On the eve of the Protestant Reformation, in the courtyard of St. Paul’s Cathedral and in front of some 20,000 spectators, Reginald Pecock, Bishop of Chichester, burned his life’s work while confessing to their “parlous and pernicious” content. He does so after weeks of examination by the highest-ranking members of the English church. This lecture will cover the events that led to the dramatic and scandalous downfall of a bishop now commemorated in a window in the north chapels of the Cathedral. It will also attempt to answer the question: Was Pecock actually a heretic advocating theological opinions contrary to the Christian faith or was he simply ahead of his time, a victim of an intolerant period in Church history?
J. A. T. Smith (PhD, UCLA) is an Associate Professor of English, Coordinator and founder of the Digital Humanities Minor, and the Associate Director of the Center for Faith and Learning at Pepperdine University. In her time there, she has received an award for excellence in teaching as well as a major grant to develop a Christian pedagogical app called The Vineyard. Her primary scholarly research focuses on the language and theology of late medieval English bishop, Reginald Pecock. She has published a translation of his last polemical volume, The Book of Faith (UCLA-CMRS, 2020), and is currently working on a major project which seeks to sequence and situate the entirety of his corpus.