or* other, ethir in opin resoun that may not be avoided; for ellis it wole as likingly be applied to falsnesse as to treuthe, and it hath disseived grete men in oure daies, by over greet trist to her fantasies.105 *ether FGKMNPQRSVUXY
In this statement, Simple Creature’s Wycliffite leanings surface in a mild way, as Mary Dove points out.106
Dove calls this prologue a “Prologue to the Prophets,” in keeping with some of the manuscripts, and with Simple Creature’s own characterization of it in GP,107 but more accurately it is only a “Prologue to Isaiah,” as is recognized in other manuscripts.108
The treatise beginning with the words The Holy Prophet David,109 advocating the translation of the Bible into English, fits Simple Creature’s preference for either (seven times), but with a rather high incidence of or (two times). That the work is by the author of GP is suggested by Mary Dove, who says that the sentence “As Gregor and Grosted sein, to make unable curatis is the higheste wikkidnesse and tresun ayens God, and is lik sinne as to crucifie Crist” is a summary of part of GP chapter 10.110 Or, in keeping with my scenario here, we may judge it to be Simple Creature’s sketch of a sentiment that he will later expand in Five and Twenty Books. But in contrast to the larger treatise, his interest here is less on serious study of the Bible than in using it, as Dove says, “for comfort and consolation.”111
In his Prologue to Isaiah, Simple Creature promised, impersonally, to write a discourse on the four levels of meaning in the Scriptures to be placed at the beginning of the Bible: “Of these foure undurstondingis schal be seid pleinlier, if God wole, on the biginning of Genesis.”112 This must have turned into a draft of GP, which in the final form begins with a very long summary of the Old Testament books and takes up the four senses of Scripture only in chapter 12.113 He originally intended to draw on Nicholas of Lyre’s commentary and other books, but at the time of his writing he did not have them to hand, and he was forced to rely instead on Augustine’s De doctrina Christiana “as a default source,” as Rita Copeland puts it, until a copy of Lyre arrived.114 In other words, he was writing at a place significantly removed from Oxford, or from ready access to Oxford’s libraries.115 I should add here that Augustine’s work was used for the same purpose by the author of a prologue to one of the Glossed Gospels, namely, the so-called Intermediate Matthew, an or speaker, whose biblical quotations resemble EV, whereas Simple Creature’s quotations in Five and Twenty Books are akin to LV and sometimes are direct quotations of LV. It is judged that both the authors draw on some longer source using Augustine’s work.116
In contrast to Five and Twenty Books, which, as we have seen, was attached to very few MEB manuscripts, the Prologue to Isaiah is included in all twenty-one of the LV manuscripts containing Isaiah.117
Since our analysis above indicates that Simple Creature’s style is not matched anywhere in the LV Old or New Testament, except for four books in the latter, we should conclude that he was not a major force behind the project, and a claim on his part to be the translator would not sit well with the real translators. Accordingly, it may be that GP as first submitted by him ended with chapter 14, and after it was spurned by the LV administrators, Simple Creature hatched the idea of adding a final chapter, a new treatise that we can call after its opening words, “Forasmuch as Christ Saith,” in which he takes credit for the whole enterprise. This is where he first identifies himself as our humble servant: “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 myche travaile, with diverse felawis and helperis,” and so on.118 We can be sure that Simple Creatures’s “divers fellows and helpers” did not take kindly to this description of their actual role in the production of EV and LV.119
CHAPTER 3
The Bible at Oxford
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
