form movements within the Roman Church but it was a spent force by 1440. The Church was manifestly not a democracy, it was not suited to government by a representative assembly, and both theological and political divisions among the conciliarists themselves gravely undermined the authority of the council. From this period of aberration in the history of the hierarchical Church emerged the Italian papacy of the Renaissance. This was firmly grounded on a temporal, territorial foundation in the papal state, largely recovered by military force and purchase under Martin V and deeply involved in the politics of the Italian peninsula. Yet the tribulations of the Church during the Avignonese period and the schism had some positive results. Ideas of reform were in the air and in England, France, and Germany reforming circles grew up inside the Church which were not without influence. Improved clerical education was undertaken in England under the aegis of the bishops, diocesan and provincial councils valiantly strove to check abuses in Germany, and the late fifteenth-century humanist reformers at Paris, such as Lefèvre d'Etaples, contributed to the Church's development as a many-faceted institution which comprehended a remarkable diversity of pastoral, intellectual, and devotional styles.
The Church had experienced two great shocks during the schism: the rise of the Wycliffite or Lollard heresy in England and the outburst of Hussitism in Bohemia. Both movements had certain beliefs in common, particularly upon the sacramental role of the clergy and the disendowment of the Church, but the eventual outcome of their activities was very different. Whereas the Wycliffite heresy lost the support of members of the ruling classes (the so-called 'Lollard Knights'), Hussitism was taken up and championed by many of the Bohemian nobility. Before 1414 the English nobility had certainly harboured and patronized Wycliffite clergy, but the association of Lollardy with political sedition by that date meant that members of the knightly class, although they had welcomed proposals for the disendowment of the Church, rejected Lollard beliefs. The rising led by Sir John Oldcastle deprived the movement of the support which was crucial to its survival as
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