I grew up in Northern Ireland, a land where the scars of the Reformation were still prominently on display. Born on the Protestant “Scots Irish” side of the religious divide, I knew hardly any Catholics, and certainly had no Catholic friends, until in 1966 I became a student at what was, at that time, the only integrated educational institution in the province, the Queen’s University of Belfast. There my fascination with medieval Catholic thought began—fostered by the unique Department of Scholastic Philosophy (which taught Thomism rather than the fashionable existentialism on offer in the Department of Philosophy just up the street). I must be one of the few people on the planet for whom reading Aquinas and Ockham was an act of youthful rebellion.

My own family, thankfully, was full of people who had little fear of the unconventional. Part of their take on their Protestant dissenting tradition was the conviction that one had to make one’s own life, through faith and works. My grandfather was a striking case in point—and a forceful, though hardly straightforward, influence. Following a disillusioning involvement with the private army which Sir Edward Carson illegally recruited to resist Irish Home Rule in 1914, he settled into an existence wherein pugnacious piety easily coexisted with contempt for many actual clergymen of our acquaintance, together with admiration for the life and works of Joe Stalin, “man of steel” (whose atrocities in the name of social revolution were as yet unknown). Another of his heroes was local author Alexander Irvine (1863–1941), now commemorated with a drab little square in the town of Antrim, where the hovel in which he lived as a child is preserved as a tourist attraction—somewhat implausibly, given that Irvine’s gospel of Christian trade-unionism (the care of fellow-workers in this world and in preparation for the next) is hardly popular nowadays. Originally an uneducated working man like my grandfather, Irvine worked as a newsboy, miner, boxer, and soldier before emigrating to the United States, where he studied theology at Yale University, became a friend of Jack London’s, and served as both missionary and union organizer among the poor in New York’s Bowery. Here was socialist nonconformity at its most complex—and its best.

Irvine further embodies the complexities of Northern Ireland inasmuch as he was the product of a mixed marriage between an illiterate Protestant shoemaker and a clever Catholic farm girl. In My Lady of the Chimney Corner (1913) Anna Irvine is presented as a madonna of the hearth who gains wisdom through the suffering brought about by abject poverty. Her simple but sage pronouncements would not look out of place in Piers Plowman.

The present book may be seen as the outcome of an intellectual mixed marriage, what happens when a product of a Protestant dissenting tradition (which proudly traces its origins back to Lollardy) enters into a relationship with the Other of Catholic orthodoxy in its late-medieval manifestation. In particular, it goes back to my original wonderment at the Catholic location of authority in institutional hierarchy rather than individual state of grace, the power and prestige of the office being supposed to transcend the fallibilities of the human being who holds it. Hence, for example, an immoral priest can (in certain circumstances at least) preach and administer the sacraments without detriment to his congregation, his sin being a private matter between him and God. To which the Protestant response would be that immorality deprives the clergyman of his right to officiate in any such way.

A more recent impetus was provided by the extraordinary events in the United States during late 1998 and early 1999, which saw the publication of the Starr Report on President Clinton’s dubious conduct and the subsequent impeachment proceedings against him. Here the relationships between the authoritative office and the fallible office-holder, between the public man and what he tried to withhold as his private life, were raised and debated as never before. Clinton himself deployed the discourse of “public and private” in his television broadcast to the nation on 17 August 1998. Some of the questions put to him by the Office of Independent Counsel and the Grand Jury had, he said, concerned his “private life,” and hence these were “questions no American citizen would ever want to answer.” Having conceded that he “must take complete responsibility for all [his] actions, both public and private,” Clinton went on to emphasize the hurt he had caused “the two people I love most,” his wife and daughter. “I intend to reclaim my family life for my family. It’s nobody’s business but ours. Even presidents have private lives.”¹ Gabriel García Márquez wrote a powerful defense of this position, declaring that “At the end of the day, his personal drama is a private matter between him and his wife. . . . It is one thing to lie to deceive, it is something quite different to protect one’s private life.”²

To judge by the opinion polls, a majority of Americans thought so too. And yet, the next president they (marginally) elected, George W. Bush, could hardly be more different in self-image. In Bush country, the private is the political and vice-versa; the same faith that sustains the president’s soul is offered to voters as ensuring their nation’s salvation (in moral, monetary and military terms). During the 2004 presidential election those who took up that offer professed themselves drawn to Bush by his “morals and his character”; the interrelated values of “faith, family, integrity and trust” which the Bush campaign consistently projected proved unbeatable.³

As I write, Bush is halfway through his second term and the jury is, so to speak, still out on the success or failure of his presidency. However, at the beginning of a book which will spend so much time with Chaucer’s Pardoner’s Tale, it seems appropriate to recall how Senator Robert Byrd used this very text as he urged the U.S. Senate to handle the Clinton impeachment investigation in a reasonable and consensual manner. He reminded his colleagues of how, in that tale, three men find a pot of gold only to kill one another to get it all.⁴ Leaving aside the obvious quibble over whether a “pot of gold” was an appropriate metaphor to apply to Starr’s findings, one might suggest that the senators could have noted another major aspect of Chaucer’s text: its claim that an immoral man can tell a moral tale. Or, as in the case of the morally flawed but highly professional Bill Clinton, preside over a successful economy and pursue policies at home and abroad which history may appraise with respect and sympathy, particularly when viewed in relation to those of a successor whose supposedly sound “morals and character” were made the basis of his fitness to lead. To quote a bumper sticker I see frequently in New Haven, “nobody died when Clinton lied.”

Continuing this move from presidents to poets, the truism inevitably follows that many of the most creative of people have sometimes acted in the worst of ways. The list is a long one, and multiplication of cases would be tedious: suffice it to mention the appeal which Nazism held for many artists and intellectuals of the mid-twentieth century, most obviously Ezra Pound; the anti-Semitism and/or racism of T. S. Eliot, George Orwell, and Graham Greene; and the appalling ways in which the likes of Thomas Hardy, Bertrand Russell, Pablo Picasso,

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