Synopses & Reviews
In the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, Coventry harboured a community of Lollards, adherents of medieval England's only popular heresy. Allowed to flourish relatively unmolested for decades, the Coventry Lollards came under close episcopal scrutiny in 1511 and 1512 when Geoffrey Blyth, bishop of Coventry and Lichfield, began a concerted effort to uncover and eradicate their community. This volume presents a remarkable record of the testimony compiled during Blyth's crackdown, along with all other surviving evidence for heretical activities in Coventry. The documents, offered here both in their original languages of Latin and Middle English and in modern English translation, give new insights into the nature of religious dissent in the years just prior to the first stirrings of the English Reformation.
Synopsis
This volume offers new insights into the nature of religious dissent in England just prior to the English Reformation.
Synopsis
New insights into the nature of religious dissent in England prior to the English Reformation.
About the Author
Since 1992, Shannon McSheffrey has taught in the History Department at Concordia University in Montreal. She has written Gender and Heresy: Women and Men in Lollard Communities, 1420-1530 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), Love and Marriage in Late Medieval London (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Press, 1995).
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements; Editorial procedure; Abbreviations; Introduction: The prosecution of heresy in the diocese of Coventry and Lichfield, 1486-1522; The charges and the defendants' beliefs; The defendants and the practice of Lollardy; The documents; Part I. Chronology of Examinations of Coventry Lollard Suspects, 1486-1522: Part II. Prosecution of The Coventry Lollards in the Ecclesiastical Records, 1486-1522, 1486-1503,1511-1512: Abjurations, 1511-1512, Undated fragments, c. 1511-1512, 1515-1522, Explanatory notes; Part III. Prosecution of the Coventry Lollards in Foxe's Martyrologies and in the Coventry Civic Annals: Explanatory notes; Appendix 1. Suspects named in the Coventry heresy prosecutions, 1486-1522; Appendix 2. Books named in the records of Coventry heresy prosecutions, 1486-1522; Appendix 3. Clerics and others present at Coventry heresy prosecutions, 1486-1522; Index.