John Wyclif c. 1320 – 1384

John Wyclif was an English scholastic philosopher, theologian, and reformer, often called the morning star of the Reformation. Master of Balliol College and a doctor of theology at Oxford, he developed in his metaphysical writings a strongly realist theory of universals and a doctrine of dominion grounded in grace, on which lawful possession depends on righteousness. His later attacks on papal authority, ecclesiastical wealth, and the doctrine of transubstantiation, set out in De Civili Dominio, De Veritate Sacrae Scripturae, and De Eucharistia, shaped the Lollard movement in England and, through his disciple Jan Hus, the Hussite reform in Bohemia.

John Wyclif was born in the 1320s, probably at Hipswell or Wycliffe-on-Tees in Yorkshire. He spent almost his whole adult life at Oxford, taking his master's degree at Merton, becoming master of Balliol around 1360, and earning the doctorate in theology at Queen's in 1372. He held a series of rectories that kept him in funds, served the crown on the Bruges peace embassy of 1374, and from the late 1370s lived under the protection of John of Gaunt while preaching from his country rectory at Lutterworth.

His Latin output is enormous, comprising the political treatises De Dominio Divino and De Civili Dominio, the polemics De Veritate Sacrae Scripturae, De Ecclesia, De Eucharistia, and De Potestate Papae, the systematic Trialogus, and the verse-by-verse Postilla covering the entire Bible. Under his influence a circle of Oxford scholars produced the first complete English Bible, the so-called Wycliffite or Lollard versions, completed shortly after his death.

Wyclif argued that righteous lordship is held directly from God and can be forfeited by sin, that endowed church property should be subordinate to civil power, that Scripture in the vernacular is the supreme authority, and against the doctrine of transubstantiation in favour of a 'remanence' of the bread and wine. He died at Lutterworth on the last day of 1384; the Council of Constance condemned his teaching in 1415 and ordered his bones disinterred and burnt, a sentence executed in 1428.