Archbishop James Ussher, who died in 1656, repeated James’s statement in abbreviated form, which was exposed to public view when Henry Wharton brought out Ussher’s Historia dogmatica in 1689 and again in 1690. Here Ussher specifies 1290 as the time of the earlier translation:
1290, Anglicanus Interpres.
Longe ante Wiclevi translationem (100 annis, ut conjicit Thomas Jamesius) prodiit universorum Bibliorum Anglicana Translatio: cujus tria in Oxoniensis Academiae Bibliothecis MSS extant exemplaria: unum in Bodleiana (publica), alterum in Aedis Christi, tertium in Reginalis Collegii Bibliotheca.
(T. Jamesius, lib. vernaculo De Corruptione Patrum, part 2, loc. 24.)23
Ussher’s entry on Wyclif is dated 1380. He cites Bale as saying that Wyclif translated the whole Bible. But he concludes from James’s remarks and the listings in his catalog that various copies of old English Bibles exist that differ in translation—which is something that James does not say. Ussher ends by saying he has seen Wyclif ’s translation of the New Testament in Sir Robert Cotton’s library.24 The only Cotton MEB extant today is an LV complete Bible.25
If Thomas James was not aware of two extant versions of MEB, it seems that Thomas Fuller was. In his History of the Worthies of England, published in 1662, Fuller says that John Trevisa, who died around 1400, had the temerity to translate the Bible about fifty years after Wyclif, and he says that “[his] translation is as much better than Wyclif ’s as worse than Tyndale’s.”26 Henry Wharton, in the commentary that he appended to his edition of Ussher, likewise showed himself to be aware of the difference between EV and LV, and he agreed with Fuller that Wyclif was the EV translator. He says that James and Ussher erred in dating the LV translation so early, since the prologue cites Nicholas of Lyre and Archbishop Richard Fitzralph. The author’s impotent rage against Oxford academics proves that Wyclif was not the author, and the printers who published the prologue in 1550 were fantasizing (“hallucinatos esse”) when they ascribed it to him. He admits that it is certain that Wyclif translated the Bible, since Bale said so, as did Jan Hus before him.27 But he was clearly not the translator of the common version (LV), in spite of the fact that it is ascribed to him in all of the copies that he has seen. These ascriptions are recent, made by uncautious readers. He concludes that the prologue and translation (LV) must be by Trevisa. He says that he has not been able to find a complete Bible in Wyclif ’s version (that is, EV), but only of some books (the Epistles and Sunday readings).28
In Wharton’s outdated entry on Wyclif, where he attributes LV to Wyclif, he speaks of a Lambeth New Testament with the Epistle to the Laodiceans, citing the prologue that says it was only recently translated into English. From this Wharton concludes either that there was an earlier translation of the Bible or that there was a double edition of Wyclif ’s translation.29 This is the first acknowledgment I have seen that a translator (here, Wyclif) may have revised his own translation.
In the first part of the eighteenth century, as Dove shows, there was a movement among Protestant scholars to retrieve Wyclif ’s authorship of LV. John Russell in 1719 proposed an edition of Wyclif ’s whole Bible, in the LV text, and John Lewis in his History of Wyclif in 1721, annotating Bale, cites only LV manuscripts as copies of his translation and his prologue.30 In 1731 he published an LV New Testament as Wyclif ’s, with a history giving a full account of Bible translation in England. In it, he says he was mistaken in ascribing the prologue to Wyclif, since it was written after his time. He takes notice of the ascription of the New Testament (EV) in the Dublin manuscript to John Purvey, and says that the prologue goes with it.31
In other words, in this first mention of Purvey in discussions of the MEB, Wyclif himself translated what we call the Later Version, and Purvey, later on, produced what we know as the Early Version and the General Prologue.
In 1728, Daniel Waterland of Cambridge University informed Lewis of his view that EV and LV were by the same person, namely, Wyclif, but later Waterland perceived that events described in the prologue (Five and Twenty Books) happened after Wyclif ’s time, and therefore it and LV must have been by a disciple of Wyclif ’s. He suggested as the likely candidate John Purvey, described by Bale as Wyclif ’s librarius and glossator. When Forshall and Madden started work on the MEB in 1829, they accepted Waterland’s suggestion of Purvey as responsible for LV and the prologue, and by the time they published in 1850, they had embraced it as established fact.32
During all this time of the progressive “Wyclifying” of the Middle English Bible, Dove has found only one doubter, namely, Humfrey Wanley, who started to catalog the library of Robert Harley in 1708. When describing a copy of the treatise Five and Twenty Books, he cites passages from it that “seem to agree well enough with the person and opinions of Wyclif, who is also commonly said to have translated the Bible out of Latin into English, though I could never yet see such a book with his name written therein by the first hand—not to mention what Sir Thomas More wrote, that there were then divers translations of Scripture into English, allowed by Authority, and that the Wycliffites were only charged with keeping certain prefaces to biblical books of Wyclif ’s composure.”33 Even though More does not say this (rather he assumed that Wyclif did make translations, of which Richard Hunne possessed a copy, which, More hoped, had not been destroyed after his trial), it is significant that this is how Wanley reads him. He is saying, in effect, that there is nothing in the extant English Bibles that he has seen to connect them to Wyclif, unlike this clearly Wycliffite tract (which he assumes to be the same as the prologue printed in 1550 and ascribed to Wyclif and also found in certain English Bibles).
In the nineteenth century, the Latin works of John Wyclif were in high esteem, at least for their content if not for their style, and they were being systematically published.34 But Wyclif had also achieved a high reputation as an English writer, so much so that Reginald Poole in 1895 called him “one of the founders of English prose-writing.”35 Four volumes of treatises attributed to him had recently been printed.36 These followed upon the publication at midcentury of the Middle English translation of the entire Bible by Forshall and Madden, which they partially attributed to him, as can be seen from their title: The Holy Bible … in the Earliest English Versions Made from the Latin Vulgate by John Wycliffe and His Followers.37 The editors suggested that only the New Testament portion of EV was by Wyclif himself, while the Old Testament and all of LV was by his followers.
By the end of the century, the entire English Bible, without distinguishing between versions or parts, was commonly said to be the work of Wyclif, “the Wyclif Bible.” It was the example of the Egerton Bible, an EV copy, displayed in the British Museum as Wyclif ’s translation, that first inspired Cardinal Gasquet to embark on his revisionist history, as we shall see. But the first scholars who responded to Gasquet used a new term, “the Wycliffite Bible,” which has found favor to this day.
Dom Aidan Gasquet’s Objections to the Wycliffied Bible
The Wycliffite nature of the Middle English Bible as it solidified in the nineteenth century was challenged by only one person, the Benedictine historian Dom Aidan Gasquet, initially in an article published in the Dublin Review in 1894.38 He held instead that the translations were not only orthodox productions, but also that they were approved of by the Church authorities. His theses were challenged on several fronts, but most trenchantly by Arthur Ogle, writing anonymously in 1900 and 1901,39 and Ogle’s arguments were taken up and relentlessly repeated by G. G. Coulton in various publications.40
Gasquet professes to identify a fallacious syllogism at work in the universal ascription of the early translations to Wyclif and his followers. It was presumed, begging the question, that the Catholic Church condemned translating the Scriptures into the vernacular. Therefore, only one possible conclusion could be drawn: the early translations must be by those who dissented from the Church. He asks: “May it not be possible that under the influence of a preconceived idea people have gone off on a wrong scent altogether?” And answers: “If