EV and LV and draw some conclusions from it, namely, the practice of EV to take over absolute constructions literally and the practice of LV to do away with such forms by resolving them finitely.90 In doing so, LV was not rejecting a hidebound traditional way of writing, but resisting an innovation that was just appearing in the language. However, though LV was thereby conforming to earlier stylistic norms, there should have been a real objection to doing this on the level of accuracy; participial constructions are deliberately ambiguous, and “clarifying” them in one definite way or another, say, as causally or temporally related (using because or when), when the relationship might be the opposite, or simply circumstantial or appositional, destroys what might be considered a divinely inspired uncertainty.91
It has been concluded on the basis of the General Prologue that “the goal in the Wycliffite Bible is a translation that produces clear English while staying as close as possible to the Latin.”92 But it is apparent that Simple Creature’s goals were much more ambitious; he wanted to outdo the Latin and make it more intelligible.
He hopes that he improves on the truth and clarity of the Latin text by taking these sorts of decisions, which might seem to imply a certain quality of arrogance in assuming the correctness of his judgments, making his version better than the original. Let us review what he (or an or-speaking interpolator) says at one point: “Whether I have translated as openly or openlier in English as in Latin, let wise men deem that know well both languages and know well the sentence of Holy Scripture; and whether I have done thus or nay, ne doubt, they that ken well the sentence of Holy Writ and English together and will travail with God’s grace thereabout, may make the Bible as true and as open, yea, and openlier in English than it is in Latin.”93 He claims, of course, to rely on the context of each passage, but ultimately his main reliance is on divine inspiration and guidance. His final thoughts sum up his attitude: “Many such adverbs, conjunctions, and prepositions be set oft one for another, and at free choice of authors sometimes; and now those shall be taken as it accordeth best to the sentence. By this manner, with good living and great travail, men may come to true and clear translating and true understanding of Holy Writ, seem it never so hard at the beginning. God grant to us all grace to ken well and keep well Holy Writ, and suffer joyfully some pain for it at the last. Amen.”94 In this view, Simple Creature may have been influenced by one of his favorite works, Augustine’s De doctrina Christiana, as well as Wyclif ’s De veritate Sacre Scripture. But both Augustine and Wyclif are speaking of seeking divine help in explicating, not translating Scripture.95
The fact remains that by disambiguating such ambiguities for the sake of fluency, a translation like LV forecloses meanings left open in translations like EV, which observe limits imposed by the original forms.
Other Factors In and About Oxford, and a Suggested Downsizing of the Translation and Revision Enterprises
Other scholars who may have participated in the translations have been suggested by Jeremy Catto, connecting supporters of the project with residents of Queen’s College, Oxford, including Richard Ullerston, who will be treated below for his defense of Bible translation sometime in the decade 1400–1409, and also Philip Repingdon in his post-Wycliffite phase.96 Repingdon, of course, may have begun his participation in his pre-Queen’s period, and while he was still a Wycliffite.
Even though I have argued that Simple Creature himself was not an Oxford man, the general dialect of EV and LV has been associated with the university,97 and one should not be surprised to find many other connections. Another locus at Oxford has recently been singled out by Anne Hudson as a probable center of translational activity, namely Greyfriars, the Franciscan house at the university: one of the reasons being the resources of its library.98 Included in her suggestion is the supposition that the compilers of other works associated with the Wycliffites (associated with them at least nowadays, I would add) also took advantage of the house’s facilities; she designates specifically the Glossed Gospels; the encyclopedia called Floretum in its full form and Rosarium in the abridged version; the revisions to Richard Rolle’s English Psalms commentary;99 and the large liturgical cycle of Wycliffite sermons.100 She points out that “Wyclif and his disciples were not in the 1370s defined as enemies,” and the intensive scholarly labor that went into at least the biblical and encyclopedic enterprises had nothing obviously Wycliffite about them, “even in the developed sense of that term let alone in that of the 1370s.”101 I agree and wish to push the argument further, specifically concerning the organization and production of EV and LV. I suggest that there was nothing hugger-mugger about this endeavor and no reason for secrecy. The question remains, however, whether it was, especially at its origins in the production of EV, a large-scale endeavor with such wide participation that it was too routine to be mentioned, or whether it was a small-scale enterprise on the level envisaged by Forshall and Madden, who saw Wyclif himself producing the EV New Testament and Nicholas Hereford most of the EV Old Testament, with John Purvey doing the whole LV Bible. If we dismiss Simple Creature’s vision of painstaking preparation of an accurate Vulgate text and just think of getting down to work and doing it, it could have been accomplished in a short time with a minimum of fuss. There is the Douai-Rheims example to be remembered, and though that project was recognized as very important, there was hardly any mention of it left in writing, just notings of its beginning and end.
The production of the ur-EV text (that is, EEV) may have been the inspiration of a single master in the theology faculty at Oxford, perhaps even Wyclif himself, in his Wycliffian, pre-Wycliffite period (not very likely, I think, given his linguistic shortcomings). If Gregory Martin by himself translated the entire Vulgate in eighteen to twenty months, our hypothetical professor along with a half-dozen graduate students, with their MAs long behind them, could have completed the whole Bible in a matter of three or four months. The resulting text could then have been circulated as a whole or by books or groups of books, as a working text, not only for the use of other students and masters, but also with an eye to further refinement, perhaps with the familiar medieval request to readers to improve the text, as, for instance, when Simple Creature says, “I pray, for charity and for common profit of Christian souls, that if any wise man find any default of the truth of translation, let him set in the true sentence, and open, of Holy Writ.”102 Or perhaps a message like that of William Tyndale at the end of his 1526 New Testament:
Count it as a thing not having his full shape, but as it were born afore his time, even as a thing begun rather than finished. In time to come, if God have appointed us thereunto, we will give it his full shape, and put out, if aught be added superfluously, and add to, if aught be overseen through negligence, and will enforce to bring to compendiousness that which is now translated at the length, and to give light where it is required, and to seek in certain places more proper English.103
At any rate, once the translation began to be reproduced, many changes were introduced into it by the copyists and users, some merely scribal, whether mistakes or dialectal features, some conscious corrections or intended improvements. We can only conjecture how many of the conscious improvements were “authorized” by the original translators or their supervisor. We must take very seriously Fristedt’s demonstration that there was a consistent effort that transformed EEV into EV. But we can readily imagine that many changes were “sports,” or mutations not naturally or deliberately selected to survive (to speak genetically). One example noted in the Chapter 2 is the intervention of an either speaker in the Gospel of Luke in Douce 369.2 (used by Forshall and Madden as their main EV text), predominantly not found in other EV copies, and not at all in LV.104
Then, after a few years, we can speculate, two other masters decided it would be a good idea to systematically revise the new translation in such a way that it would not adhere so closely to the Latin forms, to produce a text that would be more amenable to wider use, in sermons and in the liturgy in local parishes. One of these masters would take responsibility for the Old Testament;
