John Wycliffe

John Wycliffe was an Oxford philosopher, theologian, and priest whose reformist writings earned him the moniker "The Morning Star of the Reformation." Wycliffe argued that papal authority was subordinate to scripture and that all Christians had a divine right to read God's word in their vernacular tongue. Together with his circle of Oxford scholars, Wycliffe completed the first translation of the entire Bible into English in 1382. His followers, nicknamed Lollards, traveled the English countryside with handwritten copies, sowing the seeds of the English Reformation more than a century before Martin Luther.