John Wycliffe
John Wycliffe argued that the church should own no property and that everyone should be able to read the Bible, and his bones were dug up and burned forty-four years after he died. He was an Oxford theologian, master of Balliol, and by the 1370s the most formidable philosopher in England, and he was employed by the crown on an embassy about papal taxation, which is where his politics attached to his theology. His argument began with dominion. Authority, he held, is granted by God on condition of grace, so a church in sin has no right to its property and a righteous secular power may take it — a conclusion that made him extremely useful to John of Gaunt and to a parliament resenting payments to a papacy at Avignon under French influence. He went further than his patrons wanted. He denied transubstantiation, rejected papal supremacy as unscriptural, dismissed monasticism, indulgences and the veneration of relics, and held that scripture alone is authoritative and that every Christian should read it in his own tongue. The translation associated with him was made by his followers from the Latin Vulgate in the 1380s and copied by hand in great numbers, and possession of it became evidence of heresy. He was condemned but never burned, and died of a stroke at his rectory in Leicestershire in 1384. The Council of Constance condemned him posthumously in 1415, and his remains were exhumed, burned and thrown in a river in 1428. Hus had read him, and Luther read Hus.
- Lived: 1328 CE – 1384 CE
- Nationality: English
- Roles: religious_leader, philosopher
