John Wyclif Research Articles

John Wyclif on War and Peace. By Rory Cox. Royal Historical Society Studies in History, New Series. Woodbridge: Boydell, 2014. xiv + 200 pp. $90.00 cloth.

John Wyclif on War and Peace. By Rory Cox. Royal Historical Society Studies in History, New Series. Woodbridge: Boydell, 2014. xiv + 200 pp. $90.00 cloth.

Antonio Labriola nella storia della cultura. A proposito di una recente edizione degli scritti

In this essay is presented the edition of a short tract of natural theology based on the only two extant copies preserved in mss. Praha, Narodni knihovna, V.F.9, ff. 68v-75v and Wien, Osterreichische Nationalbibliothek, 4937, ff. 28r-34v. It is introduced by a historical and philological note. A defence of John Wyclif’s views on future contingents condemned at the Council of Constance in 1415, the tract turns out to be a startling profession of crude determinism, so radical that it would hardly have been upheld by Wyclif even in his later and most controversial writings. The anonymous tract can be plausibly ascribed to Peter Payne, an Oxford Wycliffite who left England possibly to escape prosecution and reached Prague only after Hus’s departure for Constance (11 October 1414). Probably composed from late 1419 to early 1420, when Wyclif’s theological views were the object of harsh criticism by many masters at the University of Prague, the tract has a literary form similar to that of a determinatio, the answer given by a master to a question at the end of a disputation. Hence, it contains eighteen arguments in support of Wyclif’s thesis that everything that will come to pass, will come to pass by absolute necessity and six arguments against this thesis, followed by relevant rejections. As to the writing technique, Payne draws a significant amount of textual materials from several sources without citing them: namely Wyclif, Thomas Aquinas, and Jan Hus.

John Wyclif’s Theology of the Eucharist in its Medieval Context

John Wyclif’s Theology of the Eucharist in its Medieval Context

“And Touching our Society”: Fashioning Jesuit Identity in Elizabethan England by Thomas M. McCoog (review)

And Touching our Society: Fashioning Jesuit Identity in Elizabethan England By Thomas M. McCoog. [Catholic and Recusant Texts of the Late Medieval and Early Modern Periods, Vol. 3.] (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies. 2013. Pp. xiv, 476. $95.00. ISBN 978-0-88844-183-6.)Over the last twenty years, the study of post-Reformation English Catholicism has experienced a lively renaissance. Once a cottage industry monopolized by scholars writing from within the Catholic fold, it has now migrated from the margins to the mainstream and become one of the busiest and most vibrant fields of early-modern inquiry. Prefaced by a brief historiographical survey, this volume of collected essays by Thomas McCoog is a timely and substantial contribution to this enterprise. It brings together hitherto unpublished essays with revised versions of others that have appeared in print previously (although several of them are here translated into English for the time). Complementing and extending McCoog's two important books on the history of the Society of Jesus in the British Isles between 1541 and 1597, the current collection underlines the vital role played by the Jesuits in the struggle to reclaim the countries that composed them from Protestantism and to reconvert their inhabitants to the Catholic faith. It explores the challenges and opportunities the Jesuits faced in extending their activities into a region where heresy had taken firm hold, and it charts the accommodations and adaptations necessitated by living in an environment in which persecution was a fact of life. Whereas much recent work on Catholicism has sought to recover the experience of the laity, McCoog's essays rightly remind us of the continued importance of understanding developments from the perspective of the clergy themselves.In the two essays in this collection, McCoog emphasizes the pronounced reluctance of Superior General Everard Mercurian to sanction a Jesuit mission to England for fear that it would compromise the Society's characteristic way of proceeding. He suggests that Mercurian changed his mind in the context of anticipations that the project to secure a match between Elizabeth I and the French Duke of Anjou would transform Catholicism's political prospects. Nevertheless, Mercurian's predictions about the complications and discords that would ensue came true: had he lived beyond 1581, McCoog concludes, the mission to Scotland would probably have been cancelled (p. 54). Likewise we learn that the celebrated martyr Edmund Campion initially resisted the call to leave Bohemia (whither he had been sent to counteract the pestilential heresies sown by the first instrument of the devil in that kingdom, John Wyclif, p. 90) and to join Robert Persons in traveling to England. It was out of obedience, not preference [that] he crossed the Channel (p. 99). The volume also includes transcriptions and translations of a valuable cache of letters written by Robert Southwell to Superior General Claudio Aquaviva between 1585 and 1590 that illuminate his reactions to the persecution of Catholics by the Elizabethan regime, his anxiety about mysterious prodigies, and his hatred of that compendium of iniquity and monster of crimes, Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester (p. …

John Wyclif on War and Peace by Rory Cox (review)

John Wyclif on War and Peace by Rory Cox (review)

A Neglected Eucharistic Controversy: The Afterlife of John Wyclif's Eucharistic Thought in Bohemia in the Early Fifteenth Century

The renewed interest in John Wyclif (d. 1384) has brought this late medieval figure back into the spotlight of historians, giving rise to numerous studies evaluating his thought and its implications in the context of late fourteenth century England. However, it is not possible fully to appreciate Wyclif's importance in late medieval European culture without understanding the legacy of his ideas on the continent. According to the accepted narrative, John Wyclif's thought was mediated to the continent through the scholarly contacts between the universities in Oxford and in Prague, and re-emerged in the Latin writings of Jan Hus. This article argues that John Wyclif's thought, especially his critique of the church's doctrine of transubstantiation, found a larger audience among the rural clerics and laity in Bohemia, whom it reached through Peter Payne, who simplified and disseminated the works of the Oxford master. Wyclif's critique of transubstantiation sparked a nationwide debate about the nature of the Eucharist, generating numerous treatises, both in Latin and in the vernacular, on the subject of Christ's presence in the sacrament of the mass. This debate anticipated, a full century earlier, the famous debate between Luther and Zwingli and the Eucharistic debates of the sixteenth century Reformation more generally. The proliferation of vernacular Eucharistic tractates in Bohemia shows that Wyclif's critique of transubstantiation could be answered in a number of different ways that included both real presence (however defined) and figurative theologies—a fact, which, in turn, explains the doctrinal diversity among the Lollards in England.

Review of 'John Wyclif on War and Peace'

Review of 'John Wyclif on War and Peace'

As the Lily among Thorns: Daniel 13 in the Writings of John Wyclif and His Followers

This study offers the fullest treatment up to date of references to Susanna and the Elders (Daniel 13) in John Wyclif’s Latin works and in vernacular Lollard writings. Focusing primarily on the political implications of the biblical narrative, it distinguishes between two conceptions of community that shape its medieval reception. Whereas Wyclif transitions from viewing Daniel 13 as the story of a crisis that afflicts one community to one about two antithetical communities, his followers almost invariably take the latter view. Both exploit a traditional interpretation of the Elders as the Church’s enemies in order to oppose its claim to authority while bolstering their own. By contrast, several other treatments of Daniel 13 from late medieval England such as the Pistel of Swete Susan consider it a tale of a single community, where justice and injustice are not contingent on identity. Their Lollard affinity, postulated by some scholars, is therefore doubtful.

The School of Heretics: Academic Condemnation at the University of Oxford, 1277-1409, by Andrew E. Larsen

Even in the twenty-first century the tension between intellectual speculation and opinions considered dangerous or socially disruptive is not far beneath the surface of public life. Universities, bodies whose members were licensed to explore ideas, have had to struggle hard to maintain their privilege: not least within their own community, the learned being quite as intolerant of one another as any outsider. Before 1277, in the first century of organised universities, theologians still aspired to establish an objective, rationally ordered Christian doctrine; disagreements needed to be resolved, if necessary by authority, if they were not to disrupt the unity of Christendom. Accordingly in that year both Stephen Tempier, the bishop of Paris, and Robert Kilwardby, archbishop of Canterbury, independently (as Andrew Larsen persuasively argues) condemned a range of ideas, at the heart of which was the notion of the soul as the unitary form of the human body. They were too late to be effective: theologians, increasingly concerned with the limits of possible human knowledge of God, were carving out areas of legitimate uncertainty about the divine nature and power, across which they could freely debate. For about a century, it was legitimate to argue virtually any position in the Paris and Oxford schools for the purpose of disputation; faculties of theology exercised a light discipline over their members—some of whom, notably William of Ockham, claimed that doctors of theology were the sole judges even of the orthodoxy of popes. But in the long run religious ideas could not be corralled within the schools. In England, first the opponents of the friars, then the friars themselves, and finally John Wyclif and his followers raised questions about the nature of the church in public debate; and, from the last quarter of the fourteenth century, church authorities (this time acting with the backing of secular princes and public opinion) gradually established control, in the name of social order, over the public expression of disruptive opinions.

Wyclif: “Trialogus.”

Wyclif: “Trialogus.”

Was the Early Wyclif a Determinist? Concerning an Unnoticed Level within His Taxonomy of Being

Abstract This article takes issue with the most authoritative argument for the commonplace that John Wyclif was an extreme determinist: he denied distinctions between divine ideas and God’s metaphysical constituents and between ideas as principle of divine cognition of creatures (rationes) and as models for their production ad extra (exemplaria); since as a constituent of God’s essence every divine idea is absolutely necessary, and every idea is unfailingly a pattern for creation, therefore God cannot but create anything He can think of. This paper argues against the premise that Wyclif never distinguished rationes and exemplaria by examining significant excerpts from Wyclif’s edited and unedited academic writings in which the distinction is assumed or discussed. Wyclif maintains that there are more ideas in God than created essences ad extra, and that God’s absolute power covers more than His ordained power does. To stress that not every divine idea is automatically a model for creation, Wyclif sometimes includes in his standard taxonomy of being a hitherto unnoticed level, the esse intentionale, which is eternal and ad intra, like the esse intelligibile, but contingent, the kind of being in which something participates as the result of God’s free choice to bring it into existence ad extra at the due time.

Wycliffite Controversies, ed. Mishtooni Bose and J. Patrick Hornbeck II

This collection of articles owes its existence to a conference held in Oxford in 2008 on ‘Lollard Affiliations: Historical, Literary, Theological’. As the theme of the conference would suggest, this has produced a multidisciplinary volume which explores a variety of subjects within the broad field of Wycliffite and lollard studies. Many of the leading lights in the study of Wyclif, Wycliffism, and lollardy have contributed articles (16 in all), and Fiona Somerset concludes affairs with a challenging afterword that throws down the gauntlet for several new lines of enquiry. Controversy is certainly at the heart of this volume. As the editors, Mishtooni Bose and Patrick Hornbeck, note, nomenclature is perhaps the most obvious initial point of divergence, with idiosyncratic authorial preferences for ‘lollard’, ‘Lollard’, ‘Wycliffite’, ‘dissenter’, and ‘heretic’; likewise, the distinction between ‘orthodoxy’ and ‘heresy’ remains problematic, both helped and hindered by Anne Hudson’s identification of a ‘grey area’ between the two. The lack of terminological consensus reflects the persisting difficulties of defining what exactly Wycliffism or lollardy were. (By favouring the lower-case ‘lollardy’, this reviewer is apparently revealing his opinion that ‘religious as well as social distances’ separated non-conformist individuals [p. 2].) Kantik Ghosh provides a characteristically elegant definition, which is worth quoting in full: ‘By “Wycliffism” I mean that body of thought and writing clearly identifiable as related to the ideas of John Wyclif, which are themselves of great, and developing, complexity and amplitude; by “Lollardy” (or “lollardy”) is indicated that more nebulous domain of religious nonconformism, whether in ideology or practice, with varying degrees of affinity to Wyclif’ (p. 13, n. 1). This is probably as close to a working definition as one could hope for, but Ghosh cautions that the value of such a distinction between Wycliffism and lollardy is in its utility as a conceptual tool rather than its reality. Indeed, the increasing awareness that there may be a conflict between heuristic scholarly devices, on the one hand, and the reality of Wycliffite and lollard experiences, on the other, is a faint but perceptible anxiety running through many of the articles. With a field of study based to a considerable extent on polemical works written by ‘the enemy’—episcopal trial records, for example—scholars of Wycliffism and lollardy are sensitive to the possibility that what traditionally have been posed as the concerns of dissenters were, rather, the concerns of their persecutors. Rob Lutton’s ambitious interdisciplinary article, ‘Lollardy, Orthodoxy, and Cognitive Psychology’, highlights just such issues. Applying a theoretical model for the psychological interpretation of religion developed by the anthropologist Harvey Whitehouse, Lutton argues that the thrill-seeking element of dissent—reading prohibited books, critiquing orthodox practice, belonging to a select and secretive community—possessed a powerful attraction. This may have been equally, if not more, attractive than any specific Wycliffite or lollard doctrine (eucharistic, anti-clerical, or otherwise) regardless of what trial records claim to be the key concerns of dissenting individuals or groups.

Holy Scripture and the Quest for Authority at the End of the Middle Ages

Holy Scripture and the Quest for Authority at the End of the Middle Ages

The Ordinary Gloss on Jonah

THE ORDINARY GLOSS WAS THE MOST WIDELY USED EDITION OF THE BIBLE IN THE LATER MIDDLE AGES AND WELL INTO THE SIXTEENTH century. Medievalists know the commentary element as the Gloss to which theologians as diverse as Thomas Aquinas, Bonaventure, John Wyclif, and Martin Luther habitually referred. As the foremost vehicle for medieval exegesis, the Gloss framed biblical narratives for a wide range of vernacular religious literature, from Dante's Divine Comedy to French drama to a Middle English retelling of the Jonah story, Patience.

Rereading Henry Suso and Eucharistic Theology in Fifteenth-Century England

This article contributes to our knowledge of the reception of Henry Suso’s work in England by comparing the treatment of Eucharistic theology in chapter six of The Seven Poyntes of Trewe Wisdom with a newly discovered version of that chapter in Cambridge, St John’s College MS G.25. Examination of the two versions reveals that MS G.25, unusually for this text, is not written in dialogue form; it also omits significant material from The Seven Poyntes, as well as including additional matter from Suso’s Latin text. It is argued that these differences, taken together, reveal the author’s anxiety about certain aspects of contemporary mainstream Eucharistic piety, specifically his concern that believers misunderstand the nature of the sacrament and focus too readily on the visible host, rather than upon the sacramental process which it signifies. The article also demonstrates the extent to which the text’s Eucharistic doctrine is compatible with that of John Wyclif, whilst remaining unimpeachably orthodox.

Trials of Conscience and the Story of Conscience

This essay analyzes the trials of conscience presented in two medieval interrogation narratives, the Testimony of William Thorpe and the Letter of Richard Wyche. Written by followers of the radical theologian John Wyclif, these are the only surviving texts from medieval England that describe heresy inquisitions from the perspective of the accused. Despite similarities between the two authors and legal proceedings, the texts are strikingly different. Thorpe produces a competing public narrative to the official account of his movement, embracing his chance to share his conscientious convictions. By contrast, Wyche’s cautious text reflects distaste for the legal technology used to test his conscience, a loyalty oath. He considers public oaths inadequate vehicles for coming to grips with his inner life, or for conveying his religious beliefs. The broader implication is that trials of conscience prompt conscience to ‘tell its story,’ defining itself in relation to the demands of public, coercive forces. In particular, oaths — pointed and memorable — are useful not only to narrators such as Wyche and Thorpe, but also to officials creating public narratives of a heresy defeated. Oaths produce coinciding narrative, personal, and political crises, in which the conflicting demands of public and private open to view and enter into negotiations.

Die konstellasie taalbegrip-logika in die Middeleeuse filosofie (2): Duns Skotus tot De Rivo

The constellation language-logic in medieval philosophy (2): Duns Scotus to De Rivo. This second in a series of two articles continues the attempt to provide an in-depth overview of some of the most prominent – and some of the most underpublished - medieval thinkers’ stances on the constellation of language and logic, thus as a combined and condensed problem in western philosophy between the 5th and 15th centuries. The two articles form part of a rehabilitating series of modern-critical articles on understated and marginalised themes, texts and figures in medieval philosophy. The positions of the well-known philosophers that are covered in the two articles, St Augustine, Peter Abelard, St Thomas Aquinas, John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham, are juxtaposed with some less familiar philosophical positions, amongst others those of Boethius, Peter of Spain, John Wyclif and Peter de Rivo.

Image, Text and Church, 1380-1600: Essays for Margaret Aston (review)

Image, Text and Church, 1380-1600: Essays for Margaret Aston. Edited by Linda Clark, Maureen Jurkowski, and Colin Richmond. [Papers in Mediaeval Studies, 20.] (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies. 2009. Ppxiv, 289. $90.00. ISBN 978-0-888-44820-0.) This Festschrift in honor of Margaret Aston is testimony to the influence of an extraordinarily gifted scholar. In chronological range and breadth of subject matter it is a fitting tribute to the scope and depth of Margaret Aston's own research and publications. The latter are fully documented in a bibliography at the end of the volume. An introduction, including a brief biography, is followed by a touching personal appreciation by Colin Richmond. Anne Hudson's illuminating investigation of the books consulted by John Wyclif during his time in Oxford is the first of eleven essays. Hudson makes a persuasive case for Wyclif 's extensive and surprisingly pragmatic use of the library of the Oxford Greyfriars, perhaps right up to his departure from the university in 1381. The other most likely source of material was the Merton College library, where Wyclif had friends and supporters. Ann Eljenholm Nichols examines the elaborate figurai illustrations in latefourteenth-century copies of non-Wycliffite glossed gospels of Mark and Luke in Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, MS 32. Containing an English commentary on the Latin gospels, the manuscript was probably intended for lay liturgical and devotional use within the household. It provides further evidence of the circulation of non-Wycliffite English biblical material for the laity before the fifteenth century. Alison McHardy's fascinating study of John Searle, chancery clerk, reflects Aston's doctoral research on Thomas Arundel, Scarle's master in the royal chancery and later archbishop of Canterbury. Searle advanced through royal service, legal and parliamentary work for religious houses, money-lending, and ecclesiastical preferment and prospered from the political turbulence of the 1380s and 139Os. King Henry rv made Searle chancellor at Arundel's suggestion and bestowed on him the archdeaconry of Lincoln. Searle recorded some of King Richard Hs least flattering episodes in the Parliament Rolls and provided eyewitness testimony and official documents for the Westminster Chronicle's uniquely well-informed account of Richard's reign. Arundel is the central focus of a typically perceptive essay by Jeremy Catto; in this case, his personal devotional interests and efforts to mount an orthodox response to the Wycliffite challenge that went beyond the often ineffective use of the law. Arundel pursued scholarly tastes and shared an interest in the contemplative life and the production of compilations for private meditation with his family circle and members of his household. From his restoration in 1399 personal interest became national project as Arundel strove for higher educational standards among the clergy and a revitalisation of public religious rites alongside the dissemination of the mixed life to an increasingly independently-minded laity. Maureen Jurkowski 's reconstruction of the career of the Lollard preacher Robert Herlaston is the first of three chapters on heresy. Ordained in 1392, Herlaston was preaching Wycliffite ideas from at least 1409 and, until his arrest in 1427, enjoyed the patronage of midlands gentry families either sympathetic to, or on the fringes of, Lollardy who had close connections with families associated with the Lollard knights. Gentry support for dissent clearly continued for some years after the Oldcastle Rebellion. Norman Tanner widens the focus to the ecumenical and general councils and the ways that they addressed dissent. For a variety of reasons councils did not always name individual dissenters in decrees that condemned their teachings, but the Council of Constance (1414-18) did not just name Wyclif but issued the longest personal critique of all the twenty-one councils, and emphatically constructed Wyclif as the root of wider European religious dissent, not least that led by John Hus. …

‘We Know in Part’: How the Positive Apophaticism of Aquinas Transforms the Negative Theology of Pseudo‐Dionysius

There has been a new reception and revival of interest in the Pseudo‐Dionysius both in popular and academic circles, which has impacted Thomistic scholarship. Scholars roughly from the time of Vatican II have stressed the importance of Pseudo‐Dionysius to Thomistic thought, in reaction to a previous emphasis on the ‘Aristotelian’ and analytic aspects of Thomistic thought. Whilst this approach uncovered a largely neglected area, the converse now appears to be the case: the Dionysian influence on Thomas is disproportionately exaggerated, leading to a false identification of the two thinkers. This paper argues that whereas the negative theology of Pseudo‐Dionysius entailed the unknowability of God as the One beyond language, concept and being, Thomas developed a ‘positive apophaticism’ that transformed Denys in light of Augustine, Aristotle and, most importantly, Scripture itself.I first trace the roots of apophaticism showing how neo‐Platonism leads to equivocal God‐talk and why Aquinas goes further than Dionysius in his rejection of equivocity. I then show how the unknowability of God taught by Dionysius is qualified by Thomas through his teaching on the ‘quidditative’ knowledge in the next life and through the doctrine of analogy in the present life that makes possible the naming of God using positive ‘perfection terms.’The primary perfection term is Being which, in contrast to the Dionysian God ‘beyond being,’ applies to God literally and pre‐eminently. This has implications for epistemology since, as Aristotle showed, knowledge and rational discourse are grounded in Being. The reason Denys' theology leads to an absolute unknowing is because He denies that God is identical with Being, whereas Aquinas' metaphysics, while denying univocal being, retains true speech about God, including logical discourse by analogy.I finally explain how in spite of believing Dionysius to be a first century apostolic convert, Thomas was able to transform his teaching because of presuppositions regarding the authority of Scripture that he interprets in light of Augustine, Aristotle and a developing understanding of a ‘literal’ sense that stands in contrast to the ‘anagogical’ hermeneutic of Dionysius. This results in an undermining of Dionysian elitism that anticipates the work of the Reformers, beginning with John Wyclif. In the contemporary context, Thomas' ‘positive apophaticism’ offers a powerful resource for addressing an increasingly agnostic culture.

A Companion to John Wyclif: Late Medieval Theologian. Edited by Ian Christopher Levy

The Heythrop JournalVolume 52, Issue 3 p. 492-493 A Companion to John Wyclif: Late Medieval Theologian. Edited by Ian Christopher Levy R. N. Swanson, R. N. Swanson University of Birmingham, UKSearch for more papers by this author R. N. Swanson, R. N. Swanson University of Birmingham, UKSearch for more papers by this author First published: 07 April 2011 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2265.2011.00663_39.xRead the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume52, Issue3May 2011Pages 492-493 RelatedInformation