Feeling Like Saints: Lollard Identity and Identification

FAIN: FT-59162-11

Fiona Somerset
Duke University (Durham, NC 27705-4677)

I will travel to visit archives in the United Kingdom and Ireland in order to examine closely the original copies of a large number of medieval manuscripts associated with the lollard or Wycliffite heresy. This research will enable me to finish my monograph Feeling Like Saints, to be submitted for publication at the end of summer 2011. The book makes use of many unpublished sources, and most of my work on them has been accomplished using microfilms. Examining the originals will allow me to see exactly how the contents of the manuscripts have been altered by their producers, readers, and later censors--the contents of handwritten books are far more variable than those of printed books, and require this sort of close scrutiny. By this means my book will be able to convey the fullest possible insight into the complex interpenetration between lollard and mainstream ideas in the lollard archive, and the negotiations of religious identity its writers, book producers, and readers engaged in.