Reading without Books

Abstract

Although only a handful of the books written by Reginald Pecock survive, these extant works—which comprise a schematic program for religious instruction and a riposte to lollardy—mark him simultaneously as a central figure in the reading practices of fifteenth-century London and as marginal to them.¹ A zealot in the cause of orthodoxy, Pecock envisaged a radical program of reform through reading, one that ultimately came to play a role in his own downfall.² Partly through his insistent emphasis on the powers of human reason and logic in questions of faith and ethics, Pecock’s works laid him open to the charge of heresy, and in 1457 the books he authored were burned in front of St Paul’s Cross.³ The reform through reading that Pecock envisaged is predicated on an inner book, the “book of reason,” which God has inscribed in man’s soul and which, when the intellect is trained to read it, allows man to discover truth.⁴ Reform would therefore be achieved through training readers’ intellects, in Kirsty Campbell’s (2010: 152) words, to think “along the lines of logical discourse.” In this regard, syllogistic reasoning—a key tool of logic—is central to Pecock’s method;⁵ so too, as Ian Johnson has recently argued, are the related practices of ordinatio (“a setting in order”; Lewis & short, s. v. ordinatio).⁶