The names you'll encounter in this reading may not mean much to you now, but I hope at least some of them will be familiar to you by the end of the course! Jan Hus lived and died a century before Luther, and was caught up in the crisis that occurred in the church prior to the calling of the Council of Constance to resolve the papal schism. There were rebels of various stripes at that time, a notable one being John Wyclif, an English theologian whose reforms were brutally suppressed after his death. He believed that the church should not own property, and that the priestly order should submit to the authority of the secular. He also translated the Bible into English, so that the public could read it. His followers, called Lollards, were persecuted as heretics.
The Bohemian Hus was influenced by Wyclif, adding to Wyclif's beliefs a strong stance in favor of predestination. This undercut the authority of the church in the matter of such things as sales of indulgences, which were letters of remission of one's sins in return for a contribution to the church's coffers. He also argued on behalf of communion in both kinds, and challenged the effectiveness of the sacraments when administered by a sinful priest. His death at the hands of the Council of Constance is revealing of the Council's understanding of its own position: the Council, which put itself at the head of the church in response to the crisis in the papacy, proved to be as capable of burning heretics as any papal decree; in this action the Council established not only its authority but also its rootedness in the traditions of the church.
Biblical humanism, in the next section, is a term that denotes the application of humanist scholarship to the text of the Bible. Humanism focused on language--recall our discussion of philology, the study of the linguistic components of ancient texts. An understanding of the historical dimension of language, how words and their usages change over time, can help scholars know something about the time and place in which a given text was written. This was particularly important in a world in which texts were transmitted entirely by hand until the 15th century, and still largely thereafter until the print revolution really caught on. The effect of such transmission was that scribes' errors crept into manuscripts, then were repeated as other scribes drew on incorrect manuscripts in making their copies. One purpose of textual scholarship was to try to determine what the original text might have been saying, using a knowledge of the usages of the time in which it was supposed to be written.
Another application was in the work of dating a particular text. Valla's researches led to the exposing of a famous forgery, the Donation of Constantine, based on his observation of the historical references that gave the text away. In modern times, for example, we'd be aware that certain inventions hadn't occurred before a particular time; if I tried to claim a letter was written in the 1960's that used the word "internet," you'd know right away I was lying! That's the kind of anachronism Valla was able to uncover.
One result of using historical and textual scholarship on the Bible is that people began to think of the Bible not just as the eternal word of God, but as a text written in a certain time and place, at which time the Greek language was used in certain ways. This is the reason why Biblical humanism was controversial.
That's about all I'm up for writing at the moment. I'll provide more background in response to your questions and comments!