Dr Kantik Ghosh: List of publications

<strong>Summary</strong> <p>Thus muses Bishop Reginald Pecock on the famously troubling episode of doubting Thomas (John 20:24-29). The passage forms part of an extended and detailed engagement with the epistemology of religious belief in Pecock's Book of Faith. Written in the form of a dialogue between a learned and rigorously patient ‘Father’ and an intellectually demanding ‘Son’, the work is evidently intended by Pecock as a piece of pedagogic elucidation of the fundamentals of ‘faith’. However, as is characteristic of his work – and that of the Wycliffite milieu which he occasionally appears to have in his sights – elementary instruction is inseparable here from startlingly ambitious explorations in the vernacular arising out of scholastic moral philosophy of daunting complexity and sophistication from the fourteenth-century Schools, in particular Oxford. Especially to be noted is the role played by the thought of the Dominican philosopher Robert Holcot. Whilst Pecock draws diffusely on some of the major scholastic thinkers of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, he normally does so without providing references or precise details; the few which are provided tend to be critical. In contrast, the ‘doctour called Holcot’ is referred to approvingly as an auctor in the context of a notably subtle and challenging discussion of intention, merit, and ecclesiology. Pecock's (single) citation of Holcot by name is unspecific and does not provide chapter and verse.</p>

The Latin sermons of John Wyclif (d.1384), as also the long English cycle of 294 sermons by his followers drawing on his Latin work, show a pervasive, and surprising, use of the labile and contentious medieval discourses related to probable reasoning. This article attempts to examine the implications of such usage in the context of biblical exegesis, polemics and homiletic exhortation. The Wycliffites, like their master, posited as foundational that access to the divine mind via the Bible, independent of the corruptions and concupiscence of a schismatic Church and a vainglorious theological magisterium, was possible and indeed necessary. However, the evidence of these sermons points in a very different direction, and suggests that a deep hermeneutic and epistemological uncertainty, bordering on what is at times a barely averted scepticism, underlay their valiant efforts to apply God’s word to human affairs.

The volume significantly redefines our understanding of texts, history, and controversies from Wyclif to Bale.