Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

In the ‘prolog’ to The Reule of Crysten Religioun (1443), Reginald Pecock identified his target audience as comprising two ‘soortis of peple’. To the first group belonged those who insisted on reading the Bible in English (‘her modiris langage’), and valued the New Testament over all other books written either in Latin or ‘þe comoun peples langage’. The second group was drawn from a broader constituency: those who read not only the Bible in English, but also other ‘unsauery bokis’ in the vernacular, which they used clandestinely (‘as fer as þei dare for drede of her prelatis’) and which they considered ‘noble and worþi and profitable bookis to alle cristen mennes leernyng and rewling’ (18). Pecock's motives were not solely polemical. He broadened his projected audience to include not only ‘undisposid men’ of the kinds described but also ‘weel disposed cristen men of þe lay partie’ (19), for whose intellectual acumen he had high regard. These people, he argued, required ‘stable doctryne’ in more durable forms than the sermons by which such doctrine was conventionally delivered. In The Repressor of Over Much Blaming of the Clergy (c.1449), he emphasizes that ‘the wickidli enfectid scole of heresie among the lay peple in Ynglond … is not zit conquerid’ because of the inadequate methods employed by a clergy over reliant on preaching as the principal or sole means of religious instruction ... log in or subscribe to read full text