(Ebook) What is a Lollard?: Dissent and Belief in Late Medieval England (Oxford Theology and Religion Monographs) by Hornbeck II, J. Patrick ISBN 9780199589043, 0199589046

(Ebook) What is a Lollard?: Dissent and Belief in Late Medieval England (Oxford Theology and Religion Monographs) by Hornbeck II, J. Patrick ISBN 9780199589043, 0199589046

What is a lollard? Generations of historians and propagandists, bishops and inquisitors, theologians and polemicists have asked this question about the dissenters who began to trouble the English church in the late fourteenth century; indeed, much of the contested historiography of the English Reformation has turned on its answer. This is a book not only about lollards but about the terms and categories that have been used to describe them. It argues that the members of the dissenting communities of fourteenth‐, fifteenth‐, and sixteenth‐century England did not subscribe to a static set of theological ideas but, instead, departed from the consensus of the late medieval church in a host of diverse and evolving ways. The beliefs of individual dissenters were conditioned by a number of social, textual, and cultural factors, including the ideas they discussed with other members of their local communities, the texts to which they had access, and the influence of mainstream religion and spirituality. Careful attention to these dynamics at the local level, as well as to the theological content implicit in Wycliffite texts and ecclesiastical records, can disclose the ways in which dissenting beliefs changed over time and varied from individual to individual and community to community. By undertaking detailed studies of lollard beliefs about salvation, the Eucharist, marriage, the clergy, and the papacy, and by juxtaposing lollards' own texts with the records of their trials, the book seeks to uncover, and where possible to explain, the many divergent strands of lollard belief.