Instructing the Ignorant: Clerical Authority, Lay Instruction, and Vernacular Theology in Thirteenth and Fourteenth Century England 11 views

Following the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, a concerted effort to better educate the laity in the faith occasioned the rapid proliferation of texts that are now classified in the broad and capacious “genre” of vernacular theology. In the era’s predominately aural culture, where many if not most learners were functionally illiterate, lay instruction was an incredibly labor-intensive activity, one that the often under-prepared and over-worked clerics were unable to perform adequately. For this reason, preaching and confessional manuals, homily cycles, and even lengthy verse treatises written in Middle English appeared at an unprecedented rate across England in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries for the benefit of both the clergy and their parishioners. A number of these texts called for and encouraged a kind of active participation by the laity in their own religious instruction that ran counter to the original expectations of Church officials. In my dissertation, I track two attitude shifts that may at least partially explain both the unprecedented acceleration of vernacular theology across the fourteenth century and its precipitous decline in the early years of the fifteenth: first, a diminished confidence in the necessity of clerical authority, and second, an increased awareness of the potential for lay-driven instruction. My three chapters cover The Lay Folks' Catechism, The Northern Homily Cycle, and The Prick of Conscience – all remarkably popular texts in their own right, but each with a different explicit relationship to ecclesial authority and with varying hopes (and anxieties) about the theological and social precedents they were setting.

PHD (Doctor of Philosophy)

laity; vernacular theology; religious instruction

English

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2026-07-30