Henry Asngar Kelly's exploration of the series of translations of the Bible from Latin into Middle English made in the late fourteenth century—what he calls the Middle English Bible, pointedly refusing to use the term Wycliffite Bible—is an interesting and at times frustrating book.

The basic aim of the book is to argue, as Cardinal Gasquet did at the turn of the twentieth century, that the Middle English translations of the Bible were entirely orthodox in their conception, execution, and (for the most part) in their use. Kelly argues that scholars have misinterpreted the constitution Periculosa, first formulated in 1407 and promulgated in 1409 by Archbishop Arundel, to mean that the translation of scripture into English was forbidden by the ecclesiastical hierarchy, and from this, they have mistakenly argued that ownership of English translations was therefore illegal and made one a heretic according to the laws of the Ecclesiastical Province of Canterbury. This has led scholars to treat these translations as inevitably heretical in execution and use. And since the names most often attached to the translation project—Nicholas Hereford, John Purvey, and John Wyclif himself—were those of Wycliffites, the translation itself has been assumed to be Wycliffite.

The point is well taken that scholars should reexamine their assumptions about how and why these translations were produced, about the use of these translations by layperson and cleric, heterodox and orthodox (whatever one might mean by those terms), and about the ecclesiastical hierarchy's reaction to these translations, especially the famous constitutions of 1407/1409. There are times, however, when it appears Kelly has not carefully examined his own assumptions.

A good example of this is his treatment of Wyclif's abilities in Latin. Scholars have sometimes wondered about Wyclif's Latin, which is somewhat idiosyncratic and certainly difficult, but to cite this as a reason for Wyclif's intensive study of scripture is strange, to say the least. Kelly writes: “For some reason Wyclif had never learned to speak or write Latin properly; his academic style may have been the worst in medieval Christendom. Could he have realized that his linguistic skills were not equal to the question oriented give-and-take of scholastic disputation?” (33). For someone as querulous as John Wyclif, it is hard to believe that he would have let anything, even the language of the debate, keep him from joining the fray. More seriously, it is practically beyond belief that Wyclif could have gone through the most stringent courses of study in medieval Oxford and become a famous logician with insufficient Latin. I would like to suggest the possibility, not considered here, that his language is difficult because the ideas he tried to convey were particularly difficult. Kelly himself recognizes the difficulty when he notes that it is a great mystery “that he went through the entire master of arts (MA) and bachelor of theology curricula with defective language skills and emerged at the level of theological master” (34). Kelly thus takes it for granted that Wyclif's Latin was so deficient that it was quasi-miraculous that he should have finished his course of studies, and that this led him to neglect the Sentences in favor of studying the Bible. A careful reading of Wyclif's works, however, demonstrates that he was a subtle interpreter of the scriptures, in Latin, and that his biblicism was a deeply held belief very unlikely to have been caused by an inability to excel in Latin—one wonders how he would even be able to accomplish the feat of commenting on the entire Bible if his Latin was not up to the rigors of medieval academic life.

Returning to the issue of the (non)heretical nature of the translations themselves, Kelly sifts the evidence of ecclesiastical legislation and heresy trials through to the Henrician period, arguing that, apart from the case of Richard Hunne in late 1514, no heresy suspects were condemned for possessing English Bibles. But in doing so, Kelly often simply assumes that suspects would not have been under suspicion for possessing English Bibles because the Bibles themselves were entirely orthodox translations, so unless the codex included Five and Twenty Books—that is, the Wycliffite prologue contained in some manuscripts—the Bibles would have been treated as orthodox. One wonders why the Bibles even get mentioned in the trial records if they were not at issue. There are some rather unsatisfactory answers to this question, which Kelly goes over on page 113. He notes, with John Thomson, that owning any book would have been suspicious; that Bible reading was particularly noted in the trials, and suspects could be seen as “aping” priests; and that it was only those who were already suspected of heterodoxy whose possession of these bibles made them suspicious. The basic argument is that the Bibles themselves were not suspect, but simply one more piece of evidence against someone who was already suspected of heresy. This may be so, and there were certainly people who owned these Bibles without ever incurring suspicion of heresy, but that leaves the question of why, if these were seen as perfectly orthodox translations, they would make good evidence of heresy, unanswered.

Despite these faults, Kelly is certainly right that the nature and purpose of these translations is not as straightforward as is sometimes claimed, and that Periculosa and its implications need to be carefully considered. Yet, while I agree that the issues raised in this book are salient, and full proof that the history of the Middle English translation of the Bible is still a place for live debate, I do not think that the arguments put forward here will end that debate.