Kantik Ghosh argues that one of the main reasons for Lollardy's sensational resonance for its times, and for its immediate posterity, was its exposure of fundamental problems in late medieval academic engagement with the Bible, its authority and its polemical uses. Examining Latin and English sources, Ghosh shows how the same debates over biblical hermeneutics and associated methodologies were from the 1380s onwards conducted both within and outside the traditional university framework, and how by eliding boundaries between Latinate biblical speculation and vernacular religiosity Lollardy changed the cultural and political positioning of both. Covering a wide range of texts - scholastic and extramural, in Latin and in English, written over half a century from Wyclif to Thomas Netter - Ghosh concludes that by the first decades of the fifteenth century Lollardy had partly won the day. Whatever its fate as a religious movement, it had successfully changed the intellectual landscape of England.

"This excellent book makes an original contribution to the study of attitudes to the Bible and its authority on the part of Wyclif, his followers, and their opponents."
- Journal of English and Germanic Philology

"Ghosh's book is highly readable, and he presents his argument lucidly. ...a valuable addition to Wyclif/Lollard studies."
- Renaissance Quarterly

"...a valuable addition to the scholarship of the area and era."
- History

"...a superb first book, learned, elegant, stimulating, and challenging."
- Sixteenth Century Journal, Richard Rex, Faculty of Divinity, University of Cambridge

"Ghosh's learned and lucidly written work, which, above all, shows the myriad breakdowns in hermeneutical logic in the dialogue between Wycliffites and anti-Wycliffites, will be of great interest to all students of interpretation, late-medieval England, and heresy."
- Speculum, Ruth Nissé,