Doctors in English: A Study of the Wycliffite Gospel Commentaries by Anne Hudson (review)

The so-called Glossed Gospels (hereafter GG), extensive Middle English commentaries on the four evangelists, are among the most important texts within the Wycliffite orbit that remain unedited and therefore underappreciated by scholars. Anne Hudson’s Doctors in English is, as she describes it, “a prolegomenon to an edition” (xiii) of this very complex set of texts. In her book, Hudson provides the necessary foundation for a long-term collaborative project that she hopes will be taken up by a group of researchers dedicated, as she has been for many years, to recovering an accurate history of the Wycliffite movement from its manuscript remains. Those who answer this challenge will owe Hudson an immense debt of gratitude for her deliberative preparations. In the meanwhile, readers can marvel at the precision of a scholar operating at the top of her game, on a group of Middle English texts that, as Hudson examines them, seem only to gain in theological and ideological interest because of their manuscript complexities.

Aside from the two translations of the Wycliffite Bible and the intertextual and marginal glosses designed by the translators to facilitate an accurate understanding of these, GG represents the movement’s most profound engagement with the basic sense and import of Scripture. The “clear objective” of those responsible for GG, Hudson notes, was “the provision of complete vernacular biblical commentary on each gospel derived from accepted authorities that would be specified in sufficient detail to be traced back to their sources” (cli). At the same time, Hudson explains, “no single ‘recipe’ . . . controlled the production of the commentary for each of the four gospels—on the contrary, each gospel’s commentary reveals individual methods of production and eccentricities of citation” (liii). The commentaries she discusses, then, are both distinct and connected—parts of a comprehensive exegetical endeavor and texts that manifest at times their own peculiar features, practices, and concerns.

More than half of Doctors in English (i–cliv) consists of an expert analysis, in seven detailed chapters, of the five most important GG manuscripts: their contents, affinities with each other, and the expository and polemical nature of their materials. Most of the rest of the book (1–98) offers edited selections from these “intended to demonstrate some of the claims that are made in the main chapters . . . and to illustrate the normal method of each of the commentaries” (3). There are, as well, two brief appendices: the first on problems posed by the use of modern editions of Latin sources in studying the vernacular commentaries—particularly Guarienti’s edition of Thomas Aquinas’s Catena aurea, the chief source for GG—and the second on the text of Odo of Chateau-roux’s commentary on the Psalms in Oxford, Balliol College, MS 37, an intriguing outlier source used heavily in two GG manuscripts. There is also a helpful bibliography of primary (both manuscript and print) and secondary sources.

At some point in the late fourteenth-century history of GG’s production, Hudson argues, there were both long- and short-form commentaries for each Gospel—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. What survives, however, is an anomalous long discourse on Matthew based on five separate Latin commentaries but not involving Aquinas—which may represent an abortive early approach to Wycliffite Gospel exegesis (four manuscripts, one of these complete, another consisting of two leaves only; and the other two abbreviated versions of the complete text, one of these a copy of the other)—and five commentaries based predominantly on Aquinas and supplemented by other authorities: a short Matthew independent from but also aware of anomalous long Matthew (two manuscripts); a short Mark (one manuscript); a long and short Luke (one and two manuscripts respectively); and a short John (two manuscripts, included respectively in one of the short Matthew and one of the short Luke copies). Beyond these works, each of which is organized around a subdivided text of one or more Gospel narratives, a single manuscript...