The Earliest Advocates of the English Bible: The Texts of the Medieval Debate (review)

In 1407, the bishop of Canturbury, Thomas Arundel, issued an edict to ban the translation of the Bible into the English vernacular. It is generally assumed that this edict, which was part of a larger set of legislation known as the “Constitutions of Arundel”, was aimed against the Lollards, who justified their (in Arundel’s eyes) heresies with an appeal to the vernacular Bible, in the translation attributed to John Wycliff. In the period leading up this condemnation, the question whether the Bible should be translated had become a hotly debated topic. Some scholars even refer to this episode as the English “Bible-wars”. In 2007, Mary Dove published her The First English Bible, the first major study on this subject since The Lollard Bible and Other Medieval Biblical Versions (Deanesley 1920). Sadly, Dove’s scholarly career was cut short by her untimely death. The present volume, however, was completed shortly before she died, and published posthumously. It is, in a way, a valuable companion volume to her monograph, and a fitting tribute to her meticulous and path-breaking work on this subject.

The Earliest Advocates of the English Bible brings together the main texts that witness to the debate on the English Bible translation in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries: the prologues to (various parts of) the Wycliffite Bible, the twelve so-called Cambridge Tracts, and the texts First seiþ Bois (i.e., Boethius), The Holi Prophet Dauid, and Pater Noster II. The present edition includes short introductions to and critical editions of each of these texts, as well as descriptions of the ca. sixty manuscripts that the edition is based on. Some of these texts are clearly Wycliffite in character, such as the general prologue to the Wycliffite Bible, which contained some highly polemical passages and chapters. For this reason, the text edited here probably never became the standard prologue to this Bible, which today is extant in some two hundred and fifty manuscripts, many of them owned by highly respected and hardly heretical members of the English nobility. Other texts are thoroughly orthodox, such as the text First seiþ Bois, which is a translation of a 1391 Oxford determinatio written by Richard Ullerston. Although clearly anti-Lollard in his theology, Ullerston clearly advocated the translation of the Bible into English. The debate over the English Bible was a highly divisive issue, and the 1407 constitutions were probably an attempt by the archbishop to quell the Wycliffite heresy before it got out of hand, without dismissing the possibility of an English Bible translation altogether. The Cambridge Tracts show that the constitutions did not end the debate. In fact, the translation of the Bible would remain a contentious issue until the appearance of the King James Bible, which this year celebrates its fourth centennial. The present volume is essential reading for anyone with an interest in the latter, and a valuable resource for anyone with an interest in the history of the English Bible.