Fraternal Correction: The Ethics of Medieval English Reformist Literature

From the 1190's to 1500, the Western European clergy licensed the laity, as well as itself, to correct the sins of others: to admonish and impose blame on them, sometimes publicly, in order to change their conduct. Like the Sins of the Tongue, the subject of my 1997 Cambridge University Press book, fraternal correction of sin is a vast, important, and embarrassingly unexplored subject. Clerical writing on correction authorizes forthright social protest by insisting that rebuking sinners is an obligation for all Christians, and it specifically encourages laypeople to denounce social evils committed by ecclesiastical and civil authorities. However, these complex texts also sought to protect people's reputations by provoking ethical reflection on what norms should control rebukes: when they should be public, how superiors should be criticized, etc.. My purpose in this project is to determine to what extent the clergy fostered social protest and what ethical considerations it used to regulate it. My method will be, first, to recover the debates over these issues in pastoral treatises on the virtues, confessional materials, sermons, theological treatises, and Biblical commentaries--all texts designed to provide the clergy with material to disseminate to the laity. I also will explore the complex adjudications of these issues in canon law. Finally, I will use both the social imperatives and the ethical nuances of this material to grasp the difficult, little-understood controversies over social criticism in Middle English reformist literature, especially William Langland's Piers Plowman, The Book of Margery Kempe, and Lollard protests.