What is a lollard? Generations of historians and propagandists, bishops and inquisitors, theologians and polemicists have asked this question about the dissenters who began to trouble the English church in the late fourteenth century; indeed, many interpretations of the English Reformation have turned on its answer.
This is a book not only about lollards but also about the terms and categories that have been used to describe them: through the process of documenting and analysing the dissenting beliefs preserved in lollard texts and the records of heresy trials, what becomes apparent is...