Ockham is often described as the origin of the via moderna, “a current way” in competition with the via antiqua, “an old way.” These terms are often used to structure late medieval intellectual history around a new “nominalism” and a reactionary “realism.” But they are misleading. The “conflict of the ways” (Wegestreit in German historiography) only took definite shape two generations after Ockham’s death. It was prompted not by “nominalism” but by an aggressive, “hyper-realism” taught by John Wyclif. Another related but separate and equally important tension was also at play, between the analytical pedagogy encouraged by a prevalent terminism and a more expository commentary style. This changes the way we must see the force of the “conflict of the ways” in intellectual life. It becomes an illustration of a central quality in all knowledge production: the ludic culture of the schools. Luther, rather than being a nominalist, provides eloquent testimony to scholastic playfulness, an essential quality of a long, hybrid Reformation.

Chapter 3 explains the methods of scribes for ruling manuscripts of English literature in the fifteenth century, from a variety of works but especially those of Thomas Hoccleve. It notes that scribes imposed geometric designs onto materials hylomorphically. It then contrasts their failures to achieve regular design. It suggests that ruling patterns seldom had a practical function to articulate the text by means of page design, but that ruling was sometimes a craft process pursued almost habitually by scribes, and at other times was an inherited convention with a force of its own. It concludes that ruling on the material pages was less important to scribes than the immaterial ideas that governed page design. Ruling was ultimately jettisoned.

This chapter focuses on unedited and largely unstudied Middle English commentaries on Matthew. In all of these texts, vernacular exegetes turned to Matthew primarily for the book’s moral teaching, and, in line with the arguments advanced in Chapter 1, they favored moralizing glosses without concern for how these interpretations fit into the different senses of Scripture. This chapter begins with consideration of a vernacular commentary likely produced in Durham Priory in the second half of the fourteenth century, almost certainly inspired by the precedent of Rolle. It then takes up the most ambitious work (or collection of works) of English vernacular exegesis, the Wycliffite Glossed Gospels, tracing their compilers’ changing ways of handling the various components of the vernacular exegetical form – close translation, gloss, and citation. The long and short recensions of their commentary on Matthew are compared at length, and the chapter concludes with a new discussion of Wycliffite interpretive theory in light of these unfortunately neglected texts.