This gathering of sixteen articles, with an introduction and summarizing afterword to the volume are, in effect, the proceedings of a conference of the Lollard Society held in Oxford in 2009, entitled “Lollard Affiliations: Literary, Historical, Theological.” The resulting essays are unsurprisingly diverse in their topics, but the editors have arranged them helpfully in an attempt to offer a kind of status quaestionis for contemporary studies of Wycliffe and a diffuse movement associated with him, Lollardry, generally referring to those strains of ecclesiastical and theological dissent thought to have been occasioned by academics, clergy, and laity who aligned themselves with his ideas. The editors and organizers of the conference have achieved a substantially indicative volume in this regard. The book is timely, a reflection of a general shift in the sensus gentium among Wycliffite/Lollard scholars over the past two decades regarding the accuracy of previous, often divisively polemical, constructions of Wyclif's work and significance; in the characterization of some Protestants he was a noble and radical reformer, “Daystar of the Reformation,” while for historians with a Tridentine perspective he was little more than a vulgar heretic. The picture of Wyclif and the Lollards that emerges from this volume is much more balanced and, I think it may be said, more accurately representative of historical realities than mainstream scholarship of the previous century. Nominally characterized in much of that writing as an intellectual thug, political subversive or proto-Reformation hero, in the light of much study of contemporary manuscripts both in Latin and Middle English, Wyclif himself and even some of his followers are increasingly being seen as substantially within the range of possible Catholic opinion on most issues, their devotional practices and preaching more harmonious, if more intense, with orthodoxy, and their passion for civic rectitude more a function of altruism about social virtue and chivalric idealism than a desire for a revolution of the masses.

The very terms “Wycliffite” and “Lollard” have often been confused and occasioned confusion. The editors have taken the expedient of guiding their contributors toward restriction of the first of these terms “to describe ideas and individuals which were indebted . . . to the teachings . . . of John Wyclif,” permitting the second, “Lollard,” to cover “the whole spectrum of individuals, practices, and beliefs” seen as theologically suspect in the period” (2–3). While the second term thus remains much less precise than one might wish, the distinction points a path toward greater accuracy (for example, not every religious dissenter in late fourteenth or fifteenth-century England was a follower of Wyclif).

Among the highlight essays in this collection, Ian Christopher Levy's “A Contextualized Wyclif: Magister sacrae paginae” offers perhaps the best balanced brief theological analysis of Wyclif's Oxford lectures and writings available anywhere to date. Wyclif's hermeneutic, beginning with his commitment to canonical reading, his conviction that all scripture is one word of God and therefore requires contextual placement for the reading of individual books of scripture, Levy shows to be basic to Wyclif's whole theology. Far from heretical, this view was in fact thoroughly traditional, having precedents in Augustine, Aquinas, Bonaventure, Nicholas of Lyra and Henry of Ghent, as well as analogues in figures such as Jean Gerson and Paul of Burgos. When Wyclif questions certain theological statements of contemporary theologians, it is from a platform he shares with authorized Catholic exegetes and theologians. The succeeding essay by Alastair Minnis, “Wyclif 's Eden: Sex, Death, and Dominion,” finds further that, on balance, Wyclif was less polemical than experimental, and was even in his style of debate much more representative of fourteenth-century theologians at Oxford and elsewhere than is sometimes claimed.

Among other essays which deserve special mention, the essay on “Wyckliffes Wycket and Eucharistic Theology,” by co-editor J. Patrick Hornbeck, is particularly helpful in marking how Lollard leadership “practiced a literate dissenting Christianity which focused on the reading and discussion of vernacular texts” (279) and in drawing attention to the obvious limitation of court proceedings as a guide to actual practice and beliefs of the Lollards. The late Mary Dove notes in her essay, “The Lollards' Threefold Biblical Agenda,” a frequently observed feature of Lollard evangelical outreach for which the historian of more recent evangelicalism will find a ready analogue, namely, that typically they worked assiduously to get their message out, but were vague and somewhat lackadaisical on the matter of follow-up pedagogy.

Finally, Fiona Somerset's “Afterword” nicely draws together the main conclusions of the conference and the volume: in her recapitulation the Oxford Wycliffites can now be acknowledged to have included many learned authors, respected by their colleagues, yet whose influence extended well beyond the walls and halls of the university, gaining currency (as well as misrepresentation) among ordinary lay followers. Of those called “lollards” she suggests that on the evidence we should regard most of them as in fact more Catholic than not. There is an evident academic moral to this book, namely, that polemicized partisanship both in the time and since has resulted in false accusations and trumped-up evidence upon which there has been far too little close critical scrutiny. If such partisan prejudice is to be checked in contemporary scholarship, she and her fellow contributors argue, then it will be through the diligent, patient study of all possible texts of the principals themselves.