INTRODUCTION

The heretical classroom envisions the leveling of traditional magisterial hierarchies. How, accordingly, does the dissenting community reimagine the work and reconfigure the social relations of intellectuals? R. I. Moore notes that heresy differed from other objects of persecution in the Middle Ages “in being identifiable with personal leaders and possessing its own structures of personal authority.” Intellectuals assume the roles of teachers, advocates, and representatives, and also of mobilizers and witnesses. They embody a political position which they articulate to and on behalf of a certain public, a community that can define itself through its public advocates and expositors. The intellectual leaders of medieval heretical groups are the most visible participants of their resistance movements. And it is with that particular visibility that they must occupy the already problematic space that official legal structures make for self-representation among dissidents.

One of those spaces – in no way an abstract one – from which dissenting intellectuals speak is prison. Two Lollard writers come forward to us through “personal” narratives of interrogation under imprisonment: the Lollard priests Richard Wyche and William Thorpe. While these heretical intellectuals are hardly unique for having suffered imprisonment, or for having produced important writings while under some kind of detention, the con-figurations of history and narrative form that condition the accounts of Wyche and Thorpe give us texts that cannot fit general categories.