The volume under review should have been published in the eighteenth century. Philip Perry was born in England in 1720 to a recusant family and, like other men who sought the Catholic priesthood, left the country. Although he returned, he left again, rising to be the rector of the College of St. Albans in Spain, a seminary producing English priests for his home country. Dying in Madrid in 1774, Perry left behind the present volume, which sees publication only now.
In writing on Robert Grosseteste, the thirteenth-century English bishop and intellectual, Perry seeks to reclaim him as a good Catholic in general and as a supporter of papal authority in particular. Here Perry aims much of his fire at a Protestant polemicist of an earlier generation, Edward Brown (died 1688/89), who comes in for some trash talk. (An instance: Perry snorts that “any Reader, that is not stark blind” cannot but see Brown’s failure on one point [48]). But although a polemicist himself, Perry is, as his editor notes, a careful scholar. To his credit, he takes head on Letter 128, Grosseteste’s remonstrance to a scriptor in the papal curia protesting a papal provision to an unworthy candidate of a benefice in Grosseteste’s see of Lincoln. The pope had thus commanded the most execrable of sins--and so the bishop refused. Perry stresses how in that very letter Grosseteste explains his refusal in terms of his very obedience to the apostolic see and further builds his case with a number of instances in which Grosseteste recognized, even celebrated, papal authority. Grosseteste followed up by visiting on the pope to his face some lovingly blunt language on the subject, an encounter that Robert Brentano later described as desperate. Anticipating (as Perry’s editor remarks) Leonard Boyle, Perry identifies the pope’s eventual response to Grosseteste’s reproofs: an apology. And Perry successfully rebuts a late tradition that Grosseteste died excommunicated by the pope, producing evidence that he instead died in good standing at Rome. Ironically, in making his case on Grosseteste’s behalf, Perry himself sometimes uses language that is reminiscent of Protestant propaganda. For example, in detailing Grosseteste’s determination to reform his clergy, Perry describes their abuses as being “almost without number” (103). But he, like his hero, though the latter resisted the pope like a Saint Paul (147), was a “thorough popesman” (95). Historians in the last generation or so have labored to insist on distinguishing between late-medieval anticlericalism, in the sense of criticism of clergy or papacy, from genuinely proto-Protestant sentiment. Perry’s Grosseteste would be a case in point. So might Perry himself. Perry also handily deals with other matters, by pointing out, for example, that the value Grosseteste placed on scripture was orthodox for his time, not a Protestant-style rebellion. Grosseteste, he also argues, was unfairly overlooked for canonization--but not, pace earlier Protestant historians, because of a hostile papacy--and Perry hopes his book will (re)start a campaign for canonization.
Jack P. Cunningham’s introduction does a fine job of setting Perry’s work in its broader historiographical context. He follows R.W. Southern’s account of Wycliffe finding in Grosseteste a kindred soul, setting up the adoption of Grosseteste by sixteenth-century English Protestants, just as they adopted Wycliffe. Cunningham then takes the account down to the eighteenth century, including a couple of Catholic ripostes to this Protestant Grosseteste tradition. But Perry’s book appears to be the culmination of such replies. As Cunningham explains, more turned on the debate than just who could claim Grosseteste. Anglicans justified their church on the basis of its antiquity. It was not, they claimed, created by Henry VIII’s break with Rome. Rather, the English church had always been, and seen itself as, the Church of England: independent, fighting off papal encroachments as best it could throughout the Middle Ages. Grosseteste’s resistance to Rome was evidence of that independence for the thirteenth century, just as Wycliffe and Lollardy were evidence for it in the fourteenth. It was that claim that Perry worked to undo. Leaving Grosseteste to one side, the larger historical argument and the apparent stakes remained live ones into the last century. In 1898, Frederick Maitland, who did not write from religious conviction, argued that papal decisions functioned as statute law in the medieval English church; they were binding, and English church courts knew it. [1] In 1912, Arthur Ogle, rector of Maidstone, responded with a broadside that the English Church had always been able to take or leave the canon law of the larger church as it liked; Maitland’s position, he claimed, would be used to make the case for, ultimately, disestablishment. [2] (Ogle seems to have lost the argument in his time, at least in the historical profession, although in the last fifty years or so historians of the medieval canon law increasingly sound rather like Ogle, albeit without the fervor or ecclesiastical agenda.)
So why was Perry’s book not published in its own time? It was not for want of trying. Perry sent off a manuscript to Richard Challoner, effectively the leader of the Catholic cause in England, hoping for his help in publication. Cunningham argues persuasively that the situation of English Catholics shaped Challoner’s response. Catholic emancipation would not come until 1829, but steps in that direction were already under consideration, and indeed would be taken, in the later eighteenth century. Perry, in far-off Spain, had lost touch with the political and diplomatic situation of Catholics in England, and so discussions there for their relief. When he sent his manuscript to Challoner, the latter replied that its publication would be impolitic; it was no time to rock the boat with a Catholic attack on the Church of England. Worse, Perry celebrated Grosseteste’s resistance to the English Crown, enthusiastically laying out Grosseteste’s position that secular authority was merely delegated by the Church. Such views would be unwelcome in Westminster. Moreover, Cunningham points out that Rome had by now become lukewarm regarding the Jacobite cause, leading some English Catholics in turn to become lukewarm toward Rome and look to the French Church, with its Gallican liberties and quasi-independence from the papacy, as a model. Yet, Cunningham says, for England that goal was a non-starter; papal leadership of English Catholics was inescapable, or at least so Challoner thought. Perry’s Grosseteste, a fervent Catholic opponent of popes, could only feed a distracting pipe dream. Grosseteste, a troublemaker in the thirteenth century, still looked like one in the eighteenth. Perry’s book would wait until 2022 to see print.
Why publish now? The debate for which Perry wrote has (I think) subsided. And there is no reason to expect the book to spark a campaign for canonization. Moreover, while, as I have noted above, Perry’s scholarship is considerable, at this point the book adds little to what is known or understood about Grosseteste himself. I would steer readers wanting an introduction to Grosseteste to more recent work, although Perry does not do a bad job. Indeed, a welcome aspect of the text is that it is littered with translations from Grosseteste himself in extenso. What Perry’s book does do is illuminate how an eighteenth-century English Catholic abroad viewed the medieval history of his church and the historiographical broils regarding that church. And the book’s fate, in Cunningham’s capable hands, illuminates a delicate moment in the life of eighteenth-century English Catholics. Scholars of the eighteenth century will, I suspect, be glad to have it. And scholars of the thirteenth century will find it an interesting read.
This book’s apparatus gives all that this reviewer could ask. The bibliography of Perry’s sources also includes more recent editions where they exist. A biographical appendix provides details of various figures, mostly of the thirteenth century, mentioned in the text. In addition to reproducing Perry’s notes, Cunningham has extensively and helpfully annotated the text, correcting Perry’s occasional error. (A cavil regarding note 55: there has been some debate in recent years on the date of Grosseteste’s Rules for households and estates and which countess of Lincoln he wrote it for; at this point, the state of the art on the question is, to my knowledge, Louise J. Wilkinson’s Women in Thirteenth-Century Lincolnshire, not cited here. [3] Cunningham in this edition collates two manuscripts: one found in Valladolid and the other now in Edinburgh, evidently the copy sent to Challoner that prompted his disappointing response. The latter, Cunningham argues, was Perry’s fair copy, and is used as the alpha text, with additions from the Valladolid text noted. The volume is well produced; I found only a couple of apparent typographical errors; a sentence on p. 198 seems to be split in two by a period and “evilbut” (54).
In all, this is a very welcome, if belated, account of a major medieval figure, and of his post-medieval afterlife.
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Notes:
1. Frederick William Maitland, Roman Canon Law in the Church of England: Six Essays (London: Methuen and Co., 1898).
2. Arthur Ogle, The Canon Law in Mediaeval England (London: John Albemarle, 1912).
3. (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2007), 59-60.