Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

The anonymous writer of the Prologue to the Wycliffite Bible was an Englishman, proud of being one of the translators of the first Bible in English, completed around 1390. He addresses his Prologue to English readers, encouraging them not to be afraid ‘to studie in the text of holy writ’ ( Forshall and Madden 1850 , vol. 1: 2). Even so, when he comes to consider the problems for interpretation caused by the textual differences between the Hebrew Psalms and the Latin Psalter derived from the Greek of the Septuagint (more on this below), he calls himself and his readers ‘Latyns’: ‘Noo book in be eld (old) testament is hardere to vndirstonding to vs Latyns [than the Psalms], for oure lettre (our Latin text) discordib myche fro be Ebreu’ (ibid., vol. 1: 38). By ‘Latyns’ he means ‘Roman Catholics’, but he also means people whose ‘holy writ’ is the Latin Bible. His intellectual world is Latin, not English; the phrase ‘vs Latyns’ reminds his readers that the Latin Bible is not theirs, although the English Bible is about to be. The purpose of the Prologue to the Wycliffite Bible is to break down the longstanding barriers between Latin and English readers. For the man who wrote it, as we shall see, knowledge of the Bible is not a privilege but a right. In early medieval Europe, only a small minority even of those literate in Latin had access to a copy of the entire Latin Bible, in spite ... log in or subscribe to read full text