The Wycliffite Bible as a Source for Caxton’s Legend of Judith

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis paper argues that numerous fragments of the Wycliffite Bible found their way into print, within Caxton’s Golden Legend. Though the only published discussion has dismissed the possibility of a Wycliffite source for Caxton’s set of Old Testament legends, the final one, of Judith, in fact shows some highly idiosyncratic lexical agreements, as well as clusters of lexical agreements in passages which also reproduce the structures of the Latin in a way that is far more typical of the Wycliffite Bible than of Caxton’s Old Testament. The source proves, unexpectedly, to be the Early Version rather than the Later Version. The generally free translation makes a decision difficult, but there are signs that the recourse to the Wycliffite Bible had begun at least as far back as the preceding legend, of Tobias.