This 3-day conference, bringing together scholars from Oxford, Prague, and other academic centres, will explore the complex relationships between Wycliffite and Hussite thinking and textual production. This is a major topic of transnational interdisciplinary research. The conference will have a primary focus on two key aspects of Wycliffite and Hussite thought. First, their location in a pan-European landscape of religious and intellectual controversy, from England in the west to Bohemia and Poland in the east. Second, on questions of methodology: i.e. the philosophical, exegetical, textual-critical and other scholarly methods that Wycliffites and Hussites developed, defined, appropriated and critiqued in the course of their endeavour to produce a range of learned and quasi-learned texts, in Latin as well as in vernacular tongues.
The conference will therefore address the following themes while bearing the above foci in mind: intellectual history; philosophy of language; Wegestreit; impact on intellectual life and on universities; methods in exegesis and eschatology; Biblical translation and translation of other learned discourses; interaction of learned and ‘quasi-learned’ discourses; devotional and other reading for the laity; international contexts/ exchanges/ synergies, especially the Councils of Constance and Basel; public intellectuals and the role of the theological magisterium; the transfer of Wycliffite and Hussite ideas across Europe; anti-Hussite polemics; afterlife of conciliar and other condemnations