The Wycliffite Heresy: Authority and the Interpretation of Texts

by Kantik Ghosh

Overview

This is a study of the Wycliffite heresy, otherwise known as Lollardy, which flourished in England in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. Kantik Ghosh examines major texts by John Wyclif, William Woodford, Nicolas Love, Thomas Netter as well as the anonymous authors of the English Wycliffite Sermons, along with a wide range of scholastic, homiletic and meditative texts in Latin and English. Whatever the ultimate fate of Lollardy as a religious movement, he reveals that the debates it initiated successfully changed the intellectual landscape of England.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521807203
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	10/04/2001
Series:	Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature , #45
Pages:	314
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 9.33(h) x 0.91(d)
Lexile:	1570L (what's this?)

About the Author

Kantik Ghosh is DARBY Fellow and Tutor in English Literature at Lincoln College, University of Oxford. He has contributed articles to Poetica, New Medieval Literatures, and the Scottish Literary Journal. This is his first book.

Table of Contents

Introduction; 1. John Wyclif and the truth of sacred scripture; 2. William Woodford's anti-Wycliffite hermeneutics; 3. Vernacular translations of the Bible and 'authority; 4. The English Wycliffite sermons: 'thinking in alternatives'?; 5. Nicholas Love and the Lollards; 6. Thomas Netter and John Wyclif: hermeneutic confreres?; Afterword: Lollardy and late-medieval intellectuality; Notes; Bibliography; Index.

Editorial Reviews

"This excellent book makes an original contribution to the study of attitudes to the Bible and its authority on the part of Wyclif, his followers, and their opponents."
- Journal of English and Germanic Philology

"Ghosh's book is highly readable, and he presents his argument lucidly. ...a valuable addition to Wyclif/Lollard studies."
- Renaissance Quarterly

"...a valuable addition to the scholarship of the area and era."
- History

"...a superb first book, learned, elegant, stimulating, and challenging."
- Sixteenth Century Journal, Richard Rex, Faculty of Divinity, University of Cambridge

"Ghosh's learned and lucidly written work, which, above all, shows the myriad breakdowns in hermeneutical logic in the dialogue between Wycliffites and anti-Wycliffites, will be of great interest to all students of interpretation, late-medieval England, and heresy."
- Speculum, Ruth Nissé,

From the Publisher