The Middle English Bible: A Reassessment by Henry Ansgar Kelly

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Middle English Bible: A Reassessment by Henry Ansgar Kelly Rebecca Huffman Henry Ansgar Kelly, The Middle English Bible: A Reassessment ( Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 2016) 368 pp. Henry Ansgar Kelly's excellent study of the three texts comprising the Middle English Bible (the Early Early Version, the Early Version, and the Late Version) picks apart centuries of reception and critical history that cast the MEB as the Wycliffite Bible. At most, Kelly argues, we might consider the MEB a "Wycliffian" Bible, a text with a breadth that touched both orthodox and heterodox contributors and readers; at its core, however, the translation project was an orthodox and nonpolemical project. This remained so of the MEB's reception, except where it was influenced by misreadings of the 1407–09 Oxford Constitutions that were sometimes construed to have banned English translations of scripture. This is a persuasively evidenced and cogently argued volume that builds on recent—and in the case of one key interlocutor, not-sorecent—scholarship reevaluating the scope of Lollard and Wycliffite influence. Reviving the findings of late nineteenth century Benedictine historian Dom Aidan Gasquet, Kelly proposes a new reconstruction of the MEB's composition and reception that positions the text as an Oxford-area team undertaking completed in a relatively short time, and argues that the translation was not seen as an inherently politicized matter. Instead, its later ties to Lollardy were imposed largely from the outside, and whether or not the text was viewed as the "Wycliffite" Bible depended on the views of the individual reading it and localized interpretations of the constitution on biblical translation. This compact volume explores the MEB, its creation, and its reception through multiple lenses and from the fourteenth century to the twenty first. The first chapter, "A History of Judgments on the Middle English Bible," delves into precisely what it promises, tracing evolving perceptions of the translation from its early readers to the present day. Critical to this history is the "Wycliffite" assignation that facilitated a long-running understanding of the text as a Wycliffite or Lollard project. More recent scholarship has productively challenged that understanding, and Kelly proposes in its stead a "Wycliffian" [End Page 220] MEB, influenced by but not attributable to Wyclif. This move opens substantial space for creatively rethinking the MEB's politics. The second chapter takes up the matter of the treatise Five and Twenty Books, a Wycliffite text printed alongside the Later Version in 1540 and thereafter presented as a "prologue" to the MEB. Dialect analysis here shows that Five and Twenty Books is a fully separate text, though its author might have had some involvement in the bible translation project. The third chapter reevaluates the status of biblical studies at Oxford in the late fourteenth century to better see the conditions surrounding the translation's origins, as well as to explore possibilities for Wyclif's direct or indirect engagement with the project. Here Kelly proposes a timeline for the much more literal EV's transformation into the more idiomatic LV as well as for the perceived needs of readers in Oxford and beyond. The third chapter loosens up some dates in previously conjectured timelines, and the fourth chapter in turn uses the case studies of three Oxford theologians to loosen up the idea that orthodox religious figures were largely opposed to scriptural translation. As Kelly finds, certainly some scholars and clergy opposed translation; but even that opposition was rarely consistent. The inconsistency of those views carries through into the fifth chapter, which turns a critical eye on the 1407–9 Oxford Constitutions and bible translation. Here, as he is throughout the volume, Gasquet is an instrumental source. His 1894 reading of the constitution on Bible translation sets out that the constitution prohibited reading (rather than possession) of an unapproved translation. The issue at stake with biblical translation is less that such translations existed and more that some were good and some were bad. Kelly argues that "Arundel and his colleagues were familiar with both EV and LV, and, recognizing their orthodoxy, believed them to antedate, at least in their inception if not completion, the Wycliffite stratagem of making a new translation, and...