Religions Reviewed

Whether or not Lollards actually chose to compete with ordained priests in dispensing bread and wine in memory of Christ, they were certainly in competition when it came to the business of producing and reading the book that they viewed as the sole vehicle of God’s Law. The period of Lollardy was a turning point in English book production, during which speculative book production for known markets had become possible.  Those markets themselves were increasingly made up of individuals like “senior guildsmen” who had experienced an “increase in their pragmatic literacy.” 
Lollard book production was an affair of artisans working in association.  Although the first Wycliffite texts were certainly produced at Oxford, the principal labor of their production must have moved to lay scribe-artisans by the 15th century.  While Lollard texts themselves were no doubt overwhelmingly produced “bespoke,” or produced on commission, the growing reality of the book industry during a period of craft organization suggests at least the possibility of a mystery of lay scribes and illuminators, which could reinforce Lollard cognizance of craft organizing.

Lollard books were evidently made with great care for their materials as well as their contents.  Rita Copeland goes so far as to suggest that some Lollards attached a “talismanic value” to their books. How does the importance of books to Lollards and their movement square with William Thorpe’s disdain for the Bible volume on which he was to swear, declaring it to be a “creature” that might not support an oath?  To invoke a cliché, familiarity breeds contempt, and Lollards who were intimate with the demands of book production (i.e. creation of the “creature”) might be more likely to view the reverence toward the material book as an effect of mystification by church authorities. Similarly, Margery Baxter, the wife of a wright, scorns church images, because “Ignorant craftsmen hew and carve such crosses and images out of sticks, and after that ignorant painters deck them out with colors.”  A reader might reasonably infer that she cannot “eat the sausage,” having seen how and by whom it is made. In keeping with these perspectives, the Twelfth Conclusion of the Lollards, regarding “Arts and Crafts,” derides the employment of excessive productive arts in the Church as “waste, curiosity, and disguising.”