The Lollard Bible

Extract

The year 1950 marked the centenary of the publication by Forshall and Madden of their monumental edition of the Lollard Bible; and since then two works have appeared to remind us how many problems their edition and the scholarship which has been founded on it have failed to solve.

Professor Margaret Deanesly can claim special authority for her lecture, and our respectful attention, for it comes as an agreeable echo of her pronouncements, thirty years ago, in The Lollard Bible, upon almost every matter connected with this field of study. Her major work received Coulton’s imprimatur, and although it shows her, as do all her writings, as an impartial, generous and urbane figure, it served further to show that the facts were on Coulton’s side, in his vast and unedifying conflict with Gasquet, when he contended that St Thomas More, writing that he had seen English Bibles, ‘fair and old’, in the houses of his friends, who used them with the approval of the Church, could not possibly be referring to an orthodox, post-Wycliffite translation, because no such new translation was ever made.

In this recent lecture, Professor Deanesly presents the Lollard Bible to us not as Coulton saw it, as a great act of charity that Christ’s hungry might be fed, but rather as an instrument of Wycliffe’s policy, the grand design being the replacement of canon law by an English text of the Scriptures as the authority to which he might appeal. Wycliffe the Poor Preacher she regards as a romantic invention; and she shows us to him instead as an adroit and agile theologian, a trained controversialist, a don high in the esteem and secure in the protection of his university.