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The Middle English Bible
THE MIDDLE AGES SERIES
Ruth Mazo Karras, Series EditorEdward Peters, Founding Editor
A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.
The Middle English Bible
A Reassessment
Henry Ansgar Kelly
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia
Publication of this volume was aided by gifts from the
UCLA Friends of English and the UCLA Division of Humanities.
Copyright © 2016 University of Pennsylvania Press
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.
Published by
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-0-8122-4834-0
For Barret and Caroline
No formal condemnation of [Wyclif ’s] English Bible was ever issued, or, as far as we know, attempted.
—F. D. Matthew, “The Authorship of the Wycliffite Bible” (1895)
Wycliffe’s chief bequest to posterity was the English Bible.
—James Gairdner, Lollardy and the Reformation in England (1908)
If the first English Bible was not produced by Wyclif and the Wycliffites, and was not censored by Arundel, the history of the late medieval English Church and of the liberation of the English people at the Reformation would need to be completely rewritten.
—Mary Dove, The First English Bible (2007)
By far the most important body of English prose since the Conquest.
—Robert Tombs, The English and Their History (2014)
Contents
Chapter 1. A History of Judgments on the Middle English Bible
Chapter 2. Five and Twenty Books as “Official” Prologue, or Not
Chapter 3. The Bible at Oxford
Chapter 5. The Provincial Constitutions of 1407
Chapter 6. Treatment of the English Bible in the Fifteenth Century
Chapter 7. The End of the Story: Richard Hunne and Thomas More
Preface
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
