Wycliffe Studies in History, Church, and Society

Higher education was one of the more vital battlegrounds that emerged from the religious conflict of the sixteenth century. On the one hand, education was seen as central in spreading the ideas of the Reformers. On the other hand, the success of the Catholic Reformation emanated from the foundation of seminaries on the Continent. This work explores the denominational division in education with Trinity College Dublin as a case study and with the French Revolution as a backdrop. Because the French Revolution inhibited Catholic educational facilities in Europe, the book explores the extent to which a Protestant institution accommodated Catholic needs domestically. The pattern that emerged in a revolutionary context was to have long-term consequences for higher education in Ireland.

The social history of the Reformation era remains a constant source of fascination for scholars. Of particular focus are the ways in which the movement intersected with print to help give birth to what we call "the modern era." One consistent theme is that while the story of the Reformation cannot be told without reference to print, often the more interesting stories are to be found in the trials and tribulations of the printers themselves. The Reformation of the sixteenth century was, among other things, about courageous printers. Without them, the message of the Reformation would have been limited. But the uncertainties associated with being a printer/publisher in the period between 1517 and 1648 cannot be underestimated. Nowhere was it more uncertain and confusing than in England. As it turned out, however, that turbulence helped set the stage for the achievement of the freedom of the press by the end of the seventeenth century that had been unthinkable when the Tudors occupied the throne.

John Wyclif has been a controversial figure since his own time, often dividing opinion between devoted followers and intransigent opponents. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, there was already a developing mythos about him, and he was variously used as a symbol of heretical depravity or of valorous defense of the gospel. The Reformation calcified opinions, and the two subsequent centuries did not see much development. The nineteenth century marked the beginning of important changes in scholarly opinion, with confessional approaches weakening and giving way to greater objectivity. This trend was strengthened by the emergence of a professional class of historians around the turn of the twentieth century, but the established confessional biases were not quickly done away with until the postwar period. Today, confessional mythmaking is gone and the goal is no longer to show why one particular branch of Christianity is correct, but to present as accurate a picture as possible of the past. As the concerns of the twentieth century give way to those of the twenty-first, it is encouraging that there are still new things to be learned about the past, new ways of seeing and engaging, even with figures so well studied as Wyclif.