The Courtly and Commercial Art of the Wycliffite Bible by Kathleen E. Kennedy (review)

A commonplace in scholarship on religious culture in late medieval England is the abundance of extant Wycliffite Bibles—over 250 witnesses survive. Less often acknowledged is the high number of these Bibles with programs of decorative illumination—roughly half contain at least some ornamentation with pigments. Both of these facts present challenges to conventional histories of what Anne Hudson famously dubbed England's "premature reformation." First, the profusion of Wycliffite Bibles would seem an impossibility in light of their dubious status after Archbishop Arundel's Constitutions (1407–9). Second, the high percentage of witnesses with illumination seems to conflict with traditional accounts of Lollard antipathy to images. It is with these apparent contradictions in the foreground that Kathleen E. Kennedy sets out to provide the first survey of illuminated Wycliffite Bibles, an overdue and rewarding enterprise.

In what follows, I focus my comments on Chapters 4–6, in which Kennedy concentrates on the illumination of the Wycliffite Bibles. While the rationale behind this is that I am an art historian, a few more words of justification are necessary. Much of what Kennedy does in these chapters involves solid gumshoe connois-seurship, a method that is in complete sympathy with philology—what Richard Neer refers to in The Emergence of the Classical Style in Greek Sculpture (2010) as a "connoisseurship of words" (p. 9). Both methods are epistemologically akin and entail the search for lines of affiliation and descent among cultural products, and Kennedy does this by localizing the origins and identifying the producers of Wycliffite Bible manuscripts. Unfortunately connoisseurship became a disciplinary embarrassment only recently the beneficiary of defense by scholars such as Neer and David Freedberg, while philology came to be so respected as to be traditional, then hoary, then ripe for revival (see Stephen Nichols's 1990 Speculum article). Regardless, if what Kennedy performs in these chapters seems alien to some of the readers of this journal, it is nevertheless in the spirit of philological inquiry.

Following three useful and engaging chapters, Kennedy devotes Chapter 4 to the manuscripts that contain figural illumination. The introductory remarks in this chapter contextualize the absence of figural illumination in the majority of Wycliffite Bibles within the broader diminution of figural illumination across all religious manuscripts in England at the time and the concomitant decline in Vulgate production. These observations are important, and Kennedy hits the nail on the head when she notes, "Vulgates made in England after about 1415 were unillustrated, and scholars do not assume the absence of images in these bibles suggests heresy" (p. 56). To these comments, I would add that the decline in figural illumination in scriptural, Latin manuscripts is counterbalanced by the explosion of vernacular manuscripts that contain both decorative and figural illumination after 1400. This comparison raises, to my mind, the question of how we construct our context—is it possible that the embellishment of Wycliffite Bible manuscripts is on a par with its vernacular counterparts? If so, how might this alter our understanding of the reception of Wycliffite Bible texts? These questions aside, this chapter challenges successfully the utility in ascribing a monolithic ideology to Wycliffite Bible owners when the realities of the manuscripts themselves are far more diverse—or, in Kennedy's terms, "hospitable," more on which below.

After opening Chapter 4 on this salutary note, Kennedy trains her focus on the elaborate Wycliffite Bibles made in the provinces (i.e., not London), the majority of which are conservative in both style and iconography. Her case studies include a handful made for a noble clientele, a Bible made ca. 1450 in Oxford with roundels showing the seven days of Creation, and two copies of the Glossed Gospels. Another section points up the only Wycliffite Bible with a column miniature, a representation of John writing (BL, Royal MS 1 C Viii, fol. 325v). In an engaging section, Kennedy traces...