author
John Wycliffe
d. 1384
A bold English thinker, priest, and Oxford scholar, he challenged church power and helped inspire later reform movements. He is especially remembered for the movement linked to the first complete Bible in English and for insisting that Scripture should be available to ordinary people.
1 Audiobook
The last age of the church
by John Wycliffe
About the author
Born in Yorkshire in the 1320s and dying in 1384, John Wycliffe was an English theologian, philosopher, and priest whose career was centered on Oxford. He became one of the most controversial religious voices of his age by criticizing abuses in the medieval church and questioning the extent of papal authority.
Wycliffe argued strongly for the authority of Scripture and for a simpler, more faithful church. He is closely associated with the first complete translation of the Bible into English, a project that made biblical teaching more accessible and helped spread his ideas beyond the university.
His followers, often called Lollards, carried his teachings into later generations. Although condemned by church authorities, Wycliffe is widely remembered as an important forerunner of the Reformation and as a figure whose ideas had a long afterlife in English religious history.