The Middle English Bible. Henry Ansgar Kelly

      Nowadays the Middle English Bible (MEB) is almost always referred to as the Wycliffite Bible (WB), and it is usually assumed that it was always thought to be Wycliffite. The reality is quite different, as we will see in studying the reception of both forms of the translation (when they were differentiated) from age to age.

       The Fifteenth to the Nineteenth Century: From Anonymous to Trevisa, Wyclif, Wycliffites

      To begin with, let us see how the new English renderings of the Bible were regarded in the fifteenth century. Scholars who believe that it was a Wycliffite production take it for granted that it was recognized as such from the very beginning until the present day, but, as will be apparent in later chapters, it is very difficult to prove that this was the case. Sometimes, as we will see, there appears to have been no other concern about it than that it was in English. The only early attribution of authorship in the more than 250 surviving manuscripts of the MEB occurs in what might be termed a secondgeneration copy (Bodleian Douce 369.1), which attributes the greater part of the Early Version (EV) of the Old Testament to Dr. Nicholas Hereford, one of Wyclif ’s early followers, who was condemned in 1382 for supporting some of his master’s doctrines. We will hear more about him later. The only name otherwise certainly attached to the MEB during the fifteenth century was that of John Trevisa, by William Caxton, in his edition of Trevisa’s Polychronicon, where he listed the Bible as among Trevisa’s other translations,¹ and this attribution was repeated subsequently, including even in the preface to the King James Bible of 1611: “Even in our King Richard the Second’s days, John Trevisa translated them [the Gospels, or the Scriptures] into English, and many English Bibles in written hand are yet to be seen with divers [i.e., in the possession of various persons], translated, as it is very probable, in that age.”²

      When we come to the sixteenth century (Chapter 7 below) and can rely on the testimony of Thomas More, we see that the MEB was regarded not only as non-Wycliffite but as pre-Wycliffite; nevertheless, it was also considered by some to be forbidden. We will also see that the preface to the Rheims New Testament of 1582 considers the surviving renditions of the Bible to be non-Wycliffite and never prohibited.

      However, the reformer John Bale, in his index of notes on the works of English authors, after saying that John Trevisa translated the whole Bible, says the same thing about John Wyclif.³ But earlier in his treatment of Wyclif, Bale has a more circumstantial entry concerning his translation of the whole Bible,⁴ based on his inspection of a Later Version (LV), prefaced by the treatise Five and Twenty Books (FTB), which Josiah Forshall and Frederic Madden in their 1850 edition printed as the prologue to LV, and which they refer to as the “General Prologue” (GP).⁵ The late Mary Dove, in her magisterial study of the Middle English Bible, identifies the manuscript that Bale saw as the one now at Princeton University.⁶ She observes that the antiquarian John Leland, who provided Bale with many details about Wyclif ’s writings, did not come to a similar conclusion (that Wyclif translated the Bible).⁷ In Bale’s published Catalogus, he leaves out the detail of the incipit identifying Five and Twenty Books.⁸ The only other person of Bale’s era who made such a claim about Wyclif ’s translation of the Bible was the printer Robert Crowley, taking his cue from Bale’s earlier Summarium (1548), in Crowley’s edition of Piers Plowman in 1550. Crowley also printed Five and Twenty Books in 1550, under the title of The Pathway to Perfect Knowledge, calling it “a prologue” by Wyclif.⁹

      Bale adds interesting details in the Catalogus to his claim that John Trevisa translated the whole Bible. He did so at the request of Lord Berkeley, he says, and he gives an incipit to it: “Ego Joannes Trevisa, sacerdos.”¹⁰

      Attributions of authorship by later owners of MEB manuscripts are fairly rare. The person who inscribed an LV Bible to Edward VI in 1550 attributed the prologue (Five and Twenty Books), placed after the Old Testament, to Wyclif.¹¹ In 1615 an attribution to Wyclif was added to an LV copy of the New Testament Epistles and Apocalypse.¹² A later manuscript attribution was that of Baron Thomas Fairfax, who died in 1671; he noted that his LV New Testament was Wyclif ’s translation.¹³ An LV Bible at Emmanuel College in Cambridge was attributed to Wyclif and dated 1383 sometime after it was cataloged in 1600 by Thomas James and before it was seen by Henry Wharton in the 1680s.¹⁴ But in an updated entry Wharton says that all of the many English Bibles that he has seen (all LV) are attributed to Wyclif, but that these attributions are recent conjectures.¹⁵ An example is the seventeenth-century hand in the Fairfax complete Bible (LV), saying of its original date, 1408: “which is 25 years after Wickleff finished the translation”—that is, accepting 1383 as the date of Wyclif ’s version.¹⁶ But it is noteworthy that an annotator of the seventeenth century surmises that the New Testament (EV) in Dublin Trinity College 75 is by John Purvey, based on John Foxe’s description of him, and that he was also the author of the following prologue to the Old Testament (that is, Five and Twenty Books).¹⁷

      It has been suggested by Dove that the earliest acknowledgment that there were two versions of the Middle English Bible was by Thomas James, the first librarian of the Bodleian, writing in 1612,¹⁸ but I disagree. Dove thinks that James assigned EV to the thirteenth century and LV to Wyclif, but in fact James is quoting from the prologue (Five and Twenty Books) attached to an LV Bible. He says of the author-translator, “Of one thing I am sure, that he that translated the whole Bible into English (which Bible came forth, as I guess, some hundred years before Wyclif ’s) held these books [other than the twenty-five inspired books of the Old Testament] for Apocrypha.” He adds a note: “The Bible hath been twice translated into English. The former edition is very ancient, whereof we have three copies (one in the Public Library, one in Christ Church Library, the other in Queen’s College), the later translated by Wyclif.”¹⁹ The manuscript that he saw in the Public Library must have been Bodleian 277, the revised LV (I call it LLV), which has the first chapter of Five and Twenty Books (GP).²⁰

      However, we can hardly conclude that James knew the difference between EV and LV and accordingly attributed EV to Wyclif. The Bible that he saw at Christ Church was almost certainly EV (MS 145), and he considered it to be the same as the LV at Queen’s;²¹ and he seems to have known of no other English Bibles at Oxford. In his catalog of the libraries of Oxford and Cambridge, published in 1600, he names only three complete English Bibles at Oxford (Christ