Reading, Wycliffe and Lollardy: Seeds of the Reformation Revolution

From PBS Secrets Of The Dead: The Battle For The Bible:  In the 14th century, the Roman Catholic Church was Western Europe's undisputed religious authority, and its central rituals -- the Mass and Communion -- the only legitimate pathway to salvation. The pope and the clergy held enormous power, and secular authorities looked to the Church for legitimation. Key to the Church's power was the fact that its rituals were conducted in Latin, a language inaccessible to the uneducated faithful. The public was completely dependent on the priesthood for access to salvation -- only through mysterious rituals conducted in an unfamiliar tongue could they conduct their spiritual lives.

John Wycliffe, born around 1320, was a prominent theologian at Oxford University and a leading ecclesiastical politician in the dark period of English history following the decimation of Europe's population by the Black Plague. He became convinced through his own scholarship that Scripture itself, rather than the Mass, should be seen as the source of Christian authority.

Wycliffe's notion that the Bible should be translated into the common tongue for the edification of all believers was a radical innovation, and one that spawned a movement. Working outside of the Church, translators eventually produced perhaps hundreds of so-called "Wycliffe Bibles," translated and hand-copied from the Latin. It is not clear that Wycliffe himself produced any translations into English, so they are more properly known as "Wycliffite" Bibles.

With or without Wycliffe's active involvement, the English Bible became part of an underground movement that became known as Lollardy and continued to spread after Wycliffe's death in 1384. It worried Church authorities enough that by 1407 the English translation was denounced as unauthorized, and translating or using translated Bibles was defined as heresy -- a crime for which the punishment was death by burning. In 1415 Wycliffe himself was denounced, posthumously, as a heretic. His body was exhumed and burned in 1428. Wycliffite Bibles, even after the ban, were produced in great numbers, and the 250 or so that now remain are the largest surviving body of medieval English texts. But the time was not yet right for the Bible to exist publicly in the common tongue.

Over the next century, however, life in England and in Europe would change radically. As the Renaissance got under way on the Continent, scholars began to rediscover Hebrew and Greek, the original languages of Scripture, and their work would spark a new series of translations even as the propagation of the printing press made possible the mass-production of books."
 

Wycliffe was a contemporary of Chaucer and loomed large in his time, and Chaucer had many Lollard friends; the decadence described in The Pardoner's Tale in The Canterbury Tales is widely believed to be a tip of the hat to Wycliffe.

The Lollards really set the stage or prefigure the coming Reformation, especially in terms of how reading is an inherently political act.