Although the title of this study frames the fifteenth century as an era of religious reform, the kind Gayk has in mind is not limited to ecclesiological politics. Reform, she proposes, "is always both theological and aesthetic" (3). Gayk grounds her argument in a diverse selection of vernacular writing by Wycliffites, Hoccleve, Lydgate, Capgrave, and Reginald Pecock. She explores how these writers take up visual representation as an object of reformist interest and, in doing so, develop "textual means of reforming the lay response to and use of devotional images" (4).
Readers eager to dwell on the details of color plates and other illustrative materials will be disappointed. None are to be found in these pages. Yet the monochromatic effect only reinforces the authors point that discourse about images often sought to supplement or supplant images themselves. What seems at first a form of critical iconomachy, an idiosyncratic privileging of the verbal over the visual, in fact approximates the very process by which medieval audiences were invited to use the former to define, delimit, or better discern the latter.
What emerges, then, is a dyadic project: "reformist aesthetics" (14). Wycliffite material, the subject of Chapter One, introduces an ethical valence into this formulation, however. If the conjunction of aesthetics and ethics is confusing at first, it soon makes sense as Gayk adroitly leads us through her archive. The first chapter begins by assembling examples from a wide range of Wycliffite writings before offering a more detailed treatment of Lollard sermons (drawn from Cigmans edition) and the anonymous alliterative poem known as Pierce the Ploughmans Crede. Framing this material as "imagistic writing" both substantially revises Lollardys attitude towards the visual piety of the period and allows Gayk to center her analysis on rhetorical terms and figures (ekphrasis, descriptio, and similitudines) not commonly employed in the critical interpretation of Wycliffite texts (22). In a striking example of antithetical descriptio, for instance, Gayk shows how a Christmas sermon appropriates conventional images of Christs poor birth, readily available in devotional writing of the period, only to place alongside them opposing ones of "material and spatial excess" (29). It seems to this reviewer at least that the same qualities of descriptive amplification and dialectical expansion lend themselves to oral delivery, even rhetorical performance. One wonders how the reorientation of the "listeners imaginations" so convincingly tracked throughout this section might reflect on the authority of sermon texts characterized by a lack of rhetorical embellishment--such as those found in the long Wycliffite sermon cycle, not discussed here--or on the more general question of rhetorics problematic status in Wycliffite hermeneutic thought (29).
Turning next to Pierce the Ploughmans Crede, Gayk explains that while the poem is often considered polemical, the first half "refrains from explicit statement of condemnation or blame," instead making its case against the friars through vivid ekphrastic sequences, "verbal repetitions," "catalogic descriptions" of riches, extensive asides, and the sensibilities of a narrator "seduced by images" (34, 35, 36). In other words, the "textual aesthetics" of the Crede, the very features that make it literary, are also what make it a reformist text (38). To Gayk, this suggests "not iconoclasm, but rather an attempt to reclaim images and imagistic language for Lollard modes of reform, of 'amending' the church by formal means" (41). Form and reform are again brought together in the chapters concluding discussion of the final sermon from Cigmans edition, in which gazing upon the "Book of Life" becomes an ethically inflected mode of vision. Readers familiar with De Veritate Sacrae Scripturae and Tractatus de Universalibus will recognize this sermon as one of many Wycliffite texts to invoke the liber vitae. Gayk does not address the centrality of this concept to Wycliffite notions of scriptural authority and hermeneutic transparency at any length. Still, her argument suggests the extent to which other registers of the movement, including early Oxford Lollardy, are implicated in questions about how to read and interpret images.
Chapter Two extends the books thesis to Hoccleve, whose poetry emphasizes "the importance of mediating and regulating social, intellectual, and spiritual vision" (47). This chapter brings forward a great deal of material--The Regiment of Princes and The Remonstrance Against Oldcastle in the first half, the Complaint, the Dialogue, and Hoccleves translation of the ars moriendi section of Susos Horologium in the second--specific to Hoccleves understanding of vision as a reciprocal relationship between subject and object. And to the extent that it can "transform the gazing subject," such a relationship, which Gayk traces across the different contexts of Hoccleves poetry, is also an ethical one (47). Gayk adduces a rich body of knowledge about optical theory to show how Hoccleves defense of religious images in the Regiment is influenced by perspectivist models of vision--that is, vision which is transactional, requiring agency on the part of the seer as much as the seen (52). But this model grants efficacy to heterodox as well as orthodox images, and in the Remonstrance, she contends, the ethics of seeing become particularly fraught as Hoccleves text recognizes the power of Oldcastles likeness to "lead others into idolatry" (56). Gayks reading of the Remonstrance thus makes a strong case for her larger contention that Hoccleve is "self- conscious about the way texts mediate vision and visibility," an insight which she then explores in relation to three of the five pieces making up the Series: the Complaint, the Dialogue, and Hoccleves partial translation of the Horologium (60). In these connected devotional verses, "orthodoxy" is a question not only of ecclesiastical or political affiliation-- the twin matrices through which Hoccleves work has most often been contextualized--but also of how texts mediate the complex relationship between seeing and knowing, between visual perception and spiritual insight.
The next two chapters also treat devotional material. Chapter Three subtly aligns Lydgate with the Gregorian view of images as libri laicorum, even as it shows how the poets unease with "inordinate affect" and "unmediated visual experience" prompts him to explore the referential and mediatory possibilities of literary form, especially vernacular religious lyric (85). Gayk concentrates on Lydgates translation from the textual portion of the French mural "Danse Macabre," his vernacular expansion of Guillaume Deguilevilles Le Pèlerinage de la vie humaine, short lyrics such as "On the Image of Pity" and "The Dolerous Pyte of Crystes Passioun," the hybrid poem "Testament," and, in an engrossing section on Lydgates legacy, the Clopton chantry at Long Melford Church, adorned at the end of the fifteenth century with stanzas from Lydgates "Testament" and "Quis dabit meo capiti fontem lacrimarum." Although it would have made sense throughout this chapter to include visual references for the devotional images Lydgate inscribes in his poems (or details from the interior of Long Melford itself, for that matter), Gayk proves adept at reading what escapes visibility. The results are illuminating as we discover how much is effaced or excluded from representation in Lydgates various adaptations. Noting that Lydgates expansion of Deguilevilles defense of images as libri laicorum curiously omits any reference to their affective import; that Lydgates verse rendering of the pietà in "On the Image of Pity" is strangely "lacking in pathetic detail"; that the triumphant representation of Christ in "The Dolerous Pyte of Crystes Passioun" departs from the visual conventions governing late medieval figurations of the imago pietatis; or, finally, that stanzas from Lydgates narration of the Passion in "Testament" are left off the cornice of the Clopton chantry--noting all these details, Gayk invites us to recognize the different permutations of visual and textual form shaping, quite literally, both Lydgates own innovative verse and "vernacular poetics" itself (93, 100, 104, 118, 122).
Chapter Five introduces Capgrave vis-à-vis the Lydgatian insistence that "writers bear an ethical responsibility to both past and present" (127). This ethical commitment to telling "trewe" stories is one Capgrave shares as a clerical poet and informs his representation of idol worship in the Life of Saint Katherine, The Solace of Pilgrims, and his oft-neglected world history The Abbreuiacion of Chronicles (127). Following the pattern set in previous chapters on Hoccleve and Lydgate, this one situates an individual writers corpus at the threshold of interrelated forms--in this case, medieval historiography and hagiography. With respect to the first of these, Gayk contends that while Capgraves Abbreuiacion inscribes a clerical point of view, it demystifies and historicizes by speaking of idols as "memorial objects" whose origins, purposes, and affective power can be made known in the "mirror" of Capgraves own historical writing (132, 126). The Life of Saint Katherine shows Capgrave grappling with the same issues in the context of a hagiographic mode that "calls upon the reader to exercise the intellect and consider the complex relations of past and present," especially when it comes to distinguishing pagan idols from Christian images of saints and martyrs (135). This boundary, Gayk suggests, was no more distinct in Capgraves day than it was in Augustines. A similar attempt at interpretive guidance and historical contextualization--rather than destruction--defines Capgraves approach to "material memorials" in The Solace of Pilgrims (153). In all these ways, then, Capgrave defends the exemplary value of devotional images even as he seeks to control their representation through narrative and historical writing.
The final chapter discusses Reginald Pecocks vision for vernacular theology and lay education in The Repressor of Over Much Blaming of the Clergy. Explaining her rationale for including Pecocks text in a book about reformist aesthetics, Gayk rightly notes that "the late medieval conflict over the status of the vernacular text was simultaneously a conflict over the image" (157). Indeed, Pecocks defense of images is well known and has often been discussed by scholars of late medieval religious culture, especially those specializing in Wycliffism. As is so often the case in this book, however, Gayks knowledge of sources and analogues affords her insight into what an author has left out or where a text diverges from established models. Whereas clerics often cited "the traditional explanation that images are useful for teaching, for remembering, and for arousing feelings of devotion, Pecocks justification of images avoids any direct articulation of this three-pronged apologetic," Gayk explains (164). Far more important to Pecock is "the power of images to create a cohesive political and urban community," a power not granted texts (168). But if material signs figure largely in Pecocks ideal of corporate identity and devotion, then vernacular religious texts "are better suited to the theological and moral education of individual laypeople" (184). In Gayks view, the already unstable relationship between these prerogatives became even more so with Pecocks efforts to build up London book culture through establishing lending libraries and other such resources. Assuming Pecock's project ran aground as a result, perhaps it did so not only because his commitment to vernacular education undermined the role images might have in promoting corporate piety and cultural memory, but also because this very understanding of material signs had come under intense scrutiny following the Wycliffite critique of sacramentality and its attendant rituals.
An epilogue on Reformation iconomachy suggests the scope of the author's contribution in this book. Scholars of different stripes--medievalists as well as early modernists, those working in literary studies as well as art history and religion--will find much to consider in Gayk's sophisticated cross- hatchings of the visual and verbal.