that there were two versions of the Middle English Bible was by Thomas James, the first librarian of the Bodleian, writing in 1612,18 but I disagree. Dove thinks that James assigned EV to the thirteenth century and LV to Wyclif, but in fact James is quoting from the prologue (Five and Twenty Books) attached to an LV Bible. He says of the author-translator, “Of one thing I am sure, that he that translated the whole Bible into English (which Bible came forth, as I guess, some hundred years before Wyclif ’s) held these books [other than the twenty-five inspired books of the Old Testament] for Apocrypha.” He adds a note: “The Bible hath been twice translated into English. The former edition is very ancient, whereof we have three copies (one in the Public Library, one in Christ Church Library, the other in Queen’s College), the later translated by Wyclif.”19 The manuscript that he saw in the Public Library must have been Bodleian 277, the revised LV (I call it LLV), which has the first chapter of Five and Twenty Books (GP).20
However, we can hardly conclude that James knew the difference between EV and LV and accordingly attributed EV to Wyclif. The Bible that he saw at Christ Church was almost certainly EV (MS 145), and he considered it to be the same as the LV at Queen’s;21 and he seems to have known of no other English Bibles at Oxford. In his catalog of the libraries of Oxford and Cambridge, published in 1600, he names only three complete English Bibles at Oxford (Christ Church, Queen’s, and one in New College, which perhaps was the same as the one he later cites as being at the Bodleian).22 He identifies no Bible that he has seen as Wyclif ’s translation.
Archbishop James Ussher, who died in 1656, repeated James’s statement in abbreviated form, which was exposed to public view when Henry Wharton brought out Ussher’s Historia dogmatica in 1689 and again in 1690. Here Ussher specifies 1290 as the time of the earlier translation:
1290, Anglicanus Interpres.
Longe ante Wiclevi translationem (100 annis, ut conjicit Thomas Jamesius) prodiit universorum Bibliorum Anglicana Translatio: cujus tria in Oxoniensis Academiae Bibliothecis MSS extant exemplaria: unum in Bodleiana (publica), alterum in Aedis Christi, tertium in Reginalis Collegii Bibliotheca.
(T. Jamesius, lib. vernaculo De Corruptione Patrum, part 2, loc. 24.)23
Ussher’s entry on Wyclif is dated 1380. He cites Bale as saying that Wyclif translated the whole Bible. But he concludes from James’s remarks and the listings in his catalog that various copies of old English Bibles exist that differ in translation—which is something that James does not say. Ussher ends by saying he has seen Wyclif ’s translation of the New Testament in Sir Robert Cotton’s library.24 The only Cotton MEB extant today is an LV complete Bible.25
If Thomas James was not aware of two extant versions of MEB, it seems that Thomas Fuller was. In his History of the Worthies of England, published in 1662, Fuller says that John Trevisa, who died around 1400, had the temerity to translate the Bible about fifty years after Wyclif, and he says that “[his] translation is as much better than Wyclif ’s as worse than Tyndale’s.”26 Henry Wharton, in the commentary that he appended to his edition of Ussher, likewise showed himself to be aware of the difference between EV and LV, and he agreed with Fuller that Wyclif was the EV translator. He says that James and Ussher erred in dating the LV translation so early, since the prologue cites Nicholas of Lyre and Archbishop Richard Fitzralph. The author’s impotent rage against Oxford academics proves that Wyclif was not the author, and the printers who published the prologue in 1550 were fantasizing (“hallucinatos esse”) when they ascribed it to him. He admits that it is certain that Wyclif translated the Bible, since Bale said so, as did Jan Hus before him.27 But he was clearly not the translator of the common version (LV), in spite of the fact that it is ascribed to him in all of the copies that he has seen. These ascriptions are recent, made by uncautious readers. He concludes that the prologue and translation (LV) must be by Trevisa. He says that he has not been able to find a complete Bible in Wyclif ’s version (that is, EV), but only of some books (the Epistles and Sunday readings).28
In Wharton’s outdated entry on Wyclif, where he attributes LV to Wyclif, he speaks of a Lambeth New Testament with the Epistle to the Laodiceans, citing the prologue that says it was only recently translated into English. From this Wharton concludes either that there was an earlier translation of the Bible or that there was a double edition of Wyclif ’s translation.29 This is the first acknowledgment I have seen that a translator (here, Wyclif) may have revised his own translation.
In the first part of the eighteenth century, as Dove shows, there was a movement among Protestant scholars to retrieve Wyclif ’s authorship of LV. John Russell in 1719 proposed an edition of Wyclif ’s whole Bible, in the LV text, and John Lewis in his History of Wyclif in 1721, annotating Bale, cites only LV manuscripts as copies of his translation and his prologue.30 In 1731 he published an LV New Testament as Wyclif ’s, with a history giving a full account of Bible translation in England. In it, he says he was mistaken in ascribing the prologue to Wyclif, since it was written after his time. He takes notice of the ascription of the New Testament (EV) in the Dublin manuscript to John Purvey, and says that the prologue goes with it.31
In other words, in this first mention of Purvey in discussions of the MEB, Wyclif himself translated what we call the Later Version, and Purvey, later on, produced what we know as the Early Version and the General Prologue.
In 1728, Daniel Waterland of Cambridge University informed Lewis of his view that EV and LV were by the same person, namely, Wyclif, but later Waterland perceived that events described in the prologue (Five and Twenty Books) happened after Wyclif ’s time, and therefore it and LV must have been by a disciple of Wyclif ’s. He suggested as the likely candidate John Purvey, described by Bale as Wyclif ’s librarius and glossator. When Forshall and Madden started work on the MEB in 1829, they accepted Waterland’s suggestion of Purvey as responsible for LV and the prologue, and by the time they published in 1850, they had embraced it as established fact.32
During all this time of the progressive “Wyclifying” of the Middle English Bible, Dove has found only one doubter, namely, Humfrey Wanley, who started to catalog the library of Robert Harley in 1708. When describing a copy of the treatise Five and Twenty Books, he cites passages from it that “seem to agree well enough with the person and opinions of Wyclif, who is also commonly said to have translated the Bible out of Latin into English, though I could never yet see such a book with his name written therein by the first hand—not to mention what Sir Thomas More wrote, that there were then divers translations of Scripture into English, allowed by Authority, and that the Wycliffites were only charged with keeping certain prefaces to biblical books of Wyclif ’s composure.”33 Even though More does not say this (rather he assumed that Wyclif did make translations, of which Richard Hunne possessed a copy, which, More hoped, had not been destroyed after his trial), it is significant that this is how Wanley reads him. He is saying, in effect, that there is nothing in the extant English Bibles that he has seen to connect them to Wyclif, unlike this clearly Wycliffite tract (which he assumes to be the same as the prologue printed in 1550 and ascribed to Wyclif and also found in certain English Bibles).
In the nineteenth century, the Latin works of John Wyclif were in high esteem, at least for their content if not for their style, and they were being systematically published.34 But Wyclif had also achieved a high reputation as an English writer, so much so that Reginald Poole in 1895 called him “one of the founders of English prose-writing.”35 Four volumes of treatises attributed to him had recently been printed.36 These followed upon the publication at midcentury of the Middle English translation of the entire Bible by Forshall and Madden, which they partially attributed to him, as can be seen from their title: The Holy Bible … in the Earliest English Versions Made from the Latin Vulgate by John Wycliffe and His Followers.37 The editors suggested that only the New Testament portion of EV was by Wyclif himself, while the Old
