The Middle English Bible. Henry Ansgar Kelly
After having finished our survey of the various ways in which the MEB has been regarded over the centuries, it is fitting that our first order of business should be an analysis of the only writing of the time that deals with it, namely, the treatise beginning Five and Twenty Books, which Forshall and Madden printed as the prologue to the Later Version. Its Wycliffite sentiments are a main reason why the MEB itself is so firmly attributed to Wycliffites. Even scholars like Anne Hudson, who points out that the treatise is to be found in only a few copies of the Bible (and therefore it cannot be safely taken as an integral part of LV), believe that the author was, if not the sole or chief translator, as he claims, at least an important participant, and accept his account of the translation process as accurate.1
The General Prologue: A Latter-Day Prequel?
Let me start by giving a specific accounting of all ten manuscript copies of Five and Twenty Books/General Prologue:2
1. It survives in complete form as prologue to one complete LV Bible (Cambridge CCC 147).
2. Chapter 1 alone serves as prologue to two complete LV Bibles (Bodl.277 and Royal 1.C.8 [added to the latter in the time of Henry VII]).3
3. It serves as prologue to one LV Old Testament; most of chapter 15 missing (Harley 1666).
4. It appears two times as prologue to the LV New Testament (CUL Kk and Princeton).
5. It comes one time between an LV Old Testament and LV New Testament (CUL Mm).
6. It comes one time after an EV New Testament (Dublin Trinity A.1.10).
7. Pertinent sections of chapters 1–11 are inserted piecemeal in the Old Testament of one complete LV Bible (Lincoln).
8. It survives one time as a separate pamphlet (OUC G3).
When the treatise was first printed, in 1540 by John Gough, it was given the title of The Door of Holy Scripture, and in a 1550 edition by Robert Crowley, it was called The Pathway to Perfect Knowledge, although Crowley identifies it as “a Prologue written about 200 years ago by John Wyclif.”4 Josiah Forshall and Frederic Madden in their parallel edition of EV and LV placed this Wycliffite work at the beginning, and they started the custom of referring to it as the “General Prologue,” but taking it to be a prologue only to the Old Testament.5 This is the way it is characterized in the Dublin Trinity manuscript: “A Prologue for All the Books of the Bible of the Old Testament.”6
Today it is more commonly considered to be a prologue to the entire Bible, including the New Testament; so Mary Dove, who calls the treatise “The Prologue to the Wycliffite Bible.”7 Most neutral of all would be to follow Gasquet’s lead and refer to it by its incipit, Five and Twenty Books.8
I should clarify that, even though the author refers to himself in the third person as “a simple creature,” he uses this style only at one point, in the last chapter, elsewhere speaking in the first person (and that not very frequently).9 Here is the whole third-person passage:
For these resons and othere, with comune charite to save alle men in oure rewme whiche God wole have savid, a simple creature hath translatid the Bible out of Latin into English. First, this simple creature hadde miche travaile, with diverse felawis and helperis, to gedere manie elde Biblis, and othere doctouris, and comune glosis, and to make oo Latin Bible sumdel trewe; and thanne to studie it of the newe, the text with the glose, and othere doctouris, as he mighte gete, and speciali Lyre on the Elde Testament, that helpide ful miche in this werk; the thridde time to counseile with elde gramariens, and elde divinis, of harde wordis, and harde sentencis, hou tho mighten best be undurstonden and translatid; the fourth time to translate as cleerly as he coude to the sentence, and to have manie gode felawis and kunninge at the correcting of the translacioun.10
He romanticizes the actual process of translation, claiming that there is one master translator for the whole Bible, namely, himself.11 Later, however, he does speak of translators in the plural, when he calls for the Church to approve the translation “of simple men.”12 (He refers to the intended audience of the translation as “simple men of wit.”)13
Simple Creature (as we can call the author) implicitly includes the New Testament in his scope, since one of the examples he chooses to illustrate his technique is from Luke.14 As we see from the cited passage, he presents himself as translating the Bible by a one-time process, with no middle stage (EV), and no glossing; with, however, much reading up on glosses and commentaries of authorities, especially Nicholas of Lyre for the Old Testament, and also lots of consultation with others, and with much correcting and improving as he proceeded.15 There is nothing impossible, I admit, about a single person taking on the job of producing EV or of transforming EV into a more presentable form (LV), someone perhaps like John Trevisa—who from Caxton onward was credited with rendering the whole Bible into English. In the sixteenth century, the Douai-Rheims Bible was translated from the Vulgate by one man, Gregory Martin, at the planned rate of two chapters a day, and the whole was finished, having been corrected and annotated by no more than one or two of his colleagues at a time, and made ready for publication, in a very brief time, some months short of two years.16 Trevisa himself is credited with translating Ranulf Higden’s enormous Polychronicon in a similarly short period (ca. 1385–87).17
As we saw in the first chapter, David Fowler and Sven Fristedt think that Trevisa had a hand in EV. David Daniell sums up Fowler’s case and leaves it an open question as to whether Trevisa was involved in the project.18 On the face of it, Trevisa’s participation might seem unlikely, in view of EV’s “iconic” character (that is, its strict adherence to Latin grammatical constructions),19 which is foreign to Trevisa’s practice elsewhere. However, Fristedt has brought forth convincing evidence that Trevisa first produced a literal version of the Polychronicon similar to EV before giving it the sort of freer form that we find in LV.20 Perhaps Trevisa’s participation in LV, which Fowler considers but does not defend, deserves more consideration. A prosodic (cursus) analysis could possibly throw light on the question, but it is outside the scope of the present study.
We will discuss further implications of Simple Creature’s alleged program, and Trevisa’s possible role in the MEB, when taking up Scripture study at Oxford in Chapter 3.
Simple Creature’s Wycliffite Sentiments and His Date of Writing
I have great doubt, on linguistic grounds and translation practices identifiable in the EV and LV texts, that the prologuist Simple Creature is himself the translator of LV, at least the greater part of it. But before I get into the peculiarities of his dialect, style, and principles, let me set out some of his views as we can deduce them from Five and Twenty Books. For the most part he avoids controversial topics, but he does manifest some Wycliffite teachings, although many are buried deep within the treatise. It would not be surprising if many users of the treatise in the Middle Ages, whether placed as a prologue to the Scriptures or as an independent work, would have missed the polemical elements, as Gasquet did.
The very first sentence of the treatise: “Five and twenty books of the Old Testament be books of faith, and fully books of Holy Writ,”21 expresses a controversial position, but it is not recognizably Wycliffite; it follows St. Jerome in labeling the other books as “apocryphal” and not inspired, a view not widely accepted since patristic times, so far as I am aware, at least in the West. Wyclif himself was not dogmatic on the subject. In De veritate Sacrae Scripturae, he follows Jerome’s count of 22 canonized books of the Old Testament, which correspond to the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet, whereas there were 24 books immediately accepted to the canon of the New Testament, corresponding to the 24 letters of the Latin alphabet (with three more soon added, namely, Mark, Luke, and Acts). But Wyclif says that many of the apocryphal books are inscribed in the Book