John Wyclif – författare

This second volume of English Wycliffite sermons is an edition of the sermons for the Proper and Common of Saints together with two Wycliffite tracts. It is intended to be used with close reference to Volume 1, comprising the sermons on Sunday Epistles and Gospels, which appeared in 1983. The sermons form part of a complete sermon cycle preserved in part or as a whole in the thirty-one manuscripts described in Volume I. The tracts are also preserved, mainly - but not exclusively - in these same thirty-one manuscripts.The two-part introduction to this volume contains an account of five additional manuscripts, and also a discussion of the textual history of the sermons in the Sanctorale and of the tracts. The latter complements the material on the Sunday Epistles and Gospels already published, and when the edition is complete, it will set the history of the Sanctorale in the context of the whole cycle. The sermons are of great interest not only in their handling of Lollard ideas but also in their utilization of theological and scientific ideas; they indicate the level of sophistication expected of their readers.

De Universalibus Volume II: On Universals

John Wyclif is known for translating the Vulgate Bible into English, and for arguing for the royal divestment of the church, the reduction of papal power and the elimination of the friars and against the doctrine of transubstantiation. His thought catalyzed the Lollard movement in England and provided an ideology for the Hussite revolution in Bohemia. Wyclif's Trialogus discusses divine power and knowledge, creation, virtues and vices, the Incarnation, redemption and the sacraments. It consists of a three-way conversation, which Wyclif wrote to familiarize priests and layfolk with the complex issues underlying Christian doctrine, and begins with formal philosophical theology, which moves into moral theology, concluding with a searing critique of the fourteenth-century ecclesiastical status quo. Stephen Lahey provides a complete English translation of all four books, and the 'Supplement to the Trialogue', which will be a valuable resource for scholars and students currently relying on selective translated extracts.

John Wyclif (d. 1384) was among the leading schoolmen of fourteenth-century Europe. He was an outspoken controversialist and critic of the Church, and, in his last days at Oxford, the author of the greatest heresy that England had known. This volume offers new translations of a representative selection of his Latin writings on theology, the Church and the Christian life. It provides a comprehensive view of the life of this charismatic but irascible medieval theologian, and of the development of the most prominent dissenting mind in pre-Reformation England. This collection will be of interest to undergraduate and graduate students of medieval history, historical theology and religious heresy, as well as scholars in the field.

The tenth of twelve treatises Wycliff wrote between 1374 and 1382, On Simony forms an integral part of his summa.