122 REVIEWS OF BOOKS January e they said that the gospel ought to be obeyed altogether according to the letter '. It should be noticed that there is no accusation of wilful perversion of the text for doctrinal purposes, such as one finds in the sixteenth century. The Waldensian versions were not heterodox in themselves, and were used as the basis of vernacular versions which in later times were possessed by orthodox nobles and houses of nuns in Italy and Germany without any suspicion of their heretical origin. Another fact which emerges is that the Waldensians had books of Sunday gospels and epistles and learnt them by heart (see especially p. 39). These facts have a bearing on the controversy respecting the origin of the English translations of the Bible. This is the first time that continental evidence and analogies have been systematically used in the elucidation of the problem. In England the evidence as to the existence of vernacular versions, whether in French or English, before Wycliffe is discussed. On the French versions Miss Deanesly is not very satisfactory : several Anglo-Norman or Anglo-French or French manuscripts are mentioned in the fourteenth century, but it is not clear whether these represented one or several translations. At any rate there seems to have been very few examples : one manuscript belonged to a monastery, others to kings, and one to a John Wells in 1361 as to which further information is desirable. Of English prose versions before Wycliffe, apart from the Anglo-Saxon ones and the Psalter, Miss Deanesly says ' there is no single will which mentions an English Bible before Wycliffe's death at all : nor is there any reference to one in any other historical source '. Even more conclusive than the absence of any definite extant evidence is the silence of contemporary controversialists. Several treatises on the lawfulness of English transla- tions, which were written at the beginning of the fifteenth century, are printed in the appendix. Purvey eagerly sought for precedents to justify the Lollard Bible, but the only English examples he can find are Bede and King Alfred : ' also a man of Loundon, his name was Wyring, hadde a Bible in Englische of northern speche, wiche was seen of many men, and it semed too houndred yeer olde ' — probably a late Anglo-Saxon version. The question of the dates and authorship of the two Wyclifiite versions is fully and fairly discussed, and the conclusions reached are that Wycliffe was the instigator of the translations, the first literal and word for word translation was being executed by Nicholas Hereford and other members of the Wyclifiite circle at Oxford in and about 1382, and completed about 1384, the second freer version with the general prologue was the work of John Purvey and was completed between the beginning of 1395 and the beginning of 1397. These conclusions seem fully justified. Miss Deanesly is less happy in arguing that Wycliffe intended that only lords and knights and less lettered priests should use such translations, and that ' it was the followers of Wycliffe, and not Wycliffe himself, who went further and desired that every man should be acquainted with the gospels, through learning them by heart '. Wycliffe himself maintained that all, whether priest, knight, or labourer, should ' carefully study the gospel in that tongue in which the meaning of the gospel was clearest to them ', and urged there was ' no man so rude a scholar but that he might learn the words of the gospel according to his simplicity -. Miss Deanesly is
