This book intervenes in a field that is as old as the earliest English literary biographers, such as John Bale and John Leland, and as new as the spate of recent work coming from scholars in departments of history, theology, philosophy, literature, and language. The field concerns the study of late medieval English heresy, and the heresy in question is Wycliffism, a reformist movement oriented around the teachings of the Oxford theologian John Wyclif (d.1384). Wyclif and his followers sought great changes in the church's sacramental practices and ecclesiastical structures. They insisted, for example, that the eucharist – by far the most important of devotional forms – was needlessly mystified by the church. Specifically, they claimed that the church rationalized its own power by obscuring the significance and symbolism of the sacrament as Jesus had intended it in the Gospels: a sign of his imminent and lasting sacrifice, and not a priestly legerdemain that produces Christ's bloody, crucified body under the appearance of bread to be consumed in Mass. They also argued that the church was mesmerized by temporalities – worldly possessions, episcopal palaces, accumulated livings – and that the only way to bring that institution to a recognition of its spiritual charge would be to effect its complete disendowment at the hands of the secular arm, redistributing its resources to the poor and into the foundation of new grammar schools and universities.