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The etymology of the term lollard remains a source of dispute among scholars: was it coined in the heat of the academic controversies in the University of Oxford in which John Wyclif and his followers played such a prominent role, or was it a pre‐existing term of abuse only retroactively applied to Wycliffites and their supporters? Examining the ways in which discourses about lollardy have inadvertently shaped our assumptions and research agendas, this chapter proposes a new model for thinking about the category ‘lollardy’, a model that draws not only on the traditional disciplines of literary, historical, and theological studies but also on those of psychology and biology. This model has the potential not to solve the mystery of which inhabitants of late medieval England were and were not lollards but, rather, to help students of lollardy ask more helpful questions of the sources.

This chapter traces Wycliffite beliefs about salvation, starting with an analysis of Wyclif's doctrines of grace and predestination. Rather than espousing the view that God has arbitrarily elected those who will be saved and condemned those who will be punished, as medieval polemicists and later scholars alike have argued, Wyclif and many Wycliffite writers instead ascribed to good deeds an essential role in the process of salvation. A majority of lay heresy suspects agreed, and only a few defendants endorsed predestinarian views after the turn of the sixteenth century. This trend suggests that many dissenters were hesitant to abandon the dominant religious world view of the Middle Ages. Ecclesiastically sponsored sermons, poems, plays, and other texts often privileged the need to perform good works over and above the operation of grace, and whilst lollard dissenters were not enthusiastic about such practices as indulgences and bequests for soul‐masses, the underlying logic of their soteriologies was strikingly similar.

Whereas many lollards never questioned a works‐oriented approach to the doctrine of salvation, dissenting views on the Eucharist reveal more substantial divergences from orthodoxy. The Mass was at the heart of late medieval religious practice, and it was Wyclif's decision to reject the doctrine of transubstantiation that led in 1381 to his exile from Oxford. Scholars have long known that Wyclif believed that Christ is spiritually present in the consecrated elements, and it has been held that, in the hands of later dissenters, his theology of remanence slowly evolved into a figurative interpretation of the sacrament. Instead, Wycliffite tracts and court records reveal that figurative and remanence theologies were both current in the early fifteenth century, and the patterns of their dissemination reveal the roles that family and civic ties played in the formation of heterodox beliefs. Figurative theologies of the Eucharist were especially prevalent among the communities of Coventry and Lichfield, Salisbury, and Winchester dioceses, and it was in these regions of England that texts articulating such views circulated most widely.

The fundamentally conservative impetus of much dissenting thought can perhaps best be seen in the areas of lay marriage and clerical celibacy, which this chapter examines. After surveying the development of the medieval church's doctrine of marriage, it argues that Wyclif's views were conservative but ultimately pragmatic. Though chaste marriage was his ideal, Wyclif acknowledged that not all have the capacity to abstain from sexual intercourse. In any case, marriage should not be governed by church courts; it is the mutual consent of the partners and not the approval of the priest that creates a marriage. Later writers tended to articulate somewhat more pessimistic views, conceiving of marriage primarily as a remedy for lust. At the same time, Wyclif's grudging acceptance of some married clergymen was taken in the opposite direction by many of those who came after him, who insisted that all clerics should marry in order not to succumb to the temptations which might arise from a lukewarm commitment to chastity. The views articulated in dissenting texts as well as trial records thus call into doubt the traditional view that lollardy was an innovative movement where issues of gender and sexuality were concerned.

This introductory chapter presents the background of the study on lollardy animating this book. After a brief discussion of the history of lollardy the chapter turns to a more in-depth overview of the available textual evidence on lollardy—the writings influenced by John Wyclif, and similar—and how previous scholars have interpreted this evidence so far, especially in the midst of controversy surrounding the movement. This chapter also sets forth the research method undertaken for an investigation into lollard affiliations and clarifies pertinent terminologies and preconceptions as to what this book’s overall study will entail. In so doing the chapter aims to equip readers with an eye for subtlety in examining religious writings and in making their own decisions on their affiliations with lollardy.

This chapter lays out the groundwork for a newly broadened understanding of the audiences and purposes of lollard writings and a newly sharpened picture of their central characteristics. Specifically, it uses a lengthy cycle of sermons from the 1390s (SS74) as a springboard for discussion into lollard pastoral teaching. The writer of the SS74 had aimed to reconfigure traditional pastoral teaching so that it would reflect his new convictions and lead his own little flock toward salvation, although the chapter argues that this proclivity for grassroots reinvention is not particularly distinctive of lollard pastoral teaching. Rather, it presents a new and distinctive basis for thinking about church membership and religious practice.

This chapter shows that lollard writings about prayer attach distinctive meanings to prayer as an activity and to the words that should be prayed, even as they draw very extensively on the common ground they share with the mainstream tradition. The chapter notes, however, that how widely the lollard writings on prayer selected for discussion were read, and by whom, and how they influenced the religious practice of ordinary people, some of whom may also have been investigated for heresy, remains uncertain. It emphasizes that the relationship between writings about prayer and the meanings ordinary people attached to prayer are not completely unrecoverable and deserve further investigation.

This chapter investigates a very common and widespread characteristic of lollard writings: their use of narrative forms, especially but not only drawn from the bible, to give their readers models for holy living. In these narratives they provide their readers with a training in feeling—that is, lollard writers use stories to show their readers how to feel like saints. Yet lollards are usually thought to disapprove of stories—and they do, at least some of the time, avoid narrative. Popular sermons containing entertaining stories were especially associated with the friars; however, lollards criticize this kind of preaching, and what is more, they do not practice it.

This chapter discusses two ‘prison’ texts which are remarkably similar: both present the heretical investigation of a suspected Lollard, which appears to fall short of a formal trial, occurring at the beginning of the 15th century, yet before the publication of Arundel's Constitutions in 1409, and described by the ‘ suspect’ himself shortly after the examination, when he was returned to prison. Indeed, Wyche's Trial and Thorpe's Testimony are the only two surviving documents in which a Lollard describes his own heretical examination. Both texts present a persuasive autobiographical identity so constructed to impact upon the political situation for which the author finds himself imprisoned. Both texts construct textual identities whose exemplary behaviour in the face of imprisonment and persecution is designed to encourage other Lollards in the firmness of their beliefs, and convince of the corruption of the Church. Both authors construct a favourable literary identity through intertextual reference.

Fall of Princes is one of the most consistently partisan poems Lydgate ever wrote: in addition to his complicity in national politics, Lydgate, a member of the abbey community at Bury St Edmunds, was caught up in ecclesiastical power struggles. This chapter analyses the Fall as an expression of Benedictine orthodoxy and discusses the ways in which Lydgate adapts the poem to articulate the superiority of spiritual authority over secular power. Key narratives (such as those dealing with Roman persecution of Christianity, the emperors Theodosius and Julian the Apostate, and the Donation of Constantine) are analysed with reference to the French source. Contextual evidence is given for the topicality of these issues in Lydgate's home monastery at Bury, including specific conflicts between the abbey and William Alnwick, bishop of Norwich, over questions such as clerical taxation and the examination of the Lollard heresy in the diocese.

This concluding chapter examines a largely neglected short text that eschews polemical declaration but that nonetheless within its short length touches on all the characteristic emphases in lollard writings that we have discovered across the course of this book, compactly providing us with an occasion to draw them together and to demonstrate how they allow us to identify and describe lollard writings more effectively. Fyve Wyttes presents a good example of how lollard writings encourage their readers’ active engagement in the discovery of truth by teaching them to doubt and question. It also provides a final example of how late medieval usage of “lollard” was often more flexible than that in some recent scholarship.

This chapter engages with commentaries on the commandments (or “hestis”) of God’s law across their full extent, as formal systems each of which attempts to find a balance amid the tensions involved in the lollard attempt to center the religious life of a community on the commandments—love versus learning, self-discernment versus correction of others, difficult versus easy, certitude versus despair, sufficiency versus inadequacy, all truth in few words versus few words that somehow encapsulate all truth. It examines all of the extant freestanding exegeses of the gospel precepts in Middle English and the single copy of the longest and most compendious of all lollard commentaries on the commandments, in order to illustrate a means of reading texts of this kind.

This chapter examines the extent of the common ground, of both theory and practice, between lollards and their contemporaries both academic and extramural, as well as between lollards and mainstream tradition. This common ground has sometimes been denied, even now, by those who want to insist instead that lollards are fleshly adherents to the letter of the biblical sense, who “inspiciunt sacram scripturam et solum capiunt litteram et non sensum” (“search through holy scripture and take only the letter, and not the sense”). The chapter argues that such an accusation does not apply to lollard writers, any more than it will to Wyclif, for their biblical interpretations are just as devoted to uncovering the spiritual sense of scripture by means of the full range of interpretative methods available to them in the Christian tradition as those of any of their contemporaries.

This chapter examines in depth a set of lollardy’s most self-consciously literary writings: writings that are attentive to literary style and rhetoric and that develop with unusual thoroughness the possibilities of speaking “gostili.” “Gostili” speech is the lollard habit of redefining in spiritual or metaphorical terms a concept usually presented as material, bodily, or closely defined by institutional convention. This chapter shows how lollard writers deployed spiritualizing metaphors for religious structures in order to adapt what had been presented as a second-best means to holiness for those unable to join a religious order into an alternative presented as better than religious life, the only true form of religion, and one that all who want to be saved should embrace.