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This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

The name of John Wyclif is surrounded by mythology. The ideas associated with his name had a huge influence and their effects were felt in the sequence of events which eventually led to the Reformation. This major biography offers fresh insights into Wyclif the man, his preoccupations and his achievements. The author follows Wyclif through his childhood and university days at Oxford to his life as a writer, preacher and lecturer, and - in his later years - a campaigner against the abuse of power and privilege. She looks at what other people have said about Wyclif, his exile in his parish and the significant contributions he made towards the publication of the Bible in English and the road to Reformation.

More than a century and a half prior to Luther's historic act at Wittenberg, the University of Oxford's distinguished scholar John Wycliff was engaged in his own full-scale war on the institutions and practices of medieval Christendom. This vitriolic theologian from Yorkshire blasted the Pope as anti-Christian and a devil . . . the father of lies; the cardinals were full of foul pride, the Caesarean secular clergy were traitors of God and his people, the monks were in love with their own belly, and the friars were hypocrites guilty of stinking covetousness. Although defenders of the Church struck back with devil's instrument, heretics' idol, flatteries' sink, admirers subsequently hailed him as the Morning Star of the Reformation. The result of so much passion on both sides has been that even today a balanced view of Wycliff is difficult to obtain. This book is one of the first attempts to steer between the extremes, to find the real man and the place he occupied in the movement toward Reform. Actually, a full and comprehensive account of Wyclif's character is almost impossible to achieve. His own writings reveal virtually nothing of a personal nature; his face cannot be studied because no authentic portrait survives. Weighing the evidence of all the widely varying partisan biographies, Mr. Stacey does construct a reliable, if incomplete, impression of Wyclif based on certain characteristics that no assessment can reasonably reject. Painting the great Bible translator into the total picture of Reform is the more fruitful task to which the author devotes the major part of this book. He discusses the validity of Wyclif's judgments of the Church, the increasingly nationalistic climate that encouraged him, his belief in the supreme authority of Scripture and insistence on its literal meaning, his theology, and the perpetuation of his thought in the doctrines and practices of the Lollards. Mr. Stacey appraises both the success and failure of Wyclif's activity, concluding that theologically and practically his contribution revolved around the precise issues that concerned the sixteenth-century Reformers. He was on the scent and going strong even if he was not to be in at the kill. Here, for all readers, is a significant new study developed with an objectivity rarely accorded one of the most baffling and controversial personalities in history.