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Wyclif And Lollardy, Stephen E. Lahey

Department of Classics and Religious Studies: Faculty Publications

John Wyclif’s place in the history of Christian ideas varies according to the historian’s interest. As scholastic theology, Wyclif’s thought appears an heretical epilogue to the glories of the systematic innovations of the thirteenth century. Historians of the Protestantism, on the other hand, characterize him as a pioneer, the “Morning Star of the Reformation,” acknowledging his theology and the Lollard and Hussite movements associated with it as forerunners of sixteenth-century change. It has been difficult to understand Wyclif as a man of his age because the late fourteenth century itself is easily viewed as a period of transition from “Late …