The Earliest Advocates of the English Bible: The Texts of the Medieval Debate ed. by Mary Dove (review)

When Mary Dove passed away on June 5, 2009, she had nearly completed her edited collection of Middle English texts concerning the translation of the Bible. The series editors, and especially Professor Anne Hudson, are much to be commended for the care they took in seeing Dove’s work through the final stages of revision and publication. The Earliest Advocates of the English Bible presents a rich selection of works, heretofore largely neglected, that offer new insight into the religious and literary culture of late medieval England.

Many of the texts brought together in this collection constituted the major sources for Dove’s monograph, The First English Bible: The Text and Context of the Wycliffite Versions (2007). These include the prologue to the Later Version of the Wycliffite Bible, the prologue to the Major Prophets in the same translation, and prologues and epilogues that accompany different versions of the Wycliffite Glossed Gospels. Such texts extend and support the argument of The First English Bible, emphasizing the important role of Wycliffite writers as advocates of vernacular scripture. Just as interesting, however, and perhaps presenting a broadening of the thesis of Dove’s monograph, are the various texts that cannot be identified as Wycliffite productions: the most important example of these being the so-called twelve Cambridge Tracts, pieces of varying length brought together in CUL Ii.6.26 by a compiler intending to create a collection of texts in support of Biblical translation. Dove thus suggests, early in her Introduction (pp. xix–xx), that translating the Bible or supporting translations are not necessarily Wycliffite activities. Indeed, the range of texts brought together by Dove demonstrates well the widespread interest, ca. 1400, in Middle English Biblical texts.

One of the other major insights made clear by this collection is the variety of uses to which these prologues and tracts could be put by their medieval readers. Thus, for example, while earlier scholarship concerning the Later Version prologue has, naturally enough, focused on its final chapters (on methods of translation and the process by which, according to the prologuer, the Middle English Bible came into being), Dove’s discussion of the manuscripts suggests that late medieval readers were rather more interested in the prologue’s early chapters, providing a convenient summary of various Old Testament books. These chapters could be extracted and copied as prefaces proper to individual Biblical books (as in Oxford, Lincoln College lat. 119), extracted and made part of a collection of Biblical prolegomena from various sources (as in Dublin, Trinity College 75), or made to preface a different Biblical translation entirely (as in Worcester, Cathedral Library F.172, where the Later Version prologue’s discussion of the Psalms precedes Richard Rolle’s English Psalter). Likewise, Cambridge Tract II also appears as a prologue to the Middle English Gospel harmony Oon of Foure, as does the beginning of the prologue to the Intermediate Version of Matthew in the Glossed Gospels. The different manuscript contexts in which these works appear, now made clear through Dove’s editorial efforts, suggest directions in which new work should tend.

The edited texts themselves are presented clearly with few obvious errors. One register of notes provides glosses of potentially unfamiliar words and identifies Biblical citations and allusions; a second records textual variants. Several of the texts survive in single manuscripts, and, for those with multiple witnesses, the reasons for choosing the base manuscript are made clear in the Introduction and seem appropriate. Dove is especially to be commended for including Renaissance printings of these texts, where they exist, in her collation. Following the texts are lengthy explanatory notes, in which Dove variously elucidates questions of historical context or identifies patristic or earlier medieval sources. The explanatory notes for the tract First seiþ Bois are particularly useful in so far as Dove provides substantial passages from Richard Ullerston’s...