John Wycliffe, "was an English preacher, writer and Bible translator who has been called "the morning star of the Reformation." He preached and wrote against various doctrines and practices of the Church of Rome, translated the Bible into English, and sent itinerant preachers (later called Lollards) throughout England to bring to the common people the the Word of God and the message of salvation through Jesus Christ,who was lived almost 200 years before the Reformation, but his beliefs and teachings closely match those of Luther, Calvin and other reformers. As a man ahead of his time, historians have called Wycliffe the "Morning star of the Reformation."
The work of wycliffe, a prose writer only, and a 'scared' and philosophical prose writer , is less novel, less attractive, but not less important. Little, despite his fame and the violent partisanship for and against him, is really known of the auther. we do not know when John Wycliffe was born or where, though the probabilities connect his birth with the place of Wycliffe-on-rees and the time of 1320-1325. He was certainly master od Balliol(a northern college) at Oxford, in 1360;and by the confession of his opponents,was a recognized expert in theology and scholastic philosophy.
The english work of Wycliffe and the Wyclifites (for a large part of the university of Oxford was saturated with his doctorine, and the complete body of Wyclifian literature is rather an earlier 'Tracts for the Times'than the work of any one man) consists on the one hand of a new and complete translation of the Bible, on the other of a considerable mass of tracts and sermons inteded for popular consumption.
Wyclif is chiefly remembered and honored for his role in Bible translating. In the early 1380's he led the movement for a translation of the Bible into English, and two complete translations (one much more idiomatic than the other) were made at his instigation. (How much of the translating he did himself, if any, remains uncertain.) He proposed the creation of a new religious order of Poor Preachers who would preach to the people from the English Bible. Today, the Wyclif Foundation, named in his honor, is committed to translating the Bible into all the languages spoken anywhere in the world.Sources: (1) Every Man's Book of Saints (Mowbray's, London and Oxford, 1981); (2) Encyclopedia Britannica; (3) The New Catholic Encyclopedia; (4) H B Workman, John Wyclif: a Study of the English Medieval Church, 2 vol, 1926. (5) George Saintsbury,A Short History of English Literature
