The Middle English Bible. Henry Ansgar Kelly
learn two things here: first, that Simple Creature is well aware that students at Oxford, specifically priests with the care of souls, at the present time can study the Bible without having to go through the arts curriculum; and second, that he believes there is an effort underway to put an end to this easy access to Scripture instruction. He could hardly be wrong about the first point. Wyclif himself, writing in 1378, speaks of the practice of parish priests going on leave to universities to study the Bible. “It is permissible,” he says, “for a rector to be away from his parish, for a time, to gather the seed of faith in theological schools, so that he may sow it ‘in due season.’”39 It is confirmed in a Wycliffite tract, Why Poor Priests Have No Benefice: “If such curates be stirred to go learn God’s Law and teach their parishens the Gospel, commonly they shall get no leave of bishops but for gold; and when they shall most profit in their learning, then shall they be clept home at the prelate’s will.”40
But Simple Creature is clearly wrong about the second point, and it demonstrates that he and his immediate associates were not familiar with procedures at Oxford.
Simple Creature’s remarks were seen by John Lewis41 and others as being a reference to the proposal in 1387 or early 1388 to enforce the statute of 1253 stipulating that no one can incept in theology (qualify for theological regency, that is, teaching theology) without first finishing regency in arts.42 According to Lewis, the proposal was “that hereafter no one should be an inceptor in divinity unless he had first completed his act in the liberal sciences, had read a book of the Canon and preached publicly in the university, which the Author [of the Prologue] represents as if it was purposed that ‘no man should learn divinity nor Holy Writ till he had done his form, or commenced in art, and been regent two year after.’”43 Lewis quite clearly tells us that the General Prologue author misrepresented the proposal by interpreting it to refer to the very beginning of theology study rather than to its completion. He could also have told us that the GP author was mistaken in assuming that the policy was directed against all students at Oxford, whereas it was aimed only against friars, by the secular clergy. It had been customary to dispense friars from the requirement of inception (and formal study) in the faculty of arts, and now it was proposed to refuse to grant any such dispensations—which, however, were characterized as dispensations from the requirement of regency after incepting as masters of arts.
Simple Creature’s garbled reference to the proposed Oxford reform has been taken as a sure date for the GP: it must have been written after the measure was proposed in 1387, and before it was inhibited by Richard II on March 17, 1387/8, and again on August 1, 1388 (the assumption being that Simple Creature could not have made his statement after the initiative was spiked and the crisis averted).44 But Simple Creature has only heard the alarming news about the curricular proposal from “many true men,” informants who would not necessarily have known about the king’s actions against it; and doubtless the shock of the deadly proposal (as they understood it) was still reverberating in the land. Even if it was not, and Simple Creature was writing years later, he may have decided to present it as an ongoing threat, since it involved the enforcement of an existing requirement (he thinks). He need not have been writing as late as 1395 or 1396, since, as we saw in Chapter 2, Lewis’s argument for associating the sodomy-at-Oxford complaint with the Lollard Twelve Conclusions has been called into question.
Simple Creature’s Unrealistic/Inaccurate Ideas About the Production of the MEB
Before we ask whether the Middle English Bible could have been intended to play a role in the continuing education of priests at Oxford, let us try to draw some conclusions about how it was and was not undertaken and carried out.
Discussion of the so-called Wycliffite Bible has been dominated by the account given by Simple Creature in Five and Twenty Books. Let us look at it in detail:
1. “First, this simple creature had much travail, with diverse fellows and helpers, to gather many old Bibles, and other doctors, and common glosses, and to make one Latin Bible some-deal true.”
2. “And then to study it of the new, the text with the gloss, and other doctors as he might get, and specially Lyre on the Old Testament, that helped full much in this work.”
3. “The third time, to counsel with old grammarians and old divines of hard words and hard sentences, how those might best be understood and translated.”
4a. “The fourth time to translate as clearly as he could to the sentence.”
4b. “And to have many good fellows and cunning at the correcting of the translation.”45
Therefore, Simple Creature’s alleged steps are as follows: (1) establishing a sound Latin text, (2) studying it for the meaning of the Latin Bible, (3) consulting about how to render difficult Latin passages into English, (4a) producing a complete translation, and (4b) correcting it. There is no talk of producing glosses to any part of the Bible;46 but elsewhere he says he has glossed Job and the prophets,47 and provided marginal word glosses via Jerome, Lyre, and others to the whole Hebrew Bible, especially the Psalms.48 And there is no sense of first executing a literal translation and then systematically transforming it into a more fluent version, though this is what Dove assumes he is talking about when speaking of his translation principles: “The writer of the prologue provided a fascinating account of ways in which the earlier version of the translation, which was never intended to be copied and circulated, was made syntactically and stylistically more comprehensible and accurate in the later version.”49 Hudson suggests that the Glossed Gospels project was part of the preparation outlined in number 2,50 but this conflicts with the conclusion that the authors of the Glossed Gospels followed EV even after LV was available, because of its closeness to the Latin.51 In other words, glossing the Gospels was not a step toward producing an accurate English translation or perfecting it. This is confirmed by the seeming lack of interest throughout these Gospel compilations in translation problems, for instance, Latin variants and grammatical ambiguities.
Hudson observes that Forshall and Madden and others after them thought that Simple Creature’s entire program dealt only with LV, whereas she believes that it accurately describes the whole project from the beginning, including therefore EV, saying that “it is not to be expected that any contemporary writer would distinguish EV from LV in the clear-cut and oversimplified way done by Forshall and Madden.”52 For my part, I believe that a clear distinction would be recognized certainly by the producers of LV, because the revision was so systematic; for instance, all Latin absolute participles were translated literally into English in EV, but in LV all were removed. The cursory way in which Simple Creature speaks of the “correction” of his translation in this account (4b) would seem to preclude any such idea of a thoroughgoing revision. Later on, he tells of changing such absolute participles in the Latin text directly into English finite forms, not rendering them first into English participles and then eliminating them. Furthermore, the methods he suggests for resolving absolute constructions do not correspond to the actual practice of LV.53 My suggestion, therefore, is that his account is largely imaginary, describing what he considers to be a reasonable way of progressing, from establishing the Latin text, to studying it, and translating it and correcting it.
Jeremy Catto finds manuscript evidence of all of the stages postulated (as he sees them), except for “the newly established Latin text.”54 There does seem to have been great interest in the Latin text of the Bible on the part of the translators, but not in producing a complete corrected Latin text. Rather, there was an effort to decide on the correct Latin reading in each passage of EV and LV as it was being worked on.55 Fristedt concludes that there was no attempt to correct the Latin text until the whole of the original form of EV (that is, EEV) was completed,56 and he places the search for old Latin Bibles by Simple Creature “and his numerous coadjutors” even later, when preparing to embark on LV.57 There appears to have been little or no concern about the impossibility in certain cases of deciding which of two variant Latin readings is the correct one, and, accordingly, giving both as possibilities. What we have instead