Marginalia -- The Journal of the Medieval Reading Group at Cambridge

Ever since Nicholas Watson's hugely influential 1995 article on Archbishop Arundel's Constitutions and this legislation's devastating effects on the contemporary cultural climate, scholarship on Middle English religious literature has been trying to nuance Watson's thesis by stressing the creativity of late-medieval vernacular theological and devotional treatises such as Dives and Pauper, John Capgrave's Life of St Katharine and Reginald Pecock's Repressor of Over Much Blaming of the Clergy. These efforts by scholars working on so-called 'vernacular theology' have brought to our notice the existence of lay, vernacular devotional practices that managed to skirt around the supposedly repressive cultural climate that Watson stressed. Mary Dove's The First English Bible: The Text and Context of the Wycliffite Versions is a welcome contribution to this field.

The first two chapters adumbrate the medieval debate on Bible translation, the prohibition by the Church on translating Latin into the vernacular (commonly known as Arundel's Constitutions of 1409) and the consequences that this legislation had on the religious culture of late-medieval England (Chapter 1, 'The Bible debate'; Chapter 2, 'Censorship'). Although copies of the Wycliffite Bible were owned by many vernacular readers, 'after the Constitutions of 1409 the Christian community for which Arundel was responsible was more anxiety-ridden and less united than it had been before the work of translation began' (p. 67).

But who was responsible for this grandiose enterprise to translate the Latin Bible in its entirety, an enterprise deemed so outrageous by the late-medieval Church that it ultimately precipitated the promulgation of such a 'draconian' (to borrow Watson's phrase) legislation? Even though we conventionally call the English translation of the Latin Bible produced by the Lollards 'the Wycliffite Bible', the attribution to Wyclif, lacking conclusive evidence, is still subject to speculation. Chapter 3, 'The translators', tackles the difficult issue of the identity of the translators of the 'Wycliffite' versions. Drawing on a wide range of material, Dove emphasises that the translation was a collaborative rather than individual project, and argues that John Wyclif, John Purvey and John Trevisa, all of whom were associated with the University of Oxford, played a major role in bringing the Latin Bible into the vernacular sphere.

This ambitious manoeuvre was necessarily predicated on the question of which books of the Bible ought to be regarded as authoritative and therefore worthy of translating. Chapter 4, 'The canonical scriptures', describes the process by which the content and order of the Latin Bible were gradually fixed and standardised towards the later Middle Ages, laying the ground for the translation of the New and Old Testaments. Such aids for reading and interpretation are also provided in the prologues attached to the Wycliffite Bible, which introduce, in an attempt to render the Bible accessible to vernacular readers, the methods of reading the Bible that writers such as Augustine of Hippo and Nicholas of Lyra advocate (Chapter 5, 'The English prologues'). Indeed, the writer of Prologue of the so-called Later Version claims that 'wiþ comune charite to saue alle men in our rewme whiche God wole haue sauid, a symple creature haþ translatid þe Bible out of Latyn into English' (quoted p. 136).

And how is this desire to disseminate vernacular Bibles reflected in the translation itself? Chapter 6, 'The text', examines the two versions of the Wycliffite Bible, the Earlier and Later Versions. The stylistic differences between these two versions have been a perennial conundrum for scholars working on the Wycliffite Bible. Instead of strictly demarcating the two translations, however, Dove acknowledges a continuous process in the overall translation project, treating the translators' efforts as a constant work of revising and editing to produce an accessible English Bible. The English translators' inclusive methods include incorporating numerous explanatory glosses imported from the Latin exegetical tradition. Dove ends the volume by considering the achievements of the Wycliffite Bible, emphasising the fundamentally democratising nature of the translators' project (Chapter 7, 'The effects').

The last two decades have witnessed a dramatic increase in articles and books on the Wycliffite heresy. Despite the central role that the Wycliffite Bible played in this dissenting religious movement, however, The First English Bible happens to be the first study on the Wycliffite Bible per se since Margaret Deanesly's pioneering The Lollard Bible and Other Medieval Biblical Versions published in 1920. The First English Bible is definitely a significant addition to the existing scholarship on Lollardy: both by situating the Wycliffite translation project in the complex nexus of contemporary historical and religious texts and by engaging with detailed philological comparison of the Latin and the English versions of the Bible, it invites us to reconsider the fascinating history of burgeoning lay piety in late-medieval England as well as the long, tortuous path trodden by the Wycliffite Bible.

Atsushi Iguchi, University of Cambridge

© 2004 The authors and the Medieval Reading Group at the University of Cambridge
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