The Middle English Bible. Henry Ansgar Kelly
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be remembered, and though that project was recognized as very important, there was hardly any mention of it left in writing, just notings of its beginning and end.
The production of the ur-EV text (that is, EEV) may have been the inspiration of a single master in the theology faculty at Oxford, perhaps even Wyclif himself, in his Wycliffian, pre-Wycliffite period (not very likely, I think, given his linguistic shortcomings). If Gregory Martin by himself translated the entire Vulgate in eighteen to twenty months, our hypothetical professor along with a half-dozen graduate students, with their MAs long behind them, could have completed the whole Bible in a matter of three or four months. The resulting text could then have been circulated as a whole or by books or groups of books, as a working text, not only for the use of other students and masters, but also with an eye to further refinement, perhaps with the familiar medieval request to readers to improve the text, as, for instance, when Simple Creature says, “I pray, for charity and for common profit of Christian souls, that if any wise man find any default of the truth of translation, let him set in the true sentence, and open, of Holy Writ.”102 Or perhaps a message like that of William Tyndale at the end of his 1526 New Testament:
Count it as a thing not having his full shape, but as it were born afore his time, even as a thing begun rather than finished. In time to come, if God have appointed us thereunto, we will give it his full shape, and put out, if aught be added superfluously, and add to, if aught be overseen through negligence, and will enforce to bring to compendiousness that which is now translated at the length, and to give light where it is required, and to seek in certain places more proper English.103
At any rate, once the translation began to be reproduced, many changes were introduced into it by the copyists and users, some merely scribal, whether mistakes or dialectal features, some conscious corrections or intended improvements. We can only conjecture how many of the conscious improvements were “authorized” by the original translators or their supervisor. We must take very seriously Fristedt’s demonstration that there was a consistent effort that transformed EEV into EV. But we can readily imagine that many changes were “sports,” or mutations not naturally or deliberately selected to survive (to speak genetically). One example noted in the Chapter 2 is the intervention of an either speaker in the Gospel of Luke in Douce 369.2 (used by Forshall and Madden as their main EV text), predominantly not found in other EV copies, and not at all in LV.104
Then, after a few years, we can speculate, two other masters decided it would be a good idea to systematically revise the new translation in such a way that it would not adhere so closely to the Latin forms, to produce a text that would be more amenable to wider use, in sermons and in the liturgy in local parishes. One of these masters would take responsibility for the Old Testament; he and his students were predominantly either speakers and did not have a set objection to forsooths (to mention a couple of features that we have noticed above). The other master gathered a group to handle the New Testament. They doubtless took to themselves whatever copies of EV happened to be at hand, doubtless in various states of correction or revision—whether or not acting in consultation with EV’s original translators. Once again, the whole enterprise need not have taken a great deal of time.
The terminus ante quem for EV is 1397, because of the Egerton Bible found to have been in the possession of Thomas of Gloucester at his death.105 What is the terminus a quo? Most of those who believe it to be “the Wycliffite Bible” date its beginnings to around 1380; but Conrad Lindberg, taking Simple Creature’s schedule as authentic, traces its beginnings, as we have seen, to Wyclif ’s first arrival at Oxford in 1354, when he would have begun to prepare the Latin edition, with glossing beginning around 1360, with EV produced around 1370–80 and LV finishing around 1390.106 If, on the other hand, we take EV to be a simple and quick translation, with no necessary involvement by Wyclif, our speculations can be wide-ranging, even ante tempus dicti Johannis Wyclif. As we will see below, “the time of John Wyclif” was defined as dating from when he began to disseminate his heresies.107
CHAPTER 4
Oxford Doctors, Archbishop Arundel, and Dives and Pauper on the Advisability of Scripture in English
Let us turn our attention now to various positions on the allowability or advisability of translating the Bible into the vernacular, specifically English. We will begin with works by three Oxford doctors of theology, namely, Thomas Palmer, a Dominican friar, William Butler, a Franciscan friar, and Richard Ullerston, a secular priest (like Wyclif and Hereford).
Thomas Palmer, OP: Partially for, Partially Against Translation
The prominent Dominican friar Thomas Palmer produced a treatise called De translacione Sacre Scripture in linguam barbaricam, which has usually been considered to be later than the others that we are considering here, but the recent researches of Cornelia Linde have called that judgment into question.1 The work was edited by Margaret Deanesly in her Lollard Bible with some mistakes and with a misleading title, putting Anglicanam rather than barbaricam.2 Linde establishes the correct title and finds no reason to doubt Palmer’s authorship (which has been considered questionable in the past). Palmer mentions the Lollards adversely twice, but because of his mild treatment of them, Linde suggests that the exchange it details may have taken place comparatively early, perhaps in the 1380s.3 The academic structure of the treatise might suggest that it was completed while he was still at Oxford, where he achieved his doctorate in theology by 1393, the year that he was appointed provincial of his order in England.4 It was also in 1393 that he allegedly defended the recently reconciled Nicholas Hereford from a Lollard critic, but I judge that this response was written by Hereford himself.5 However, when Palmer wrote in defense of images in 1398, he still cast his treatise in academic form, specifying that it was a determination made “in the schools of St. Paul, London.”6
The treatise on translation begins, like most scholastic exercises, with a question favoring the “wrong side”: “Utrum Sacra Scriptura in linguam anglicanam vel in aliam barbaricam sit transferenda,” that is, “Whether Sacred Scripture should be translated into the English or any other barbarous tongue,” and it opens with eighteen arguments for the affirmative, Quod sic videtur (we can call this part 1),7 followed by another eighteen Ad oppositum (part 2),8 corresponding to the Sed contra arguments that one finds in Thomas Aquinas’s Summa theologiae. But then Palmer complicates the form by positing thirteen “other truths” (aliae veritates), of which the first is in favor of translation and the others against, or at least against translating all of Scripture (part 3).9 Next comes a brief reply to some of the veritates (part 4),10 followed by a Responsio on “not giving what is holy to dogs” (part 5).11 Finally, there are answers to the original eighteen arguments in favor of translation (part 6).12 Some parts are in rougher shape than others, and Linde suggests that it is to some extent a reportatio of an actual debate, which was not put into final form.
The bald distinctions “for” and “against” in this summary obscure Palmer’s own point of view, which emerges throughout the treatise: he agrees that essential portions of the Bible should be translated, but believes that other portions should not be translated, and, in fact, he holds that some portions cannot be translated adequately into a barbaric vernacular like English, which lacks the necessary sophisticated elements of style and structure to accommodate the scriptural meaning. His position is summed up in the final argument of the treatise, where the expectation is that he will refute the eighteenth argument in favor of translation, which is this: “According to the rule of reason, we understand that all things are conceded that are not prohibited; but there is not found anywhere in Scripture that it is forbidden to be translated into a barbaric idiom.”13 But the response to argument 18, which constitutes the end of the treatise, addresses an argument against translating any part of Scripture, and refutes this argument:
To