People began celebrating Wyclif long before they began celebrating centenaries. Though we have failed to make our celebration in the correct calendar year, 1984 did not pass without some appropriate manifestations. They included the suspicions, in some quarters, that it was divine displeasure at the threat of heresy in the present-day Church of England that caused lightning to strike York Minister on 9 July. What then, was to be made of the fact that ten days later large parts of the country were shaken by the most severe earthquake for many years? There could once have been little doubt.

It is usual for historians investigating the impact of the work of great scholars of the past to stress the importance of their years spent at university in influencing the development of their mature opinions. Frequently, however, such historians are not fully aware of conditions prevailing inside universities and so unable to provide a proper assessment of the role of academic factors in moulding the formation of a scholar’s personality and prejudices.

Almost twenty years ago, one of our distinguished scientific colleagues, the late Jacob Bronowski, orchestrated a litany of remarks by other mathematicians and physicists to the effect that no system of theoretical constructs dealing with the universe, or indeed any conceivable set of prescriptive algorithms, could ever define their subject in its totality. In this century we have become uncomfortably aware of the extent to which the act of observation, the fact of our singling out some particular phenomenon for study and interpretation, itself affects the outcome of those observations. Even in striving to objectify ourselves, and in the very process of objectification, we still subjectivize the external world by touching it with the fingers of inquiry.

A deliberate, many-sided literary effort on the part of a group of Wycliffite masters in the decade and a half after Wyclif’s death has been one of the most important discoveries in the field of Wyclif studies in recent years. Whatever the precise role of Wyclif himself in their common enterprise, its coherence and single-minded purpose can be traced confidently in the English translation of the Bible with its glossed gospels, the standard English sermon-cycle and the reference books of authorities for the preacher and polemicist. What is less clear is the role of Wyclif’s Latin works in this Lollard library. That they have on the whole come down to us through the filter of a comprehensive revision is likely enough, though whether this was the work of their author or of subsequent Lollard editors has not been established. In this paper I want to consider the circulation of the Latin writings before they were taken up by the Hussites: were they copied in the same way as other academic texts of the age, or were they transmitted through the specialised publishing-house of the Lollard masters? These categories are not entirely separate, but for immediate purposes perhaps they will do.

Wyclif’s contemporaries saw him as a spider sitting at the centre of a web of intrigue and unrest. Our own contemporary Professor Wilks sees much the same thing: Wyclif headed an organised band of missionaries who aimed to convert England to his beliefs. Others have seen this view as alarmist and fanciful. Réville, working on the Peasants’ Revolt, investigated the contemporary charge that it was orchestrated by Wyclif and his supporters, but found no evidence to sustain the allegation. K. B. McFarlane looked for material about the ‘poor priests’ whom Wyclif is said to have dispatched over the land to carry his message. He found none. Like Réville, he concluded that contemporaries were so frightened by Wycliffite opinions that they tended, in their alarm, to see Lollards everywhere and at the root of every disaster.

The Middle Ages provide us with a number of theoretical statements about the value of books and libraries to learning and society. They range from brief proverbs—’A monastery without books is like a castle without soldiers’—to full-length treatises such as Richard de Bury’s Philobiblon. What we want to examine here is a series of statements regarding the practical value of access to books and libraries that form part of the litany of criticism aimed at the friars at the end of the fourteenth century, and the formal response of the Oxford Franciscans to these.

In this paper I wish to draw attention to a small matter of some interest to students of Wycliffism: some English documents of the 1390S where arguments about suitable methods for ending the Great Western Schism briefly combined with lamentations about the spread of heresy, as if schism, heresy and disorder were necessarily interconnected, so that a false move over one problem (schism) would probably worsen the others.

‘We heard him say in a sermon that there is a universal ass’. With this unfortunate (and inaccurate) translation R. R. Betts introduced the evidence of the otherwise unknown cleric from Ingolstadt Kaspar Weinstein, whose reception of Jerome’s real message was more subtle than he has been given credit for, during the trial of Jerome of Prague at Vienna in September 1410. Like many other members of the German nation, this student at the university of Prague had been obliged to leave the Bohemian capital a year earlier, and was—or claimed to be—repelled by the Wycliffite teaching on universals propounded by the prominent Czech master. It has long been widely recognised that universals and the concept of the church are twin barometers for any assessment of Wyclif’s position in the Bohemian and central European conflict during the decades leading up to the Council of Constance, but any attempt to arrive at an overall appraisal of the problem in the light of modern research is confronted by at least two basic questions of interpretation. In the first place it is necessary to strike a balance between the older view, represented by the pan-Germanic historiography of the late nineteenth century and especially by Johann Loserth during his Czernowitz years (1875-93), which saw Jan Hus simply as a plagiarist who copied Wyclif slavishly without having any original thoughts of his own, and some modern Czech—often equally chauvinistic—reactions to this position.

The two canons who are the subject of this paper are Philip Repyngdon and John Eyton. The former was an Austin canon from Leicester Abbey, though his surname perhaps suggests he originated from Repton, and was at one time a follower of John Wyclif. John Eyton was a lesser known contemporary, another theologian at Oxford but he was from the Augustinian house at Repton in Derbyshire. The sources each uses in his extant writing may prove a salutary warning in our hunt for Lollards.

In 1966 Crompton predicted that there would be ‘no comparison in mood’ between observations of the sexcentenary of John Wyclif’s death and the ‘crescendo of praise’ heard at its quincentenary. His prediction has not proved altogether true, but he was right insofar as we are unable to approach our subject with anything like the assurance of our predecessors. They had a Wyclif coated with many layers of varnish, not least the ‘rich brown protestant’ ones McFarlane speaks of.Ours has been stripped, and we find ourselves very uncertain about what we now see.

When in the first part of the fourteenth century the Oxford master Thomas Bradwardine (†1349) launched his formidable offensive Contra Pelagium in a massive work completed in 1344, the very assumption of his campaign was the common front of the Pelagians of all times. For him, the ancients and the moderns formed one unbroken phalanx: ‘Sicut antiqui Pelagiani… ita et moderni.’ To leave no room for doubt, he clarified his battle plan as directed against ‘tarn veteres quam recentes’.

IN the early 1520s, the doctors and masters of the University of Oxford—like their peers in Paris, Louvain, Cologne, and elsewhere-faced a profound threat in the emergence of the Lutheran heresy. It is hard to exaggerate the problems of heresy for early sixteenth century mentalities. Heresy was, of course, an ‘iniquitous disease’ which could infect the mind of the Church and endanger the souls of all Christians. Popular heresies were a political menace which easily fomented rebellion. They could coalesce social and economic tensions into open attacks on the traditional order. But a learned heresy, as Luther’s at least in part certainly was, posed a particular challenge to the universities. While it is true that the academies had produced more than a few heretics themselves, one of the principal purposes of the universities (and especially their theology faculties) was to refute errors when they were heard, to proclaim orthodoxy anew, to train thinkers and preachers to oppose the heretics: in short, to fulfill their claims (made increasingly often during the later Middle Ages) to act, on the basis of their expertise, as religious authorities.