Before Luther: John Wycliffe, English Bible, and the Birth of Lollardy скачать в хорошем качестве

Before Luther: John Wycliffe, English Bible, and the Birth of Lollardy

Imagine England after the plague—muddy lanes, half-empty villages, wages rising because labor is scarce, and a government desperate for war taxes. In that strained world, the church is everywhere: landowner, court system, moral authority, and the gatekeeper of sacred language. Most people hear Scripture and prayer in Latin, a wall they can’t climb. And when money moves around holy things—fees, tithes, masses for the dead—some begin to wonder whether the wall protects mystery… or protects power. This long-form episode follows the man who gave those doubts a vocabulary: John Wycliffe, an Oxford-trained scholar who argued like an insider, not a street rebel. He used the system’s own tools—logic, theology, Scripture, scholastic precision—to ask questions that institutions feared precisely because they sounded competent. We walk through the hidden machinery of his age: the economic shock after the Black Death, the Hundred Years’ War and rising taxation, resentment over papal financial demands, and the humiliation of the Western Schism—two popes claiming one throne. Then we follow Wycliffe’s escalation: from critique of church wealth and “dominion” to a deeper challenge about what the church truly is, and whether obedience is still virtue when it shields corruption. We explore why vernacular Scripture mattered in a manuscript world—how English reading could shift authority from office to text, and why networks of poor preaching frightened both church and crown. We also cover the turning points that hardened the crackdown: the atmosphere after the Peasants’ Revolt, the Earthquake Synod of 1382, the tightening pressure at Oxford, and the later laws that turned heresy into a security threat. #JohnWycliffe #MedievalEngland #Lollardy #BlackDeath #WesternSchism