Pedagogy, Intellectuals, and Dissent in the Later Middle Ages: Lollardy and Ideas of Learning by Rita Copeland
Abstract
Reviews 311 Rita Copeland, Pedagogy, Intellectuals, and Dissent in the Later Middle Ages: Lollardy and Ideas of Learning, (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer sity Press, 2001), xii + 243 pp. Rita Copeland's subjects—the pedagogical strategies of the Lollard heresy and the rhetoric of dissent and repression in late medieval England— might seem remote from the concerns of contemporary rhetoric and peda gogy That apparent gap between past and present is one Copeland labors to close. "What this book offers," she announces, "is a study of issues that were of profound importance for the Middle Ages and that will disappear from our historiographical map if we do not recognize them as being im portant to ourselves" (p. 1). In a fifty-page general introduction, "Pedagogy and Intellectuals," Copeland views late medieval struggles over lay access to religious knowledge through the lenses of postmodern pedagogical theory, postcolonial studies, and liberationist pedagogy. That "pedagogy is the most political and politicized of discourses" (p. 18) is for her as true of the Middle Ages as it is today; understanding the relation of pedagogy and dissent in medieval England helps illuminate "what most insistently links past with present" (p. 20). Later chapters connect the prison narratives of the Lollard intellectuals Richard Wyche and William Thorpe to the writings of Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Ken Saro Wiwa, and Nelson Mandela (p. 151) and find the blur ring of pedagogical and inquisitorial methods in Thorpe's 1407 interrogation "poignantly resonant with modern literatures of political detention" (p. 210). Readers may find some of Copeland's parallels forced; however, few medievalists will dispute the value of her contribution to the burgeoning study of Lollardy, which has transformed our understanding of medieval English culture and has provoked radical reinterpretations of authors from Geoffrey Chaucer to Margery Kempe. Beginning in the 1380s, Copeland argues, a university-trained elite, eventually to be hereticized as Lollards, developed and implemented a sys tematic pedagogy that sought to disestablish hierarchies separating aca demics and laypeople, teachers and students, leaders and followers. Cen tral to that pedagogy was the promotion of "literal" reading to instate "an independent and conscientious knowledge of Scripture among the laity" (p. 123-124). (Copeland is careful to distinguish the Scriptural literalism of present-day fundamentalism from that of Lollardy, which retained "the interpretive flexibilities of traditional multi-layered exegesis [p. 127].) In advancing this pedagogy, Lollard intellectuals repudiated a long-standing association of the literal sense with childishness, an association whose history Copeland painstakingly traces to a split in late Antiquity between pedagogy and hermeneutics. The English Church hierarchy responded with a counter-pedagogy that, among other things, reasserted the association of the literal with the childish and deployed a rhetoric of infantilization to attempt a broad intellectual disenfranchisement of lay adults. The Church's crackdown on heterodoxy met with limited success, however; although it did staunch the flow of 312 RHETORICA dissident intellectuals from the universities to lay communities through censorship, imprisonment, and capital punishment, it could not undo the damage wrought by dissident academics such as Wyche and Thorpe, for "the products of intellectual labor, the pedagogical apparatuses that are exportable from one milieu to another, once set in motion, can long outlast the power of the individual teacher to teach" (p. 219). Pedagogies, Intellectuals, and Dissent evinces the meticulous scholarship and nuanced treatment of abstruse rhetorical issues that one would expect from the author of Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1991). Copeland's analyses of intellectual labor, pedagogies, the "literal sense," and the politics of childhood illuminate the story of dissent and repression well known to scholars of Lollardy. Her study is a must for specialists in late medieval England. Though non-medievalists may struggle with Copeland's dense analyses of politico-religious issues, I expect that scholars of contemporary pedagogy and rhetoric—particularly oppositional pedagogies and rhetorics of resistance and coercion—will find this book well worth the effort. Karen A. Winstead The Ohio State University Luigi Spina, L'oratore scriteriato. Per una storia letteraria e política di Tersite, Napoli : Loffredo, 2001, pp. 124. Luigi Spina's short essay brilliantly shows how rich (and sometimes contradictory) can be the rhetorical reuse of...
- Journal
- Rhetorica
- Published
- 2002-06-01
- DOI
- 10.1353/rht.2002.0016
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