The Middle English Bible. Henry Ansgar Kelly
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by the diocesan of the place, or (if need be) by the Provincial Council. He who shall act otherwise let him be punished [similarly] as an abettor of heresy and error.14
In reprinting the 1894 article in the Old English Bible, Gasquet adds the Latin, and italicizes the adverb emphasizing the newness of the designated compositions: “jam noviter … compositus” (“now newly composed”). His comment on the mandate is:
Now it is obvious from the words of the decree that in this there is no such absolute prohibition as is generally represented. All that the fathers of the Council of Oxford forbade was unauthorized translations. The fact that no mention is made of any Wycliffite translation of the entire Bible is not without its significance, and in view of the Lollard errors then prevalent, and of the ease with which the text of Holy Scripture could be modified in the translation in any and every manuscript, so as apparently to be made to support those views, the ordinance appears not only prudent and just, but necessary.15
We note that it is the reading, not the possession, of a recent unlicensed translation that is prohibited.16 The literal translation of this clause is “nor is any such book to be read.” Moreover, the reading intended is not private perusal but formal reading, that is, lecturing or expounding, as in the Oxford statute, “unless he has read a book of the canon of the Bible or a book of the Sentences or of the Histories” (“nisi legerit aliquem librum de canone Biblie vel librum Sentenciarum vel Historiarum”),17 and as it was explained in the previous constitution, Quia insuper: no treatise from Wyclif ’s time onward “is to be read in schools, halls, hospices, or any other places” in the province, “or taught from it” (“legatur in scholis, aulis, hospitiis, sive aliis locis quibuscumque … sive secundum ipsum doceatur”) until approved for publication by university committee.18 This will be made clearer when we look at William Lyndwood’s explanation of the constitution.
We note too that a translation need be approved only once for each diocese (or for the whole province, by a council), meaning that copies of it would be thenceforward allowed; and there is no requirement to give licenses to individual readers. Perhaps the clergy, speaking in the archbishop’s name, had in mind a license in the book itself, like the modern nihil obstat and imprimatur, or the Censure and Approbation in the 1582 Rheims New Testament. We should also observe that conviction under this edict would not be of heresy, but, at most, of favoring heresy (as will be explained below). Hudson has characterized the effect of the legislation as forcibly closing down “debate about the legitimacy of biblical translation into the vernacular,”19 but, taken at its face value, it would seem to be rather an invitation to enter into such debate.
It might strike us nowadays that this mandate was very impractical and difficult to enforce. There would be difficulty first of all in trying to ascertain the date of any given translation in any given manuscript, and then determining whether another manuscript contains the same translation or whether the translation has been altered, since each copy would have different foliations (but of course the same capitulations). All very true, but these problems did not seem to occur to the legislators who formulated the process, or, if they did, they did not worry them. Gasquet in his comment cited above seems to assume that every copy of every translation would have to be inspected. But the constitution does not say so and implies otherwise.
We should also note that the fifth constitution, Similiter quia, approved of the traditional method used in elementary schools of explicating Scripture: “Ordinamus quod magistri … se nullatenus intromittant … de expositione Sacre Scripture nisi in exponendo textum prout antiquitus fieri consuevit” (“We ordain that teachers … not be involved in the explanation of Holy Scripture except in explaining the text as has been the custom from of old”). The authoritative canonist William Lyndwood in his Provinciale, which he released for publication in 1434, takes this to mean that they should stick to the grammatical level and not go into mystical or moral levels, since this is beyond the capacity of their students.20 It also means that there was no prohibition against explaining the Bible in one’s native tongue.
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