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 is an abundance of internal glosses, especially in EV, of alternative translations of the same Latin word.
Why EV Before LV? Unsatisfactory First Try, or Planned Preliminary Stage, or Study Help for the Clergy?
In analyzing Five and Twenty Books (GP) and its relationship to the MEB, we have already seen some differences between EV and LV. Let us remind ourselves that the biblical text that EV translates is the Latin Vulgate, and the LV revisers of EV seemingly had only the Vulgate before them as well, with no knowledge of the Hebrew or Greek texts or languages.58 EV usually follows Latin grammatical constructions very closely, while LV systematically transforms some of them into more idiomatic forms. Albert Baugh pronounces LV “in every way superior to the early version.”59 But it all depends on what one means by “superior.” When dealing with the Word of God, what is more important, accuracy or fluency?
Recently Lilo Moessner has given a more positive analysis of the EV and its “structural iconicity,” that is, its fidelity to the Latin constructions, and finds that the grammatical structure of the LV “is not without flaw,” and that LV does not always achieve the goal of being as clear, let alone clearer, than the original Latin.60 Instead of an “iconic” or “mirror-image” metaphor, we can speak of “calques,” that is, patterns, in the narrow sense of “loan translations,” in which the donor language contributes a structure not entirely natural in the receiver language: it has a foreign or nonnative feel about it, and stands out as a “loaner.”61 Middle English examples are “again-buyer” for redemptor and “again-bite of inwit” for remorsus conscientiae.
Moessner finds that the usual designations of “literal” and “free” translations are inadequate and confusing, and notes with approval David Lawton’s observation that the EV and LV present “a choice not between literal and free translation but between two understandings or types of literal translation.”62
EV can be regarded in a number of ways. To begin with, we may think that it was a timid first try at Englishing the whole Bible, dominated by fear of distorting the meaning of the Latin original, and that its inadequacy was soon recognized and a redo was undertaken. Or we may think of it as a deliberate preliminary step taken to get the exact meaning of the Latin into English first, and then to adjust it in the interests of the vernacular idiom.63 This second view is a common one, shared, for instance, by Conrad Lindberg: “When John Wyclif and his followers decided to take on the work of translating the Bible into English, they were faced with a twofold problem: how to be faithful to the Word and yet create a readable text. They solved it by making two translations, one more literal, the other more idiomatic.”64 As we have seen, Mary Dove assumes that EV was never intended for circulation.65
This second hypothesis, however, does not seem as plausible as the first. It is not easily credible that a systematic Latinate translation would be carried through to the end with the intention of then scrapping it for an idiomatic rendering, going though the whole Bible again. The envisaged process has been compared to Richard Rolle’s twofold rendering of the Psalms, first word for word, and then less so.66 But Rolle was dealing with a single book of the Bible, and he did the second version himself immediately after doing the first, whereas the adherents of a provisionary EV seem to think of it as handed over
