In about 1950, A.L. Rowse persuaded K.B. McFarlane to contribute to his biographical series 'Teach Yourself History' a short book on John Wyclif, an Oxford intellectual dead for six hundred years and the only arch-heretic bred in Catholic England before the Tudors and the Reformation. In one way this wasn't surprising, since Rowse and McFarlane were friends. But in another way it was, since the philosophical reasonings and theological transgressions of Wyclif, if not some of their political repercussions, were not a subject one would have associated with McFarlane. It's not strange that the result was a brilliant little book - the only one by the most influential 20th-century historian of the Middle Ages to be published in his lifetime. But it is strange that G.R. Evans, in what is blurbed as 'the first major biography of Wyclif to be published for almost a century' (the reference is to the two volumes published by H.B. Workman in 1926), makes no reference to it.

LRB 22 February 2007 | PDF Download