Europe After Wyclif

This volume brings together scholarship that discusses late-medieval religious controversy on a pan-European scale, with particular attention to developments in England, Bohemia, and at the general councils of the fifteenth century. Controversies such as those that developed in England and Bohemia have received ample attention for decades, and recent scholarship has introduced valuable perspectives and findings to our knowledge of these aspects of European religion, literature, history, and thought. Yet until recently, scholars working on these controversies have tended to work in regional isolation, a practice that has given rise to the impression that the controversies were more or less insular, their significance measured in terms of their local or regional influence. Europe after Wyclif was designed specifically to encourage analysis of cultural cross-currents--the ways in which regional controversies, while still products of their own environments and of local significance, were inseparable from cultural developments that were experienced internationally. Europe after Wyclif builds on the recent shift in scholarship to a more international exploration of late-medieval cultural transaction and religious controversy. The inclusion of "Wyclif" in the title--a reference to the Oxford theologian and reformer John Wyclif (c. 1320-1384)--anchors the volume in reformist developments that took shape in fourteenth-century England, but which quickly resonated further afield. Specifically, the volume explores intersections--the points at which Wycliffism and English religious controversy meet with broader social, cultural, historical, literary, and material issues of European significance. Contributors approach these intersections through examinations of textual transmission and compilation, polemical rhetoric and the fifteenth-century general councils, and philosophical and theological interchange, among other emphases.

J. Patrick Hornbeck II is Chair and Associate Professor of Theology at Fordham University. He is author of What Is a Lollard? and A Companion to Lollardy and editor of four volumes on medieval heresy and contemporary Roman Catholicism.

Michael Van Dussen is Associate Professor of English at McGill University. He is author of From England to Bohemia: Heresy and Communication in the Later Middle Ages and editor of volumes on manuscript studies and late-medieval European religious controversy.