This is the most complete account yet of Lollardy, the medieval English heretical movement derived from the ideas of John Wyclif that anticipated many of the ideas and demands of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century reformers and Puritans. Considering new evidence--such as texts composed or assembled by adherents of Lollardy, episcopal records, chronicles, and tracts written against Wyclif and his followers--Hudson offers an exceptionally coherent picture of the movement, sheds new light on the reasoning that lay behind the radical opinions of Wyclif's disciples, and demonstrates that the concern shown by ecclesiastical authorities may have been justified.

In a work that is as much about the present as the past, Brad Gregory identifies the unintended consequences of the Protestant Reformation and traces the way it shaped the modern condition over the course of the following five centuries. A hyperpluralism of religious and secular beliefs, an absence of any substantive common good, the triumph of capitalism and its driver, consumerism—all these, Gregory argues, were long-term effects of a movement that marked the end of more than a millennium during which Christianity provided a framework for shared intellectual, social, and moral life in the West. Before the Protestant Reformation, Western Christianity was an institutionalized worldview laden with expectations of security for earthly societies and hopes of eternal salvation for individuals. The Reformation’s protagonists sought to advance the realization of this vision, not disrupt it. But a complex web of rejections, retentions, and transformations of medieval Christianity gradually replaced the religious fabric that bound societies together in the West. Today, what we are left with are fragments: intellectual disagreements that splinter into ever finer fractals of specialized discourse; a notion that modern science—as the source of all truth—necessarily undermines religious belief; a pervasive resort to a therapeutic vision of religion; a set of smuggled moral values with which we try to fertilize a sterile liberalism; and the institutionalized assumption that only secular universities can pursue knowledge. The Unintended Reformation asks what propelled the West into this trajectory of pluralism and polarization, and finds answers deep in our medieval Christian past.

A consistent, indigenous English doctrine of scriptural perspicuity correlates with a commitment to the availability of the vernacular scriptures in English and supports the English roots of the Early English Reformation (EER). Although political events and figures dominate the EER, its religious component springing from John Wyclif and streaming throughout the tradition must be recognized more widely. This book critically surveys the doctrine of scriptural perspicuity from the beginning of the Church in the first century (noted as early as John Chrysostom) through the seventeenth century, examining its impact on the current debates concerning competing hermeneutical systems, reader response hermeneutics, and the debates in conservative American Presbyterianism and Reformed theology on subscription to the Westminster Confession of Faith, the length of «creation days», and other issues.

A fully revised and updated version of this authoritative account of the birth of the Protestant traditions in sixteenth-century Europe, providing a clear and comprehensive narrative of these complex and many-stranded events.

The New York Times bestselling author of How the Irish Saved Civilization reveals how the innovations of the Renaissance and the Reformation changed the Western world. • “Cahill is our king of popular historians.” —The Dallas Morning News This was an age in which whole continents and peoples were discovered. It was an era of sublime artistic and scientific adventure, but also of newly powerful princes and armies—and of unprecedented courage, as thousands refused to bow their heads to the religious pieties of the past. In these exquisitely written and lavishly illustrated pages, Cahill illuminates, as no one else can, the great gift-givers who shaped our history—those who left us a world more varied and complex, more awesome and delightful, more beautiful and strong than the one they had found.

A historian examines the evolution of dissenting thought and how it shaped the transformation of England from a rural to an urban, industrialized society. The foundations for the Industrial Revolution were in place from the late Middle Ages, when the early development of manufacturing processes and changes in the structure of rural communities began to provide opportunities for economic and social advancement. Successive waves of Huguenot migrants and the influence of Northern European religious ideology also played an important role in this process. The Civil Wars would provide a catalyst for the dissemination of new ideas and help shape the emergence of a new English Protestantism and divergent dissident sects. The persecution that followed strengthened the Nonconformist cause, and for the early Quakers it intensified their unity and resilience—qualities that would prove to be invaluable for business. The book proceeds to explore how in the years following the Restoration, Nonconformist ideas fueled enlightened thought, creating an environment for enterprise but also a desire for more radical change, how reformers seized on the plight of a working poor alienated by innovation and frustrated by false promises—and how the vision which was at first the spark for innovation would ignite revolution.