The Middle English Bible. Henry Ansgar Kelly
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the translation “task force,” before going on to compile Five and Twenty Books, which he submitted as a prologue to the Old Testament. I speculate that it was not accepted by the translators because of its stridently Lollard (Wycliffite) sentiments. Thereupon, I further conjecture, the author, characterizing himself as “a simple creature,” supplemented his treatise with an account in which he took the chief credit for the entire translation enterprise.
Chapter 3 takes up the study of the Bible at Oxford and Wyclif ’s role in it and offers considerations on the production of EV and LV there, different from the account given in Five and Twenty Books (the latter shows the author, Simple Creature, not to be familiar with Oxford procedures). I will then consider some of the possible purposes for the two versions, especially EV, which may have been intended not primarily as a preliminary version but as an aid to the weakly Latinate clergy to understand the Vulgate text properly. Finally, I will offer a suggestion that EV and LV could each have been accomplished in a relatively short time with only a few participants.
In Chapter 4, I discuss controversies over the advisability of translating the Scriptures into English, from the point of view of three Oxford doctors of theology: the Dominican Thomas Palmer, the Franciscan William Butler, and the secular master Richard Ullerston, together with a report about Thomas Arundel when archbishop of York, and, finally, the views of the friar who wrote the dialogue Dives and Pauper and the Longleat Sunday Gospels Commentary.
Chapter 5 takes up the provincial constitutions formulated at Oxford in 1407, especially the seventh, Periculosa, which called for episcopal oversight of new biblical translations, and I discuss whether EV and LV were intended to be included in this supervision.
Chapter 6 attempts to trace the ways in which Periculosa was understood and enforced and examines alleged instances of persecution or the fear of persecution for the possession of EV and LV.
Finally, in Chapter 7, I take up Thomas More’s assessment of the history of the vernacular Bible in England and his opinion of the trial of Richard Hunne, as compared with verifiable trial records, which demonstrate that Hunne was in fact accused of fostering English biblical translation and was convicted (posthumously) of approving of the Wycliffite sentiments in Five and Twenty Books, which was affixed as a prologue to his copy of the English Bible. More seems to have assumed that the rest of Hunne’s Bible was Wycliffite as well, while he believed that the EV or LV Bibles that he had seen were orthodox translations produced before Wyclif ’s time.
In the Conclusion, I sum up the results of my investigations and speak of some of their implications.
The Middle English Bible was a highly significant project in its time, and it is surprising that the persons responsible for it left so few indications of how it was accomplished. Rita Copeland calls it “perhaps the greatest achievement of textual culture in medieval England.”4 I agree; but whether it was “the central and monumental achievement of the Wycliffite Lollard movement”5 remains to be seen.
A Note on the Texts Cited in This Study
EV and LV are printed in parallel columns in Josiah Forshall and Frederic Madden, eds., The Holy Bible, Containing the Old and New Testaments, with the Apocryphal Books, in the Earliest English Versions Made from the Latin Vulgate by John Wycliffe and His Followers (FM); they are searchable in The Bible in English (970–1970) (BIE) online, without variants, however, and with the letter thorn transformed to th, and the letter yogh changed to y (which I change to gh where appropriate). I also regularize the allographs i/j and u/v, and also usually regularize i and y, which were normally interchangeable in Middle English, except where it is important to preserve the original forms for purposes of scribal identification or the like. See my “Uniformity and Sense in Editing and Citing Medieval Texts,” Medieval Academy News, Spring 2004, pp. 8–9; and “Letter,” Medieval Academy News, Spring 2005, p. 6. In the main text, for the sake of clarity or ease of reading I often modernize the spelling of Middle English texts but sometimes quote the original spelling in the notes and examples. All translations are my own, unless otherwise specified.
Abbreviations
| BIE | The Bible in English (970–1970), Chadwyck-Healy online, http://collections.chadwyck.com/bie/htxview?template=basic.htx&content=frameset.htx |
| BL | British Library |
| CIC | Corpus iuris canonici, ed. Emil Friedberg, 2 vols. (Leipzig 1879–81, repr. Graz 1959) |
| CJC | Corpus Juris Canonici, 3 vols. (Rome 1582), http://digital.library.ucla.edu/canonlaw/index.html |
| CUL | Cambridge University Library |
| DMLBS | Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources (Oxford 1975–2013) |
| DP | Dives and Pauper, ed. Priscilla Heath Barnum, EETS 275, 280, 323, 2 vols. in 3 (Oxford 1976–2004) |
| ECCO | Eighteenth Century Collections Online |
| EEBO | Early English Books Online |
| EETS | Early English Text Society |
| EEV | Early EV: forebear(s) of Oxford, MS Bodley 959, and Oxford, MS Christ Church 145 (OxCCC 145), ed. Lindberg, The Earlier Version of the Wycliffite Bible |
| Emden, BRUC | A. B. Emden, A Biographical Register of the University of Cambridge to A.D. 1500 (Cambridge 1963) |
| Emden, BRUO | A. B. Emden, A Biographical Register of the University of Oxford to A.D. 1500, 3 vols. (Oxford 1957–59) |
| EV | Early Version of the MEB, ed. FM |
| FM | Josiah Forshall and Frederic Madden, eds., The Holy Bible, Containing the Old and New Testaments, with the Apocryphal Books, in the Earliest English Versions Made from the Latin Vulgate by John Wycliffe and His Followers, 4 vols. (Oxford 1850; repr. New York 1982) |
| FTB | Five and Twenty Books. See GP |
| GP | General Prologue, the name given by FM to the treatise Five and Twenty Books (FTB), which FM edit as the Prologue to LV (1:1–60) |
| HUO | The History of the University of Oxford, gen. ed. T. H. Aston, 8 vols. (Oxford 1984–2000) |
| LALME | A Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English, ed. Angus McIntosh, M. L. Samuels, and Michael Benskin, with Margaret Laing and Keith Williamson, 4 vols. (Aberdeen 1986) |