Bible Manuscripts: 1400 Years of Scribes and Scripture by Scot McKendrick and Kathleen Doyle, and: The First English Bible: The Text and Context of the Wycliffite Versions by Mary Dove (review)

332 CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE Bible Manuscripts: 1400 Years ofScribes and Scripture. ByScot McKendrick and Kathleen Doyle. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. ISBN 978-0-71234922 -2. Pp. 159.$35.00. The First English Bible: The Text and Context ofthe Wycliffite Versions. ByMary Dove. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. ISBN 978-0-521-88028-2. Pp. xvi + 313. $99.00. Whatever disagreements Christians may have about beliefs, practices, and liturgies, they share a common set of sacred texts, collectivelyknown as "The Bible:' Even here, of course, there are disputes over what exactly should be included in the canon of scripture and how that canon should be read, but that the Biblemaintains a central role in the Christian faith is not itself in question. Given this central role, it is not surprising that books about the Bible proliferate; in 2007 two such books were published that may be of particular interest to literary scholars and teachers. The first, Bible Manuscripts: 1400Years ofScribes and Scripture, is a very highquality picture book. Compiled by two librarians at the British Library-Scot McKendrick, head of Western manuscripts, and Kathleen Doyle-it offers 142fullcolor facsimiles of manuscript Bible pages ranging from second-century papyri fragments to the Latin Psalter of HenryVIII, handwritten and illuminatedfiftyyears after the advent of the printing press in England. Along the way,it showcases some of the treasures housed at the British Library: Codex Sinaiticus (fourth century), the earliest surviving copy of a complete New Testament; Codex Alexandrinus (fifth century), the most complete of the earliest Christian Bibles;the beautifully decorated Lindisfarne Gospels (eighth century); the Vespasian Psalter (eighth century), with its interlinear Anglo-Saxon glossing of the Latin text, "the oldest extant translation into English of any biblical text" (29); and a whole host of later lavishly illustrated Psalters, Gospels, Lectionaries, New Testaments, and complete Bibles. This collection, a contribution to history of the book studies, provides both a visual teaser and a limited chronology. As a teaser, it provokes any number of questions about the composition and use of the Bibles that are featured, few of which are answered in the short descriptions that accompany each colored plate. Similarly, as a limited chronology, a reader notices the change from Greek to Latin or from simple text to increasingly complex illustrations but is given little information as to how or why these changes took place. For those facts, one must consult works such as David Norton's A History of the Bibleas Literature (1993), The Oxford Illustrated History of the Bible (2001), The Cambridge History of the Bible (2004), or any number of other volumes that treat the Bible as book. Bible Manuscripts instead highlights the artistic work of the scribes, and here the brief descriptions draw our eye to compositional details such as the ornamentation on BOOK REVIEWS 333 canon tables (which provide early harmonies of the gospels), a pictorial allegory of the Bible itself (34), the decorative initial letter common to later English Psalters (55), or the intricate script and illumination developed by the Benedictines (81). I plan to keep this book handy for those times in class when I want to illustrate the traditional emblems of the four evangelists, or the interlocking schema of medieval text and images that foreshadows contemporary graphiC novels, or other delights that beautiful manuscripts hold. If Bible Manuscriptsprovides a welcoming visual feast, Mary Dove's The First English Bible: TheTextand Contextofthe Wycliffite Versions asks its readers to ingest a dense, scholarly argument. Dove, Professor of English at the University of Sussex until her sudden death in June 2009, has provided a great service to specialists in medieval and early modern literature by examining both the fourteenth-century manuscripts of the English Bible and the contemporary debates that surrounded their appearance and the critical commentary that has ensued since the publication of Forshall and Madden's edition of the WycliffiteBiblein 1850. Along the way she asks and answers a good many persistent questions that have arisen in this field: Did Wycliftranslate much if not allofthe Biblethat bears his name or were John Purvey and others mainly responsible? (The evidence points toward Wyclif as the initiator and supervisor of the project with himself, Nicholas...