ABSTRACT
The use of printing for purposes of religious polemic was a German innovation. Only after 1520, and the first reports of Lutheran influence in England, did concern begin to be expressed ahout the influence of the press. Nevenheless, the association hetween books and heresy was over a century old hy then, and English bis hops had long heen accustomed to confronting their subversive influence. The Lollards had been great writers, and grea t readers. In 1414, according to the indictment later preferred against the offenders, 'p lures libros Anglicos' had been seized in Colchester, where they had been read 'hoth by day and (night ), secretly and openly, sometimes in company, and some-, times individually'.1 Over 230 manuscripts of the Lollard Bible are known and about 30 versions of the 'sermon cyele', Contemporary evidence also suggests that large quantities of ephemera were produced, usually referred to as schedulae, and quaterni, ahhough these now survive only in occasional fragments. 2 The manner and extent of the interaction between existing Lollard ideas and the new theology being imported from the Continent in the 1520s are matters of controversy among hi storians of the English Reformation. Ir has, however, heen established that a number of Lollard tracts, books and verses were printed in whole or in part by Protestant editors and puhlishers. For example The Lantern of Lyght, issued in London by Roben Redman, probably in 1535, also survives in two pee-Reformation
rnanuseripts. l Similarly The examinacion of Master Wilfiam Thorpe (Antwerp, 15 30) was derived direedy from a fifteenth-centufY souree . At least ten other examples have been identified.4 There seern to have been {WO main reasons for {his. One was tha{ {heir polemical armoury could be added to with very little effoet, given the congruity of the ideas. The other was that the antiquity of the works themselves served a useful purpose. As the aUfhor of A proper dyaloge betfvene a gentil/man and an husbandman put it,
Not only could such arguments be used [0 support the Protesta nt historiography of the two ehurches, they also provided a partial answer to the Catholic gibe 'where was YOUf church before Luther?'.
