The Middle English Bible: A Reassessment by Henry Ansgar Kelly (review)

Is the Middle English Bible Wycliffian or Wycliffite? The question marks an important distinction that informs Henry Ansgar Kelly's The Middle English Bible: A Reassessment. In this volume, Kelly sets out to disentangle the Middle English Bible from the political constraints imposed upon it by its association with Lollardy. Although he believes that the work of Wyclif (and particularly Wyclif s emphasis on the importance of scriptural study rather than scholastic disputation) laid the foundations for the translation, Kelly does not believe that Wyclif or the Lollards were responsible for the translation project itself. Nor, as he demonstrates, did the 1407 constitution Periculosa strictly prohibit English translations. In this volume, Kelly considers why modern scholars believe the Middle English Bible to be a Wycliffite project, explores the role of the author of what is commonly designated the General Prologue to the Later Version of the Bible, and investigates both the theologico-political climate of the period and the fifteenth-century interpretations of Periculosa to determine how English Bibles were regarded in the later Middle Ages.

The thesis is an enticing one, and Kelly charts the origins and development of many assumptions that have underpinned so much scholarship on the Bible itself and on Lollard writings. The volume brings together some of the dissenting voices calling for a reappraisal of received knowledge, and it attempts to posit an alternative context for the composition of the Middle English Bible. In so doing, key actors, including the author of the so-called General Prologue to the Later Version, are brought more fully into view in an eminently readable and lively monograph.

In the first chapter of the volume, Kelly traces the centuries of critical attention given to the translation, from the second-generation copy attributed to Nicholas Hereford to Forshall and Madden's 1850 printing of the treatise Five and Twenty Books as the General Prologue to the Later Version. Kelly centers Dom Francis Aidan Gasquet in the discussion, presenting Gasquet's refutation of the Wycliffite attribution and his challenge to the persistent view that the church of the later Middle Ages condemned English translations of the Bible.

The second chapter deals with the treatise Five and Twenty Books, whose author (Kelly calls him Simple Creature because of his self-presentation in the Prologue) claims to have been responsible for the Middle English Bible. Dialect, style, and linguistic principles compel Kelly to doubt the attribution, and he examines a handful of lexical choices to counter Simple Creature's claims of responsibility. With so few examples, however, any conclusions that may be drawn from such scant evidence ought to be handled lightly, but this is not the case here. Instead, Kelly speculates about Simple Creature's level of involvement in the translation, and he presents Simple Creature's assertion of authority as a spiteful maneuver resulting from the rejection of his treatise (on the grounds of its Wycliffite content) as a prologue to the Old Testament.

The study of the Bible at Oxford and Simple Creature's demonstrable lack of understanding of the procedures there take up much of Chapter 3. Kelly speculates upon the time taken to complete the Early and Later Versions of the Middle English bible, the composition of the translation teams, and how they conducted their project. Five and Twenty Books is the focus of much of the discussion, with Simple Creature's stated methodology held up to scrutiny. Here, Kelly's examination of the differences between the two versions is particularly strong as he considers what each translation sought to achieve, and his review of the scholarship on how the translations related to each other is presented cogently and thoughtfully. Yet, once again, the chapter closes on a speculative history of the translation process itself, and the rigor of the preceding arguments comes to be diffused into an unfulfilling conclusion.

The question of the advisability or allowability of English...