The Middle English Bible: A Reassessment by Henry Ansgar Kelly (review)

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.¹

Chapters 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...