The Middle English Bible. Henry Ansgar Kelly

      I first entered the Bible-translation field when studying the Douai-Rheims Version, which was completed by the English priest Gregory Martin in 1580, but was revised by Bishop Richard Challoner in 1750. We medievalists usually tell our students to use this translation rather than the King James because it renders the Latin Vulgate, and not the Hebrew and Greek texts, but in fact Challoner’s revision was largely in the direction of the King James language, which in turn was largely William Tyndale’s text.¹ I decided that I should also examine the earlier complete translation of the Bible into English, produced at the end of the fourteenth century, now generally known as the Wycliffite Bible, and recognized as existing in two main forms, an original very literal rendering, called the Early Version, or EV, and a revision of it into a more idiomatic style, called the Later Version, or LV.

      I soon found that the scholarship concerning this translation was affected by the same “wars of religion” that surrounded the history of the Protestant and Catholic Bibles of the sixteenth century and later. It seemed to me that there was need for a review of how it has been regarded over the years, and the points of controversy connected with it at each stage, especially concerning claims for and against its origin as a project of the religious dissident John Wyclif (d. 1384) and his followers.

      Accordingly, in the first chapter below, I attempt to give a historiography of critical attention to the medieval translation, to which I give the neutral name of “Middle English Bible,” or MEB.² I recount that, after seemingly being regarded as a straightforward rendering from Latin into English during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, notably in the report of Thomas More, it was first designated as Wyclif ’s by John Bale in the middle of the sixteenth century, an attribution that was repeated and elaborated subsequently. Its identity as Wycliffite was monumentalized in the elaborate edition of 1850 by the Reverend Josiah Forshall and Sir Frederic Madden, as by “John Wycliffe and his followers.”³ The most significant early challenge to this status came in 1894 from a figure almost forgotten today, the Benedictine historian Francis Aidan Gasquet. I conclude with an account of the most recent developments and trends.

      In Chapter 2, I analyze the treatise Five and Twenty Books, which Forshall and Madden printed at the beginning of the Bible and referred to as the “General Prologue” to the translation, the author of which claims to be the main translator of the Middle English Bible. I conclude on the basis of linguistic and content analysis that the author most probably did participate in the final production of LV, perhaps supervising a few of the later books of the New Testament, and then joining the Old Testament LV team and producing a prologue to the major prophets,