Lollards of Coventry, 1486–1522

by Edited and translated by Shannon McSheffrey , Norman Tanner

• ISBN13: 9780521830836
• ISBN10: 0521830834
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2003-11-10
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

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.

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.