The history of the Lollard movement is intimately concerned with their writings and literacy. Anne Hudson's work in this field is the most important modern contribution to the subject. This collection of articles makes indispensable reading for anyone interested in the history or the literature of the period.

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.

The text is in Middle English with extensive supplemental notes that help to fully explain the context of each work. This new MART edition comes with a revised and updated bibliography by the editor.

Fiona Somerset examines the lollard movement by closely reading their own writings, which provide rich evidence for how lollard writers collaborated with one another and with their readers to produce a distinctive religious identity based around structures of feeling.

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.

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.

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.

J. Patrick Hornbeck II explores the wide range of lollard beliefs on some of the key issues in late medieval Christianity. He argues that the beliefs of individual dissenters were conditioned by a number of social, textual, and cultural factors.

DIVHow medieval texts represent and reproduce normative heterosexual identities./div