Summary: this seminar takes a close look at a controversial historiographical question; that of how much the early evangelical movement in England owed to the pre-existing protest of the Lollards – in social, doctrinal or organizational terms. We will discuss the evidence for links and connections, and also seek to gain an understanding of what is at stake in the debate, for contemporaries and for modern interpreters.

Seminar and essay questions:

a) In what sense, if any, was Lollardy a springboard for the Reformation?

b) ‘Lollards only become Protestants in the sense that their history was co-opted and rewritten by Protestants.’ Discuss.

 

R Rex, The Lollards (2002), ch 5

M Aston, ‘Lollardy and the Reformation: Survival or Revival’, in Aston, Lollards and

Reformers and in Journal of Ecclesiastical History (1964) (b)

A. G. Dickens, 'Heresy and the Origins of English Protestantism', in his Reformation Studies (London, 1982), pp. 364-70

JF Davis, ‘Lollardy and the Reformation in England’, Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte (1982) and in P Marshall (ed) The Impact of the English Reformation (a)

----------, ‘The Trials of Thomas Bylney and the English Reformation’, Historical Journal (1981) (a)

----------, Heresy and Reformation in the South-East of England 1520-1559, chs 1-4

AG Dickens, The English Reformation (2nd ed) ch 5

Anne Hudson, The Premature Reformation: Wycliffite Texts and Lollard History (1988), ch. 10

G Walker, ‘Heretical Sects in Pre-Reformation England’, History Today (May 1993)

and fuller version as ch 5 of his Persuasive Fictions

Craig W. D’Alton, ‘Cuthbert Tunstal and Heresy in Essex and London, 1528’, Albion, 35 (2003) (a)

Richard Rex, ‘New Light on Tyndale and Lollardy’, Reformation, 8 (2003), 143-71 (a)

A. G. Dickens, Lollards and Protestants in the Diocese of York (1959)

JAF Thomson, ‘John Foxe and some Sources for Lollard History’, Studies in Church History 2 (1965) (b)

P Marshall, ‘Lollards and Protestants Revisited’, in M. Bose and P. Hornbeck (eds), Wycliffite Controversies (2011) (b)