Books Under Suspicion ─ Censorship and Tolerance of Revelatory Writing in Late Medieval England

"Now and again a study appears that in its particular combination of authorial talents, new materials, and fresh approach dramatically moves our shared scholarly enterprise forward. Kathryn Kerby-Fulton's Books Under Suspicion is precisely such an achievement. Kerby-Fulton is at once a careful and sensitive literary reader, a learned and rigorous intellectual historian, and an able writer of crisp English prose. The subject of Books Under Suspicion is the anxious world of late medieval English readers and writers. Censorship arises only when people believe that books matter. Kerby-Fulton shows us with admirable learning just how passionately the arbiters of religious orthodoxy and social order thought they mattered in late medieval England. The book is, among other things, an important new chapter in the history of ideas and the passionate contest for their control." —John V. Fleming, Princeton University

Books under Suspicion: Censorship and Tolerance of Revelatory Writing in Late Medieval England examines the censorship issues that propelled the major writers of the period toward their massive use of visionary genres. Kathryn Kerby-Fulton suggests that writers and translators as different as Chaucer, Langland, Julian of Norwich, “M.N.,” and Margery Kempe positioned their work to take advantage of the tacit toleration that both religious and secular authorities extended to revelatory theology. The book examines controversial ideas as diverse as the early experimental humanism of Chaucer, censured beatific vision theology and the breakdown of Langland's A Text, the English reception of M.N.'s translation of Marguerite Porete's condemned book, Julian's authorial suppression of her gender, and the impact of suspect Continental women's activism on Kempe.