The Wycliffite Heresy

Abstract

Kantik Ghosh argues that one of the main reasons for Lollardy's sensational resonance for its times, and for its immediate posterity, was its exposure of fundamental problems in late medieval academic engagement with the Bible, its authority and its polemical uses. Examining Latin and English sources, Ghosh shows how the same debates over biblical hermeneutics and associated methodologies were from the 1380s onwards conducted both within and outside the traditional university framework, and how by eliding boundaries between Latinate biblical speculation and vernacular religiosity Lollardy changed the cultural and political positioning of both. Covering a wide range of texts - scholastic and extramural, in Latin and in English, written over half a century from Wyclif to Thomas Netter - Ghosh concludes that by the first decades of the fifteenth century Lollardy had partly won the day. Whatever its fate as a religious movement, it had successfully changed the intellectual landscape of England.

The Litteral Sense of Scripture and the Search for Truth in the Late Middle Ages

“…Yet, whereas FitzRalph was a friend to the papacy and unquestionably orthodox, Wyclif spent the last ten years of his life locked in bitter disputes with the ecclesiastical hierarchy. 33 There is a great deal that can said about Wyclif's larger approach to Scripture, one which would have to take into consideration his realist metaphysics among other things. Although some scholars have argued that Wyclif fits fairly comfortably within the greater medieval exegetical tradition, 32 others have found him to be a capricious and ultimately destructive force.…”