Inventing the Lollard Past: The Afterlife of a Medieval Sermon in Early Modern England

• Autores: Alexandra Walsham
• Localización: Journal of ecclesiastical history, ISSN 0022-0469, Vol. 58, Nº 4, 2007, págs. 628-655
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • This essay explores the evolving significance of a famous fourteenth-century Paul's Cross sermon by Thomas Wimbledon in late medieval and early modern England and its transmission from manuscript to print. It highlights the ideological ambiguity of the text against the backdrop of the academic Wycliffite challenge and shows how it illuminates the permeability of the boundary between heterodoxy and orthodoxy in the fifteenth century. It then examines how the sermon was revived and published in the mid-Tudor period as a Lollard tract as part of an effort to supply the new Protestant religion with an historical pedigree and how it subsequently entered into the popular stock of commercial publishers. The afterlife of Wimbledon's celebrated sermon sheds fresh light on the ongoing process of inventing and re-inventing the pre-Reformation past.