The Papacy, Secular Clergy and Lollardy.
- Author/Editor
- Lepine, David.
- Title
- The Papacy, Secular Clergy and Lollardy.
- Published
- Lepine, David. "The Papacy, Secular Clergy and Lollardy." In Historians on John Gower. Ed. Stephen H. Rigby, with Siân Echard (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2019), pp. 243-69.
- Review
- Lepine engages questions of Gower's religious orthodoxy by exploring what his depictions of and comments on the papacy, episcopate, and higher and lower clergies owe to the "stereotypes of medieval estates satire tradition," gauging how "radical was Gower in his criticisms of the Church" (244). Reviewing the scholarship and describing the historical context, Lepine finds that Gower's "examination of" the Church in MO and in VC "closely follows the structure and conventions of estates satire" (247); he is "particularly close to traditional estates satire" when discussing the "episcopate and the beneficed clergy" (248), even though his "knowledge of the higher clergy came in part from personal experience" (252), described by Lepine. Two groups that Gower criticizes, "unbeneficed priests and scholars," appear infrequently in estates satire, so he adapts "the genre to the conditions of his own time"(254) and, for the expanding "university-educated clergy" he "engages with contemporary reality" to update his views. Gower's "critique of the papacy," Lepine says, is "significantly more radical" (258), but--unlike John Wyclif--he stopped short of challenging the spiritual power of the papal office; he was "very far from being a Wycliffite" (265) in accepting Purgatory, prayers for the dead, indulgences, transubstantiation, the Latin Bible, and more. He "did not use his often scathing criticisms of the clergy to make a fundamental attack on the Church" and so "it is difficult" to place Gower's work within a late fourteenth-century 'new-anticlericalism'" (267). [MA. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 39.1]
- Date
- 2019
- Gower Subjects
- Backgrounds and General Criticism
Biography of Gower
Mirour de l'Omme (Speculum Meditantis)
Vox Clamantis
Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations