1 - Introduction

Summary

The Wycliffite Bible (WB) is the first complete translation of the Bible in English produced at the end of the 14th century by the followers of the Oxford theologian John Wyclif. The identity of the translators remains uncertain, but the scale and scholarly nature of the project suggest the involvement of many academic translators, probably based in Oxford. Though accurate, learned and orthodox, the translation was condemned and banned within twenty-five years of its appearance. The legislation promulgated early in the 15th century by the Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Arundel prohibited the making of new versions and the use of any recent translations without episcopal approval of both the text and owner. In spite of this WB became the most widely disseminated medieval English text: it survives in around 250 complete or partial copies, most professionally produced to a high standard. Several manuscripts, such as MS Bodl. 277, are large format, richly decorated and known to have been owned by the members of the royalty and aristocracy.

The translation survives in two versions: the Earlier Version (EV), a literal rendering of the Latin text, and the Later Version (LV), its more idiomatic revision. The manuscripts of LV considerably outnumber those of EV, and out of 64 copies described in the present catalogue only twelve contain the EV text and a further seven combine EV and LV, mostly through the inclusion of EV prologues (such manuscripts are listed in Appendix III).

Scholarly investigation in the past fifty years has concentrated on the translation's origin and revisions, drawing mostly on a limited number of extant copies. The majority of the manuscripts, particularly those seen as late, modest, ‘run-of-the-mill’ or textually less important, remain virtually entirely unexplored. Most conspicuously there are no catalogues of the manuscripts of WB. A list of manuscripts in Forshall and Madden's edition (1850, vol. 1, pp. xxxix–lxiv) covers only a selection of the surviving copies and provides brief descriptions that are only one or two paragraphs long. Dove (2007) offers more detailed descriptions of a small selection of important manuscripts, including nine from Oxford, and a list of all known surviving copies. This list, though undeniably a very useful point of reference, has errors in manuscript shelfmarks, the identification of the text as EV or LV, and in the description of the contents of manuscripts.