7 - Reginald Pecock’s Reading Heart and the Health of Body and Soul

Summary

During the tumultuous fifteenth century in England, the vernacular English writings of the bishop of Chichester, Reginald Pecock (c. 1395–c. 1461), unnerved some readers, eventually to a lethal degree for the prelate. In a 1457 letter that precipitated legal action, the Viscount Beaumont (1409–60) – one of the strongest supporters of the Lancastrian cause, remaining unusually loyal during the War of the Roses – expressed his concerns to his monarch, King Henry VI (1421–71). Beaumont's worry centres on Pecock because the bishop, ‘thurgh presumpcioun and curiosite demed by hym in his owne wytte’, has threatened the realm's Christian orthodoxy. Beaumont writes that a multiplicity of opinions, including Pecock’s, verges towards heresy:

And yt ys so now .at grete noyse rennyth that .er shuld be diuerse conclusyons labored and subtilly entended to be enprented in mennes hertis, by pryvy, by also vnherd, meenes, to the most pernicyous and next to peruercyoun of our faith.

Beaumont fears that a ‘great noise’, a cacophony of conclusions that he considers deadly and destructive (‘pernicious’, with a sense of disease pervading the word) as well as dangerously inverted and false (‘perversion’, with a sense of reversal), spells danger to Christian orthodoxy. Not only does Beaumont express his anxiety in terms of bodily health and healing: he adds to his expression of anxiety a noisy labour couched in terms of intent (‘entended’), print (‘enprented’), and secrecy (‘pryvy’ and ‘unherd’). Beaumont suggests that the goal of heresy's words – the ground on which the controversy rests, and on which Henry's reputation lies – is the heart. Beaumont portrays the individual subject's heart – the healthy body's centre, home of intent, hidden yet printable, affected by sound as well as silence – as material and secret, a potentially dangerous seat of words heard, read, kept and efficacious. A simplified Middle English translation of a Latin original – for example, the Middle English Doctrine of the Hert, manuscripts of which passed between religious and lay women – could only partially meet such concerns. On the other hand, Beaumont addresses his sovereign king and his royal heart in a different manner. Beaumont implores King Henry to let his heart continue to act differently from the hearts of his subjects.