Author Description

This volume addresses a perennial question in the history of English religion: to what extent did the late-medieval dissenters known as lollards influence the Protestant Reformation? To answer this question, it examines the afterlife of the lollards as shaped by sixteenth-century evangelicals, especially John Foxe, and their seventeenth-century successors. Foxe's Acts and Monuments (1563) is second only to the Bible as the most influential book in early modern England, a juggernaut in Tudor historical writing that solidified the emergent national church. His reorientation of the lollards from heretics and traitors to martyrs and model subjects portrayed these medieval dissenters as Protestants' ideological forebears. This volume offers a strong corrective to the traditional interpretation that Foxe heavily edited radical Lollard views to bring them in line with a mainstream monarchical church. Instead, it shows that a wealth of non-mainstream material is present in Foxe's text that allowed seventeenth-century religious radicals to appropriate the lollards as historical validation of their own theological and political positions, including the act of separation. Lollards in the English Reformation traces the ensuing struggle for the Lollard legacy between conformists and nonconformists, arguing that the same lollards that Foxe used to bolster the fledgling English church in the sixteenth century would play a role in its fragmentation in the seventeenth. This fresh and exciting research promises to shake up our assumptions about Foxe, the levels of radicalism in post-Reformation Protestantism and the significance of historical precedent in post-Reformation polemic.