Studies in the Transmission of Wyclif’s Writings (review)

This is an unusual Variorum volume in that it includes, as well as reprints, items selected by the author, which are published here for the first time. The first of these new pieces, placed at the beginning of the volume and forming an introduction, is concerned with “Wyclif’s Works and Their Dissemination.” It takes capable charge of the confusion that derives not only from the attempts to suppress John Wyclif’s works but also from Wyclif’s own untidy authorial habits. In this he was not alone in his day, although he seems to have been peculiarly susceptible to fits of indignation leading to irritable changes and to revisions of the very opinions he was so passionately recording. The Oxford academic of the time was used to lecturing with a student reportatio commissioned to remind him of what he had said and the expectation that he would be lecturing again. A book was not necessarily envisaged as a finished product but as work in progress. Wyclif was often conscious that he had said something similar elsewhere. (The fourth item included in this volume looks at “Cross-Referencing in Wyclif’s Latin Works.”) Then there was the factor of the making of extracts for purposes of condemnation, not always from versions that survive in the same form in a complete text. Discussed in no. XIII are “Notes of an Early Fifteenth-Century Research Assistant and the Emergence of the 267 Articles against Wyclif.” “Accessus ad auctorem: The Case of John Wyclif” (no. VII) takes us into the complexities of contemporary attempts to provide finding systems for would-be users of Wyclif’s works.

The reprinted items originally appeared from 1991, but derive, as Anne Hudson explains, from researches of earlier decades. They form, with the new material, a comprehensive body of original work principally on the history of the Wyclif texts, in which Hudson has long had no equal. Trinity College Cambridge, MS B.16.2 is re-examined in no. VIII in an attempt to reconstruct the process of its evolution. A new piece (no. III) is “The Hussite Catalogue of Wyclif’s Works.” There are pieces on “Wyclif Texts in Fifteenth-Century London” (no. XV); “Wyclif and the North: The Evidence from Durham” (no. IX); and “The Survival of Wyclif’s Works in England and Bohemia” (no. XVI), another new publication.

There are studies of Wycliffite themes: the issues of authority (no. X) and poverty (no. XI), and “The King and Erring Clergy” (no. XII). There is a piece on “The Development of Wyclif’s Summa Theologiae” (no. V) that takes a sharp knife to the suppositions of the Wyclif Society editors, working as they were in a generation that knew much less than we do now about the structure of the medieval syllabus of systematic theology. Further key questions of genre and norms are explored in “Wyclif’s Latin Sermons: Questions of Form, Date, and Audience” (no. VI). “The Framing of the Lollard Heretic and/or Saint” Wyche is the subject of no. XIV.

Each of these studies stands on its own, but a successful effort has been made to draw them together into a book that has, in every sense, an integrity of its own. An index of Wyclif’s works discusses, an index of manuscripts, and a general index conclude the volume. Of the quality and importance of this work it is scarcely necessary to speak.