John Wyclif Research Articles

Sean A. Otto, John Wyclif, New Perspectives on an Old Controversy

Book review on Sean A. Otto, John Wyclif, New Perspectives on an Old Controversy Eugene (Oregon): Wipf & Stock 2021, 73 pp. (Wycliffe Studies in History, Church, and Society), ISBN 978-17252-5105-2

The Noblest Complexion

Abstract This article examines an uncommon materialist argument preserved in late medieval Prague quodlibets by Matthias of Knín (1409) and Prokop of Kladruby (1417). The argument connects the Galenic claim that the human body has the noblest and best-balanced complexion possible with the Alexandrist claim that the human rational soul emerges from such well-balanced matter without any supernatural intervention. Of the various medieval renderings of these claims, John Wyclif’s De compositione hominis is singled out as the most probable source of the argument. Far from attributing plain materialism to Wyclif, the article highlights a semimaterialist position, mentioned in two fifteenth-century De anima commentaries of Prague origin, grafting the immortal spirit postulate onto an Alexandrist-like doctrine of the intellect as educed from the harmoniously complexioned body. Finally, it is argued that this semimaterialist position may not only encapsulate how Bohemian masters read Wyclif, but also be close to Wyclif’s actual anthropological stance.

Oxford to Prague: Orthodox Insular Texts in Bohemia

Abstract Owing to protracted investigations of heresy, much of John Wyclif’s oeuvre is now available, not in insular, but only in Bohemian manuscripts. However, the mechanisms of such transmission have remained murky, in spite of Anne Hudson’s magisterial investigations in Czech libraries. This essay looks at evidence for an analogous, yet orthodox, transmission, earlier and, before 1407, considerably more prolific than the Wycliffite example. This involves Oxonian texts written for preachers; these had a lively and early Bohemian circulation, dating back to the foundations of the Charles University, Prague.

Suđenja za jeres i sistem kažnjavanja pripadnika sekte Lolarda u Engleskoj rezime

Trials and system of punishment created by the Inquisition, primarily for the necessity of struggling against the thirteenth-century Continental popular heresy are notorious. Medieval England was faced for the first time with the heretical movement late in its history and its origin was not in the populus, but in the radical professor of the University of Oxford, John Wyclif. This paper considers the experience of trials led - and punishments - dealt to the followers of Wyclifism, pejoratively named Lollards, with a particular interest in the punishments that women of this heterodox group incurred.

Biblical Commentary and Translation in Later Medieval England: Experiments in Interpretation

Biblical Commentary and Translation in Later Medieval England: Experiments in Interpretation

John Trevisa's Information Age: Knowledge and the Pursuit of Literature, c. 1400 by Emily Steiner

Reviewed by: John Trevisa's Information Age: Knowledge and the Pursuit of Literature, c. 1400 by Emily Steiner Matthew Boyd Goldie Emily Steiner. John Trevisa's Information Age: Knowledge and the Pursuit of Literature, c. 1400. Oxford Studies in Medieval Literature and Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. Pp. xii, 287. $80.00. John Trevisa, father of English prose? Is that a prosaic father, or can informative writing be beautiful? What contributions to a history of style does [End Page 425] a translator make? What is the relationship between facts and literature? When have there been "information ages"? Emily Steiner's John Trevisa's Information Age asks these questions and offers thoughtful answers in seven carefully researched chapters. Each draws attention to Trevisa's contributions to English, English literature, and English "information culture" (1). The book contends that Trevisa's translations of compendious works helped shape English literary prose style and English literature more broadly by making English a suitable and even eloquent vernacular to communicate historical, scientific, and didactic learning. As most readers know perhaps more implicitly than explicitly, Trevisa translated Ranulph Higden's universal history, the Polychronicon; Bartholomaeus Anglicus's encyclopedia, De proprietatibus rerum; Giles of Rome's mirror for princes, De regimine principum; and other shorter works. As David Fowler suggested in his 1995 biography, Trevisa was possibly from Cornwall and spent most of his life at Oxford before securing a position as chaplain, canon, and vicar for Thomas de Berkeley in Gloucestershire. He is presumed to have died in 1402, so he is an exact contemporary of Geoffrey Chaucer. His works survive in about thirty manuscripts as well as early prints by William Caxton, Wynkyn de Worde, Thomas Berthelet, and Stephen Batman. Steiner concentrates on the Polychronicon and De proprietatibus rerum more than on De regimine principum or other translations, and she also glances sideways into Trevisa's "information age" by considering Piers Plowman, the Concordance to the Wycliffite Bible (c. 1425), and the earlier versified encyclopedia Le livre de Sydrac (c. 1275). Most of the chapters examine Trevisa's divergences from and additions to his sources, the characteristics of his style, and how the large scale of his translations makes the late fourteenth century an age of information in England, following similar projects in France and elsewhere in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. One recurring topic in the book concerns form—the compendium versus the monograph and how book history and the canon would look if we considered the compilation as central to manuscript and print publication. After all, if every compilation/compendium/florilegium/collecte/recueil/gathering/miscellany/"litel tretys"/anthology were tallied, they might add up to more copies than the single-text or single-author book, with arguably more cultural influence. Steiner posits that "what we now recognize to be literary properties emerged in part from translations of medieval compendia," with Trevisa translating and glossing, for example, the Poly-chronicon, to form a "megagenre" or "super-compendium" so that he [End Page 426] "provided an intellectual and literary rationale for English prose" (25, 30). Just in terms of the vernacular, although possibly overrepresented in the Middle English Dictionary and the Oxford English Dictionary, Trevisa remains a major source for the lexicon, with 9,553 contributions in 6,279 entries in the OED. Another key topic is the idea of an Information Age in England c. 1400. Steiner proposes that "our attachments to those texts we call literary, and which we invest with richness and complexity, have roots in medieval information culture," describing Trevisa as "the perfect entry point into a literary history of information" (12). She stresses that "Every age is, in its own way, an information age, and the late fourteenth century was no exception. … It was not merely the age before the printing press or the age before the internet, but also the age in which the collection and classification of knowledge was bound up with the production of vernacular literature" (227). In Steiner's reading, Trevisa, who likely knew John Wyclif at Oxford, does not simply translate in a straight manner but has works that "criticize the professional religious and redefine the relationship between clergy and laity" while...

John Wyclif and the Eucharistic Words of Institution: Context and Aftermath

In matters of eucharistic theology, John Wyclif (d. 1384) is best known for his rejection of the scholastic doctrine of transubstantiation. There were many reasons why Wyclif came to regard this doctrine as fundamentally untenable, such as the impossibility of substantial annihilation and the illogicality of accidents existing apart from subjects, but chief among them was his deep dissatisfaction with the prevailing interpretation of Christ's words, “Hoc est corpus meum,” the words of institution required to confect the sacrament in the Mass. Wyclif insisted that getting this proposition right was essential for a correct understanding of Christ's presence in the Eucharist. This article presents Wyclif's position on this matter within the context of later medieval scholastic discussions in an effort to lend clarity to his larger understanding of eucharistic presence. The article will then trace the reception of Wyclif's ideas to Bohemia at the turn of the fifteenth century, with special attention given to the Prague master Jakoubek of Stříbro. One finds that Wyclif, and then later Jakoubek, developed new and effective means of conceptualizing the conversion of the eucharistic elements, thereby expanding the ways in which one can affirm Christ's presence in the consecrated host and the salvific effects of that presence for faithful communicants.

Antichrist in Bohemia: A Theme in the Genesis of Hussite Theology

Antichrist in Bohemia: A Theme in the Genesis of Hussite Theology Stephen Lahey The figure of Antichrist loomed over the late fourteenth century as the papal schism divided the church, and its peoples, into bitterly opposed factions. In Bohemia, this was keenly felt, and a widespread interest in church reform combined with an increasingly popular tendency to favor apocalyptic imagery in preaching to give rise to what would become the Hussite movement.1 In particular, the Paris-trained Matthias of Janov (d. 1393) would develop a theory of church reform centered on Antichrist that was to captivate Jakoubek of Střibro (d. 1429), who would become the chief theologian of the Hussite movement on Hus’s death.2 It has also been customary to identify the thought of John Wyclif (d. 1384) with the genesis of Hussite theology. Wyclif’s name had become firmly associated with the reform preaching of Jan Hus, Jerome of Prague, and others (like Jakoubek) during the first decade of the fifteenth century. When Sigismund, King of Bohemia, pledged to do everything possible to oppose “heresiesˮ in February 1428, he swore to oppose “the newly introduced ideas of Wyclif or Hus.”3 That connection has held for six centuries, with some scholars claiming that Hussitism is but a variation of Wycliffism, and others responding that such arguments elevate German (Anglo-Saxon) thinking over Czech thought. The issue became politicized as the Czech nations struggled to define themselves as distinct from the German nature of Austria-Hungary in the late nineteenth century. More recently, it has been recognized outside of the Czech literature that earlier Bohemian reform thought had a great deal to do with the content of Hussitism, but aside from very general summaries of figures such as Matthias and Jan Milíč, little has appeared in print.4 Wyclifʼs and Matthias of Janovʼs two different models of Antichrist reveal a much more important difference between the two thinkers. Each had a well-developed understanding of the church. Both described its membership as at best accidentally connected to the church of Rome, and for both thinkers, the clergy [End Page 21] betrayed the mystical body when they embraced secular power and wealth. For both, clerical abuses were evidence of Antichrist’s persecution of the church, to be countered by priests preaching the gospels and exemplifying Christ’s perfect life. The difference lay in whether or not these priests could identify the individual members of Antichrist or not. Wyclif was prepared to identify kinds of members, such as friars, corrupt clergy, and so on, but he restricted himself to generalities.5 Matthias and his intellectual heirs were prepared to identify specific members of Antichrist based on their hypocritical behavior.6 This is what led to the differences between Wyclif and the Hussites, as will be evident in our concluding discussion of one of the Four Articles of Prague. Not being able to identify specific members of Antichrist kept reform at an ideological level, but Matthias’s Regulae provided the wherewithal to identify them with its carefully delineated explanations of their characteristic hypocrisy. More important than questions of influence of specific thinkers was the shift that was occurring as the Hussite movement germinated. Christian theology was expanding venues in the mid fourteenth century, from the province of the Latin schools to vernacular and popular Latin.7 However, descriptions of Antichrist had long been in a liminal zone, as much the subject of prophetic exegesis and mystic eschatology as well as the basis for scholastic arguments about ecclesiology and other formal disputes.8 In this case, Wyclif represented a more conventional, scholastic description of Antichrist, while the Bohemian model, I will argue, represented a powerful readiness within Hussite reform to depart from the discourse of the schools.9 The key will be to show how these two models of Antichrist revealed the contrasting models of the church and how reform could be realized. We should begin with two models by which to understand the relation of Antichrist to the church, of which Wyclif made use of one, and Matthias, and subsequently Jakoubek, used the other. While it is interesting to consider the lineage of apocalyptic theology that led...

A Puzzling Silence: James 2:24 before the Reformation

Abstract Since the Reformation, James 2:24, ‘justified by works and not by faith alone’, has been the source of special controversy within an already contested epistle. But in the patristic and medieval period it was almost entirely unemployed and ignored, despite the widespread use, both approvingly and critically, of the expression sola fide. This article offers a pre-Reformation reception history of James 2:24. It begins with Origen and Augustine’s broader interpretation of James 2, then turns to the key pre-Reformation references to James: the earliest references (fifth–seventh century), Bede the Venerable (eighth), the Glossa Ordinaria (twelfth), Nicholas of Gorran (thirteenth), John Wyclif and Ps-Jan Hus (fourteenth), and Dionysius the Carthusian (fifteenth). Surprisingly, James 2:24 is at times explicitly harmonized with the expression sola fide, and only rarely used to critique it, because most read the Vulgate’s language in James 2:24 (non ex fide tantum) to refer solely to the need for later good works. At the same time, ‘justified by works’ was generally interpreted as referring to a confirmation or manifestation of justification until the scholastic period, when we find the earliest instances of interpreting ‘justified by works’ as a further justification. These results provide a theologically rich historical perspective on the reception of James 2:24 with respect to the development of sola fide and the scholastic interpretation of ‘justified by works’ as a subsequent increase in justification.

John Wyclif, edited by Luigi Campi

John Wyclif, edited by Luigi Campi

Stephen Penn, trans. and ed. John Wyclif: Selected Latin Works in Translation

Stephen Penn, trans. and ed. <i>John Wyclif: Selected Latin Works in Translation</i>

Is Perfection of this World? A Quaestio on Creatures’ Perfection in Terms of Propinquity to or Distance from the First Being, Ascribed to Matěj of Knín

The article focuses on Matěj of Knín, a member of the circle of the Bohemian followers of John Wyclif. It proposes a reconstruction of Matěj’s academic career and sheds light on the role he played in the late 14th and early 15th century in the reception and development of Wyclif’s metaphysical views in Prague. In particular, Matěj’s views on creatural perfection are taken into account, as they are presented in a quaestio ascribed to Matěj by a marginal note in the only extant manuscript copy, and edited in the appendix.

"Ech good gramarien hath power to construe Scripture": Grammar and the Vernacular in the Theology of Reginald Pecock

This article argues that Reginald Pecock, fifteenth-century bishop of Chichester, calls upon his scholastic background to present a grammatical justification for a theological vernacular. However, in attempting to justify the vernacular, Pecock finds himself confronting the specter of John Wyclif and the shadow that the posthumously condemned cleric casts over any form of lay education. Pecock is so anxious to prove himself non-Wycliffite that he seeks to control the interpretations of his texts in very Wycliffite fashions, a choice that characterizes his paradoxical approach to the task of vernacularizing theology.

Phillip N. Haberkern. Patron Saint and Prophet: Jan Hus in the Bohemian and German Reformations.

The year 2015 was of special significance for the study of the Czech national hero Jan Hus. It was one hundred years earlier, on the five-hundredth anniversary of Hus’s execution by fire in July 1415, that Thomas Masaryk launched in Switzerland the Czech independence movement that led to the disintegration of the Habsburg Empire at the end of World War I. The six-hundredth anniversary stimulated the appearance of significant new literature on Hus in Czech and German. The jubilee also found response in the United States in a distinguished trilogy by the doyen of Hus studies, Thomas A. Fudge, published in 2013–2015. Fudge was joined by his junior American colleague Phillip N. Haberkern in 2016 in marking the occasion with the publication of Patron Saint and Prophet: Jan Hus in the Bohemian and German Reformations. The introduction offers a brief, competent biography of Hus, stressing the paramount significance of his martyr’s death on the development of the Bohemian and German Reformations. In agreement with Fudge and Jiří Kejř, Haberkern recognizes the legalistic validity of Hus’s trial in Constance. On the other hand, Haberkern differs from Paul de Vooght by attributing to Hus a strictly predestinarian ecclesiology in accord with John Wyclif’s (11).

Matěj of Janov: Corpus Mysticum, Communionem, and the Lost Treatise of His Regulae

The Bohemian theologian Matěj of Janov (d.1393) is little known outside of Czech Hussite scholarship, yet his Regulae Veteris et Novi Testamentum is arguably as important an influence on the genesis and development of Hussitism, as is the thought of John Wyclif. The chief Hussite theologian Jakoubek of Střibro relied on his works, and his emphasis on the need for daily Eucharist for all Christians seems to have been central to the utraquist ideal central to Hussitism. This article describes the structure and content of Matěj’s Regulae, a carefully constructed sustained argument of the threat of Antichrist facing the church, and the nature of the reforms needed to respond to them. The editions of Kybal (1908–1926) and Nechutová (1993) present the extant books of the Regulae, but Book Two treatise 2 appears to have been lost. Based on my argument for the overall structure of the Regulae, I attempt to reconstruct the contents of this book, which I will argue is directly related to Matěj’s very high regard for his predecessor, the preacher Jan Milič of Kromeřiž.

Scholastická logika „vědění“ I.

Fourteenth-century logic gave rise, among others, to the genre De scire et dubitare, which offered a unified framework for discussing different forms of epistemic sophisms by utilising the underlying systems of epistemic logic. One of the problems introduced in this context already by the founding father of this genre, William Heytesbury, was the so-called axiom of positive introspection, i.e., the principle that an agent who knows that something is the case, knows that she knows that it is the case. Owing to Heytesbury’s enormous popularity in the subsequent centuries, discussion of this problem became relatively widespread. This debate was addressed already in Boh’s seminal Epistemic Logic in the Later Middle Ages, which, despite its limitations acknowledged by its author, is a standard source. The present study elaborates on Boh by extending the corpus of his works (both in the sense of including new authors and of utilising manuscripts along with printed editions) and drawing new connections based on that. The core of the survey consists of an analysis of the positions of William Heytesbury and John Wyclif (both pertaining to the context of Merton College), their Italian reception by Peter of Mantua, and the “continental” reception of Heytesbury by John of Holland. The main goals of this study are to formalise the key arguments, which makes it possible to address the underlying systems of epistemic logic and their respective “strength”, and to articulate the conceptual background of those arguments and systems (the concepts of evidence, attention, and order of cognitive operations). The gist of the debate is, on one of the sides, an attempt to prove that it is impossible to doubt whether one knows that something is the case by employing whether the principles of positive introspection and of distribution of knowledge over implication, or the principles of positive and negative introspection combined.

English Evangelical Historians on the Origins of “the Reformation”

Although Luther’s protest of indulgences in 1517 is often considered to be the point of origin for “the Reformation”, first- and second-generation English evangelicals understood that origin differently. Knowing their fledgling movement needed to be grounded in history for legitimacy, evangelicals searched historical records for evidence of their movement prior to Luther’s protest. This essay examines the work of two leading historians during the English Reformation, John Bale (d. 1563) and John Foxe (d. 1587), to analyze what they made of the beginnings of the English Reformation. Specifically, it explores the place of the lollards, late medieval English dissenters condemned by the Church, in the histories written by Bale and Foxe between the 1540s and 1570. It argues that Bale and Foxe saw their own reform movement through an apocalyptic prism; reading the historical records through the light of Scripture, especially the Book of Revelation, led them to recognize the career of John Wyclif (d. 1384), the putative progenitor of the lollards, as the beginning of the final age of the world. Alongside Bale and Foxe, Luther, William Tyndale (d. 1536) were living at the end of that age. The essay concludes that early English evangelicals understood “the Reformation” to be a process, not a single event, and this is further demonstrated by a brief case study examining the issue of vernacular Scripture in the reform movement.

John of Paris: Beyond Royal and Papal Power ed. by Chris Jones

John of Paris: Beyond Royal and Papal Power. Edited by Chris Jones. [Disputatio, vol. 23.] (Turnhout: Brepols. 2015. Pp. xiv, 421. €100,00. ISBN 978-2-5033280-6).John of Paris has not been studied as systematically as other Dominicans like Thomas Aquinas or as other anti-papal polemicists such as Dante, Marsilius of Padua, or John Wyclif. This makes him a prime candidate for that latest milk cow of academic publishing: the Companion genre of collected articles.The editor, Chris Jones, introduces his apt volume with a nice survey of John of Paris's life and of recent scholarship. On June 26, 1303, John of Paris signed a petition originating at the court of King Philip the Fair that called for a general council against Pope Boniface VIII. John's famous work, De potestate regia et papali, forms part of this conflict. It is not, however, his only surviving work: John also authored an attack on critics of Thomas Aquinas with the Correctorium Corrupti 'Circa, ' a criticism of secular attacks on mendicant privileges in De confessionibus audiendis, and a censure of Arnald of Villanova's prediction of the Antichrist's advent with his Tractatus de Antichristo, a critique of transubstantiation in his Determinatio de modo existendi corporis Christi in sacramento altaris, some comparatively uncontroversial sermons, and a neglected Sentences Commentary. Each of these receives some attention-though the treatment of preaching and confession is scant-but the book really does not go all that far beyond Royal and Papal Power. The majority of articles are focused on the De potestate regia et papali. There are traditional analyses of its political theory by Joseph Canning, Gerson Moreno-Riano, Takashi shogimen, and Bettina Koch. A more unconventional theoretical analysis is offered by Lidia Lanza and Marco Toste, who examine John's distinct use of the Aristotelian four causes (efficient, formal, material and final) when discussing the relation of temporal to spiritual power.But the stand-out piece in the collection is by historians' historian, Karl Ubl, who recently argued that On Royal and Papal Power went through several revisions and originated in early 1302 as a response to a Quodlibet in Paris by James of Viterbo, O.E.S.A., (the papalist author of De regimine Christianorum). Ubl builds on his now foundational work by taking issue with Brian Tierney's Foundations of Conciliar Theory, which reduced John of Paris's ideas to nothing more than a logical consequence of canonistic thought. Looking at the treatment of jurisdiction from the Sentences Commentary to On Royal and Papal Power, Ubl demonstrates how John came to formulate his radical idea of consent-that rightful jurisdiction comes from below rather than from above-and that this formulation was little influenced by canon law. Having precisely traced the radicalization of John's thinking on papal immunity/accountability, Ubl comes to the general conclusion: Canonists . …

Doctrinas y relaciones de poder en el Cisma de occidente y en la época conciliar (1378–1449) ed. by José Antônio de C. R. De Souza and Bernardo Bayona Aznar (review)

Doctrinas y relaciones de poder en el Cisma de occidente y en la epoca conciliar (1378- 1449). Edited by Jose Antonio de C. R. De Souza and Bernardo Bayona Aznar. [Coleccion Ciencias Sociales, No. 94.] (Zaragoza: Prensas de la Universidad de Zaragoza. 2013. Pp. 386. euro25,00 paperback. ISBN 978-8415770-53-4.)The editors of this volume start from the extended interest in Spain for historical novels and the dearth of knowledge about medieval philosophy and legalpolitical thought in that same population. They seek to remedy the situation in this collection of studies aimed at a Spanish audience in that all the contributions either were written in or translated into Spanish, and the secondary literature and even the original sources are presented for the most part in a Spanish translation. Within this limitation the volume provides an abundance of information and insights covering the major aspects of the conciliar era.The introduction (by Bernardo Bayona Aznar) gives an overview of the relationship of the Church, its doctrine, and the secular world, including the Church's ideas on power and a discussion of the ebb and flow over the centuries especially in regard to the consolidation of papal power, the tendency to identify the Church with the pope, and the failure of reform. The chapters that follow confront and examine the key persons, events, and ideas. Chapter 1 (by Jose Antonio de Camargo Rodrigues de Souza) details the antecedents of the Great Western Schism, its immediate consequences, the fundamental question why the pope and cardinals at the outset did not grasp the gravity of their actions, and the dominance of political and territorial interests in the decisions and actions that followed over the decades. Chapter 2 (by Luis A. De Boni) takes up John Wyclif and his questioning of the power attributed to the papacy. The author notes that Wyclif must be considered in the context of the English situation (royal centralization versus outside interference) and the call for a return to a poor Church. Chapter 3 (by Bernardo Bayona Aznar) provides an excellent introduction to Francesc Eiximenis, his world, and his ideas on power. This is most welcome, as he is a figure not well known outside of Spain. Chapter 4 (by Fatima Regina Fernandes) examines the Church from Pisa, which deposed claimants from both the Roman and Avignon lines for their failure to work for unity of the Church and then at Constance, which moved against a third claimant (John XXIII) not because he was not valid but because he was found unworthy of the papacy. Chapter 5 (by Gregorio Piaia) centers attention on Francisais Zabarella as the theorist of conciliarism from the legal perspective. It especially notes the significant revision in the evaluation of Zabarella since the Second Vatican Council. …

Nicholas Love as an Ecclesiastical Reformer

Nicholas Love was the prior of the Carthusian house of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary at Mount Grace from its incorporation into the Order at the General Chapter of 1410 until shortly before his death, which occurred between 15 March and 28 July, 1423. He is most commonly known to present-day scholarship as the author of The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ and because of the licensing of the Mirror by Archbishop Thomas Arundel in accordance with the stipulations of the Lambeth Constitutions of 1409, as an agent in the archbishop's campaign against the followers of John Wyclif, and against Wycliffite translation of the scriptures into the vernacular. It would be better, however, to see him as an actor in his own right, a promoter, like his continental European Carthusian confrères, of the reform of the western Church in the fifteenth century.