This book examines the afterlife of the lollard movement, demonstrating how it was shaped and used by evangelicals and seventeenth-century Protestants. It focuses on the work of John Foxe, whose influential Acts and Monuments (1563) reoriented the lollards from heretics and traitors to martyrs and model subjects, portraying them as Protestants’ ideological forebears. It is a scholarly mainstay that Foxe edited radical lollard views to bring them in line with a mainstream monarchical church. But this book offers a strong corrective to the argument, revealing that the subversive material present in Foxe’s text allowed seventeenth-century religious radicals to appropriate the lollards as historical validation of their own theological and political positions. The book argues that the same lollards who were used to strengthen the English church in the sixteenth century would play a role in its fragmentation in the seventeenth.

This detailed local history examines the impact of the Lollards and the Reformation on the society, local government and church of York.

An account of how, in certain parts of sixteenth-century England, challenges to conventional piety anticipated the Reformation. Here is a richly detailed account of the relationship between Lollard heresy and orthodox religion before the English Reformation. Robert Lutton examines the pious practices and dispositions of families and individuals in relationto the orthodox institutions of parish, chapel and guild, and the beliefs and activities of Wycliffite heretics. He takes issue with portrayals of orthodox religion as buoyant and harmonious, and demonstrates that late medieval piety was increasingly diverse and the parish community far from stable or unified. By investigating the generation of family wealth and changing attitudes to its disposal through inheritance and pious giving in the important Lollard centre of Tenterden in Kent, he suggests that rapid economic development and social change created the conditions for a significant cultural shift. This study contends that in certain parts of England by the early sixteenth century piety was subject to dramatic changes which, in a number of important ways, anticipated the Reformation. Dr ROBERT LUTTON teaches in the Department of History at the University of Nottingham.

Shannon McSheffrey studies the communities of the late medieval English heretics, the Lollards, and presents unexpected conclusions about the precise ways in which gender shaped participation and interaction within the movement.

Who were the Lollards? What did Lollards believe? What can the manuscript record of Lollard works teach us about the textual dissemination of Lollard beliefs and the audience for Lollard writings? What did Lollards have in common with other reformist or dissident thinkers in late medieval England, and how were their views distinctive? These questions have been fundamental to the modern study of Lollardy (also known as Wycliffism). The essays in this book reveal their broader implications for the study of English literature and history through a series of closely focused studies that demonstrate the wide-ranging influence of Lollard writings and ideas on later medieval English culture. Introductions to previous scholarship, and an extensive Bibliography of printed resources for the study of Wyclif and Wycliffites, provide an entry to scholarship for those new to the field.Contributors: DAVID AERS, MARGARET ASTON, HELEN BARR, MISHTOONI BOSE, LAWRENCE M. CLOPPER, ANDREW COLE, RALPH HANNA III, MAUREEN JURKOWSKI, ANDREW LARSEN, GEOFFREY H. MARTIN, WENDY SCASE, FIONA SOMERSET, EMILY STEINER. FIONA SOMERSET is at Duke University, Durham NC; JILL C. HAVENS is at Texas Christian University; DERRICK G. PITARD is at Slippery Rock University, PA.

There has been dispute amongst social historians about whether only the more prosperous in village society were involved in religious practice. A group of historians working under Dr. Spufford's direction have produced a factual solution to this dispute by examining the taxation records of large groups of dissenters and churchwardens, and have established that both late Lollard and post-Restoration dissenting belief crossed the whole taxable spectrum. We can no longer speak of religion as being the prerogative of either 'weavers and threshers' or, on the other hand, of village elites. The group also examined the idea that dissent descended in families, and concluded that this was not only true but that such families were the least mobile population group so far examined in early modern England - probably because they were closely knit and tolerated in their communities. The cause of the apparent correlation of 'dissenting areas' and areas of early by-employment was also questioned. The group concludes that travelling merchants and carriers on the road network carried with them radical ideas and dissenting print, the content of which is examined, as well as goods. In her own substantial chapter Dr. Spufford draws together the pieces of the huge mosaic constructed by her team of contributors, adds radical ideas of her own, and disagrees with much of the prevailing wisdom on the function of religion in the late seventeenth century. Professor Patrick Collinson has contributed a critical conclusion to the volume. This is a book which breaks new ground, and which offers much original material for ecclesiastical, cultural, demographic, and economic historians of the period.