Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- PART I INSTITUTIONS AND CHANGE: 1100–1200
- PART II FORGING A CHRISTIAN WORLD, 1200–1300
- PART III THE ERECTION OF BOUNDARIES
- PART IV SHAPES OF A CHRISTIAN WORLD
- PART V CHRISTIAN LIFE IN MOVEMENT
- PART VI THE CHALLENGES TO A CHRISTIAN SOCIETY
- PART VII REFORM AND RENEWAL
- 26 Empowerment through reading, writing and example: the Devotio moderna
- 27 Demons and the Christian community
- 28 Wycliffism and Lollardy
- 29 Observant reform in religious orders
- 30 Public purity and discipline: states and religious renewal
- 31 The Bible in the fifteenth century
- Select bibliography
- Index
- Map 1 Western Europe c. 1100 – c. 1500
- Map 2 Universities of Europe
- References
28 - Wycliffism and Lollardy
from PART VII - REFORM AND RENEWAL
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2010
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- PART I INSTITUTIONS AND CHANGE: 1100–1200
- PART II FORGING A CHRISTIAN WORLD, 1200–1300
- PART III THE ERECTION OF BOUNDARIES
- PART IV SHAPES OF A CHRISTIAN WORLD
- PART V CHRISTIAN LIFE IN MOVEMENT
- PART VI THE CHALLENGES TO A CHRISTIAN SOCIETY
- PART VII REFORM AND RENEWAL
- 26 Empowerment through reading, writing and example: the Devotio moderna
- 27 Demons and the Christian community
- 28 Wycliffism and Lollardy
- 29 Observant reform in religious orders
- 30 Public purity and discipline: states and religious renewal
- 31 The Bible in the fifteenth century
- Select bibliography
- Index
- Map 1 Western Europe c. 1100 – c. 1500
- Map 2 Universities of Europe
- References
Summary
The title of this chapter raises a question of fundamental relevance to the study of late-medieval ‘heresy’ in England. Commentators - both then and now - would largely be agreed in identifying the philosophical and polemical thought of John Wyclif (d. 1384), and of his immediate academic followers, as integral to the formation of a dissenting mentalité characterised by an informed, and articulate, critical engagement (in English as well as in Latin) with the received meanings and sources of religious authority. There is far less consensus as to the precise relationship of such dissent - deriving an impressive intellectual coherence from the thought of Wyclif, revealing important congruences in its implied conceptualisation of identity, and embodied in an extraordinarily diverse and voluminous textual output - to that far more diffuse, nebulous and elusive domain of what was gradually perceived and defined in terms of official ecclesiastical legislation as well as in those of a burgeoning and multifarious polemic, and lived and practised, as the ‘Lollard heresy’. This chapter will accordingly reopen the question of whether it might be meaningful to use ‘Wycliffism’ and ‘Lollardy’ - at least for purposes of analysis - as designating conceptually distinct phenomena, whatever their actual interrelationship may have been in late-medieval England.
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- The Cambridge History of Christianity , pp. 433 - 445Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2009
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