ABSTRACT
Chapter 2 turns to a well-known group of marginalized figures in the late middle ages: the Wycliffites. Much of the chapter examines The Testimony of William Thorpe and The Plowman’s Tale, showing first how William Thorpe’s narrative representation of a mind of exile rewrites a disempowering interrogation into an ideologically affirming testimony. Given the frequent usage of liminality and exile, I contend that some Wycliffites developed an internal sense of exile and understood its potential power for altering traditional religious authority. The desire to write themselves into and out of the margins thus enabled them to reshape centers of power in their literature, like an exiled Constance who then travels back to the center of her spiritual and political world.
