The Invisibility of the Soul and the Rhetoric of Dissent: Conscience and the Wycliffite Heresy

This essay argues that the use of conscience as a justification for dissent has an even longer history than has often been assumed by intellectual historians of the Reformation. Through a close examination of the English Wycliffite Sermons (c.1380s–1390s) and the Testimony of William Thorpe (1407), it offers the first extended consideration of the use of the word “conscience” in Wycliffite texts, using this as the point of departure for an assessment of Lollard characterisations of human interiority more generally. Wycliffite writers repeatedly emphasise the opacity of the inner life and its consequent authority, a rhetorical tendency inherited and adapted from Wyclif’s own writings and other Latinate discourses. This not only provides Lollards with a helpful strategy in their attempts to avoid prosecution for heresy, but also provides the somewhat shaky ground upon which a number of their doctrinal convictions rest—especially those pertaining to oral confession and membership of the Church. Conscience also provides an obvious connection between religious dissent and political rebellion, which is why it must be central to any future account of Lollardy’s relationship to class struggle or sedition more generally conceived. When writers like Thorpe refer to the soul as invisible, or to God as their only judge, they invoke a fundamental, if unstable, aspect of Wycliffite belief: an incipient but dynamic account of the relationship between individual conscience, interiority, and authority that was to find even greater expression in figures such as Martin Luther, Jan Huss, and Henry VIII.


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The Invisibility of the Soul and the Rhetoric of Dissent: Conscience and the Wycliffite Heresy ...domini locucio est consciencie mocio quomodo Deo nota est prodicio, quomodo necessaria est racionis reddicio et quomodo per mortem necessario sequitur huius ministerii deposicio... (Wyclif, 1887: 272) ...spekyng of þis loord is meuyng of mennus conscience; and þus God telluþ to men boþe more and lesse how he knoweþ here traytorie whanne þei don amys, and how þei beþ nedud to dye fro þis offys, and how þei ben nedyd to God to reken for þis seruyse... (English Wycliffite Sermons, Vol. 1, 1983: 257-258) The use of conscience as a justification for dissent has an even longer history than has often been assumed by intellectual historians of the Reformation. In the long English Wycliffite sermon cycle, produced probably in the late 1380s or 1390s (see Vol. 4, 1996: 10-20), the word "conscience" appears in a variety of contexts, with a corresponding diversity of intended senses and characterisations. Paul Strohm offers a salutary warning to any scholar working on ideas of conscience in the medieval and early modern periods: "even a limitation to the single work or body of work does not guarantee that conscience will stand still for unitary consideration" (2012: 3). The present essay offers the first extended consideration of the use of the word "conscience" in Wycliffite texts, using this as the point of departure for an assessment of Lollard 1 characterisations of human interiority more generally. 2 No distinctively "Lollard" understanding of conscience or interiority will ever emerge, due to the sheer complexity, variability, and inaccessibility of the inner life, and the consequent insufficiency of language to express it-as well as a highly lacunose historical record and the irresistible alterity of even the well-documented past. Nevertheless, a close examination of the English Wycliffite sermons and the Testimony of William Thorpe (1407), in particular, will reveal a rhetorical emphasis on precisely this opacity of homo interior and its consequent authority, inherited and adapted from John Wyclif's own writings and other Latinate discourses. This not only provides Lollards with a helpful strategy in their attempts to avoid prosecution for heresy, however; it also provides the somewhat shaky ground upon which a number of their doctrinal convictions rest. Not merely a cheap ploy intended to render themselves unimpeachable-although it may, at times, seem to be such as well-when Lollards like Thorpe refer to the soul as invisible, or to God as their only judge, they invoke a fundamental, if unstable, aspect of Wycliffite belief: an incipient but dynamic account of the relationship between individual conscience, interiority, and authority that was to find ever-greater expression in subsequent centuries. but rather what first communicates such betrayal to God. On this reading, therefore, not only is the voice of conscience not unitary (having a threefold content), but it is not monologic either, resembling, in some sense, a two-way conversation (no matter how imbalanced) between the human and the divine.
Conscience, therefore, according to Sermon 9, first makes the individual aware of their sin, then gestures towards its potential consequences (whatever they might be), and, finally, informs them of the need to repent and do penance-perhaps through a process of inner confession (or whatever else "reken" might entail). Neither the English writer nor Wyclif explicitly states a chronological relationship between these stages, or even that they really are discrete stages at all. However, particularly in the order of the English text, the apparent conceptual progression-from awareness to atonement-does seem to imply a chronological one as well. This transforms the conventional division of the Catholic sacrament of penance into contrition, confession, and satisfaction, reformulating it as an almost completely internal process (see Otto, 2013: 6). Furthermore, the enormous field of scholastic debate about the precise nature of conscience and its allied concept synderesis, our innate tendency towards good (see Zamore, 2016)-how each is related to the other; where each is located within the psyche; whether and how conscience can be erroneous; whether it binds; and, if it does not bind, how to disregard it; etc.-is here set almost completely to one side. In fact, the word synderesis does not occur anywhere in the long English sermon cycle. 4 Much important work has already been done on scholastic conceptions of conscience (see, e.g., D'Arcy, 1961;Baylor, 1977;Potts, 1980); however, any attempt to identify the diverse and highly technical ideas of specific philosophers-such as St. Bonaventure, St. Thomas Aquinas, or William of Ockhamwith the even more varied characterisation of conscience in vernacular Wycliffite texts would be to confuse the issue even further. What is most helpful is instead to consider how elements of general agreement among the Latinate schoolmen are reworked and refracted by Lollards working in the vernacular, particularly in homiletic and polemical contexts. This reflects the "extraclergial" position of most vernacular Wycliffite writing (Somerset, 1998): academic discourses are nominally dismissed yet subtly deployed.
Throughout the long English sermon cycle, there is a contingent deployment of the term "conscience" in the service of Lollard polemic-whether against oral confession (Sermon 63), priests' lechery (Sermon 80), clerical wealth (Sermon 83), the mendicant orders (Sermon 120), or secular and canon law (Sermon 158)-instead of, or alongside, close explication of the biblical text. We can see a comparable use of "Conscience" in the roughly contemporaneous Piers Plowman: contra critics such as Nicolette Zeeman (2006), Sarah Wood (2012) shows how, rather than standing in for fixed, immutable qualities, personifications such as the character "Conscience" in Langland's poem tend to be constructed contingently in each instance in which they appear, in relation to the various other discourses being invoked in the context. This is an example of what A. C. Spearing has termed "textual subjectivity" (2005; see Wood, 2012, esp. 1-10). Even in Sermon 9, the identification of conscience with the speech of the rich man may not-depending on our understanding of "reken"-be considered a straightforward interpretation of the parable, perhaps concealing a critique of oral confession. Among the 294 sermons of the long English Wycliffite cycle, the word "conscience" appears, by my count, 20 times in 15 different sermons. 5 It is mentioned several times, but is never the focus of an extended discussion in its own right. When it appears, it is subordinated to the sermons' wider ideological programme, or exists merely at the periphery of their hermeneutic concerns. As we shall see, the general rhetorical emphasis on the invisibility of homo interior in Wycliffite writings results in a sense of authority in invocations of faculties such as conscience, but this is only rarely accompanied by any clarity about how they actually work: it is difficult to describe something one can only feel and not see (cf. Denery, 2005).
The passage from Sermon 9 is the moment in the English cycle in which the anatomy of conscience as a moral-epistemological faculty (i.e., scholastic concerns relating to conscience) achieves its most central position within a sermon's exegetical or polemical argument. Only one sermon, E3, takes as its lectio a passage which, in the sermon collection's translation-not the famous "Wycliffite" translation-contains the word "conscience" (1 Cor. 4:1-5). However, while the sermon does quote the word-"al ȝif Y haue no conscience" (Vol. 1, 1983: 487; italics original)-it does not explicate its meaning or its contextual significance at all. And, in the Wycliffite Bible (whose very Wycliffite provenance has been questioned again recently [see Kelly, 2016;Gasquet, 1908]), the adjective "conscius" in 1 Corinthians 4:4-Jerome's translation of St. Paul's verb, σύνοιδα [synoida], the word from which the Greek noun for conscience, συνείδησις [syneidesis], derives-for example, is not even translated as a cognate of "conscience" (Clementine Vulgate, 2005;Greek New Testament, 2018). Instead, it appears as the adverb "[s]othli" (in the earlier version) and the gerund "trowynge" (in the later version), both of which emphasise the word's original connection purely to epistemology rather than moral discernment (Holy Bible, 1850). In their literal senses, both con-scientia and συν-είδησις mean, simply, "knowing-together" (for classical ideas of conscience, see Potts, 1980: 1-3;D'Arcy, 1961: 5-8;Strohm, 2011: 6-7).
Based on the evidence of the sermons, therefore, we certainly cannot describe a recognisable, uniform, or even coherent "Lollard conscience" (as some scholars have attempted to do with the "Reformation" or "Protestant conscience" [see Strohm, 2011: 23-25]). For the Wycliffites-and perhaps even for Wyclif himselfconscience appears to have had little or no conceptual clarity at all (see Strohm, 2012: 4-6). The entries on conscience in the Wycliffite Floretum and Rosarium have sadly never been published. However, at best, they would simply enumerate paratactically the multiple, often conflicting, senses in which "conscientia" could be understood at the time (see Middle English Rosarium, 1979). Many of these, we can assume, we already encounter in, for example, the sermon cycle and the patristic and scholastic texts from which the entries in these encyclopaedic works were gathered. Nevertheless, as we shall see, in many places, Lollard invocations of "conscience" and similar rhetorical appeals to homo interior do indicate an awareness of the possible uses to which its very complexity and inaccessibility can be put. Such invocations can be helpful not only to the individual in their personal struggle against ecclesiastical authority but also in the wider promotion of Lollard beliefs, some of which even seem to derive from a more fundamental recognition of the invisibility of human interiority. As we have seen in Sermon 9, Lollard belief in the futility of oral confession depends, in turn, on the belief that only God can ever truly know the state of a person's soul. Scholastic uncertainty about whether and how one can know when one's own conscience is in error is thus extended to include the consciences of others as well. The efficacy of oral confession is clearly predicated upon both one's ability to recognise one's own sin and the ability of another person (the priest) also to discern it: Lollardy apparently rejects both as illusory, as presuming foolishly on the grace and knowledge of God. And, as we shall see, something similar can be said for membership of the body of the Church as well. We shall look at some more examples from Wyclif, the anti-Lollard Reginald Pecock, and the English sermons, before turning to William Thorpe's Testimony. In the latter, we can already see invocations of the opacity of the inner life (to anyone apart from the individual and God) being integrated into the array of argumentative strategies at the individual's disposal in their attempts to undermine the authority of the medieval Church-into Lollardy's complex rhetoric of dissent.
Within Wyclif's own writings, "traditional and innovative views of conscience co-mingle", but there is nevertheless a clear emphasis on conscience as a resource for excommunicants (Strohm, 2012: 4). William of Ockham, an important influence for Wyclif, had considered the uses of conscience in a similar light in his Dialogus (1332-1347) (see Shogimen, 2007: 122, 131ff.). Ockham also believed that to follow an invincibly erroneous conscience was not merely excusable (as Aquinas had believed) but "virtuose et meritorie"-an idea that clearly had the potential to be exploited (1984: 424; see Ghosh, 2022: 284-285;for Aquinas, see D'Arcy, 1961: 33-47). Wyclif rejected "the famous maxim that the judge ought to decide according to the evidence presented and not according to 'conscience' (iudex secundum allegata non secundum conscientiam debet)". Indeed, "[h]is rigorist argument that a judge should rather lay down his office than convict an innocent defendant against conscience became the standard opinion in the English reformed tradition" (Decock, 2013: 80, 83; see also Whitman, 2008: 168). And, in another of his Sermones (Vol. 3, Sermon 49), Wyclif even concludes that "the final forum of merit 'rests in my own conscience' ('in consciencia mea propria stabilitatur')" (qtd. in Strohm, 2011: 16). For Wyclif, therefore, conscience may lack conceptual stability, but-in what perhaps represents a radicalisation of Ockham-it is nevertheless a source of enormous moral-epistemological and even legal authority. Indeed, albeit in a slightly different sense, Wyclif also refers repeatedly to "the law of conscience"-apparently identical to "the law of love", "the evangelical law"-in his works on dominion (Boreckzy, 2008: 17). Paraphrasing part of Wyclif's abstruse argument in De mandatis divinis, Elémer Boreckzy writes: "The law of conscience implies that no human law can be appropriated; law is common and applies to everyone"; "the law of conscience, the law of love, should govern the soul of the republic, too" (2008: 145, 166). While more work (currently being undertaken by Kantik Ghosh) is clearly needed to untangle and explicate such "co-mingl[ing]" views of conscience-not only "traditional and innovative" but individual and communal (Strohm, 2012: 4)-Wyclif's emphasis, in places, on "consciencia mea propria" certainly provides an important antecedent for the declarations of Jan Hus (for whom Wyclif was the fundamental influence) at the Council of Constance in 1415 and Martin Luther (who wrote, in February 1520, "[W]e are all Hussites and did not know it" [1963: 153]) at the Diet of Worms in 1521. Neither would submit to the authority of the Church, because to do so would be to act contra conscientiam, and to act against one's own conscience is, they believed, always wrong (see Baylor, 1977;Provvidente, 2015, esp. 282ff.). The former was to be executed, but the latter escaped with his life; he was, of course, to become leader of the German Reformation. Similarly, Henry VIII of England invoked his conscience repeatedly as the ultimate source of authority when first questioning the legitimacy of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon in the late 1520s: this turned out to be an inciting incident in the English Reformation, too (Klinck, 2010: 11).
Wycliffism's apparent inheritance of this rhetorical emphasis on the authority of the individual conscience clearly worried the movement's orthodox opponents. Reginald Pecock was certainly not alone among anti-Lollards in identifying it as a problem, as we shall see in the presentation of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Arundel, in Thorpe's Testimony. In Pecock's much later Book of Faith (1456), he treats individual conscience as itself worthy of suspicion and warns against making "thou thi silf iuge in thin owne cause" (1909: 190, 196). At the opening of Chapter 10, Pecock does repeat Aquinas's belief that one is "bound forto folowe" an erroneous conscience and quotes Romans 14 in support (222). He almost immediately contradicts himself, however, writing, "thou art bounde forto obeie and folowe thilke conscience of the clergie", even if that conscience is erroneous (223). For all his emphasis throughout his works on "the dome of resoun", on providing rational justifications for orthodox religion (see Lahey, 2005), there comes a point at which Pecock directs his readers to stop seeking answers and to submit their consciences to "thilke conscience of the clergie"-whatever that might mean. This strange reference to the "conscience", singular, "of the clergie", a group, clearly departs from even Pecock's own previous use of the term, let alone scholastic conceptions; although it does, perhaps, recall the importance of communal accountability in earlier, classical ideas of conscience (see Ghosh, 2022: 287-294). The lack of clarity about the nature of conscience in Pecock thus resembles the inconsistency of its treatment by his Lollard opponents. In vernacular contexts, on both sides of the Wycliffite controversy, "conscience" seems to lack the conceptual precision it often has (as "conscientia") in the Latinate academic discourses from which it has been imported (see Eaton, 2004).
Sermon 120 in the long English cycle takes as its lectio Mark 18:1-10, the passage in which Christ tells the disciples they shall not enter heaven unless they "ben made as luytule children" (Vol. 2, 1988: 311;italics original). After a short explication of the text, the sermon writer interpolates an apparently unrelated attack on the "newe ordris" of friars, asserting that it is in men's "conscience" that reservations about them arise (Vol. 2, 1988: 311-312). Unless explicit scriptural precedent for the orders can be shown, men reserve the right to doubt their necessity in their consciences: And so alle þes nouelryes þat be not growndude in Cristus lawe men supposon as heresyes, til þat þei ben tauȝte þe contrarye; as dymys [tithes] and offryngus, and defendyng of þis persone þat doþ aȝenys Godis lawe, semon by lawe of conscience to be aȝenys Godus wille. And so schulden men leeue [reject] hem. (Vol. 2, 1988: 312) Like Pecock's treatment of the "conscience of the clergie", the sermon writer refers here to the "lawe of conscience" as though it has a universal, readily intelligible, positive content. However, it is nevertheless characterised as essentially negative in operation: it is the source of the scepticism that leads to the rejection of the mendicant orders, tithes, and other financial donations to the Church (see Ghosh, 2019: 431-432). Here, as in places in Wyclif, conscience is invoked in an attempt to transfer authority from the Church to the individual subject, using the supposed clarity of scripture as an extra-subjective, communal ground (although even this, at least for Wyclif, has a much higher existence than the text we see [1905: 107-109]).
In Sermon 158, explicating the Parable of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15:11-32), the sermon writer identifies the "[d]raf", the food given to the pigs, as "sciense of godis [goods], as worldly lawe and þe popis law". While "alle þes lawis seken good", none of them do so in the same way as "Goddis [God's] law" (Vol. 3, 1990: 103). " [M]an is turnyd in hymsilf whanne his consciense bitiþ hym; þat mannus soule fariþ myche betere þat serueþ God by his lawys" (Vol. 3, 1990: 104): secular and canon law, (overly) concerned with knowledge of material things ("sciense of godis"), distract the people from serving God's law and thus threaten the health of "mannus soule". In so doing, they cause man's conscience to "bite" him and make him "turn in hymsilf". "Turn" here seems to imply a conflict between different mental impulses (see Middle English Dictionary, 2018, "turnen", v., senses 5 and 16). Implicitly, therefore, such legal systems ought to be resisted on the basis of conscience and the corresponding health of the soul, at least until they can be brought into line with the teaching of scripture. This seems to engage Wyclif's dual interest in both the individual conscience and the universal "law of conscience"-which should underpin the common law-by endorsing (individualised) civil disobedience (see Boreckzy, 2008: 145, 166); although it thus seems clear that, in a departure from their intellectual master, the Lollards are, in general, more interested in the former than the latter. An almost identical argument is made more explicitly in the tract "Of Mynistris in þe Chirche", appended to the long English sermon cycle, in which the tract's single use of "conscience" also appears: "among oþre deedis þat þe popis lawe doþ to men, it makuþ hem perplex, and bynduþ here conscience wiþ feynede bondis" (Vol. 2, 1988: 364). Canon law leads men into a state of perplexity, binding their consciences with extraneous demands (see Ghosh, 2019: 434; for conscience and perplexity, see Grosse, 1994: 13;Corran, 2018: 53-54). The negative potential of conscience-the ability to generate scepticism about external practices from within a faculty hidden inside the individual-is here directed against "þe popis lawe", but could just as easily be directed against almost any social or religious practice, potentially inspiring more active forms of resistance against them. For the Wycliffites, this is, at least nominally, limited to practices without (in their opinion) any biblical basis. Nevertheless, Pecock's later fears about the use of conscience in this wayand the establishment's more general fears of political revolution-were thus clearly by no means unfounded.
Indeed, as the Marxist historian Rodney Hilton notes: "Although the Lollards were usually quietist rather than politically militant, the ruling class, as [has] been well shown by Margaret Aston, identified Lollardy with sedition because of their memories of [the Peasants' Revolt of] 1381" (1985: 164). This happened, Aston argues, despite the apparent lack of any connection between the leaders of the revolt and the emerging Lollard movement, and Wyclif's own vehement condemnation of the rebels' actions. In the historical conjunction of the Peasants' Revolt and the comparatively late appearance of England's first heretical movement-surely not entirely a coincidence-it was "nothing if not easy" to see in the demands of Wyclif and his followers "a programme of devastating [political] revolution", even where there was, perhaps, only a polemical call for religious reform (Aston, 1960: 2, 3). However (as Aston also shows), just over thirty years later, after John Oldcastle's failed rebellion of 1414-and thus for later writers such as Pecock-the question of Lollard insurrection had become far from merely theoretical.
Lollardy's relationship to class struggle and the decline of feudalism in late-medieval England has, however, largely been overlooked in scholarship and is, in any case, difficult to articulate. This is, in large part, due to the ever-problematic relation for Marxist historiography of the medieval Church to the idea of a "ruling class"an issue which largely disappears, of course, after the end of feudalism, the corresponding decline of the Church, and the emergence (and ascendance) of a middle class. The often highly antagonistic relationship between the medieval Church and the nobility or monarchy, as well as the often violent conflicts within and between the nobility and monarchy themselves, resist any straightforward identification of the interests of any of these groups with those of any of the others, and thus the identification of a single "ruling class" (cf., e.g., Anderson, 1974: 151-153). Lollardy's specific relationship to class struggle is further complicated by the movement's academic origins: only in its second phase-around the time of the composition of the long English sermon cycle, in the years after the Peasants' Revolt and Wyclif's death in 1384-did it move beyond the university to become a predominantly "lower-class" movement. Even then, the evidence suggests that Lollard social groups consisted "far more of lower middle and artisan classes than economically marginal laborers" (Copeland, 1996: 212;see Hudson, 1988a, esp. 128-134). Although, in medieval England, the universities (Oxford and Cambridge) did have their own, small measure of political autonomy and often facilitated a degree of social mobility. Moreover, the most prominent example of Wycliffite insurgence-Sir John Oldcastle's rebellion-was led by a small minority of English nobles, not an organised class of Lollard peasants: it was, in many ways, just another example of conflict among the dominant political entities of medieval England. However, no matter how difficult its articulation, Lollardy clearly retains a very significant relationship to sedition that resembles the nevertheless inadequate orthodox paradigm of class struggle, and which cannot simply be set to one side if we are to appreciate the full socio-political implications of the movement's beliefs and the institutional responses to them. There is evidently an intimate connection between the intellectual and the practical in heretical movements, as well as a (related) inseparability of the religious from the socio-political in medieval Europe. Therefore, Lollardy's distinctive rhetorical use of ideas of conscience and interiority-provoking not only dissenting opinion but, as we shall see adumbrated in William Thorpe, also corresponding forms of action-must be integral to any future account of the movement's historical relationship to class struggle or sedition more generally conceived.
This brief sketch of Wycliffism's volatile concatenation of the intellectual and the practical helps to clarify what might be at stake politically in even the most theoretical aspects of Lollard depictions of conscience. To return to the implicit agenda of the English Wycliffite sermons: another practice particularly open to criticism by the negativity of conscience because of its perceived lack of biblical foundation was, of course, oral confession, as suggested in my opening discussion of Sermon 9 (cf. Denery, 2005: 39-74). As Katherine C. Little observes, "[t]he Wycliffite sermons use the word confession to mean confession either as public proclamation or as private speech with God. Confession to a priest is redefined as a kind of whispered conversation, 'rownyng'" (2006: 59). An important example of this redefinition comes in Sermon 63, which takes as its lectio Matthew 10:26-32, a "gospel" which "counforteþ martiris". Close to the beginning of the sermon, the writer describes "þe day of doom, whan bookis schal be opone, þe whiche bokis ben mennys sowlys, and conscience of hem" (Vol. 2, 1988: 43). Later, the author writes, glossing verse 32, "þat confession þat Crist [n]a[m]eþ here, is not rownyng in prestis heere, to tellon hym synne þat wee han doon, but it is grawntyng of trewþe, þe whiche is apertly seyd, wiþ redynesse to suffre þerfore, whateuere man denieþ it" (Vol. 2, 1988: 45). The implicit opposition here between "rownyng" and "grawntyng of trewþe", indicating a preference for martyrdom over oral confession (with the suggestion that the latter may be, in some way, untruthful), has clear eschatological significance within the sermon as a whole: when the Book of Life is read, "þanne schal boþe good and yuel knowe mennys werkys and þer þowtys" (Vol. 2, 1988: 43; italics mine). (Note the depiction here of "conscience" finally becoming a legible document [see Baker, 2021, esp. 638-641].) It is only at the end of time that homo interior shall become accessible to other people: "rownyng in prestis heere", therefore, is pointless and, possibly, sinful. "The practice of confession denied the penitent any privileged epistemological and private access to himself", notes Dallas Denery (2005: 69-70); the Wycliffites reject it precisely for this reason. The implicit argument about confession from Sermon 9 is thus made more explicitly in Sermon 63. Similar apocalyptic visions appear in Sermons 85-"And þanne þer conscience schal be opon of alle þe lyues þat þey han led" (Vol. 2, 1988: 176)-and E3-"Bokis schullen be openede þanne, and men schullen knowe þer owne dedis, boþe goode men and yuele" (Vol. 1, 1983: 488). This is the most consistent strand in the extremely varied characterisation of conscience across the English sermons.
Helpful in our attempts to elucidate such variety is the distinction Eric D'Arcy draws between the "judicial" and "legislative" consciences. 6 The classical "judicial conscience", as a function of the memory, represents a transcript of one's past deeds, which, if found to be immoral, moves one to remorse. "Legislative conscience", on the other hand-seemingly, as D'Arcy argues, an innovation of St. Paul's-actively guides one's present and future actions, albeit also informed by one's past experiences. The remit of legislative conscience thus includes that of judicial conscience (D'Arcy, 1961: 5-12). While this distinction is clearly generalising and thus threatens imprecision, in almost all its descriptions in the English Wycliffite sermons, conscience is nevertheless recognisably "judicial"-and noticeably non-legislative-in nature. Even conscience as presented in the English text of Sermon 9 is surprisingly limited to retrospection: God only speaks to the individual via their conscience "whanne þei don amys" (Vol. 1, 1983: 258; italics mine). The leading schoolmen, however, were unanimous in characterising conscience as definitively legislative, so we can, at this point, conclude that the sermons do not merely set aside scholastic conceptions of conscience but (consciously or otherwise) disregard them (cf., e.g., Potts, 1980). What emerges from our survey of descriptions of conscience in the sermons, however, is not only their tendency to locate conscience in or at the end of time, but also their corresponding tendency thereby to suggest its illegibility in this world to anyone apart from the individual and God. The ordinary gloss for St. Paul's phrase "illis conscientia [their conscience]" in Romans 2:15 reads "etsi aliis non videatur [even if it is not seen by others]" (Biblia Latina, 2009;Glossa Ordinaria on Romans, 2011: 41): one of the defining features of conscience, like the soul itself, was precisely its invisibility to others. Its corresponding removal from the normative spheres of community and law would, of course, take centre stage from the sixteenth century, but is already manifest in the rhetoric of Wycliffite texts. While the scholastic genealogy of Luther's understanding of conscience has already been charted in great detail (Baylor, 1977), and Lollardy's anticipation of the English Reformation has very frequently (and perhaps too strongly) been insisted upon (in modern scholarship, ever since Gairdner, 1908;cf. Foxe, 2011), this observation clearly calls for another significant revision to our understanding of the intellectual ferment of the Reformation, especially in England, and its relation to forms of direct action. Communal accountability in matters of conscience-which had been a crucial dimension of classical uses of the term (see, e.g., Strohm, 2011: 6), and which Pecock seems to allude to in his phrase, the "conscience of the clergie" (1909: 223)-the English Wycliffite sermon writers already suggest, at the end of the fourteenth century, is impossible on earth and will, in any case, be rendered wholly unnecessary by God's judgment in the eschaton. While such a negative emphasis certainly does not result in any kind of conceptual clarity, I argue that it nevertheless derives from the dependence of a number of crucial Lollard doctrinal beliefs-particularly those relating to oral confession and membership of the Church-on the same opacity of homo interior. This is exemplified in William Thorpe's Testimony (1407), "one of the clearest and most comprehensive expositions of [L]ollard belief" (Somerset, 2016: 88).
The Testimony depicts the interrogation of its author on suspicion of heresy. As Ian Forrest has shown, in the late-medieval period, "heresy was counted as an occult or hidden crime", due to its dependence on belief, thus presenting "considerable epistemological and evidential problems" for those trying to discern it (2005: 1). Not only were judges asked to put aside their own consciences, the Church, in principle, did not claim to judge the inner life of heresy suspects either: "ecclesia de occultis non iudicat [the Church does not judge what is secret]" was a common adage in canon law (see Kuttner, 1936;cf. Levy, 2016;translation mine). However, as Peter Godman (2009) argues, drawing on a description of the paradoxical possibility of feigned penance from St. Bernard of Clairvaux's twelfth-century De gradibus humilitatis et superbiae, there also seems to have been a growing anxiety during the Middle Ages that the words and actions of a penitent or heresy suspect might not, in fact, be accurate manifestations of their deeply held motivations and beliefs: they might have the capacity to lie, or at least to conceal the truth (cf. Denery, 2005: 67). The opacity of homo interior was thus also a point of anxiety in medieval antiheresy proceedings. Indeed, it is important to note that, contrary to popular assumption, heresy did not, in fact, consist in holding a supposedly erroneous belief or set of beliefs, but rather in refusing to renounce any such beliefs when subject to the correction of the Church. It thus had little external reality at all (although it may have had a number of unreliable outer signa), being made truly visible only in a single moment within a judicial trial, in which the heretic revealed their unwillingness to recant (Forrest, 2005: 15).
Thorpe claims to provide a faithful reproduction-"as nyȝ þe sentence and þe wordis as I can" (1993: ll. 36-37)-of his (very real) questioning by the Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Arundel on 7th August 1407 (see Jurkowski, 2002). Christopher G. Bradley, in his article "Trials of Conscience and the Story of Conscience" (2012), rightly emphasises the public nature of the Testimony, the text's appeal to as wide an audience as possible, in part through such assertions of its own veracity. However, he nevertheless almost completely ignores the text's actual uses of the word "conscience", conflating the public staging of the text with a similarly externalised conception of conscience, which is not actually to be found anywhere in the text. The closest "conscience" comes to being characterised in this way is when Thorpe claims, in the "Prolog", that his conscience played an important role in his decision to write: "in my conscience I was moued to bisie me hereaboute" (ll. 39-40). (In the Testimony, we thus see a fully legislative, rather than a merely judicial conception of conscience.) It is upon this narrative impulse that much recent criticism of the Testimony has focused (e.g., Bradley, 2012;Schirmer, 2009). However, even here it is "in" Thorpe's conscience that he "was moued" to act; conscience was not somehow "externalised" in the process. Thorpe's use of the passive also fails to reflect what Bradley describes as "Thorpe's transparent world", concealing just as much as it reveals (2012: 39): the suggestion in the context is that it is the counsel of Thorpe's supporters that has moved him, but the phrasing completely obscures the actual processes through which it has done so. Recalling Sermon 9, we might even wonder whether it is again God who is supposed to do the "meuyng" ("mocio") here (English Wycliffite Sermons, Vol. 1, 1983: 257;Wyclif, 1887: 272). The schoolmen tended to regard conscience as a practical syllogism, the synthesis of a major premise (a general moral principle supplied by synderesis) and a minor premise (supplied by the specific context), leading, in turn, to action (see, e.g., Potts, 1980). Here, however, Thorpe invokes such interior processes without giving any equivalent description of how they actually operate. Recurrent throughout the Testimony, as we shall see, is a rhetorical emphasis on the inaccessibility of homo interior to others (except, of course, to God) outside of the individual's mediation of it: as Thorpe says at one point to Arundel, "a mannys soule […] may not now here be seen" (l. 1790). It is precisely its invisibility that gives the inner life its authority, but this is also what makes it so hard to describe. Bradley's characterisation of the Testimony as essentially external in character, in direct contrast to the inwardness of Richard Wyche's Letter (the only other surviving first-person account of a Lollard's investigation for heresy), creates an oversimple dichotomy that clearly becomes untenable when we consider the actual uses of the vocabulary of interiority in Thorpe's text. His inner life may well be invisible, but, in Mishtooni Bose's phrase, "Thorpe's conscience and testimony" nevertheless "form the moral and rhetorical centre of the Testimony" (2007: 48).
Thorpe's rhetoric of dissent consistently asserts the epistemic authority of his own subjectivity. Following Rita Copeland, and a number of subsequent critics, we can see this as initiating an essentially Hegelian struggle for recognition: "As we see in the textual drama of Thorpe's encounter with Arundel, the process of creating a self is one of opposition, positioning others 'in a negative relationship to that self'" (Armstrong & Tennenhouse, 1989: 8;Copeland, 1996: 201). Indeed, for Bose, the fundamental, utopian dynamic of the Testimony is one of negotiation, in which religious authority itself is able to be represented as "transactional and apparently still negotiable"; this is why it "insist[s] on the charisma of texts as events" (2007: 47, 49). In the final section of Thorpe's opening "creed", exploiting the repetition of the first-person pronoun in the Christian creeds themselves, he uses the words "I", "me", and "my" 22 times in just 29 lines (ll. 305-334;see Copeland, 1996: 213). Then, when Arundel asks him to renounce his beliefs and to provide the Church with a list of the names of other Lollards, Thorpe calls upon both his own "conscience" and his own "experience" (a word new to the English language, which, as the Wife of Bath had shown, could also easily be used as a substitute for "auctorite" [see Pearsall, 2016]) in refusing to do so: he says it would result in the spiritual and bodily deaths of a large number of people (ll. 349-380). He cannot find any basis in scripture for the archbishop's request that he become an informant, so he will not do so (ll. 384-388). And, when he finally stops talking and falls silent before Arundel, Thorpe the narrator refers multiple times to "myn herte" as a source of mental fortitude (ll. 410-424). Such descriptions allow Elizabeth Schirmer to write: "Asserting the legibility of the self, [Thorpe's narrative] shifts the purpose of autobiographical narration from self-discovery in the context of oral confession to self-assertion in the face of persecution" (2009: 295). However, while this is, perhaps, a fair assessment, it is ultimately only the performance of selfhood that becomes legible and not (necessarily) the authentic, immanent qualities it is usually assumed to representwhat Thorpe actually refers to at one point as "myn inner man" (l. 421). Thorpe thus imports the Pauline-Augustinian phrase homo interior into the vernacular (cf. Matthews, 1967), demonstrating his narrative's awkward "extraclergial" position as well (Somerset, 1998;cf. Somerset, 1996). Bradley is also right, therefore, to emphasise Thorpe's rhetorical assertion of personal identity, but he again mistakes this externalised identity for Thorpe's inner conscience, which remains, importantly, opaque: Thorpe's self-characterisation issues forth from an otherwise wholly inaccessible interiority. Indeed, when he falls silent, one of the archbishop's clerks demands to know, "What þing musist þou?" (l. 432; for "muse"/"musare", see Ghosh, 2019). There is an obvious anxiety here about the selective legibility of the heretic's inner life: it manifests itself only on its own terms, and those terms can be highly stylised, distortive-if not simply deceptive, contrived in bad faith. Thorpe thus exploits the existing legal protection of individual interiority that we have seen (for formal heresy trials, see Hornbeck, 2016: 159-187).
Over the course of Thorpe's text, the opacity of homo interior emerges as perhaps the crucial theoretical issue at the heart of the Wycliffite controversy. Such opacity is, however, a condition whose existence neither side even seems to question. Indeed, in his response to Thorpe's attempts to use it to arrogate authority to himself-the opposition that allows Thorpe's struggle for recognition to unfold-Arundel, perhaps following legal precedent, does not deny the inaccessibility of homo interior at all. Instead, he emphasises the importance of engaging it in affective religious worship, referring to "deuocioun" repeatedly from the second question onwards (ll. 1050ff., the first instance at l. 1109). At one point, he even exclaims angrily, "What ianglist þou aȝens deuocioun?" (ll. 1344-1345). Kantik Ghosh observes a wider movement within the Church in the early fifteenth century: a "developing emphasis on non-rational modes of spirituality, and the active promotion of affective devotion", with the circulation of works such as Nicholas Love's Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ (2004: 19; see also Bose, 2013;Catto, 1985). Arundel explicitly approved the publication of the Mirror, and he and his circle promoted contemplative literature by other prominent figures such as Richard Rolle and Walter Hilton (Catto, 2007: 85, 87). Particularly when seen against such a background, Thorpe's gestural characterisation seems to suggest that both he and Arundel recognise the impenetrability of the inner life and that this makes it an important potential locus for individual resistance to ecclesiastical authority. Reacting against what he perceives to be Thorpe's abuse of it in this way, however, Arundel insists that homo interior ought to be kept busy in acts of religious devotion. This resembles Pecock's later insistence that believers submit their consciences to that of the clergy: an important aspect of the orthodox response to Lollardy seems to have been an attempt to dictate and delimit the activity of the inner life itself. We can thus begin to understand the conflict between Thorpe and Arundel, and perhaps even the entire Wycliffite controversy, as arising from elements of disagreement, not so much about the nature of individual interiority as the extent of its authority and, specifically, the uses to which it ought to be put.
In the Testimony, the importance of the opacity of the inner life as a foundation for Wycliffite belief is made clearest in the discussion of two issues: oral confession and membership of the Church. Thorpe expresses the typically Wycliffite belief that "it perteyneþ oonly to God to forȝeve synne" and that confession to a priest is, therefore, unnecessary or even sinful (ll. 1885-1886). He also recalls telling one of his fellow prisoners that a person can be saved "wiþouten counseile of ony oþer liif þan of God and hemsilf" (l. 1937). As was implicit in my analyses of Wyclif, Pecock, and the English sermons, God's unmediated access to one's consciousness seems also to ratify one's self-knowledge. If only the individual and God can ever know the state of the individual's soul, and only God, therefore, can forgive their sins, then the whole apparatus of the medieval Church is called into question: individual interiority emerges as a significant moral agent, in competition with, or even superseding, the theological magisterium of the Church. In his opening "creed", however, as Hudson notes, Thorpe also clearly alludes to Wyclif's conception of the Church as the congregatio predestinatorum, the identity of whose members cannot be known, on earth, even by the individuals themselves (ll. 276-299;Hudson, 1988b: 128). Not being able to know, or even reasonably to judge, whether even oneself is to be counted among the elect might, in principle, seem to encourage radical uncertainty, perplexity, or even scrupulosity of conscience (a constant anxiety that one is committing sin without knowing it), resembling the effects associated with canon law in "Of Mynistris in þe Chirche". Thorpe, however, clearly places great confidence in his own interiority anyway, leading him into inconsistencies in his application of this doctrine. Indeed, in his creed, he even says he will submit only to the authority of those he "perceyue[s] to ben þe membris of holi chirche", suggesting that internal qualities may, in fact, be discernible from external signs after all (l. 298; italics mine). Later on, however, he appears to contradict himself, claiming at one point, "I deme mysilf dampnable if I […] bisie me not to preche þe word of God", and, at another, "I wol not dampne ony liif", with the implication again that it is only God who can see (and thus judge) the state of a person's soul (ll. 881-883, 1606). Such inconsistencies are not only a result of Thorpe's ego, his ignorance, or the high stakes of the inquisitorial setting, however, but also of inherent tensions and contradictions in his Wycliffite beliefs and the insufficiency of the vocabulary available to express them. The Testimony is thus of particular interest precisely because of its peculiar and paradoxical, and ultimately unsuccessful, attempts to cultivate a legible vocabulary for the very illegibility of homo interior.
Despite the relative consistency (if extreme technicality) of scholastic debate about the nature of "conscientia", therefore, its lack of conceptual and even linguistic clarity in Wyclif's Latin is clearly amplified when imported by his followers into vernacular, "extraclergial" contexts (Somerset, 1998). Across the English sermons, "conscience" is invoked repeatedly, but only ever in relation to (and in terms of) the individual sermons' particular-and often peculiar-exegetical and polemical aims. Something similar could be said of all the vernacular writing we have seen, as well as the Ancrene Wisse (c.1200), in which the first recorded English use of the word "conscience" appears (Eaton, 2004). However, Lollardy nevertheless clearly places significant rhetorical emphasis on the opacity of homo interior, a condition that was already presupposed in a variety of late-medieval scholastic, legal, and exegetical discourses. A complementary belief in the authority of individual interiority provides the foundation for the movement's rejection of practices such as oral confession, the mendicant orders, and financial donations to the Church. However, the difficulty of negotiating the simultaneous invisibility and (supposed) authority of the inner life also results in contradictions in Wycliffite belief, as we have seen in Thorpe. Nevertheless, it is no surprise that the Church establishment-represented by figures such as Pecock and Arundel-was so concerned about the potential abuse (as it saw it) of interiority in this way. And, as we saw in Sermon 158 and "Of Mynistris in þe Chirche", the negativity of conscience could be directed against secular authority as well: conscience provides an obvious connection between Lollard dissent and action. This is why it must be central to any future account of the movement's connections to class struggle or sedition more generally conceived. In refusing to submit to the authority of the Church on the basis of his conscience, Thorpe resembles Hus, Luther, and other later reformers. The awkward discursive and conceptual position of "conscience", therefore, does not prevent it from possessing considerable rhetorical power in Wycliffite texts, preparing the way for an era in which its authority would be articulated in much clearer terms.