General Prologue to the Wycliffite Bible

late fourteenth century

The anonymous prologue printed with the Wycliffite Bible. In its last chapter the translator, who calls himself “a simple creature”, explains how the English Bible was made and defends translating Scripture.

The prologue is printed in the first volume of Forshall and Madden’s edition of the Wycliffite versions. Its fifteenth and last chapter is a statement by a translator about his own work. He does not name himself. He says that he gathered old Latin Bibles and commentaries to establish a sound Latin text, studied it with the gloss and above all with Nicholas of Lyra on the Old Testament, consulted grammarians and theologians about hard words, and then translated “to the sentence”, that is, by the sense, with “manie gode felawis” correcting the work. He adds that the English Bible “late translatid” is more accurate than most Latin Bibles he has seen.

The online page heads the text “Purvey’s Prologue”. That attribution to John Purvey is not made in the text itself, and the chapter carries no date; the period given here is approximate. See Wycliffe and the First English Bible.

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