The Historiography of the Lollards and John Wyclif, 1700-1900

Abstract

The philosopher and heresiarch John Wyclif and the Lollards, the religious radicals who followed, have always divided opinion. Held up as reformers and models of evangelical piety by some, for others they were heretics and insurrectionists. This thesis examines the hitherto neglected subject of responses to Wyclif and the Lollards in Britain in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

It maps the historiographical landscape, examining writing about John Wyclif and the Lollards as it passed through the hands of writers situated across the denominational spectrum from nonconformist to Catholic, as well as general historians whose concerns were predominantly secular. It seeks to examine all the principal types of writers who entered the debate, including the abridgers and editors of Foxe’s Acts & Monuments, general historians who followed the lead of Paul de Rapin de Thoyras and David Hume in the eighteenth century, and John Lingard in the early nineteenth, as well as confessional historians and polemicists who produced ecclesiastical histories. The range of genres widened during the nineteenth century to include popular evangelical novels and polemic, the writing of high churchmen like Dean Hook and Samuel Maitland and the first attempts at more academic analysis towards the end of the century.

It argues that throughout this time, writers have reimagined Wyclif and the Lollards in their own image, rendering them as heroes or villains to suit their own preconceptions. No-one was neutral or even displayed what we now understand as academic objectivity. To demonstrate this, it contextualises the historiography, showing how it was influenced by trends in wider society, both religious and secular; and how Wyclif and the Lollards provided historians with antecedents, allowing them to situate their own denominational or historical positions within a contextual framework and endow them with the authenticity of historical precedent.