In The English Church in the Fourteenth Century W. A. Pantin relates the story found in the Durham Cathedral Muniments of one Richard Helmslay, a Dominican, who preached in Newcastle in 1379-1380, attacking the secular clergy in general and in particular offering a new interpretation of the opening words of the twenty-first decree of the 4th Lateran Council of 1215, concerning annual confession. Interpreting the words Omnis utriusque sexus rather literally, Helmslay argued that all those of both sexes that is, only hermaphrodites had to perform their confession "at least once a year privately to their own priest"; presumably the rest of the lambs in the Church's flock could roam where they might. Helmslay was reported to Rome, and later recanted both at Newcastle and at the diocesan seat of Durham (164-165).

    The humor in this incident, of course, turns on the way Helmslay took the Council's words literally, but in a manner quite other than they were intended. Helmslay's gloss of the text of what was by now a well-established doctrine caused a bit of a stir he became known in the Roman curia as Frater Ricardus utriusque sexus (165). His joke suggests one of the ways in which interpretation was a topic of the day. Confession was a matter of Church teaching strongly buttressed with a literature of its own, replete with manuals of sin and confession. By the time Helmslay preached, much of this material, such as the Manuel des péchés, was available in English, the latter under the title of Handlyng Synne by Robert Manly of Bourne, a work he completed in 1303. Nearer the end of the century, at the proposed close of The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer sets the Parson's Tale, a work which is clearly part of this

    I would like to suggest some ways in which Helmslay's gloss indicates the intellectual climate, a pervasive and strikingly consistent set of interests among late-fourteenth century English writers. There is an overt interest in defining abstract concepts of virtue the stuff of theological literature, the sermon and the debate suggested for instance, by the titles we assign to the poems Patience and Cleanness or Purity. I would also argue that such efforts exhibit an interest in the limits of authority, intellect, and language itself. What follows is a suggestion of how usage reflects contemporary concerns, a topical footnote of sorts to the affinities that J. A. Burrow finds in his study, Ricardian Poetry. The rhetoric of anti-intellectualism, which has long been cited straightforwardly by historians as different as Pantin and Gordon Leff, has been too little studied by literary scholars of the period.

    Recently I have been exploring in Middle English texts the use of what Raymond Williams for another era has labelled "key words." Late fourteenth-century usage of clergie and queintise suggests a suspicion of those who have learning and their abilities to manipulate language. I am thinking here of the Canon's Yeoman's words, "Oure termes been so clergial and so queynte..." (VIII 752, ed. Benson), and those of the Miller generalizing upon Nicholas' seduction of Alison: "clerkes ben ful subtile and ful queinte" a compliment from which he will pull the rug in the infamous deflationary ryme riche of the next line (I 3275). I would like to further this argument for a contemporary anti-scholasticism by examining the relationship of text and gloss by the ways in which contemporary writers, both clerical and lay, set up the dynamic of these two terms. Far from the complementarity they enjoy in previous Scholastic practice, late Middle English usage

    Examples abound; a few will suffice. In the Book of the Duchess for instance the Dreamer sees the walls of his bedchamber "peynted, both text and glose,/ Of al the Romaunce of the Rose" (333-334). Here text and gloss form a figure of completeness, an integral whole, as they were supposed to do in ideal practice. But in fragment C of the Middle English Romaunt, not usually attributed to Chaucer, Fals Semblaunt criticizes the teaching of the mendicant friars, which, "if men wolde ther-geyn appose/ The nakid texte, and lete the glose,/ It myght soone assoyled be" (6555-57). Here, as in so many instances, text and gloss are polarized in their relative truth-functions. In The Legend of Good Women the God of Love upbraids Chaucer, speaking "in pleyne text, withouten nede of glose" for his own translation of this poem; again, the literal is prior and superior to the superfluous explanation (F 328; G 254). In the Squire's Tale, the knight affirms the magical properties of a sword by swearing of its abilities, "This is a verray sooth, withouten glose" (V 166). Here the opposition of verray sooth and glose shows the late Middle English sense of glosyng to be "practically synonymous," as Alfred David has said, with distortion of the text" (138).

    Though in beginning her Prologue the Wife of Bath would assert experience over authority, she makes immediate and frequent recourse to the latter, seeking to turn its edge to her own purpose. And she also sets text and gloss in opposition. Having botched the gloss of her first exemplum of the Samaritan woman, she moves directly to a central point of her theology:

Intellectual speculation and explanation, verging on distortion, as she suggests in the phrase "withoute lye," are bootless for her own understanding of God's text in Genesis 1:28. A bit later, she challenges clerks again "Glose whoso wole" (119) to explain the purpose of what she calls euphemistically "oure bothe thynges

    After her tale, the Friar coyly praises her for having touched "In scholematere greet difficultee" but it is best, he suggests, to leave such to the clergy (1272). For his tale of a summoner, of course, the Friar is roundly quitted with a story that turns on fraternal compulsion to gloss a text. Visiting the sick and ill-tempered Thomas, Friar John of the Summoner's Tale promises to rehearse the sermon he has just this morning preached

Glosing Scripture is the means here of laying open its difficult truth to the laity, while at the same time distancing the lay audience from the text. In the gap the friar provides himself between scriptural text and exposition, he ensures himself the space to turn the text to his own purpose.

Of course the friar wrenches 2 Corinthians 3:6 out of its context and omits the second half of the verse, that "the spirit gives life," very much in the style of the Wife of Bath. Employing that is, exploiting the gap between true text, which is the letter, and the gloss, a less dangerous version of the truth, the friar can lead people to be charitable in the financial sense of his gloss, not the spiritual sense of the letter. At this point in his proem, of course, the sight of Thomas' wife distracts him from instruction, a moment that gives us a gloss on his text and his person.

    When the friar returns to his sermon he states openly,

that Christ had friars in mind when he said, "Blessed are the poor in spirit." Thus, for Friar John, text and gloss are not even a natural conjunction, for lettre sleeth. The difficulty, the danger of Scripture makes the gloss a necessary mediation for instructing the laity. The ridiculous dénouement of the tale, wherein the friar is forced to remain faithful to the letter of Thomas' condition accompanying his donation, parodies the Pentecost, as several readers have noted (Levitan, Levy). The conclusion effectively glosses the friar's character for us as no strict statement could, and also picks up Friar John's earlier rhetorical question concerning small donations with a good Chaucerian pun: "What is a ferthyng worth parted in twelve?" (1967)

    But we must let the friars have their say. One of the most interesting of the refrain-poems found in the Vernon manuscript also speaks to the distance between text and glose. The fifth of eight stanzas reveals the speaker to be a friar. "Who says the Sooth, He shall be Shent" is a poem of bitter disenchantment and trenchant sarcasm whose tone is similar to the anti-courtly poems of the late sixteenth century.

To do well in this world, one must misuse speech to conceal, not to reveal, and so hide intention, truth itself, what lies in the herte, separating it from what one speaks, for whoever speaks the truth shall be destroyed. In the second stanza, the speaker echoes the distance he has advised between heart and mouth in our familiar terms:

Here again is gap between text, now a metaphor for truth in any form, and a gloss that conceals, not reveals, that truth, a gap that is encouraged by the corruption of the world: ideally text and gloss would not be disjoint. The history of Middle English queynte is conveniently parallel to that of glose here; the meaning of both words broadens in the late Middle Ages from positive fields suggesting recognition and revelation, respectively, to negative fields of concealment. We may recall the Canon's Yeoman's smug assertion that "Oure termes ben so clergial and so queynte" (VIII 752). Consistent with the polarization of tough and queynte, tixt and glose, the speaker uses diction usually reserved for describing features of the consummate verbal art, rhetoric: "Ever i word thei colour and peynte" a line that suggests a concealment distinct from the true purpose of rhetoric. "Falshede is called a sotiltee," he concludes, using a word drawn from the diction of scholastic argument. Against the ways of the world he sets the efforts of the friars:

In fact, he will be persecuted. In his conclusion the friar speaking in this poem leaves out the idea of glosing altogether, suggesting that it can only mean distortion of the trewe tixt. This understanding is very different from the ideal dynamic of reading and interpreting espoused by other contemporary religious voices.

    The intellectual climate in which the polarization of text and gloss must be situated is in the response or, better, the reaction to Scholasticism of such varied religious figures as Richard Rolle, John Wyclif, and Richard FitzRalph, Archbishop of Armagh, who

    FitzRalph describes what is usually termed his 'conversion' from philosophy to theology in the most affective language, addressing God as "Solid Truth":

What were the components of the Thomistic synthesis, FitzRalph recasts here as the antithesis of Christian and pagan, very much in the vein of the Fathers. Such language suggests a widespread contemporary nostalgia for the early days of the Church.

    Similarly the mystic Richard Rolle of Hampole attacks his school-trained detractors:

The rivalry between Athens and Jerusalem, instituted by the classically-trained Fathers, has here become an intramural contest.

    From a very different quarter Wyclif argues for knowledge of Scripture before all other kinds of learning in his work of the late 1370's entitled On the Truth of Sacred Scripture (De Veritate Sacrae Scripturae). We are "to believe no one else on any topic except to the extent to which he bases himself on scripture" (Wyclif 1905, 382; Kenny 62). Scripture for Wyclif, as for Langland, is not a static page-text, but a dynamic of text and individual understanding. And the need to reach an understanding of "the written book, and the sacred sense" is as much a matter for laity as for clergy (Wyclif 1905. 189; translated in Kenny 61):

I should add that here Wyclif attacks a straw-man: part street-preaching friar, and part Franciscan and/or Oxford scholastic. As in much of his reformist polemic for example, his invective against clerical absenteeism Wyclif knows well whereof he speaks. While his sense of the supremacy of scriptural style and logic has in it the traditional ring of the early fathers, such as

   Furthermore, Wyclif offers the understanding of language as sign, not reality:

We only understand the law of God via languages that are all equally remote from its reality, and so are all equally relevant to the purpose of understanding that law. Wyclif establishes the mediating status of language as sign, rather than universal or particular, much as Ockham suggests in the Seven Quodlibeta that, as common signs, words are not individuals (Wm. of Ockham, I. ) (III. 1). Ockham, the ultimate English Scholastic, and Wyclif, the ultimate rhetorical anti-scholastic, held very different epistemologies, but not such very different views of language. Similarly, Chaucer and Langland, both conservatives and, as such, hardly sympathetic to Wyclif's views, are nonetheless occupied with the status of language as a medium of truth.

    It remains for me to recover as far as possible the process whereby topics of scholastic discourse, in Janet Coleman's words,

    To take up once again the example with which I began: to mistranslate the words of the Lateran Council, as Helmslay did, is to disempower the language of Rome's decree. His gloss is consistent with the text-turning challenges and appeals to authority of Chaunticleer, Alisoun of Bath, and that most scholastic of anti-scholastics, that most fraternal of anti-fraternals, John Wyclif. Such usage as Father Helmslay's is a pointed reminder of an awareness voiced by the author of an early fifteenth-century Wycliffite concordance to the New Testament: "In Englisch also as in Latyn ben wordis equivouse, that is, whanne oon worde hath manye signyficaciouns or bitokenyngis" (Angus McIntosh 292). From whatever viewpoint, the efficacy of language, and the nature of its potential authority and integrity in the face of its apparent fluidity, form the horns of the problem of learning in the process of salvation a crucial step, in the words of Chaucer's Parson, "Of thilke parfit glorious pilgrymage/ That highte Jer-susalem celestial" (X.50-51).