Future Publications

Columbia University, MS Plimpton Add. 03

Before translators at the University of Oxford began producing the first Wycliffite Bibles in the 1380s, few complete books of the Bible had ever been translated into Middle English. One notable exception is the English Apocalypse, a Middle English version of the Book of Revelation translated between 1340 and 1360 from an Anglo-Norman Apocalypse dated to the early fourteenth century. The English Apocalypse survives in eighteen extant manuscripts and often appears alongside Wycliffite material, attesting to its popularity with Wycliffite translators. In the case of this edition’s chosen base manuscript, it almost completely replaces the Middle English translation of the Book of Revelation from the Latin Vulgate Bible, the source text for most Wycliffite Bibles of the period. Expanding upon earlier work on this important textual tradition, this edition of the English Apocalypse offers a unique glimpse into English Bible translation and production at a historic moment of transition.

This new edition of the Middle English Castle of Love pairs this fourteenth-century poem with its Anglo-Norman source: Le château d’amour, written by English philosopher and theologian Robert Grosseteste in the early thirteenth century. Grosseteste’s poem begins with an influential interpretation of the allegory of the Four Daughters of God before deploying another allegory: that of the Virgin Mary as the Castle of Love protecting the Incarnation of Jesus. These twinned allegories drive the poem’s central theme of salvation history as Jesus, recast as the king’s son, volunteers to trade places with the castle’s prisoner, the biblical forefather Adam, imprisoned by original sin. Described by historian R. W. Southern as “the most complete outline of Grosseteste’s theology” available, the Castle of Love also showcases Grosseteste’s talents for biblical allusion, architectural imagery, romance motifs, and knowledge of feudal structures and legal principles, all marshaled in service of this striking work.