Jerome’s Prefatory Epistles to the Bible and The Canterbury Tales

Jerome's Prefatory Epistles to the Bible and The Canterbury Tales Brenda Deen Schildgen University ofCalifornia, Davis The voice of books informs not all alike. Thomas a Kempis, Imitation ofChrist ...the lerned man mygte I feele in o wise in the same sentence / and the unlerned in an other maner.... St.Jerome, Prefatory Epistles1 ALTHOUGH MUCH ATTENTION HAS BEEN DIRECTED to th, inHu­ ence Augustine's De doctrina Christiana may have had on medieval inter­ pretive theory and literary practice, particularly in regard to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales,2 less attention has been paid to Jerome's theory of 1 ]erom in his Prolog on the Byble 8. All quotations fromjerom in his Prolog are from Conrad Lindberg, The Middle English Bible: Prefatory Epistles ofSt.Jerome (Oslo, Bergen, Tromsii: Universitetsforlaget, 1978). Lindberg's edition includes the Latin version of the Prefatory Epistles as well as two Middle English versions-the first translation attempt and a later revised version. For this discussion I have used the later Middle English version, dated, according to Lindberg, in the 1380s; it is a less literal rendition ofJerome's Prefaces. 2 Sancti Aurelii Augustini, Opera, pt. 4, De doctrina Christiana, ed.Joseph Martin, in Corpus Christianorum series Latina, vol. 32 (Turnholti: Typographi Brepols Editores Pon­ tificii, 1962), pp. 1-167; subsequent quotations from De doctrina Christiana are from Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, trans. D. W. Robertson (New York: Bobbs-Merrill,1958). See also D.W. Robertson, A Preface to Chaucer: Studies in Medieval Perspectives (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1962). A forthcoming two-volume collection ofessays on De doctrina Christiana (South Bend, Ind.: Notre Dame University Press, 1992) explores the large range of hermeneutical implications of Augustine's treatise. Brian Stock's forthcoming Au­ gustine and theBirth ofthe MedievalReaderincludes a chapter onDe doctrina Christiana and its impact on reading habits in the Middle Ages. 111 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER biblical interpretation as represented in his Prefatory Epistles to various sections ofthe Bible and the influence that theory may have had on literary interpretive attitudes even if not methods.3 In his Prefatory Epistles, because he had entered into "pious work, but a dangerous undertaking,"4 in the translation of the Bible, Jerome had set out a number of specific interpretive problems raised by his translating activity that deserve the attention of medievalists. The Prefaces must have carried a great deal of authority since they were part ofthe Vulgate that was included in the Wycliffite translation project, initiated in the 1370s.5 Jerome's interpretive concerns emerged in his translation ofthe Bible from Greek to Latin, for most ofthe ChristianWest from a "silent" language to a "spoken" language. That Jerome's Prefaces appeared in the Wycliffite Bible suggests that similar concerns must have arisen in the translation from Latin to English. Many of the specific interpretive issues that the Prefaces raise also appear in Chaucer's literary presentation ofthe complexity ofunderstanding in The Canterbury Tales. As medievalists have argued in recent years, a well-educated reader in the fourteenth century had access to numerous approaches to literary exegesis, many aspects of which find parallels in contemporary theory.6 Jerome's 3 Whetherornotallthe originalLatin prefacesthatappear in theVulgateBible were infact the work ofJerome is still very much a matter ofspeculation, but what matters for a discussion oftheir importance in the fourteenth century is that they were believed to beJerome's work. 4 Jerome, "Epistula ad Damasum," Novum Testamentum Latine, Secundum Editionem Sancti Hieronymi (London: British and Foreign Bible Society, 1985), xiv. My translation; subsequent quotations from "Epistula ad Damasum" are from Frank Sadowski, ed. and trans., ''.Jerome's Preface to the Four Gospels," Church Fathers and the Bible: Selected Readings (New York: Alba House, 1987), pp. 198-200. 5 Dating theWycliffite Bible is controversial, according ro Anne Hudson, The Premature Reformation: Wycliffite Texts and Lo/lard History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988). She argues that the earliest datable manuscript must have been made before 1397; ifWyclilfwas involved in the project, it would be hard to date the start ofthe project later than 1382. For Hudson's arguments about dating, see ibid., p. 247. Some scholars, as, for example, Lindberg, in Middle English Bible, p. 58, argue...