Abstract
The relationship between Lollardy and Protestantism has long been the subject of intense debate. On the one side, Lollardy has been seen as at least preparing the soil if not sowing the seeds of Protestantism. On the other, it has been dismissed, in terms of the Reformation, as at worst an irrelevance and at best a sideshow. On both sides it can probably be agreed that the debate is longer on arguments than on evidence. There is little direct evidence that Lollardy paved the way for Protestantism. And by the nature of things there can be no direct evidence to the contrary. That leaves arguments, which on the one side rest chiefly on the massive doctrinal overlap between the two bodies of teaching, and on the other on the paucity of evidence for significant contact between adherents of the two movements.
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Notes
J. Gairdner, Lollardy and the Reformation in England (4 vols, London, 1908–13).
J. J. Scarisbrick, The Reformation and the English People (Oxford, 1984), p. 6.
J. F. Davis, ‘Lollardy and the Reformation in England’, Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 73 (1982), pp. 217–36, at p. 219. See also his Heresy and Reformation in the South East of England, 1520–1559 (London, 1983).
A. G. Dickens, The English Reformation (2nd edn London, 1989), pp 46–60, esp. p. 59.
Margaret Aston, ‘Lollardy and the Reformation: Survival or revival?’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 49 (1964), pp. 149–70. Even Thomson, sceptical about the extent and coherence of Lollardy in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, concludes that Lollardy may well have prepared the ground for Lutheranism (which he sees as having spread speedily). See his Later Lollards, pp. 51, and 138.
C. R. L. Fletcher, An Introductory History of England (5 vols, London, 1904), I, p. 301. This reached its 10th printing in 1929.
Not since Euan Cameron’s The Reformation of the Heretics (Oxford, 1984).
Q. Skinner, ‘The limits of historical explanations’, Philosophy 41 (1966), pp. 199–215.
D. D. Smeeton, Lollard Themes in the Reformation Theology of William Tyndale (Kirksville, MO, 1986), is a study which (as I hope to show on another occasion) is entirely innocent of Skinner’s critique and is in consequence massively flawed in its methods and its conclusions.
Diarmaid MacCulloch, Tudor Church Militant (London, 1999), pp. 109–14.
For revealing insights into several of these urban reformations, see P. Collinson and J. Craig (eds), The Reformation in English Towns, 1500–1640 (Basingstoke, 1998).
See Maria Dowling, Fisher of Men: A Life of John Fisher, 1469–1535 (Basingstoke, 1999), pp. 63–6.
R. A. Houlbrooke, ‘Persecution of heresy and Protestantism in the diocese of Norwich under Henry VIII’, Norfolk Archaeology 35 (1970–73), pp. 308–26, esp. pp. 311 and 322–23. These four cases left no trace in the diocesan records, unlike the other known burnings, in which case they may have been recorded in separate documentation now lost.
N. P. Tanner, The Church in Late Medieval Norwich, 1370–1532 (Toronto, 1984), p. 162, for the absence of recorded Lollardy to 1532; see Houlbrooke, ‘Persecution of heresy’, p. 312, and p. 323 (appendix, no. 46), for Myles.
M. C. McClendon, The Quiet Reformation (Stanford, 1999), pp. 68, 75, and 142.
J. Craig, ‘Reformers, conflict, and revisionism: The Reformation in sixteenth-century Hadleigh’, Historical Journal 42 (1999), pp. 1–23.
W. J. Sheils, The Puritans in the Diocese of Peterborough, 1558–1610 (Northampton, 1979), pp. 13–14.
K. G. Powell, ‘The beginnings of Protestantism in Gloucestershire’, Transactions of the Bristol and Gloucestershire Archaeological Society 90 (1971), pp. 141–57.
Caroline Litzenberger, The English Reformation and the Laity (Cambridge, 1997).
G. J. Mayhew, ‘Religion, faction and politics in Reformation Rye’, Sussex Archaeological Collections 120 (1982), pp. 139–60, at pp. 142–3.
R. B. Manning, Religion and Society in Elizabethan Sussex (Leicester, 1969), pp. 151–4, 159–64, and 221–37.
Glanmor Williams, Wales and the Reformation (Cardiff, 1997), p. 32.
C. Carpenter, ‘Gentry and community in medieval England’, Journal of British Studies 33 (1994), pp. 340–80, esp. pp. 341–52. By the end of the Tudor era the county had become a far more significant unit.
Andrew Sulston, ‘Catholic recusancy in Elizabethan Norfolk’, Norfolk Archaeology 43 (1998), pp. 98–110, at p. 100. Litzenberger, English Reformation and the Laity, p. 28.
D. MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer (New Haven, CT, and London, 1996), pp. 26–9.
For Joan Bocher, see J. F. Davis, ‘Joan of Kent’; and also C. J. Clement, Religious Radicalism in England, 1535–1635 (Edinburgh, 1997), pp. 35–67, who investigates links between Lollardy and radical religion.
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© 2002 Richard Rex
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Rex, R. (2002). From Lollardy to Protestantism. In: The Lollards. Social History in Perspective. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-230-21269-5_5
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