The Middle English Bible. Henry Ansgar Kelly

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      I first entered the Bible-translation field when studying the Douai-Rheims Version, which was completed by the English priest Gregory Martin in 1580, but was revised by Bishop Richard Challoner in 1750. We medievalists usually tell our students to use this translation rather than the King James because it renders the Latin Vulgate, and not the Hebrew and Greek texts, but in fact Challoner’s revision was largely in the direction of the King James language, which in turn was largely William Tyndale’s text.¹ I decided that I should also examine the earlier complete translation of the Bible into English, produced at the end of the fourteenth century, now generally known as the Wycliffite Bible, and recognized as existing in two main forms, an original very literal rendering, called the Early Version, or EV, and a revision of it into a more idiomatic style, called the Later Version, or LV.

      I soon found that the scholarship concerning this translation was affected by the same “wars of religion” that surrounded the history of the Protestant and Catholic Bibles of the sixteenth century and later. It seemed to me that there was need for a review of how it has been regarded over the years, and the points of controversy connected with it at each stage, especially concerning claims for and against its origin as a project of the religious dissident John Wyclif (d. 1384) and his followers.

      Accordingly, in the first chapter below, I attempt to give a historiography of critical attention to the medieval translation, to which I give the neutral name of “Middle English Bible,” or MEB.² I recount that, after seemingly being regarded as a straightforward rendering from Latin into English during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, notably in the report of Thomas More, it was first designated as Wyclif ’s by John Bale in the middle of СКАЧАТЬ