Towards a new edition of the Wycliffite Bible

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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 learned and accurate, 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 work: it survives in 250 complete or partial copies. It is also the most widely evidenced of European translations of the Vulgate.The discovery of new manuscripts and recent research on the text of the translation have rendered obsolete the only complete edition of WB published in 1850 by J. Forshall and F. Madden. A new edition is unquestionably needed, but it is at present a remote goal, not only because of the amount of work it would involve, but also because it remains unclear which principles should underlie such an edition. There is no consensus among scholars as to which manuscripts should be collated and used as the base text for different parts of the translation, or how glosses that appear in the margins of many manuscripts relate to the biblical text and should be presented in an edition; the relevance of other apparatus attached to individual manuscripts in forms clearly related to WB is also not agreed upon. The proposed inquiry aims to establish whether what are currently known as the Earlier and Later versions of the translation (believed to reflect the translators' first efforts to produce an English text and its subsequent revision) represent each a single text or a series of different redactions. It also aims to investigate the relationships between important manuscripts and their value as evidence for different parts of the text. In addition the proposed research seeks to understand better the methods of the translators' work through the study of differences between versions of the translation, particularly in vocabulary, and the study of apparatus found in manuscripts, particularly marginal glosses. The project will also explore possible ways of editing WB and how such a large body of evidence can be presented and made intelligible to a user. It will develop a methodology for editing WB and produce trial editions of two Old Testament (Proverbs and the Song of Songs) and two New Testament (the Epistles to the Romans and Hebrews) books for print and online presentation. The online edition will offer a framework for expansion when editions of other biblical books are created in future or when further materials, such as additional images or records of variants, are developed to supplement the trial editions.