Mishtooni Bose and J. Patrick Hornbeck ii (eds), Wycliffite controversies

Abstract

In the last twenty years or so there has been a revolution in the way theology, history and English literature have viewed the  fifteenth century in England and continental Europe. Up to the 1990s the standard view was neatly expressed by David Knowles: “… the fifteenth century in England is peculiarly barren of great men and genial ideas.” (1978) Others refer to this century as “the dark ages”  or “dull and sterile”. The main reason for this view is that the quality of religious and literary production in the fifteenth century was considered much inferior to that of the fourteenth century on the one hand and the sixteenth on the other. The imaginative and inspired vernacular spiritual writings of the fourteenth century, it is often claimed, had no equivalent in the fifteenth century because  of the Church’s repression of the Wycliffite and Lollard heresies, whose use of English had given a certain stimulus to spiritual  writings. It was commonplace to assert that the dull orthodoxy of the fifteenth century and the declining state of the Church were ripe  for reform in the sixteenth. In a sense, the fifteenth century got squeezed out as the inferior coda of the fourteenth century and  the dull prologue to the sixteenth.