William Thorpe's Narrative Theology Elizabeth Schirmer The Testimony of William Thorpe is a first-person narrative account of its author's informal heresy trial at the hands of no less a personage than Thomas Arundel, Archbishop of Canterbury.1 Thorpe dates the events he narrates to 1407:2 six years after the 1401 statute De heretico comburendo officially provided for relapsed heretics to be turned over to the secular arm and burnt at the stake,3 and two years before Arundel promulgated his anti-Lollard Constitutions, which seek to regulate academic speculation, preaching, and vernacular textuality.4 [End Page 267] The Testimony is thus set between two landmarks of the anti-Lollard campaign waged by the archbishop and his colleagues under the aegis of the usurping Lancastrian regime.5 Thorpe's text dramatizes the conflict between Lollardy and the ecclesiastical establishment—each embodied in one of its main characters, Wycliffite priest and Archbishop of Canterbury—at this key moment in the controversy. As an Oxford-trained priest with ties to the heresiarch, one of the few of that cohort to confront Arundel's campaign directly, Thorpe was uniquely positioned to confront the problem of how vernacular Wycliffism was to survive this new wave of persecution.6 The answer lay, for Thorpe, in discursive creativity. Thorpe's Testimony, I shall argue, sidesteps the textual strategies that had come to define both sides in the Lollard controversy, expanding the discursive territory of vernacular Wycliffism. In particular, Thorpe turns to narrative—a discursive mode shunned by the majority of his co-sectarians, and strongly associated with anti-Lollard textual programs—in order to enact his intertwined theological and political projects.7 By the early fifteenth century, the Lollard controversy had calcified into a "textual struggle,"8 with each side working to promulgate distinctive forms of vernacular textuality and lay religious experience. This "struggle" centered [End Page 268] on the question of vernacular biblical transmission. It was initiated by early Wycliffite textual programs, which sought to flood the vernacular literary marketplace with highly standardized copies of the English Wycliffite Bible, the long Sermon Cycle, and related biblical texts.9 Anti-Lollard efforts tended to mirror—that is, both to mimic and to reverse—Lollard textual programs. The Festial of John Mirk, perhaps intended as an orthodox alternative to the English Wycliffite cycle, goes so far as to do away with the biblical theme text, replacing the Lollard sermons' characteristic exposition secundum ordinem textum with "liturgical instructions" on the feasts of the church.10 Mirk conducts these instructions, moreover, almost entirely through narrative: the exemplum, freed from subservience to biblical doctrine, merges with hagiography and takes over the content of the sermons. Mirk thus substitutes narrative for the biblical text and uses it to reify the gap between clerical and lay readers, resisting Lollard challenges to clerical authority. For anti-Lollard writers like John Mirk, narrative, conceived of as inherently flesh-bound and affective, was the perfect discursive mode by which to define lay audiences as equally mired in the flesh and the world, dependent upon the discursive and sacramental mediation of the clergy and their church. Lancastrian anti-Lollard programs continue to [End Page 269] use narrative to construct lay audiences as affective and devotional, rather than intellective or contemplative. The classic articulation of this project is Nicholas Love's assertion that his "symple" readers, like children, need to be "fedde with mylke of lyᵹte doctrine & not with sadde mete of grete clargye & of hye contemplacioun." 11 Love's Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ was famously authorized by Arundel himself on the heels of the 1409 legislation, implicitly as substitute for the Wycliffite bible translations banned by the new legislation.12 Love's text offers its "symple" readers moral and doctrinal commentary on episodes from the life of Christ, inviting imaginative, affective engagement with biblical narratives in place of intellective or contemplative engagement with the biblical text.13 Authorizing Love's stories of the life of Christ at nearly the same moment that he legislates against biblical translation, Arundel reinforces an implicit dichotomy between biblical narrative and biblical text, reserving the latter to clerical, Latinate readers.14 Citing Wyclif...
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