in its source document. Full translations into Modern English of each edited source are also included.
In addition to meticulous editing and translation, the volume is to be praised for its thorough annotation and tabulation of the evidence the records provide. The volume includes an extensive Introduction, a chronology of all the examinations, explanatory notes for each source, and three appendices; the first listing all named suspects and tabulating what is known of them, the second listing all named books, and the third listing all the clerics and others named as present at the trials. There is as well a full index of persons, books, authors, and topics.
Rather than a brief flourish of presentation, McSheffrey's lengthy Introduction is a substantial contribution to scholarship on the evidence the volume presents, notable for its sensitivity to the limitations, as well as the possibilities, of the sources included here. Along with describing each source edited within the volume, McSheffrey gives a narrative account of the trial procedures, analyzes the sentences given and the investigative processes used, describes all that is known of the individual defendants and their social status (having scoured the local records for further evidence about each person named), and analyzes the Lollard community's methods of recruitment, practices of faith, literacy and use of books, and response to prosecution. Her work here shows the fruits of the extensive research on Lollard records that led to her book Gender and Heresy: Women and Men in Lollard Communities, 1420-1530 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), and is sure to be influential.
Although I am impressed and in most ways persuaded by McSheffrey's interpretation, I would like to offer an alternative view on these Lollards' use of books, based on my own reading of the evidence. After explaining that the reading of books was central to this and other Lollard communities' activities, McSheffrey claims that "while the records refer generically to the books in Lollard possession as 'books containing heresy', the great majority of the books that were specifically identified by the deponents were scriptural or otherwise orthodox" (41). Well, maybe. But this of course is to place an interpretation on descriptions of books, which can certainly be interpreted otherwise. For example, most of the Lollards' references to books with biblical content (all of them listed by McSheffrey as 'scriptural') are listed by the authorities as 'liber de ___' or sometimes 'liber super ____', where the blank may be filled by 'Old Testament,' 'New Law,' 'Commandments,' 'Life of Tobit' or another name for a book or portion of the bible. But 'de' and 'super' are used in a variety of ways in book descriptions in general and particularly for Wycliffite books. The Wycliffites copied and distributed copies of the entire bible, of the Hebrew Bible, and of the Gospels and Epistles, a surprising number of which are extant today. But they also copied and adapted to their own uses summaries, digests, and commentaries on particular portions of the bible: these too could be given the title 'liber de ____' where the blank may be filled by the portion of the bible concerned. McSheffrey admits this flexibility in the term 'de' with reference to the Lollards' eleven mentions of a book 'de mandatis'/'of/concerning the commandments,' acknowledging that these probably refer to a commentary on the decalogue (343). But it would be helpful if the same flexibility of reference could be admitted for several others among the forty-seven apparently scriptural titles, especially where a specific description suggests that commentary or summary is involved (e.g., "librum de et super vetere iure in Anglic' traductum"/ "a book of and about the Old Law translated into English"[118]).
This is not simply a nitpicking point, though it is a small suggestion about a splendidly thorough and helpful edition. We need to pay more attention to the uses Wycliffites apparently made of ancillary biblical material: these writings have not received much notice, even though they represent a large proportion of the Wycliffite writings that remain to us. So it seems important not to foreclose the possibility that Lollard descriptions of bible study, even when produced in the hostile environment of examinations for heresy, may refer to these writings. And although it is intriguing to consider the kinds of uses that Lollards might have made of orthodox writings (as McSheffrey does in her forthcoming "Heresy, orthodoxy, and English vernacular religion"), it is also useful to remain aware of the possibility that any or all of the writings they used may have had Lollard content. Lollards were known for recopying orthodox materials with their own additions: this was the origin of some of the Lollard decalogue commentaries McSheffrey mentions (343). Any of the biblical, and also the devotional works the Lollards referred to could have been a manuscript copy with Lollard content, if not in origin, then as a result of its Lollard recopying.
While these suggestions might seem to some to impose too much continuity between earlier Lollard writing and reading practices and what was going on within this particular early sixteenth century Lollard community, let me point out one real piece of rather exciting evidence for just this sort of continuity, newly made apparent by the publication of this volume. The one book referred to by the Lollards which I think can only be a Lollard tract is the 'book against the sacrament of the altar' referred to by the defendant John Atkynson (115). And sure enough, these Lollards appear familiar with the Eucharistic debate. Elsewhere, Robert Silkby's deposition describes a discussion on the gospels he had with several others in which the interpretation of the Latin words 'hoc est corpus meum' was discussed (102). The interpretation of these words was one of the sorest points of contention in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries (for a summary of the debate and a survey of its influence see Fiona Somerset, "Here, There, and Everwhere? Wycliffite Conceptions of the Eucharist and Chaucer's "Other" Lollard Joke" in Lollards and their Influence in Late Medieval England, ed. Fiona Somerset, Jill C. Havens, and Derrick G. Pitard (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell and Brewer, 2003), 127-38). The topic is discussed at length in the most extensive vernacular treatise on the Eucharist, the Wycliffite Tractatus de oblacione iugis sacrificii (recently edited in Two Wycliffite Texts, ed. Anne Hudson EETS o.s. 317 Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). It is intriguing to discover that a group of early sixteenth century artisans in Coventry not only had access to a book about the sacrament of the altar (albeit with title and content unspecified), but were aware of an abstruse point in the earlier debate, and discussed it in the course of their sessions of gospel reading and explication.
This is only one example of the new insight into Lollard learning and practice made possible by this new book, which should be eagerly read by all those engaged in the study of the Lollard movement.