John Wycliffe

John Wycliffe spent his career as a scholastic philosopher and theology professor at Oxford, but his political-theological theory of dominion put him on a collision course with the Church. He argued that men in mortal sin had no right to exercise authority or own property, and that the church itself should hold no wealth and maintain no ecclesiastic courts - a demand for radical clerical poverty that made him an influential dissident within his own priesthood. Though recent scholarship has scaled back claims about his direct role in translating the Vulgate into Middle English, his ideas spread: followers called Lollards carried forward his skepticism about transubstantiation, the veneration of saints, and the papacy itself, while his Latin writings shaped the Czech reformer Jan Hus. Wycliffe died on 31 December 1384, dubbed both the "evening star" of scholasticism and the "morning star" of the English Reformation - a hinge figure whose challenge to Church power prefigured the Protestant break that would come more than a century later.