Patrick Collinson writes:

Evans’s title means what it says: this is a study of Wyclif as both ‘myth and reality’. The myth, what Wyclif was not, is represented by the dust jacket, which features a spurious portrait, modelled perhaps on the iconography of Moses, taken from Lutterworth in Leicestershire, where, on the last day of 1384, Wyclif, having suffered a stroke, died in bed at his rectory; and where, half a century later, Pope Martin V had his bones exhumed, burned, and the ashes thrown into the River Swift. Leicestershire folklore maintained that on the spot where one of the bones being carried to the fire fell, a spring of pure water spontaneously emerged, and became known as St John’s Well, it was widely thought after Wyclif (in fact, the well was situated within the grounds of a medieval hospital dedicated to St John the Baptist). We have little idea of what Wyclif looked like, indeed who he was.

(LRB 22 February 2007)

Lion | hardback 320 pp. |ISBN: 9780745951546