English Reformation was not, by itself, a Reformation. However, the political break with Rome was inseparable from the success of Protestantism. English Catholicism was strong and popular in the early 1500s, and while there were those who held Protestant sympathies, they would have remained a religious minority if political events had not intervened. An earlier reform movement that anticipated some Protestant teachings but remained outside the religious mainstream was Lollardy. Derived from the writings of John Wycliffe, a 14th-century theologian and Bible translator, Lollardy stressed the primacy of Scripture and emphasised the preaching of the word over the sacrament of the altar,
John/Eleanor Rykener John/Eleanor Rykener's arrest and interrogation took place at the height of the spread of Lollardy. Lollardism was deemed heresy, and it was only a few weeks after Rykener's arrest that its followers promulgated their "Twelve Conclusions". The Rykener case, comments Dinshaw, must have been "like a nightmare of the Lollard imagination", consisting as it did of a "cross-dressed prostitute who had had sex with so many clerics s/he couldn't remember them all confirm[ing] the Lollards' lowest expectations of the prelacy". The third of the Lollards' twelve conclusions specifically addressed the question of clerical sodomy, which Lollardism blamed on the church's