The Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy Podcast, brought to you

with the support of the Philosophy department at King's College London and the

LMU in Munich, online at history of philosophy.net.

Today's episode, Morning Star of the Reformation, John Wycliffe.

Among 14th century scholastics, you'd be hard-pressed to name two such dissimilar men as John Burredon and John Wickcliffe.

Where Burredon was a prominent nominalist, Wycliffe stated that all envy or actual

sin is caused by the lack of an ordered love of universals.

Where the Eternal Artsmaster Burreden steered clear of theological issues, Wycliffe made daring pronouncements

on such subjects as the sacraments and divine predestination.

But the two do have one thing in common, apart from their given name.

Both are famous above all for something they never actually did.

Just as Buriden did not in fact devise the thought experiment of a donkey choosing between two bales of hay,

so Wickcliffe did not translate the Bible into English.

In 1396, the chronicler Henry Knighton gave him credit for doing so, or rather the blame.

He wrote, because of him the content of scripture has become more common and more open to laymen

and women who can read than it customarily is to quite learned clerks of good intelligence, and thus the pearl of the gospel is scattered abroad and trodden underfoot by swine.

But though Wycliffe may have inspired and help guide the effort that produced the so-called Wycliffe Bible, scholars are agreed that it was in fact the work of many hands. The association of Wycliffe's name with the English Bible did it no favors,

and helps to explain the banning of this version of scripture in England in 1409.

For Wycliffe became notorious as no other Englishman of the time.

He was hated by the Church for his relentless attack on ecclesiastical wealth.

He was associated with the peasants' revolt of 1381, which involved the murder of an archbishop and rioting in London.

Perhaps unfairly, given that the revolt was less an expression of his ideas, than an angry backlash against tax policies and attempts to keep wages artificially

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