SOURCE: Knapp, Peggy Ann. “The Medieval Mind: Scholasticism and Folklore.” In The Style of John Wyclif's English Sermons, pp. 79-92. The Hague, Netherlands: Mouton, 1977.

In the following excerpt, Knapp examines Wyclif's combination of Scholastic and popular modes of argumentation in his English sermons.

[Wyclif's sermons reveal] an author with a radical idea, an idea which not only coordinated [his] thought on most subjects, but also influenced his habits of expression and perhaps his habits of conception as well. A great deal of Wyclif is revealed by following his theory of the availability of God's grace through the Bible backward to its source in philosophical realism and forward to its implications for practical reform. It took him, in Miss Deanesly's phrase ‘very far’,¹ far toward personal danger, and, from our point of view, far toward modern Protestantism. But this view of Wyclif, as long as it remains unqualified, fails...