Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-76fb5796d-45l2p Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-28T12:22:50.667Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
This chapter is part of a book that is no longer available to purchase from Cambridge Core

17 - John Wyclif

Stephen E. Lahey
Affiliation:
University of Nebraska
Graham Oppy
Affiliation:
Monash University, Austrailia
Get access

Summary

Few medieval thinkers have evoked the reactions that Wyclif has. His admirers, from late medieval Oxford and Prague to post-Reformation historians and Protestant apologists, wax enthusiastic about the ‘Evangelical Doctor’ or the ‘Morning Star of the Reformation’. On the other hand, his detractors, from his day into the present, revile him as heresiarch and apostate. Turning to his many extant works, one would expect dramatic prose, still smouldering with the whiff of the bonfire, from such a polarizing figure. After all, two distinct, widespread reform movements claim Wyclif's teachings as their inspiration. Lollardy beleagured the English establishment into the fifteenth century, and the Hussite movement ended in full-scale war in Czech-speaking lands. Instead, the reader finds dense argument and scholastic terminology, dizzying repetition and endless reference to Scripture. Wyclif's appeal, and his danger, lie not in his popular availability, but in his solid foundation in the scholastic tradition. He envisaged himself as continuing the tradition of Augustine, Anselm and Robert Grosseteste, and even championing the synthesis of Aqunias, in the face of Ockhamism's threat to theology's pre-eminence among the sciences. Wyclif was less an innovator or a reformer than a radical reactionary, a zealot hungry to cleanse the Church and its theology of the intellectual and political poisons that had built up by the fourteenth century. But his call for a royal divestment of ecclesiastical and especially papal power, the widespread availability of vernacular Scripture and his rejection of transubstantiation seem more consonant with Reformation theology than with scholasticism. While earlier scholars concluded that Wyclif ’s thought presaged Protestantism, our understanding of later scholasticism, particularly of Oxford in the early fourteenth century, allows us to understand his ideas as products of his age.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Acumen Publishing
Print publication year: 2009

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

  • John Wyclif
  • Edited by Graham Oppy, Monash University, Austrailia
  • Book: The History of Western Philosophy of Religion
  • Online publication: 05 February 2013
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/UPO9781844654642.018
Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

  • John Wyclif
  • Edited by Graham Oppy, Monash University, Austrailia
  • Book: The History of Western Philosophy of Religion
  • Online publication: 05 February 2013
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/UPO9781844654642.018
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • John Wyclif
  • Edited by Graham Oppy, Monash University, Austrailia
  • Book: The History of Western Philosophy of Religion
  • Online publication: 05 February 2013
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/UPO9781844654642.018
Available formats
×