There have been a number of scholars who have advanced our knowledge of the Wycliffite Bible since Forshall and Madden published their edition in 1850, and the historiography of Wycliffism and Lollardy has likewise come a long way in recent generations. This beautifully-written, useful and learned book by Mary Dove takes stock of the scholarship to date and looks at all the textual, linguistic and interpretative questions afresh in the light of the considerable manuscript evidence. Dove establishes that the translation project began at The Queen's College, Oxford, in the 1370s and 1380s, and that it was a group effort, with different books assigned to different scholars. The only identifiable translator was Nicholas Hereford; Wyclif, although assumed to be the instigator, cannot be linked firmly with the work, beyond the shared ethos and personal connections of the likely core group. The work of translation began apace, such that copies of the so-called Earlier Version were being made before the accuracy of the Latin base-text had been verified, and before the translations had been rendered into good English. In appendices Dove lists the contents of the complete Later Version, which included translations of Jerome's Latin prologues and the glosses of Nicholas Lyra, as well as the more famous Wycliffite prologue; and she notes the contents of each of the 253 known manuscripts containing at least part of the Wycliffite Bible. The text of the Later Version was more accurate and complete than that of most Latin Bibles of the late Middle Ages, but in common with those, the Wycliffite translation circulated in small packages: the Gospels plus St Paul's epistles, or the New Testament alone, rather than the complete Bible as we know it today. Such books were impressive and expensive volumes, owned by royalty and religious houses, while the more numerous partial texts may have been aimed at university students and preachers whose ropey Latin made them unreliable or unwilling interpreters of the Gospel. Dove gives a largely balanced and well-illustrated account of the place of bible translation in late medieval English culture. The translators were reformers who shared in contemporary academic values, and whose interest in translation and in the literal sense of Scripture was far from being radically novel. It seems paradoxical that a belief in the capacity of ‘simple men of wit’ to understand the Bible unmediated, should exist alongside the elaborate interpretative apparatus in which the text was clothed, but Dove shows that this was a clerical, academic project, and not the democratisation of Scripture imagined by scholars hopelessly wedded to the imagined radicalism of Lollardy. The social context of bible ownership, the effects of prohibition under Arundel and the role of Lollardy in the Reformation are discussed, although not at great length, but these subjects lie beyond the remit of this book. Dove provides the resources by means of which historians unversed in the complexities of bible scholarship can begin to discuss with greater confidence the Wycliffite translation and its significance.