This is the 6th episode in our podcast mini-series The Long Road to Reform.Much of the reform energy in the European Church of the Late Middle Ages was among the poor. Being poor meant being illiterate. The poor and illiterate don’t, as a rule, write books about their hopes and dreams.  So it’s often from sources hostile to the reforming movements of this era we learn of them. That hostility colors the picture of them much of history since has regarded them by.Wycliffe’s ideas lived on, not so much among scholars or nobles who initially endorsed them, as among the poverty-committed Lollards who went from village to village, carrying his reforms like torches, continually setting new places ablaze with reforming zeal. The Lollards preached a simple Gospel that contradicted a great deal of what commoners heard from local priests.In Bohemia, the ideas of Jan Hus, at first so popular among the gentry, ended up being embodied by an Apocalyptic sect called the Taborites, made up largely of the illiterate poor.Another movement took place in the late Middle Ages and into the Renaissance that rarely seems mention. We’ve already talked about how some women were drawn to the monastic life and lived in sequestered communities affiliated with a men’s compound. There were orders for women in both the Franciscans and Dominicans. But in the late Middle Ages, the number of women seeking inclusion in these orders swelled dramatically. So many applied, the orders had to limit their intake of new sisters. Those rejected didn’t just shrug their shoulders and go home; back to the default of being a wife and mother. Many of them decided—if the established orders wouldn’t take them, they’d form their own communities. Though not sanctioned by the Church, they devoted themselves to corporate lives of prayer, devotion, and poverty. Called beguines, [beg-geenz] their communities were usually large houses they converted into beguinages. Just what the word ‘beguine’ means is unclear; most likely a less than complimentary label assigned these women by critics. Because they lived outside the church sanction, they were suspected of being aberrant at best and probably downright heretical, if tested.The Low Countries had many lay-Beguine orders from the 13th thru 16th Cs. While they lived in semi-monastic communities, they didn’t take formal religious vows. They promised not to marry, but only so long as they remained a Beguine, something they could step out of at any time. In a practical sense, the Beguines were an attempt to re-connect with the simplicity of the Gospel as it altered one’s relationship with God and others. So Beguines focused on personal devotion to God and the care of one’s fellow man. Their charitable works were well-known across Northern Europe.Though the Church in many places passed rules banning these unofficial monastic communities, their popularity grew and soon men formed their own version. Such men where called “beg-hards” a word which eventually morphs into today’s “beggar.”Another popular movement first appeared in 1260; the flagellants. They got off to a slow start, but by the 14th C, their numbers swelled.While the personal discipline of flagellants took many forms, the primary method, the one yielding their name, was to whip themselves with the flagellum. Self-flagellation as penance for sin wasn’t new. It was a practice common to many monastic houses. Now it was a popular craze. Thousands of people from all levels of society lashed themselves till bloody, convinced by current events and the fiery preaching of Apocalyptic Announcers the end was near; that God was about to destroy the world for its failure to repent.But don’t think this was all just a bunch of emotionally-worked up illiterates who’d been stoked into some kind of mass hysteria. No: Flagellants followed a specific rite of self-flagellation and other forms of personal mortification. The movement held to a rigid discipline. While th