Sixteenth-century English Protestant reformers were hard-pressed to establish a historical pedigree that would provide their ideas with weight and legitimacy. Many of those reformers turned back to early fifteenth-century Lollard texts, recycling and reprinting them to serve the needs, both political and spiritual, of the burgeoning English Protestant reform movement. The anti-clerical and reformist Lollard text, The praier and complaynte of the ploweman vnto Christe, was one of the works used by sixteenth century English Protestants in their struggle for religious reform. This is an old-spelling, critical edition of the version of The praier and complaynte of the ploweman vnto Christethat resurfaced in the 1530s. Demonstrating the continuity of ideas between the Lollards and the Reformists, Douglas Parker situates The praier and complaynte firmly in the tradition of English Reformist borrowing of texts, and argues for William Tyndale as editor of the sixteenth-century version of The praier and complaynte. Parker examines the two extant copies of the manuscript, and comments on the work's structure and reformist content. He presents full historical, literary, and biographical information in his introduction, and a full line-by-line commentary on the text. This careful, meticulous work is a revealing look at the ideology of Protestant religious struggles in England from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century.

This study examines expectations of imminent judgment that energized reform movements in Late Medieval and Reformation Europe. It probes the apocalyptic vision of the Lollards, followers of the Oxford professor John Wycliff (1384). The Lollards repudiated the medieval church and established conventicles despite officially sanctioned prosecution. While exploring the full spectrum of late medieval apocalypticism, this work focuses on the diverse range of Wycliffite literature, political and religious treatises, sermons, biblical commentaries, including trial records, to reveal a dynamic strain of apocalyptic discourse. It shows that sixteenth-century English apocalypticism was fed by vibrant, indigenous Wycliffite well springs. The rhetoric of Lollard apocalypticism is analyzed and its effect on carriers and audiences is investigated, illuminating the rise of evil in church and society as perceived by the Lollards and their radical reform program.

Giving a different perspective on the relations between early judicial process & the development of literature in England, this book argues that texts ranging from political libels & pamphlets to laments of the unrequited lover constitute a literature shaped by the crucial role of complaint in the law courts.

Literary and cultural historians typically cite Thomas More's 1516 Utopia as the source of both a genre and a concept. Karma Lochrie rejects this origin myth of utopianism along with the assumption that people in the Middle Ages were incapable of such thinking. In Nowhere in the Middle Ages, Lochrie reframes the terms of the discussion by revealing how utopian thought was, in fact, "somewhere" in the Middle Ages. In the process, she transforms conventional readings of More's Utopia and challenges the very practice of literary history today. Drawing on a range of contemporary scholarship on utopianism and a broad premodern archive, Lochrie charts variant utopian strains in medieval literature and philosophy that diverge from More's work and at the same time plot uncanny connections with it. Examining works such as Macrobius's fifth-century Commentary on the Dream of Scipio, Mandeville's Travels, and William Langland's Piers Plowman, she finds evidence of a number of utopian drives, including the rejection of European centrality, a desire for more egalitarian politics, and a rethinking of the division between animals and humans. Nowhere in the Middle Ages insists on the relevance and transformative potential of medieval utopias for More's work and positions the sixteenth-century text as one alternative in a broader historical phenomenon of utopian thinking. Tracing medieval utopianisms forward in literary history to reveal their influences on early modern and modern literature and philosophy, Lochrie demonstrates that looking backward, we might extend future horizons of utopian thinking.

William Tyndale is one of the most important of the early reformers, and particularly through his translation of the New Testament, has had a formative influence on the development of the English language and religious thought. The sources of his theology are, however, not immediately clear, and historians have often seen him as being influenced chiefly by continental, and in particular Lutheran, ideas. In his important new book, Ralph Werrell shows that the most important influences were to befound closer to home, and that the home-grown Wycliffite tradition was of far greater importance. In doing so, Werrell shows that the apparent differences between Tyndale's writings from the period before 1530 and his later writings, in the period leading up to his arrest and martyrdom in 1526, are spurious, and that a simpler explanation is that his ideas were formed as a result of an upbringing in a household in which Wycliffite ideas were accepted. Werrell explores the impact of humanist writers, and above all Erasmus, on the development of Tyndale's thought. He also shows how far Tyndale's theology, fully developed by 1525, was from that of the continental reformers. He then examines in detail some of the main strands of Tyndale's thought - and in particular, doctrines such as the Fall, Salvation, the Sacraments and the Blood of Christ - showing how different they are from Luther and most other contemporary reformers. While Tyndale, in his early writings, used some of Luther's writings, he made theological changes and additions to Luther's text. The influences of John Trevisa, Wyclif and the later Wycliffite writers were far more important. Werrell shows that without accepting the huge influence of the Wycliffite ideas, Tyndale's significance as a theologian, and the development of the English Reformation cannot be fully understood.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1973.