Books under Suspicion: Censorship and Tolerance of Revelatory Writing in Late Medieval England examines the censorship issues that propelled the major writers of the period toward their massive use of visionary genres. Kathryn Kerby-Fulton suggests that writers and translators as different as Chaucer, Langland, Julian of Norwich, "M.N.," and Margery Kempe positioned their work to take advantage of the tacit toleration that both religious and secular authorities extended to revelatory theology. The book examines controversial ideas as diverse as the early experimental humanism of Chaucer, censured beatific vision theology and the breakdown of Langland's A Text, the English reception of M.N.'s translation of Marguerite Porete's condemned book, Julian's authorial suppression of her gender, and the impact of suspect Continental women's activism on Kempe.

Kerby-Fulton also narrates success stories of intellectual freedom, tracing evidence of ecclesiastical tolerance of revelation, the impossibility of official censorship in a manuscript culture, and the powerful, protected reading circles for radical apocalypticism and mysticism, such as those of the Austins and the Carthusians. Until now, Wycliffism has been seen as the only significant unorthodox or radical body of writings in late medieval England. Books under Suspicion is the first comprehensive study of banned non-Wycliffite materials in Insular writing during the period of the Avignon and Great Schism papacies.

This weighty, complex, and rewarding book makes use of neglected material in manuscripts and archives to reconstruct new aspects of the history of religious thought and vernacular writing in Ricardian and early Lancastrian England. As such it will interest scholars of late medieval religious history and Middle English literary history.

About the Author

Kathryn Kerby-Fulton is Notre Dame Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame. She is the author and editor of a number of books, including most recently Voices in Dialogue: Reading Women in the Middle Ages (University of Notre Dame Press, 2005), co-edited with Linda Olson.

Reviews

"Kerby-Fulton's book simply rewrites the history of heterodoxy in late-medieval England. . . . It would be hard to walk away from the book with any assumptions intact about medieval England's insularity, its impermeability to Continental heterodoxy, and its total domination by Wycliffism. . . . Kerby-Fulton's stunning codicological work is the book's greatest resource, and its ambition its most admirable trait. She has done a great service to the profession with this book, and it will prove a monument of literary scholarship in years to come." -Yearbook of Langland Studies

"Kathryn Kerby-Fulton concentrates on the reign of Richard II . . . and contends that total censorship was a more subtle process before the uniformity imposed by the printed book. . . . I am sure that [the] book will spark controversy, making many of us re-examine old assumptions." -Times Literary Supplement

"Kerby-Fulton modestly claims that hers is but a beginning study that only suggests lines of enquiry. Possibly, but her detailed study and observations make this a bedrock for further study on Medieval censorship. It belongs in academic libraries supporting graduate study in religious or literary history." -Catholic Library World

"In Books Under Suspicion, Kerby-Fulton brings this second image of medieval culture brilliantly to life in the specific instance of attitudes toward revelatory writing in England from 1329 to 1437, a period of robust tolerance, and on the whole, as she puts it, 'an age of failed censorship.' . . . Books Under Suspicion is bound to mark a turning point in scholars' understanding of the pervasive cultural awareness and tolerance of heterodox theology in late-medieval England. That turning point will be evident not only in scholars' use of the wealth of information and insight that Kerby-Fulton makes available in this book but also in the new research it will stimulate." -Journal of the Early Book Society

"In many ways, this is a bravura display of book history. By building her study of manuscripts as much as texts, Kerby-Fulton has-perhaps fully, for the first time in an English context-uncovered the complex dynamics of learned communities in the Black Death period, the undermighty nature of the Oxford and Cambridge schoolrooms by comparison with the intellectual inventiveness and intrigue, and the publishing power of the communities of mendicants, monks, and professional clerks in the provinces." -American Historical Review

"Kerby-Fulton's admirable book is necessary reading for all who are interested in the textual culture of England at the end of the middle ages." -The English Historical Review

"With Books Under Suspicion, Kathryn Kerby-Fulton has accomplished something remarkable. This far-reaching study does nothing less than shift the paradigms with which we think about such fundamental categories as heterodoxy, orthodoxy, theology, and revelation in relation to fourteenth- and fifteenth-century English religious cultures. Her original, painstaking study of manuscripts also leads us to revise our thinking about major canonical English writers including Chaucer, Langland, Julian of Norwich, and Margery Kempe . . . no scholar or student of Middle English literature, or medieval English religion, should be without this sophisticated, groundbreaking volume." -Church History

"Engagingly written and persuasively argued, it provides a tremendously nuanced view of a period of religious debate and censorship that has been all too easily flattened in contemporary scholarship. . . The excitement one gains in reading Kathryn Kerby-Fulton's work is exceeded only by the awareness of the richness of scholarship yet to come that will continue to explore the wide range of theological speculation and revelatory prophecy in late medieval England." -Comitatus

"Kathryn Kerby-Fulton's latest book will rapidly become essential reading for scholars of medieval literature. In her study of the reception history of various prophetic and visionary writings, she has provided a thoroughly revisionist account of theological politics in England in the late medieval period." -College Literature

"Kerby-Fulton's monumental work serves modern scholars as a guide to the complexity of English manuscript culture as it relates to visionary writing and the censoring pressure it both invited and resisted. Engaging with the demands of Books under Suspicion will take the reader into a world of medieval writing and reading that cannot be contained by our own sense of disciplinary boundaries." -Rocky Mountain Review

Awards
Winner of John Ben Snow Prize 2007 (United States) and Haskins Gold Medal 2010 (United States).



Book Information
ISBN 9780268033231
Author Kathryn Kerby-Fulton
Format Paperback
Page Count 616
Imprint University of Notre Dame Press
Publisher University of Notre Dame Press
Weight(grams) 815g
Dimensions(mm) 229mm * 152mm * 31mm