The Lollards

Abstract

The Lollards offers a brief but insightful guide to the entire history of England's only native medieval heretical movement. Beginning with its fourteenth century origins in the theology of the Oxford professor, John Wyclif, Richard Rex examines the spread of Lollardy across much of England until its eventual dissolution amidst the ecclesiastical and doctrinal upheavals of the sixteenth century. Taking account of recent scholarship, Rex reassesses Wyclif's political career and provides a compact survey of his theology which corrects a number of current misapprehensions about it and identifies those features which help explain the hostility it aroused. Whilst endorsing the traditinal view that Lollardy was indeed the lay face of Wycliffism, the author nevertheless challenges a number of cherished myths about England's late medieval heretics. Rex controversially argues that Wyclif and the Lollards were far less important than historians and literary scholars have often claimed, and takes issue with recent attempts to restore Lollardy to its once conventional position as a 'cause' of the Reformation. Powerful and persuasive, The Lollards is essential reading for anyone interested in the movement's relationship to Wyclif's teachings, its social and geographical distribution, its political significance, and its impact on the English Reformation.

Lollards and Protestants Revisited

“…47 Rex pursued the case further in a small volume of 2002, devoted exclusively to the phenomenon of Lollardy and to demonstrating its lack of real historical importance. 48 A couple of observations suggest themselves here. One is the extent to which modern revisionist scholarship reiterates some of the themes and approaches of earlier Catholic and Anglo-Catholic thinking on Lollardy and the Reformation.…”

“…To take but one example, a point often stressed by revisionists is that interest in, or possession of, a vernacular Bible before the Reformation cannot in itself be regarded as a sign of heterodoxy. 49 This was something that Gasquet, Gairdner, and Maynard Smith had all insisted upon, the last observing that, once shorn of its glosses and prologues, the Wycliffite Bible was 'only a too literal translation of the Vulgate', which the most orthodox people might possess, 'never dreaming that it was the book that had been condemned' by Arundel. 50 A second observation concerns perspective and affiliation.…”

(Re)defining the English Reformation

“…In a heroic act of self-abnegation, Richard Rex devoted a 2002 book on the subject to demonstrating that Lollardy was almost entirely insignificant. 74 MacCulloch, by contrast, remains convinced that Lollard concerns-biblical legalism, intense hostility to religious imagery, skepticism about the real presence in the eucharist-imprinted themselves onto the central theological agendas of the Henrician and Edwardian Reformations, but he has not been able to demonstrate in any detail the processes by which this could have happened. 75 The prevalence of heresy, anticlericalism, and dissent in pre-Reformation society remains a significant question for investigation.…”