The Middle English Bible. Henry Ansgar Kelly

      The MEB has been persistently connected with Oxford University, whether through its supposed origins in the circle of the Oxford professor John Wyclif or simply as a center for biblical studies. We shall now explore these connections and implications directly.

       Loss of Interest in the Bible in the Mid-Fourteenth Century and Its Revival by Wyclif (and Others)

      In a recent study of Wyclif, G. R. Evans refers to “the legend that Wyclif put Scripture back at the centre of theological studies, and sought to make its text available for ordinary people to read in their own language,” and asks, concerning the first part of the legend, “Did Wyclif need to bring the study of the Bible back into a prominent position? Had it ever slipped from first place in theological studies?”¹ The answer to these questions is an undoubted “yes,” and it seems that we must affirm the truth of Wyclif ’s important role in renewing academic interest in the Latin Bible. Furthermore, like his admired predecessor at Oxford, Robert Grosseteste (d. 1253), he sought to diminish the scholastic “track” by reducing all theology to the study of the Bible.² It may well be that we cannot avoid crediting to Wyclif the vernacular Bible as well, at least in the sense that his emphasis on the Bible was at least indirectly responsible for it. If so, we will have to decide whether the resulting project should be called simply “Wycliffian” rather than “Wycliffite” (the latter term, like “Lollard,” carrying with it polemical and heterodox intentions and overtones).

      From the beginnings of the universities in the twelfth century until well into the fourteenth, there were major faculties of theology only in three centers of Europe: Paris, Oxford, and Cambridge.³ Originally at Oxford it seems that biblical exposition or exegesis was one of three “concentrations” for a theology degree, the others being the study of the Sentences of Peter Lombard and the study of the Histories of Peter Comestor. But by the mid-thirteenth century, Bible study had become an essential part of every theological education, along with the Sentences. However—and this is a sobering fact—even though the scholarly study of the Bible had flourished around the turn of the fourteenth century all over Europe, producing, notably, the commentaries of the Franciscan Nicholas of Lyre in France and the commentaries of the Dominican Nicholas Trevet in England, by the middle decades of the century interest in biblical exegesis had died out. According to William Courtenay, during the fourteenth century throughout the universities and other centers of study of Europe there was a “general separation of biblical exegesis and speculative theology,” and after 1335, scriptural studies were “almost a silent topic for the next forty years.”⁴ Beryl Smalley refers to it as the midcentury slump.⁵ Courtenay goes on to say that “the most important stage in the development of biblical studies in the late fourteenth century was the appearance of the treatises and commentaries of John Wyclif” written between 1371 and his death in 1384; and also, Courtenay adds, Wyclif ’s “English translation of portions of the Bible”⁶—which is another matter! He concludes that Wyclif ’s activity in this area should be seen “as part of the first wave of that reawakened interest” in Scripture study.⁷ However, Wyclif ’s exact contemporary, the Franciscan William Woodford, who lectured on Lombard at the same time as Wyclif, was also chiefly interested in producing biblical commentaries.⁸ Just before Wyclif ’s time, Richard Fitzralph (d. 1360) was vitally taken up with the text of Scripture, as shown in the dialogue on the subject in his Summa,⁹ and another contemporary of Wyclif ’s, the Benedictine Adam Easton, taught himself Hebrew and made a new Latin translation, and he also collated readings from different versions of the Bible.¹⁰

       The Oxford Theology Curriculum and Wyclif’s Participation; Wyclif’s Bad Latin

      Whatever the practice was in the faculty of theology at Oxford in the 1300s, the statutes that continued in force favored the Bible over the Sentences and certainly over the Histories. In the earliest statute, passed in 1253, it is said that before one can incept (meaning “commence” in the academic sense of finishing all requirements and receiving a degree) as a master of theology (after fulfilling the requirements of a bachelor and being licensed), one must read (lecture on) a book of the Bible or one of the four books of the Sentences, or a book of the Histories.¹¹ A later statute requires lecturing on a book of the Bible or the Sentences,¹² but further on it says that one must have audited (taken courses on) the Bible for three years and lectured on a book of the Bible,¹³ with no mention of the Sentences.

      The requirements for proceeding from bachelor of theology to doctor of theology are obscurely stated: “After lecturing on a book of the Sentences, the one intending to incept must undertake study for at least two years or so before he ascends the magistral chair.”¹⁴ James Weisheipl tells us that this means that the new bachelor, called a “bachelor of the Sentences,” is to first lecture on the Sentences before giving at least two years of “cursory lectures” on the Bible.¹⁵ This procedure differed from that of the University of Paris, where the lectures on the Sentences followed those on the Bible. The Dominicans objected to the Oxford order, but the settlement of 1314 left the English custom in place.¹⁶

      It is odd that Wyclif left no traces of a Sentences commentary or writing in the form of disputed questions or quodlibets, although he did leave behind determinationes, reflecting public academic disputes on controversial questions (but without using the term questiones). Given Wyclif ’s obsessive desire to write and publish constantly, and to rewrite and edit earlier writings, it is hard to believe that he would not have preserved such scholastic efforts if he took them seriously. We know from Woodford’s testimony that Wyclif did lecture on the Sentences, but it may be that he merely summarized the material for the students without adding anything original of his own. Instead, he wrote treatises on a wide range of subjects; and those who argue that some of them were outgrowths of his Sentences work must deal with the point that none of them preserve the sentential mode of discourse.

      It has been suggested that the sentential style of presentation was going out of fashion in England just at this time, which might account for Wyclif’s failure to use it.¹⁷ But perhaps there was another explanation for his dislike of the discourse. For some reason Wyclif had never learned to speak and write Latin properly; his academic style may have been the worst in medieval Christendom. Could he have realized that his linguistic skills were not equal to the questionoriented give-and-take of scholastic disputation? Blame for his poor Latin has been unjustly put on his scholastic studies.¹⁸ Another spurious explanation is that by this time English scholars had stopped thinking in Latin and were instead thinking in English: “Wycliffe’s Latin is base even as compared with that of such of his predecessors as Ockham; there is a gulf between it and that of Thomas Aquinas. Wycliffe in fact belongs to a time when scholars were ceasing to think in Latin. It is significant of his position that he is one of the founders of English prose-writing. To understand his Latin it is often necessary to translate it into English; certainly in obscure passages this is often the readiest way of getting at his meaning.”¹⁹ However, other writers of the time wrote good Latin, from his former scholastic colleague William Woodford to formulators of episcopal constitutions and registers to legal commentaries to chronicles to spiritual treatises and other kinds of composition. The idea that Wyclif’s Latin is infected by English constructions is sound enough in his case, in contrast to other authors of the time. But the further notion that, even though he was linguistically inept in Latin, he was masterful in English needs reconsideration, since it is based on the assumption of his authorship of numerous English treatises. Perhaps, however, one might make a case that he served as an inspiration for the awkward Latin-based language of EV, though hardly for Fristedt’s theory that Wyclif carefully doctored a Latin Bible with English glosses, which provided the basis for the First Revision (that is, from EEV to EV). The great mystery is that he went through the entire master of arts (MA) and bachelor of theology