The Middle English Bible. Henry Ansgar Kelly

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      H. G. Richardson admits that the letters patent cited by Knighton are genuine enough, but he says that “the other details of the chronicler’s story have little basis.”⁸⁶ There was, however, clearly some talk among the Lords and Commons about suspect writings at this time, but whether the subject of the Scriptures in English came up, we cannot tell. The tradition in circulation at the time of Against Them was that the clergy of the realm, led by both archbishops, Canterbury and York, attempted to suppress a current English translation of the entire Bible as well as other translations of the Gospels. Gasquet points out the Foxe reading of “Bible” for “bill” in his edition of Against Them and suggests that the incident referred to an attempt of the clergy to sanction an approved vernacular translation.⁸⁷ Perhaps John of Gaunt and his partisans were objecting to the phasing out of the already beloved EV by the new-fangled LV! A valid objection to LV would have been that it was less faithful to the literal meaning of the Vulgate. We know that Gaunt’s brother Thomas of Woodstock, the Duke of Gloucester, possessed a lavish copy of EV. In fact, this was the Egerton Bible on display in the King’s Library at the British Museum, labeled as “The English Bible, Wycliffe’s Translation,” which originally inspired Gasquet to question the Wycliffite connections with the Middle English Bible.⁸⁸ It is rubricated for public liturgical use and contains a lectionary, or table of liturgical readings, at the end.⁸⁹

      Gasquet considers Gloucester’s ownership of this and other English Scriptures (a Psalter and two books of Gospels) to be evidence of their non-Wycliffite nature, since Gloucester was a firm supporter of Archbishop Arundel.⁹⁰ Others, of course, argue the other way round, assuming the Wycliffite nature of the Bibles and taking Gloucester’s possession of them as evidence of his connection with or interest in Lollardy.⁹¹ There is, as Forshall and Madden noted,⁹² a brief Wycliffite rant in the Egerton Bible lectionary, complaining about recent bishops, abbots, and others being honored as saints. This has been taken by Matti Peikola as evidence that Gloucester supported the Wycliffites’ cause.⁹³ However, he points out that the common sanctoral that follows contains some of the objectionable saints, notably Thomas Becket and Swithun of Winchester;⁹⁴ and, even though the scribes were aware of the passage, neither of them seems to have composed it (or the lectionary itself),⁹⁵ and we cannot conclude that they, much less the duke, approved of it. Anne Hudson has recently given an example of a brief Lollard commentary, part of it quite strident, incorporated into Richard Rolle’s Psalter commentary, and copied by several orthodox scribes with no sign of hesitation or unease.⁹⁶

      Let me add here some support to Gasquet’s argument that the early and continued use of the English Bibles for the liturgy is one of the strongest indications for the widespread acceptance of the translations by the general populace.⁹⁷ Peikola reports that 40 percent of all surviving manuscripts of the Middle English Bible contain lectionaries,⁹⁸ and Gasquet’s explanation is surely more plausible than Peikola’s suggestion that these tables were placed in the Bibles by Wycliffites to persuade the ecclesiastical authorities of their orthodoxy,⁹⁹ and that the practice was continued by orthodox bookmakers once the Wycliffites lost control of English Bible reproduction.¹⁰⁰

      If a dispute over vernacular Scriptures did take place in 1388, it is certain that the current archbishop of York, Alexander Neville, did not participate in it, since he was not there; he was on the run from the Lords Appellant and was convicted of treason in absentia.¹⁰¹ His replacement as archbishop was none other than the chancellor, Thomas Arundel, bishop of Ely; the papal provision was granted on April 3,¹⁰² and it could hardly have reached England by June 4, when Parliament was dissolved.

      The other parliament suggested by Hanna for the Bible debate, that of 1394, which was in session from January to March, conflicts with the final anecdote of Against Them, which is said to have taken place at the funeral of Queen Anne later that same year, at the end of July 1394.¹⁰³ In the former, the archbishops of Canterbury and York are said to have been opposed to Bible translation; in the latter, the archbishop of York at that time (1394), Thomas Arundel, identified as the current archbishop of Canterbury at the time of the writing of Against Them, is shown to be in favor of Bible translation. Here is the story:

      Also the bishop of Canterbury, Thomas Arundel, that now is, said a sermon in Westminster, there-as were many hundred people at the burying of Queen Anne, of whose soul God have mercy, and in his commendings of her he said it was more joy of her than of any woman that ever he knew, for notwithstanding that she was an alien born, she had on English all the four Gospelers, with the doctors upon them. And he said she had sent them unto him, and he said they were good and true, and commended her in that she was so great a lady and also an alien, and would so lowly study in so virtuous books. And he blamed in that sermon sharply the negligence of prelates and of other men, insomuch that some said he would on the morrow leave up his office of chancellor and forsake the world—and then it had been the last sermon that ever they heard.¹⁰⁴

      Note the word “last” in the final line. In Dove’s base manuscript, the Wycliffite Trinity version, the text reads: “and 3an it hadde be the lest sermoun 3at euere 3ei herde.” This makes sense: if Arundel forsook the world, this sermon would be his last, and he would never preach another sermon. Deanesly accepted this reading, but Bühler and Dove adopt the reading of the other, non-Wycliffite, medieval manuscript (Morgan), which has best instead of lest, producing a clause that does not make syntactic or semantic sense: “and then it had been the best sermon that ever they heard.” It has been taken to mean: “it would have been the best sermon they had ever heard if Arundel had carried out his impulse to forsake the world and never preach again.” This is how Mary Dove reads it: “It is difficult to gauge the tone of these words, but presumably those who thought Arundel would ‘forsake the worlde’ judged it ‘the best sermoun that evere they herde’ because he would no longer be in a position to prohibit the English Bible.”¹⁰⁵ But this is just after they heard him praise Queen Anne to the skies for reading the Gospels in English! Rather, we must conclude that people thought it the best sermon they ever heard for two reasons: because he approved of the English Scriptures, and because he disapproved of unworthy clergy and laymen.¹⁰⁶

      Gasquet cites John Strype’s acceptance of the historicity of this account, which shows, Strype says, that Archbishop Arundel “was for the translation of the Scriptures into the vulgar tongue, and for the laity’s use thereof.”¹⁰⁷ This certainly seems to be the purport of the story, as told by our author. His account of Arundel’s sermon on this occasion was taken as historical by Herbert Workman in his exhaustive work on Wyclif,¹⁰⁸ and it is also accepted by Sven Fristedt,¹⁰⁹ and by Jonathan Hughes in his recent life of Arundel in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, reporting that the archbishop on this occasion expressed a desire to give up his chancellorship and to forsake the world.¹¹⁰ It is also taken as historical by Katherine Walsh, who says that “it is unlikely that the remarks made by Archbishop Thomas Arundel in his sermon at Anne’s funeral in 1396 [sic] were intended as a criticism of vernacular scriptures.”¹¹¹ She adds: “Anne had grown up in a climate of easy availability of vernacular bibles, she possessed her own and she belonged in a tradition of patronage of this genre by the House of Luxembourg—the most spectacular example is the six-volume, exquisitely illuminated German bible made at Prague in the court atelier between 1387 and 1405 and commissioned by Anne’s brother, the King of the Romans Wenceslaus of Bohemia.”¹¹²

      Anne’s previous ownership of the Gospels in Czech, German, and Latin has been assumed from a passage in Wyclif ’s treatise De triplici vinculo amoris, in which he rails against the foolishness of those who damn writings as heretical because they are in English and deal sharply with the sins of their country. He then speaks of the possibility that Queen Anne had the Gospel set out in three languages, Bohemian, German, and Latin, and to hereticize her for this would be, implicitly, a Luciferian pride.¹¹³ Johann Loserth criticizes those СКАЧАТЬ