Orthodoxy and Heresy

This bibliography is intended as a guide to the critical works on orthodoxy and heresy in the medieval West. It is by no means complete, and my own interest in the Lollard or Wycliffite movement of the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries has skewed the majority of entries in the direction of later English dissent. That being said, however, Lollardy and related phenomena in England (and to a lesser extent in Wales and Scotland) are best understood within the larger context of pan-European heterodoxy.

As R. I. Moore was among the first to show in his groundbreaking work The Origins of European Dissent (Oxford, 1985), it was in the early eleventh century that heresy returned to the European consciousness after several centuries of putative ecclesiastical unity. Ensuing years saw the rise of the Cathars in the Languedoc, of the Waldensians in the southwest of modern-day France and the northwest of modern-day Italy, of the Free Spirit heretics in the Low Countries, and of the Lollards in England. Recent scholarship has emphasized that these “movements” were often not so much centrally driven organizations as they were loose networks of individuals and constructions of ecclesiastical and political elites.

The bibliography below includes an admittedly cursory selection from the dozens of Lollard and anti-Lollard texts which have been edited, many recently; in the interests of brevity it also selects sparingly from the secondary studies, omitting much valuable work on the manuscript transmission of Lollard texts. A fully comprehensive bibliography of primary and secondary literature on the Wycliffite movement is available from the home page of the Lollard Society, www.lollardsociety.org; it also appears in print as the conclusion to the collection Lollards and Their Influence in Late Medieval England, eds. Fiona Somerset, Jill C. Havens, and Derrick Pitard (Woodbridge, 2003).

Asterisks denote especially valuable works.

This bibliography has been provided by J. Patrick Hornbeck II at St Cross College, Oxford. Please see our UK and Worldwide Contacts page for details regarding his research and for his contact information.

Posted 21st October 2004

General studies and studies of non-English heretics

Audisio, Gabriel, The Waldensian Dissent: Persecution and Survival (Cambridge, 1999)

Congar, Yves M.-J., Etudes d’Ecclésiologie Médiévale (repr. London, 1983)

Duvernoy, Jean, Le catharisme, 2 vols. (Toulouse, 1986)

Hendrix, Scott H., “In Quest of the Vera Ecclesia: The Crises of Late Medieval Ecclesiology,” Viator 8 (1977), 347–69

Leff, Gordon, Heresy in the Later Middle Ages: The Relation of Heterodoxy to Dissent, c. 1250–c. 1450, 2 vols. (Manchester, 1967)

*Lambert, Malcolm, Medieval Heresy, 3d edn. (Oxford, 2002)

Lerner, Robert E., The Heresy of the Free Spirit in the Later Middle Ages (Berkeley, 1972)

*Moore, R. I., The Birth of Popular Heresy (repr. Toronto, 1995)

*———, The Formation of a Persecuting Society (Oxford, 1987)

Reeves, Marjorie, Joachim of Fiore and the Prophetic Future, rev. edn. (Phoenix Mill, 1999)

Jonathan Sumption, The Albigensian Crusade (London, 1999)

Wakefield, Walter L., Heresy, Crusade, and Inquisition in Southern France, 1100–1250 (London, 1974)

*Wakefield, Walter L., and Austin P. Evans, eds., Heresies of the High Middle Ages (New York, 1991)

Primary sources for the study of English dissent

**Nearly all of John Wyclif’s extant Latin writings were edited at the turn of the twentieth century through the labours of the now-defunct Wyclif Society. Modern editions of several of Wyclif’s tracts are in print or forthcoming, and the Wyclif Society volumes are in the process of being published electronically by a collaborative venture based at Georgetown University.

Arnold, Thomas, ed., Select English Works of John Wycliffe , 3 vols. (Oxford, 1869–71)

* Fasciculi Zizaniorum , ed. W. W. Shirley (London, 1858)

*Hudson, Anne, ed., Selections from English Wycliffite Writings (Cambridge, 1978)

*Hudson, Anne, and Pamela Gradon, eds., English Wycliffite Sermons , 5 vols. (Oxford, 1983–1997)

Knighton, Henry, Chronicon , ed. J. R. Lumby, 2 vols. (London, 1889–95)

———, Knighton’s Chronicle , ed. and trans. G. H. Martin (Oxford, 1995)

Matthew, F. D., ed., The English Works of Wyclif Hitherto Unprinted , rev. edn. ( Early English Text Society 74, 1902)

McSheffrey, Shannon, and Norman Tanner, eds. and trans., Lollards of Coventry, 1486–1522 (Camden Fifth Series 23, 2003)

Netter, Thomas, Doctrinale Antiquitatum Fidei Catholicae Ecclesiae , ed. B. Blanciotti, 3 vols. (Venice, 1757–9)

Swinburne, Lilian M., ed., The Lanterne of Liõt ( Early English Text Society 151, 1917)

Tanner, Norman P., ed., Heresy Trials in the Diocese of Norwich, 1428–1431 (London, 1977)

———, ed., Kent Heresy Proceedings 1511–12 ( Kent Records 26, 1997)

Early and hence in many ways dated studies of Wyclif and his followers

Gairdner, James, Lollardy and the Reformation in England: An Historical Survey , 4 vols. (London, 1908)

Lechler, Gotthard Victor, John Wycliffe and His English Precursors , trans. Peter Lorimer, rev. edn. (London, 1884)

McFarlane, K. B., John Wycliffe and the Beginnings of English Nonconformity (London, 1952)

———, Lancastrian Kings and Lollard Knights (Oxford, 1972)

Workman, H. B., John Wyclif: A Study of the English Medieval Church , 2 vols. (Oxford, 1926)

Contemporary scholarly work on dissent in late-medieval England

**Anne Hudson’s magisterial study The Premature Reformation (Oxford, 1988) deservedly remains the standard account of Lollard history, belief, and textuality. Her collection of essays, Lollards and Their Books (London, 1985) offers a series of additional important perspectives on English heresy.

Aston, Margaret, “Lollardy and Sedition,” Past and Present 17 (1960), 1–44, repr. in Lollards and Reformers: Images and Literacy in Late Medieval Religion (London, 1984), 1–48

———, “Were the Lollards a Sect?” in The Medieval Church: Universities, Heresy, and the Religious Life: Essays in Honour of Gordon Leff ( Studies in Church History Subsidia 11, Woodbridge, 1999), 163–191

———, “Wyclif and the Vernacular,” in Anne Hudson and Michael Wilks, eds., From Ockham to Wyclif ( Studies in Church History Subsidia 5, Oxford, 1987), 281–330

Catto, Jeremy, “Fellows and Helpers: The Religious Identity of the Followers of Wyclif,” in The Medieval Church: Universities, Heresy, and the Religious Life: Essays in Honour of Gordon Leff (Studies in Church History Subsidia 11, Woodbridge, 1999), 141–161

———, “Wyclif and Wycliffism at Oxford, 1356–1430,” in idem and Ralph Evans, eds., The History of the University of Oxford , vol. 2. (Oxford, 1984), 175–261

Forrest, Ian James, “Ecclesiastical Justice and the Detection of Heresy in England, 1380–1430” (D.Phil. thesis, Oxford University, 2003)

Hudson, Anne, “Wyclif and the English Language,” in Anthony Kenny, ed., Wyclif in His Times (Oxford, 1986), 85–103.

———, “Wycliffism in Oxford, 1381–1411,” in Anthony Kenny, ed., Wyclif in His Times (Oxford, 1986), 67–84

Justice, Steven, Writing and Rebellion: England in 1381 (Berkeley, 1994)

Lahey, Stephen F., Philosophy and Politics in the Thought of John Wyclif (Cambridge, 2003)

McSheffrey, Shannon, Gender and Heresy: Women and Men in Lollard Communities, 1420–1530 (Philadelphia, 1995)

Peikola, Matti, Congregation of the Elect: Patterns of Self-Fashioning in English Lollard Writings (Turku, Finland, 2000)

Plumb, Derek J., “The Social and Economic Spread of Rural Lollardy: A Reappraisal,” in W.J. Sheils and Diana Wood, eds., Voluntary Religion ( Studies in Church History 23, Oxford, 1986), 111–29

Rex, Richard, The Lollards (London, 2002)

Robson, J.A., Wyclif and the Oxford Schools (Cambridge, 1961)

Strohm, Paul, England’s Empty Throne: Usurpation and the Language of Legitimation, 1399–1422 (New Haven, Conn., 1998)

*Szittya, Penn R., The Antifraternal Tradition in Medieval Literature (Princeton, N.J., 1986)

*Thomson, J. A. F., The Later Lollards: 1414–1520 (Oxford, 1965)

Watson, Nicholas, “Censorship and Cultural Change in Late-Medieval England: Vernacular Theology, the Oxford Translation Debate, and Arundel’s Constitutions of 1409,” Speculum 70 (1995), 822–64

*Wilks, Michael, Wyclif: Political Ideas and Practice , ed. Anne Hudson (Oxford, 2000)