The gnostic paradigm

By the later fourteenth century, Gnosticism and its influences seem to have dispersed almost completely, at least on the surface. Certainly the late-medieval church was vigorous in its efforts to teach orthodoxy to the laity. Yet a sense of simmering continuation, and outright reemergence, has figured in a number of studies of late-medieval literature. Yet to this point, no study has been carried out examining the gnostic undercurrent with specific regard to medieval England. Investigating the existence of gnostic traces in some of the more prominently "Catholic" late medieval English literary works will lead to a reevaluation of late medieval English literature on the one hand but will also show the way in which these texts foreground elements of gnosticism that may have not been obvious up to this point. This study, therefore, seeks to shed light on a gnostic dimension that was there all along, but not recognized or, therefore, fully appreciated — -