This thesis examines the means by which Walter Brut, a fourteenth-century gentryman, exerted his rhetorical influence in order to change the fourteenth-century Church. Divided into three chapters, this study translates some of Brut\u27s most controversial statements into five component tenets, through which this argues Brut exerts his said-rhetoric. Further, Brut\u27s rhetoric is corroborated and put into dialogue with the voices of two contemporaneous female writers, thereby evidencing the impact of what this little-known layman did, in his challenge to Church authority
