This study argues that medieval English political alliances with the Holy Roman Empire drew a variety of English texts into wider continental circulation, and brought English responses to domestic heresy into the orbit of international politics. I begin where political alliance and reformist fervor meet, arguing that England’s response to the Great Schism (1378-1417) and to Wycliffite heresy must be understood in terms of its broad cultural exchange with Bohemia as the Empire’s capital. When in 1382 England forged an alliance with the Empire through Richard II’s marriage to Anne of Bohemia in support of the Roman pope, the Oxford theologian John Wyclif was escalating attacks on papal authority. When Wyclif’s texts later end up in Prague, do we conclude (as many have) that Anne was somehow implicated? Did the Queen of England harbor and abet heresy?
I show how English authors from disparate ideological backgrounds co-opt Anne’s authority particularly after her death, and how their narratives have lingered on, giving Anne a long historiographical legacy. I reposition Anne in the context of English religious politics, presenting previously unknown material from Czech archives. Then I demonstrate that the circulation of texts between England and Bohemia was never limited to Wycliffte writings; that Anglo-Bohemian cultural exchange initially reflected the variegated reformist landscape in England when Wycliffism was still openly discussed among other reformist programs. Eventually this diversity of exchange would be dominated by heretical communication—a marked change from what had once been the case. In the final chapters I illustrate how, as a result of the trafficking of Wycliffite texts to Bohemia, the English prosecution of heresy came to intersect with Anglo-Imperial diplomacy in the years before the Council of Constance (which aimed to end the Schism), compelling English officials to redefine their concept of what had been considered an English heresy. The project departs from previous examinations of Anglo-Bohemian heretical communication by arguing that we see this heterodox exchange less for how it prefigured the Reformation, and more for how it participated in a widening of European cultural communication in the Schism period, particularly between England and Central Europe.