Review

Abstract

In his long-awaited The Middle English Bible: A Reassessment, Henry Kelly recommends a wholesale renaming of the Bible translation known as the Wycliffite Bible. In arguing for “the Middle English Bible,” Kelly revives arguments made by Cardinal Francis Gasquet in the late nineteenth century, and he nominates the Benedictine “the patron saint of revisionism” (135). In the end, Kelly's reassessment seems effectively limited to his suggestion that we change the name, as his original, provocative arguments often lack substantial supporting evidence in their present form. Future publications will demonstrate whether or not the field chooses to adopt this particular name change.The body of The Middle English Bible will be familiar to scholars who have heard Kelly's conference papers over the past six or seven years. Having these and voluminous appendixes based on his handouts in print renders them a valuable resource to a wider readership than the limited audiences at conferences. The amount of source material Kelly includes in his notes and appendixes in both Latin and English translation adds significantly to the body of primary texts available in recent print and furnishes the highlight of the volume. The bibliography is relatively up to date. Nevertheless, Mary Dove and Anne Hudson serve as the primary interlocutors throughout, while most other scholars are effectively excluded from the discussion and relegated to the notes. Certainly, one expects a collection of papers to vary in tone, audience, organization, and argumentation, but in The Middle English Bible a reader must take special care.Chapter 2 is considered separately below, but chapters 1, 3, and 4 and their linked appendixes retread ground familiar to those who work in the field. Chapter 1 and appendixes A and B reexplore some of the historiography of the Wycliffite Bible from the Middle Ages through to the twentieth century. Kelly ends with Dove's reminder that Gasquet troubled scholarly waters in a period during which study of the Middle Ages and the early modern period still divided largely along confessional lines. Chapter 3 reconsiders the size of the teams involved in both the Earlier and Later Versions of the Wycliffite Bible and how long each translation took to complete. Kelly questions whether a large team and a long period of time were absolutely necessary, and given how little direct evidence we currently have either way, caution on this matter is surely warranted. Nevertheless, his insistence that the translations could have been made quickly by one or two people in a very short span of time is not borne out by his evidence as presented later in chapter 7. Chapter 4 turns to the debate about Bible translation in England in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries as evinced by Palmer, Butler, and Ullerston. This is a place where the lightly revised paper format shows particularly baldly. While others' work turns up in occasional notes, the scholarly context deserves direct confrontation here.1Chapters 5 and 6 leverage Kelly's long specialization in canon law and offer the most original material in the volume. Chapter 5 briefly offers a revisionist interpretation of Archbishop Thomas Arundel's Constitutions of 1407–9. Kelly argues that only the public reading of recent scripture translations was forbidden, not owning such translations. Appendixes O and P examine the process of censoring Wyclif's works at Oxford and include a list of the works that contain the censored material. Chapter 6 turns to the increasingly documentable illegality of the Wycliffite Bible as the fifteenth century progressed. Like chapter 5, chapter 6 draws from episcopal registers and canonist William Lyndwood's Provinciale. Kelly provides the sections of Lyndwood in appendix Q in facing-page Latin-English translation. According to Kelly, like the Constitutions themselves, Lyndwood's interpretation was comparatively mild. In evidence, he provides a series of cases of suspected heretics owning English scripture who were later found guilty, but not on account of their books. Here he might have more directly engaged Ian Forrest's substantial work on the detection of heresy, which appears only in a few notes.2 Kelly documents that English scripture came under episcopal investigation directly by the 1430s under Archbishop John Stafford and became outright illegal in the late 1450s under Archbishop and then Cardinal Thomas Bourchier. Kelly does not mention that this increasing illegality parallels the time line of copying (or at least illuminating) Wycliffite Bibles perfectly: fewer copies were made from the 1430s onward, and almost none postdate 1450.3 Though he does not cite Elizabeth Solopova's work on the topic here, he notes nevertheless that clergy continued to use their copies without apparent legal difficulty throughout this period.4Chapter 7 takes readers to the Reformation, Thomas More's Dialogue Concerning Heresies, and an era when people were unquestionably executed for owning English Bibles, whether Wycliffite or Tyndalean. Despite his explication of Richard Hunne's trial as described by More in the late 1520s, Kelly says nothing about the Reformation or the effect that Tyndale's translations had on the application of earlier ecclesiastical law in Reformation-era heresy trials. Kelly skips ahead to the Catholic Douai-Rheims translation of 1582 instead, and he emphasizes that its translator, Gregory Martin, worked without reference to earlier English translations. Though Kelly cites none of it, sixteenth-century English Bible translation is a subfield of its own. Scholars in the field share the consensus that Martin probably made use of earlier translations, though thorough linguistic work has yet to be done to prove or disprove this.5 This silent rejection of scholarly consensus is particularly troubling as Martin furnishes Kelly's proof that the earlier Wycliffite Bible translations could have been rapidly achieved by individual translators. Given how little linguistic work has been done on either the Wycliffite Bible or the Douai-Rheims, however, we can only speculate about their likely methodologies.Chapter 2 and appendixes C through M concern the so-called General Prologue of the Wycliffite Bible and make textual claims about the dialect of its author that are important enough to consider separately. Some of this chapter derives from a talk co-written for the International Congress on Medieval Studies in 2011 with Leslie K. Arnovick, and a note explaining why she receives no credit in this published version should have been included. Although only a handful of copies remain extant, in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries scholars have granted the “General Prologue” considerable importance. For this reason, Kelly's efforts to decenter it from the primary Wycliffite Bible production process are laudatory. Nevertheless, while Kelly's linguistic work with the “General Prologue” is interesting, it is difficult to know what to make of his findings from the biblical text, since he employs only three or four exemplars in his analysis. (Kelly is not consistent in his manuscript source citations, so it is not entirely clear from which exemplars he draws.) The field will be able to test Kelly's linguistic claims better once Solopova publishes her forthcoming methodology for editing the Wycliffite Bible.Many scholars take advantage of the self-selecting, expert audiences at conferences to present preliminary research and to test arguments as we develop them. Very few scholars can have those conference papers published so lightly revised as this, lacking even full manuscript shelf marks, by the University of Pennsylvania Press. A range of presses exist today that eagerly publish short, preliminary, or experimental work. That Penn Press selected this collection for publication is therefore especially surprising. Ruth Mazo Karras and Edward Peters's series The Middle Ages is the work of many years and boasts a long list of solid titles. Time will tell whether The Middle English Bible marks a new direction for The Middle Ages at Penn Press or proves to be an experiment.