‘Grant me Grace’: Alternative Visions for Vernacular Theology and Lay Devotion in Richard Caister and Nicholas Love

Richard Caister is an important but unstudied example of vernacular theology in England in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. Himself a priest, Caister’s extant work indicates a figure who departed from the conservative instutionalism of Thomas Arundel’s regime on two very important points: the suitability of the vernacular for theological and spiritual discourse and the necessity of auricular confession. The distinctive position Caister takes on these points can be observed best by a comparative analysis to Nicholas Love’s theological work which provided a theological rationale for Arundel’s restrictive legislation, articulating a negative view of the vernacular and of the capacity of the laity which endorsed lay dependence upon their Latinate clergy. This article argues that Caister provides an important alternative vision for vernacular theology and the laity predicated upon a thorough Christocentrism.

The Pre-Reformation Landscape

This chapter surveys the rich and vibrant devotional culture of late medieval England, expressed in liturgy and collective religious practices, and in the development of a wide-ranging lay literature of spiritual and theological ambition, from writers such as Walter Hilton, Nicholas Love to energetic promoters of orthodox theology such as Margaret Beaufort. While acknowledging the emergence of Wycliffism, the heresy associated with Oxford theologian John Wyclif, the chapter argues that Wycliffism and its perceived off-shoot, ‘Lollardy’, should be read as part of a spectrum of reformist thinking that characterized the late medieval Church’s conception of its evangelical mission. The chapter problematizes notions of medieval religious culture as either atrophied or homogeneous, arguing instead that the variety and vitality of medieval English religious culture should complicate any quest for origins in accounts of the English Reformation.

Nicholas Love as an Ecclesiastical Reformer

Nicholas Love was the prior of the Carthusian house of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary at Mount Grace from its incorporation into the Order at the General Chapter of 1410 until shortly before his death, which occurred between 15 March and 28 July, 1423. He is most commonly known to present-day scholarship as the author of The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ and because of the licensing of the Mirror by Archbishop Thomas Arundel in accordance with the stipulations of the Lambeth Constitutions of 1409, as an agent in the archbishop's campaign against the followers of John Wyclif, and against Wycliffite translation of the scriptures into the vernacular. It would be better, however, to see him as an actor in his own right, a promoter, like his continental European Carthusian confrères, of the reform of the western Church in the fifteenth century.