SOURCE: Hearnshaw, F. J. C. “John Wycliffe and Divine Dominion.” In The Social and Political Ideas of Some Great Medieval Thinkers, edited by F. J. C. Hearnshaw, pp. 192-223. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1923.

In the following excerpt, Hearnshaw sketches Wyclif's life, surveys his writings, and encapsulates his thought on ecclesiastical and political subjects, concluding that Wyclif was not in any significant sense a religious thinker but rather a rationalist.

Wycliffe was born in the north of England about the year 1320. As he grew up to manhood, the evils which had marked the opening of the fourteenth century became manifestly worse. In particular, the Papacy, exiled from Rome and established at Avignon (1309-76), having been robbed of its temporal suzerainty, lost also its spirituality, and sank into a deplorable condition of religious apathy, moral corruption, and intellectual contempt. It also passed under the control of its destroyer, the king...