the end of the century, the entire English Bible, without distinguishing between versions or parts, was commonly said to be the work of Wyclif, “the Wyclif Bible.” It was the example of the Egerton Bible, an EV copy, displayed in the British Museum as Wyclif ’s translation, that first inspired Cardinal Gasquet to embark on his revisionist history, as we shall see. But the first scholars who responded to Gasquet used a new term, “the Wycliffite Bible,” which has found favor to this day.
Dom Aidan Gasquet’s Objections to the Wycliffied Bible
The Wycliffite nature of the Middle English Bible as it solidified in the nineteenth century was challenged by only one person, the Benedictine historian Dom Aidan Gasquet, initially in an article published in the Dublin Review in 1894.38 He held instead that the translations were not only orthodox productions, but also that they were approved of by the Church authorities. His theses were challenged on several fronts, but most trenchantly by Arthur Ogle, writing anonymously in 1900 and 1901,39 and Ogle’s arguments were taken up and relentlessly repeated by G. G. Coulton in various publications.40
Gasquet professes to identify a fallacious syllogism at work in the universal ascription of the early translations to Wyclif and his followers. It was presumed, begging the question, that the Catholic Church condemned translating the Scriptures into the vernacular. Therefore, only one possible conclusion could be drawn: the early translations must be by those who dissented from the Church. He asks: “May it not be possible that under the influence of a preconceived idea people have gone off on a wrong scent altogether?” And answers: “If we start with a foregone conclusion, we can have little hope that we shall read facts rightly, even though they be as plain as the proverbial pikestaff, and in this instance it appears to me that it has been assumed altogether too hastily that the English pre-Reformation Scriptures could not have been catholic, and must have been and were the outcome of the Wycliffite movement.”41
Gasquet begins his original essay by documenting the widespread scholarly belief at the time, the last decade of the nineteenth century, that John Wyclif himself had had an active role in the English Bible project, starting with the label on the Egerton manuscript that stood as the premier exhibit in the King’s Library in the British Museum: “The English Bible, Wycliffe’s Translation.”42 He can easily show that the idea of translating the Bible into English and examples of English translations existed long before Wyclif ’s time and were not the outcome of his movement.43 On the conclusion of Forshall and Madden that Wyclif translated the EV New Testament, he finds no evidence at all, and adds, “It is difficult to account for the silence of Wyclif himself, who in none of his undoubted writings, so far as I am aware, lays any stress on, or, indeed, in any way advocates having the Scriptures in the vernacular, except so far as is implied in the claim that the Bible is the sole guide in faith and practice for all.”44 It is admitted nowadays that Wyclif showed little interest in any kind of vernacular use until the end of his life.45 Alastair Minnis puts it strongly: “The arch-heresiarch himself, John Wyclif, made no attempt to champion his ‘vulgar’ tongue (to the best of our knowledge). No justification of the translation of that most authoritative of all books, ‘The Book of Life,’ may be found anywhere in Wyclif ’s voluminous theological writings, though for centuries he has been lauded as the fons et origo of the First English Bible.”46 “Wyclif ’s dismissive, perhaps even insulting, remarks in De veritate sacrae scripturae (1378) about the skills needed for the making of material Bibles are very much his own—and evidently consistent with what Anne Hudson has termed his ‘amazingly nonchalant’ attitude to language transference.”47
None of Wyclif ’s adversaries attribute any such enterprise to him, Gasquet says, except that Henry Knighton said that he translated the Gospel; and John Hus reported that he translated the whole Bible, while Archbishop Arundel, writing to Pope John XXIII, at least implied the same.48 Later scholars agree with Gasquet in dismissing the first two of these witnesses, and they should agree with him on his arguments against the third.49 Finally, Gasquet observes, “From what we know of Wyclif ’s active, restless, and combative disposition, and of his particularly speculative turn of mind, we should hardly have been disposed to assign to him so tedious a task as that of mere translation.”50
F. D. Matthew, in his 1895 response to Gasquet, cites a few pseudo-Wycliffian passages from his own English Works of Wyclif and from Thomas Arnold’s Select English Works of John Wyclif, which, he says, certainly imply “the authorship of Wyclif or some associate of his,”51 and Ogle rebukes Gasquet for not responding to this evidence.52 But Gasquet had already written off the wholesale ascription of English works to Wyclif,53 and most modern authorities agree in denying his authorship of everything previously assigned to him in English.54
What of the role of particular Wycliffites in the translation project? It was an easy deduction on Gasquet’s part that the universal acceptance of Wyclif ’s secretary John Purvey as the translator of LV rested on no proof whatsoever: “I believe that practically the only direct evidence to connect Purvey with this translation is the fact that his name appears in a single copy of the revision as a former owner.”55 Ogle responds to this statement with indignant bluster, simply repeating what Forshall and Madden have to say—which indeed consists of no evidence at all.56 The definitive dismissal of Purvey’s participation in the project came only in 1981 in Anne Hudson’s article in Viator.57
Gasquet was willing to admit the participation of the Wycliffite Nicholas Hereford in the EV Old Testament, if the big “if ” of Forshall and Madden’s assertion turns out to be true. Gasquet says, “If the note ascribing the version to Nicholas Hereford is, as Forshall and Madden testify, practically contemporary, it certainly furnishes us with strong evidence that Hereford had a main hand in the translation of the Old Testament.”58 Gasquet goes on to tell of Hereford’s renunciation of Wycliffite doctrines, and Ogle can see no reason for his doing so “unless it be to suggest that the orthodoxy which Hereford may have resumed in 1391 possessed some kind of retroactive virtue.”59 Perhaps Gasquet was suggesting that he resumed work on the Bible, a possibility noted by Conrad Lindberg.60
In recent times, the authenticity of the ascription to Hereford has come into question, as Hudson points out. It appears in manuscript Douce 369.1 at Baruch 3.20. This is the manuscript that Forshall and Madden used as their base text of EV from 1 Esdras up to this point.61 But this manuscript was written subsequently to another manuscript, Bodley 959, which preserves EEV, considered by Forshall and Madden to be “the original copy of the translator.”62 It breaks off at the same point, but has no attribution.63 Hudson concludes: “The attempt to ascribe sections of the translation and its revisions to individual Wycliffites, or indeed to Wyclif himself, seems to me misguided, and furthermore, to show a singular failure to grasp the nature or magnitude of the undertaking.”64 I will, however, suggest reasons later for doubting that the project was as massive as is sometimes supposed.
That leaves us without Wyclif and without specific Wycliffites and only with the Wycliffite doctrine in the anonymous so-called General Prologue (GP). This is where Gasquet made his big mistake. He did not read this treatise on the Old Testament, which Gasquet calls Five and Twenty Books (FTB),65 closely enough to take notice of its occasional antiestablishment statements. While he exposed the groundlessness of Forshall and Madden’s assumptions about Purvey’s authorship of FTB and LV, he accepted their position that the treatise and LV were by the same person, the position taken by Henry Wharton: “In some few copies there exists a lengthy prologue, which gives an account of the method employed by the translator. Whatever the author says of these methods is borne out in the actual version; and there is thus no room for doubting, as Henry Wharton long ago observed, that the prologues [sic] and the translation are by the same hand.”66 Gasquet goes on to cite the passage from chapter 15 of Five and Twenty Books that details the four steps outlined
