The English Apocalypse

The English Apocalypse is a Middle English translation of the Book of Revelation whose composition dates to the middle of the fourteenth century, ca. 1340–1360. Unlike the more well-known Wycliffite versions of the Bible which translators at the University of Oxford produced starting in the 1380s, the English Apocalypse does not translate Scripture directly from the Latin Vulgate Bible but from an intermediate source, an early fourteenth-century Apocalypse and commentary written in Anglo-Norman, the dialect of Old French primarily spoken in England in the centuries following the Norman Conquest.

Elis Fridner produced the first printed edition of the English Apocalypse in 1961 under the title An English Fourteenth Century Apocalypse Version with a Prose Commentary. Since then, scholars have given it a variety of titles and names. James Morey refers to it, in his scholarship on non-Wycliffite Bible translations, as the Apocalips of Jesu Crist or AJC, after its opening line. Walter Sauer and others have called it a “Middle English Apocalypse.” But the simple title English Apocalypse seems the most appropriate, given that it is the very first translation of the Book of Revelation to appear in its entirety in any dialect of the English language. It also happens to be the title given to the text by Anna Paues, the first scholar to give it serious attention. Paues devoted a chapter of her 1902 doctoral dissertation to the English Apocalypse, and she began work on an edition in the 1920s for the Early English Text Society which was never completed. She was also the first to discover the translation’s Anglo-Norman origins, and she identified several of its manuscripts, which before that point had been labeled as early drafts of the Wycliffite Bible.

The English Apocalypse survives in fifteen manuscripts from the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, which are listed in the section “Other Manuscripts of the English Apocalypse” below. Three manuscripts from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries also reproduce the English Apocalypse but are not included in this total, as they are simply transcriptions of earlier extant copies. Twelve of the early manuscripts share enough similarities to likely derive from the same source, called Version A, and three represent an alternate rendering, possibly a later revision, called Version B. To produce his 1961 edition of Version A, Fridner collated eleven of the twelve extant manuscripts, from libraries in London, Oxford, Cambridge, and Dublin, and it has remained until now the only printed edition of the original text. The present edition is both an update and an extension of the work he began more than sixty years ago. The alternate Version B text has also been edited only once, by Walter Sauer in 1971, in a doctoral dissertation for Heidelberg University in Germany.

The one manuscript Fridner did not include in his collation in 1961 — in fact, he made no mention of it whatsoever, either because he was unaware of its existence or because he did not have access to the library where it was held in New York City — is in many ways the most interesting and unusual of all the extant manuscripts of the English Apocalypse. Columbia University MS Plimpton Add. 03, held at Columbia’s Rare Book & Manuscript Library, is a codex of 265 parchment pages. It contains a complete New Testament in Middle English, which takes up nearly 90 percent of its total volume, followed by a variety of devotional materials, including at least one work, The Lollard Chronicle of the Papacy, which is directly related to Lollardy, the anticlerical and heretical movement inspired by John Wyclif in the late fourteenth century. Three other extant copies of the English Apocalypse appear in manuscripts alongside Wycliffite or Lollard material, but this is not what makes Plimpton most unique.

The New Testament at the front of the codex features a total of three separate Middle English translations of Scripture, starting with both versions of the Wycliffite Bible — the Early Version (EV), which is a direct word-for-word translation from the Vulgate, and the Later Version (LV), which smooths out the Latinate syntax for English readers and uses more English idioms. Matti Peikola, who has exhaustively catalogued the Plimpton manuscript’s features and analyzed it as an example of early Lollard book production, describes its New Testament as representing “the transition phase from the Early to the Later Version.” The first two books, the Gospels of Matthew and Mark, begin in EV, followed by a prologue to Luke which runs for one page and five lines (fols. 55r–55v) before it abruptly cuts off and is crossed out with red ink — apparently a discarded draft. A new prologue begins on a separate page, followed by the Gospel of Luke, now in the LV translation. This shift is also accompanied by a change in scribal hands and in layout, from double-column to single-column formatting. According to Peikola, only four other manuscripts out of the 253 Wycliffite Bible manuscripts extant show a similar shift, making the Plimpton New Testament a rare example of a blended biblical text, one that may afford a valuable glimpse into the process of Wycliffite Bible translation and manuscript production.

But the Plimpton manuscript has one final surprise in store after its shift from EV to LV. The New Testament’s final book, the Apocalypse, begins as expected with the Wycliffite LV translation for the first sixteen verses, though it includes an interpolated commentary that none of the other New Testament books share. Then, starting in verse 1:17, the biblical text becomes the English Apocalypse, the Middle English translation from Anglo-Norman French which predates the Wycliffite Bible by 20–40 years. This shift is accompanied by no change in scribal hand, page layout, or any other signal. The producers of this manuscript, either because their copy of the EV or LV Apocalypse was corrupt or missing, or because their translation was not yet complete, or because they simply found this translation superior for reasons unknown, decided to replace the final book in an otherwise Wycliffite New Testament with the earlier, non-Wycliffite English Apocalypse — making it unique among all other extant copies of both the English Apocalypse and the Wycliffite Bible.

The earliest manuscripts of the English Apocalypse — including British Library MS Harley 874, which provides secondary readings for this edition — do not include the first eight verses of the biblical text as they appear in Vulgate and Old French Bibles but start instead at verse 1:9. Clearly the exemplar from which these copies were made did not include this opening passage, which was either a deliberate decision by the early fourteenth-century translator (the first eight verses of the Book of Revelation comprise a prologue that can easily be excised) or a necessity because the exemplar was corrupt or missing a leaf. Whatever the reason, five later manuscripts, including Plimpton, replace these verses with their equivalents from the Wycliffite LV — proof that the producers of these English Apocalypse manuscripts had multiple translations on hand and felt free to blend them to create the best possible edition.

Plimpton is unique in borrowing from the LV through verse 16, but another late manuscript, British Library Royal 17 A.xxvi, whose Apocalypse appears alongside a Wycliffite Gospel of John, continues with the LV through verse 12. Two others, Oxford University Bodley MS Laud Misc. 33 and Rylands Library English MS 92, extend the LV through verse 11. Two more, British Library Harley 3913 and Cambridge University St. John’s College MS G.25, feature biblical verses primarily from the Wycliffite LV and commentary from the English Apocalypse, a thorough blending of what must have begun as two separate manuscripts.

In addition, the Plimpton copy of the English Apocalypse exhibits influence from the Wycliffite LV that goes beyond the mere substitution of verses. Unlike any other manuscript, Plimpton briefly switches back to the LV for a few verses after the first chapter, in 3:7–22, and throughout the text, stray words and phrases appear to be borrowed from the LV at various points. In other words, the English Apocalypse as it appears in the Plimpton manuscript is a blended text in nearly every way, and it offers a unique glimpse into English Bible translation and production at a historic moment of transition. It is a prime example of the ways that boundaries between Wycliffite and non-Wycliffite material were often flexible in late fourteenth and early fifteenth-century manuscripts, as the Lollard producers of English Bibles took up and used earlier material that predated Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Arundel’s ban on English translations in 1407, an event discussed below in the section titled “The Influence of Arundel’s Constitutions.”

The Plimpton manuscript may well have been assembled by a Lollard patron or a community of Lollards in defiance of this ban in the early fifteenth century, as part of their project to make Scripture available in the vernacular to preachers and lay readers. One piece of evidence to support this possibility is the manuscript’s entirely nondescript appearance, with no illuminations and very few decorated initials. It is a book which, though clearly produced by professional scribes, does not wish to draw attention to itself from censors or confiscators.

The English Apocalypse includes a prologue, translated from the Anglo-Norman original which is itself a translation of a twelfth-century Latin commentary attributed (probably falsely) to Gilbert de la Porrée, who died in 1154, as well as an explanatory commentary, or “glose,” which alternates with the text after every few verses. These glosses are “demonstrably Franciscan,” which places their date of composition in the mid-thirteenth century at the earliest, after the foundation of the Franciscan order, but anything more about their authorship or date of translation is unknown. The English Apocalypse manuscripts in general, and the Plimpton manuscript in particular, add their own anticlerical flourishes to the glosses, excoriating “false clerkis” (14.¶7, 16.¶11, and 17.¶¶3, 9) and highlighting concerns about the corruption of the priesthood and church hierarchy. These anticlerical insertions, which are examined in further detail in the section “The Gloss and Lollard Anticlericalism” below and in the Explanatory Notes, provide another possible explanation, in addition to the quality of the translation itself, for why a Lollard producer of the Plimpton New Testament might have been attracted to this text.

This new edition of the English Apocalypse uses Plimpton as its base text for all of these reasons — because it has never been edited before and remains relatively unexamined among Middle English biblical texts, because it appears at the end of a Wycliffite New Testament unlike any other extant manuscript, because it is a blended text which gives insight to the process of English Bible translation in the late fourteenth century, and because it contains a unique set of additions to the standard gloss. Extensive textual notes catalogue each instance of potential Wycliffite influence; in addition, an Appendix presents a complete edition of the Wycliffite LV Apocalypse for comparison. A second Appendix makes a facing-page comparison of Plimpton’s borrowings from the LV in chapters 1 and 3 alongside passages from the earliest copy of the English Apocalypse, so readers can see clearly what the producers of the manuscript chose to replace.

The edition thus serves two purposes for two types of readers. For students of Middle English literature and Bible translation, it provides an easy-to-read edition of the English Apocalypse, an influential work of Middle English translation which has not appeared in print for more than sixty years. For more advanced scholars of the Wycliffite Bible and the history of Lollard book production, the blended nature of the Plimpton manuscript provides a fascinating glimpse into the craft of medieval Bible translation and production, and the verse-by-verse decision-making process of compilers and scribes as they worked with at least two editions of the same biblical text. It is impossible to know whether the producers of the Plimpton manuscript had a copy of the Anglo-Norman Apocalypse and commentary which served as the origin of their Middle English text at hand, but doubtless they had access to the Latin Vulgate. In places where the Plimpton text gives an unusual reading or a unique mistranslation of the text, the notes offer speculation about where the irregularity might be traced and why it occurred.

The Manuscript

Columbia University MS Plimpton Add. 03, the base manuscript for this edition, is a codex 25 x 17 centimeters in size with 265 parchment leaves, of which the first 237 are a New Testament composed of three Middle English translations: the Wycliffite EV and LV and the English Apocalypse with commentary, which appears at the end of the New Testament on folios 203r–237r. According to Matti Peikola, the manuscript contains at least six scribal hands which can be dated paleographically to the early fifteenth century. Most of the Apocalypse is in a single hand, but one page following the prologue (fol. 204r) is in a smaller and more formal textura hand than the rest of the book. The manuscript is not illuminated, and its rubricated initial letters are typically two lines in height and all in the same red ink.

The Gospels of Matthew and Mark and part of the prologue to Luke are in EV, at which point the prologue cuts off, a new LV prologue to Luke begins on a separate page, and the MS continues in LV for the remainder of the New Testament until the Apocalypse, perhaps because the EV exemplar copy was corrupt or because the LV exemplar was incomplete. As noted above, the number of columns per page changes from two to one at the same point, likely in parallel with the two Wycliffite versions’ respective exemplars. The manuscript shifts again at verse 1:17 of the Apocalypse, to the translation referred to here as the English Apocalypse, though there is no corresponding change in scribal hand or page layout.

The reasons for the shift to a third translation at the end of the New Testament are as obscure as the reasons for the first shift but may also have involved a corrupt or incomplete LV translation. Peikola observes:

A manuscript like this would be a good candidate for the Later Version exemplar obtained by the makers of Plimpton after the corrupt text of the Early Version had to be discarded . . . The almost blank page at the end of the Catholic Epistles probably betokens that the exemplar used at that point did not contain any more text . . . Instead, it appears that the makers once again had to start looking for a new exemplar — this time one from which the Apocalypse could be copied.

A few verses early in the English Apocalypse, 1:1–16 and 3:7–22, replace the biblical text with corresponding passages from the LV, perhaps because the exemplar was corrupt or missing a leaf — the length of missing text in both instances corresponds roughly to the amount that would fit on a single page. However, the gloss remains keyed to the complete uncorrupted text, causing its language in a few places not to match the biblical text it explicates. For example, verse 1:13 (1.¶7) refers to “oon lyk to the sone of man,” following LV, but the gloss for 1:13 (1.¶8) refers to the same figure as “the maydenesse sone,” the phrasing of the original English Apocalypse translation as found in earlier uncorrupted copies. In another case later in the manuscript, the gloss interprets the phrase “the two colurrs that ben in the reynebowe” (4.¶2), an image from the second half of verse 4:3, which the manuscript for unknown reasons has dropped altogether. The explanatory notes for this edition thoroughly list and analyze every instance of this type of discrepancy, but as these two examples demonstrate, the producers of the Plimpton manuscript were clearly working with a complete gloss for the English Apocalypse, but the exemplar for the biblical text must have been slightly corrupted, perhaps the impetus for the insertion of occasional LV verses.

In at least one intriguing case, the Wycliffite LV appears to have had an influence on a revision of the English Apocalypse gloss, a helpful reminder that textual influence does not always flow from older texts to newer, and revisions can be made in both directions. Like several other copies of the English Apocalypse, including the earliest, Plimpton mistranslates the Anglo-Norman word “phioles” (vials) in verse 5:8 as “fithelis” (fiddles), apparently by way of the Middle English “viol,” which can mean either vial or violin, resulting in the visually striking but inaccurate image of “harpis and fithelis of gold ful of swete smele” (see the explanatory notes for 5.¶3 and 5.¶4). Later manuscripts including Plimpton, while not correcting the mistranslation in the biblical text, add a gloss that is absent from earlier manuscripts and follow the LV in using the accurate, though in this context possibly ambiguous, “violis” (5.¶4).

Fridner locates the Middle English dialect of the earliest manuscripts of the English Apocalypse in the East Midlands of England and asserts that “there is no reason why the original dialect should not also have been EM.” Paues, however, lists several “northerly forms” in the early manuscripts which lead her to speculate that the translation originated instead in the North Midlands. Several of the forms she lists are noticeable in the early MS Harley 874 (H in this edition), such as a preference for the pronoun thai over thei (Plimpton also uses thai, but far less frequently), the conjunction oither where Plimpton has either (meaning “or”), and the personal pronoun Ich for I or Y. Fridner, contra Paues, claims that these variations are minor and likely reflect local scribal preferences. Plimpton, as with all later copies of the English Apocalypse, uses the central Midlands dialect shared by the Wycliffite LV. Perhaps the most noticeable shift from H to Plimpton is in the use of the conjunction but in place of the East Midland ac, though other shifts are also apparent, such as a complete elimination of the ne . . . naughth double negative form. How far removed the Plimpton manuscript is from the Wycliffite Bible translators themselves we cannot know — Peikola goes no further than to say it was likely produced in a “metropolitan” context alongside Wycliffite Bibles, in or around Oxford or London. Without more information about the translation’s origins beyond what the manuscripts can tell us, a precise location and dialect for the original text of the English Apocalypse is impossible to pinpoint.

Prior to the antiquarian George A. Plimpton’s acquisition of the manuscript, which he donated to Columbia in 1936, it belonged to the Norwich cathedral priory in Norfolk, a Benedictine house, though it was not likely to have been produced there and its texts contain no obvious connection to the Benedictines. The presence of the Wycliffite translations and other Lollard material indicates that the manuscript cannot have been produced earlier than ca. 1390, and more likely the early fifteenth century. It was bound in vellum over pasteboards at some point in the eighteenth century.

The manuscript contains the following contents:

1. Matthew and Mark in EV with prologues and partial prologue to Luke (fols. 2r–55v).
2. Luke to Jude in LV with prologues (fols. 56r–202v).
3. The English Apocalypse with commentary (fols. 203r–237r).
4. Proverbial sayings from the Old Testament in paraphrase, non-Wycliffite (fols. 237r–238r).
5. Shortened version of the Lollard Chronicle of the Papacy (fols. 238r–240r).
6. Prophecy of St. Hildegard, also known as Insurgent gentes (fols. 240r–241r).
7. Seven Words of Christ on the Cross with commentary (fol. 241r).
8. Ten Commandments with commentary (fols. 241r–241v).
9. Short penitential lyric, “God that alle myghtes may” (fol. 241v).
10. Old Testament lectionary in LV translation (fols. 242r–265v).

Other Manuscripts of the English Apocalypse

The English Apocalypse is extant in fifteen copies that date from the mid-fourteenth to the early fifteenth centuries. Twelve of these copies are in Version A and three in a possibly later Version B. As noted above, Fridner collated eleven copies of Version A in his 1961 edition but did not include Plimpton. The libraries and shelfmarks for these twelve manuscripts are listed alphabetically by city below, with brief notes about a few of the most significant. Unless otherwise noted, manuscripts of the English Apocalypse omit verses 1:1–8; a few later manuscripts, including Plimpton, fill in the missing verses with corresponding verses from the Wycliffite LV.

1. Cambridge, Caius College, MS 231/117, fols. 1r–86v. One of the earliest manuscripts, but fragmentary and missing large sections of text, including the prologue, the first chapter through verse 1:20, and more than two chapters later in the text (17:6–20:7), apparently because its parent copy was incomplete.
2. Cambridge, Magdalene College, MS Pepys 2498, fols. 226b–263b (P). A later copy (ca. 1400) with no apparent Wycliffite influence, which serves as the second supplementary text for this edition, filling in from verses 3:1–4:6 where H is missing a leaf (see description of H, below).
3. Cambridge, St. John’s College MS G.25, fols. 17–67. One of two Apocalypses, along with British Library, MS Harley 3913 (listed below), in which the biblical text comes mostly from the Wycliffite LV and its commentary from the English Apocalypse. Mary Dove lists this Apocalypse in her index of Wycliffite Bible manuscripts, but does not include Harley 3913. Morey cites it as the sole example of an English Apocalypse with “text from LV.”
4. Dublin, Trinity College, MS 69, fols. 55v–65r, 72v–78r.
5. London, British Library, MS Harley 874, fols. 2r–31r (H). The earliest known extant copy from the mid-fourteenth century (ca. 1340–1370). H serves as the first supplementary text for this edition. It has been digitized and is available for viewing in high-resolution color scans on the British Library’s website. Like all copies of the English Apocalypse that predate the Wycliffite Bible and a few later copies, H omits verses 1:1–8. The manuscript contains a lacuna, apparently a single missing leaf, starting in the gloss at the end of chapter 2 and continuing into the gloss that follows verse 4:6. To cover this section of missing text for this edition, P (see above, p. 6) fills in as a second supplementary manuscript.
6. London, British Library, MS Harley 3913, fols. 113v–203v. Apocalypse with biblical text primarily from the Wycliffite LV and commentary from the English Apocalypse. Fridner collates the commentary from this manuscript in his edition but does not collate the biblical text, since it has been too closely copied from “a Lollard Bible.”
7. London, British Library, MS Royal 17 A.xxvi, fols. 67–206. Appears in a manuscript with the Wycliffite EV Gospel of John. Includes verses 1:1–12 in LV.
8. Manchester, Rylands Library, English MS 92. Includes verses 1:1–11 in LV, fols. 1r–46v.
9. New York City, Columbia University Rare Book & Manuscript Library, MS Plimpton Add. 03, fols. 203r–237r (MS). The base text for this edition. MS appears as the final book of a Wycliffite New Testament which uses EV for Matthew and Mark and LV thereafter. Includes verses 1:1–16 and 3:7–22 in LV.
10. Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud Misc. 33, fols. 96v–144r. Appears in a manuscript with LV Pauline and Catholic Epistles. Includes verses 1:1–11 in LV.
11. Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud Misc. 235, fols. 265r–300r. Appears in a manuscript with EV Gospel of Matthew.
12. Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Rawlinson C.750, fols. 1r–51v. A later copy which is missing multiple leaves; it begins mid-sentence at verse 2:1 and cuts off at 22:16, four verses from the end.

The Wycliffite Bible Manuscripts (Appendix A)

The base manuscript for the Wycliffite LV Apocalypse published here as Appendix A is Oxford University, Bodley MS Fairfax 2, fols. 380ra–385rb (F). The secondary text is Oxford University, Bodley MS 277, fols. 370r–375r (B).

Elizabeth Solopova describes the characteristics of F in the catalogue Manuscripts of the Wycliffite Bible in the Bodleian and Oxford College Libraries. The Apocalypse is the final book of a complete Wycliffite Bible in LV, followed by a lectionary calendar. The biblical texts include occasional marginal glosses, which are noted in the textual notes of this edition. F is internally dated to the year 1408; a note following the end of the Apocalypse reads, “The eer [year] of the Lord M.CCC & viii this book was endid.” Clearly the year 1308 is too early for a Wycliffite Bible manuscript, but an erasure following the third C suggests that a fourth C was dropped. Solopova speculates that the date may have been intentionally altered to avoid censorship under Arundel’s recently published Constitutions. However, she adds that “examination under UV light” suggests a more likely explanation: “that the scribe first wrote ‘M.ccc’ and the ‘and’ symbol, erased the latter, wrote it in the right place, and then forgot to insert the fourth ‘c.’”

F has not appeared in a printed edition before now, but the secondary text for this edition, B, is one of the most extensively edited Wycliffite Bible manuscripts in existence. B serves as the base text for Conrad Lindberg’s four-volume edition of the Wycliffite LV titled King Henry’s Bible: MS Bodley 277: The Revised Version of the Wyclif Bible, completed in 2004. The Apocalypse appears in the fourth volume, which is Stockholm Studies in English, volume 100. Lindberg’s title refers to a large woodcut illustration of King Henry VI pasted to one of the final leaves of the codex, with a Latin inscription noting that the king owned the Bible and that it was later donated to the London Charterhouse, a Carthusian monastery. Solopova dates the manuscript to ca. 1415–1425.

The text in both F and B is formatted in double columns, and both feature large initial letters in blue and red ink, though B is more lavishly illuminated with decorative borders and gilded initial letters.

The History of French and Anglo-Norman Bible Translation

To trace the history that led to the production of the English Apocalypse in the mid-fourteenth century, we must start with the translation tradition behind its source text, the Anglo-Norman Apocalypse, and the texts in turn that undergird it, in particular the Old French Bible. The history of Bible translation in French begins in the tenth century, not long after Old French itself emerged as a Romance dialect, when translators began converting individual books of the Bible from St. Jerome’s Vulgate Latin into the vernacular, but hundreds of years before these efforts coalesced in the production of a full Bible. Relatively few manuscripts from these early years are extant until the twelfth century, a few decades after the Norman Conquest, when an unprecedented explosion of French translations of the Bible were produced, the bulk of them in England. As Paues observes in her 1902 study of Middle English New Testament translations, “It is a remarkable and significant fact that the earliest specimens of the French vernacular Bible are of Norman origin, and that the earliest MSS. in which they have come down to us were executed in England by Anglo-Norman scribes.” The first book of the Bible to be translated into the newly emergent dialect of Anglo-Norman was the Psalms, possibly at the Benedictine abbey of St. Albans in the 1140s.

A great flourishing of Anglo-Norman Psalters would follow and crescendo in the closing decades of the twelfth century. Also predominant among twelfth-century French productions were illustrated “Bible books,” sometimes with commentary, as well as liturgical aids and collections of sermons which included original translations of various biblical passages. A slightly later development originating in Paris were Bibles moralisées, described by Ian Short as “profusely illustrated picture books made for the French royal family,” which dated from the 1220s and reached England a few decades later. The biblical texts in these Bibles moralisées were selected for their moral or typological significance and heavily paraphrased. Though the primary teaching aid in these stunningly beautiful and expensive productions was clearly their colorful pictures, they invariably included commentary translated from Latin as well, which came either from Berengaudus — a writer about whom nothing is known, who may have lived anywhere from the ninth to the eleventh century — or from another anonymous source.

The popularity of these richly illuminated Psalters and Bible paraphrases on both sides of the English Channel soon extended to other books of the Bible. By the middle of the thirteenth century, picture books of the Apocalypse had become one of the most popular luxury book productions in France and England, as measured by their more than eighty extant manuscripts, including two of the largest and most lavishly decorated, the Trinity Apocalypse (Cambridge, Trinity College, MS R.16.2, fols.1r–31v) and the Abingdon Apocalypse (London, British Library, Add. MS 42555, fols. 5r–82v). The commentary that accompanied the illustrations and biblical text of these Apocalypses came either from the aforementioned Berengaudus, or from one of the other anonymous commentaries in the Bibles moralisées, whose original texts do not survive, or from the Glossa Ordinaria, the ubiquitous twelfth-century compilation of glosses mainly from patristic sources. Calling them works of “remarkable prestige and beauty,” Daron Burrows argues that “there are few events of greater importance to the history of medieval art and bookmaking than the production of the first illustrated manuscripts of the Apocalypse of St. John . . . This development is also of singular importance to francophone literature, since half of these manuscripts contain vernacular material, with the earliest, most important, and greatest number of these texts copied in Anglo-Norman.”

Ten of these forty vernacular Apocalypse manuscripts are cast in verse, in roughly octosyllabic couplets. The rest make up what is broadly known as the French Prose Apocalypse, the source text that would be used half a century later by the translators of the English Apocalypse. The translation is anonymous and approximately 27,000 words in length, a measure which includes both the biblical text and an interpolated commentary approximately twice its length. Twenty of the thirty extant vernacular texts, including the earliest copies, are in the Anglo-Norman dialect. Both their language and the prominence of their illustrations suggest that the intended audience for these books, far from being the almost exclusively clerical and monastic readers of prior generations, now included the less educated laity.

Incredibly, no critical edition of the Anglo-Norman Apocalypse has yet been published. The standard edition, edited by Léopold Delisle and Paul Meyer in two volumes in 1900 and 1901, is not, in the editors’ own words, “une édition critique” but merely a transcription of a possibly corrupt text from the manuscript Bibliothèque Nationale de France, MS Français 403, fols. 1–45v. Burrows elaborates on the frustrations for scholars as a result of this lack:

There is no critical edition of the Prose Apocalypse, nor has there been any study of the textual tradition which would allow one to pronounce with any certainty on affiliations between manuscripts or the possibility of establishing a stemma, and this fundamental philological neglect only exacerbates the uncertainties surrounding other key questions, such as the date of the text’s composition, the identity of its anonymous author, the relationship of its “non-Berengaudus gloss” to the vast exegetical tradition on which it clearly draws, and even, despite the predominance of its transmission in Anglo-Norman manuscripts, on which side of the Channel it was originally written. As a result, the Prose Apocalypse remains shrouded by nearly as many mysteries as Jerome famously declared the last book of the New Testament to contain.

In his edition of the English Apocalypse, Fridner echoes Delisle and Meyer’s assertion that all available manuscripts of the Anglo-Norman Apocalypse, including their own base text, are unreliable to some degree. He quotes M. R. James’s observation about one such corrupt Apocalypse manuscript, the lavishly illuminated Bodley MS Douce 180, that it is “so carelessly (though beautifully) written as sometimes to make nonsense.” Despite these potential problems, Fridner reproduced Delisle and Meyer’s transcription of BnF fr. 403 as a running text in his edition of the English Apocalypse, in effect because he had no choice without embarking on an entirely separate project of producing a critical edition of the Anglo-Norman Apocalypse himself. My own explanatory and textual notes on the Anglo-Norman text, when its language is relevant to an understanding of the English translator’s word choices, are derived from Fridner’s copy, though the original text can also be found in Delisle and Meyer’s edition.

A complete Bible in French — the first complete vernacular Bible of its kind to be produced in western Europe — was a somewhat later development, and it started with innovations in the presentation of the Vulgate text. As David Lawton points out, “the Bible as we most commonly experience it today, as a single portable volume with its books in a fixed order, and with chapter divisions, was the invention of Paris workshops in the 1220s and 1230s,” and was designed to meet the needs of fraternal orders, particularly the Dominicans, “for an individual source of authority, reference, and preaching material.” Through the work of an anonymous team of translators in Paris, copies of what came to be known as the Old French Bible were in circulation in both France and England by 1260, with a different type of audience, lay readers, in mind. The translation was based on the Vulgate Latin, with most books featuring a light to moderate gloss, and its goal, according to Clive Sneddon, was “rendering the Vulgate in a clear Old French prose which respected the register and style differences between Bible books and was generally accessible to readers.” Three complete manuscripts of the Old French Bible are extant, and surviving fragments suggest that at least twenty-two complete copies were made.

In the early fourteenth century, copies of the Old French Bible begin appearing in “fusion” with a Bible in the Picard dialect produced by Guiart des Moulin in ca. 1297 called the Bible historiale, a hybrid translation known to scholars today as the Bible historiale complétée. Margriet Hoogvliet calls the manuscripts of this biblical fusion “one of the great successes of the commercial manuscript production in Paris during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries,” with more than 140 partial and complete copies extant. Despite the clear popularity of complete French Bibles in the fourteenth century, readers in England and France would nevertheless have still been most likely to encounter the Bible the same way their predecessors in the early thirteenth century did — through fragmentary forms including illuminated manuscripts with abridgements and commentary, paraphrases, and individual books produced separately from the rest of the Bible.

A complete Bible in Anglo-Norman French did not appear until the first half of the fourteenth century, perhaps only a short while before the English Apocalypse translators began their work. It is possible, though unlikely to be proven one way or the other, that the English translators had at their disposal both a copy of the Anglo-Norman Apocalypse, the primary text for their translation, and a supplementary copy of the Old French and/or Anglo-Norman complete Bible which included the Apocalypse.

Apocalypse Commentaries

The commentary that appears in the prologue and in the interpolated gloss of the English Apocalypse, and in the Anglo-Norman Apocalypse that came before it, participates in a long tradition of Apocalypse commentaries, especially those disseminated by the Dominican and Franciscan orders of friars in the twelfth to thirteenth centuries and taken up in the fourteenth century by English dissidents in the Lollard movement.

Given the complex and mysterious nature of the imagery in the Book of Revelation, it is no surprise that this book of the Bible inspired volumes of commentary from the earliest days of its inclusion in the New Testament canon. In the first centuries of the Common Era, commentaries on the Apocalypse proliferated and eventually broke into two strands — those which used the text to speculate when end times events would occur (usually imminently), and those which gave the text’s symbolic imagery a broader, less specifically predictive interpretation. Kevin Poole notes that by the late fourth century, “Revelation had proven itself non-predictive, and many of the major exegetes . . . began to read Revelation as a more symbolical or allegorical text.” As Apocalypse editions and their accompanying commentaries exploded in popularity in the later Middle Ages, starting in France in the thirteenth century, this latter approach in Apocalypse commentaries predominated. The biblical text could still be used to speculate about end times events, as the commentary to the English Apocalypse makes clear, but just as pertinent were interpretations that gave its images contemporary relevance.

One clear example of this interpretive tradition roughly contemporary with the production of the Plimpton manuscript comes, ironically, from a church official writing in opposition to English Bible translations, in the very document that would ban their production. Archbishop Thomas Arundel, in his introduction to the Constitutions of 1407, writes that just as Satan comes dressed as an “angel of light,” so those who wish to destroy the church also come in deceptively pleasant garb:

. . . by which the emblem in the Apocalypse is verified, “one sitting on a black horse held a balance in his hand.” By this heretics are meant, who allure people to them with an appearance of what is right and just under the figure of a balance, but afterwards comes the horse with his black tail scattering poisonous errors . . .”

The black horse of Revelation 6:5 appears here not as a figure of end times catastrophe but as a present danger in the contemporary church, a generalized heretic who uses the appearance of justice to mask hypocrisy and lead Christians astray.

The early twelfth century saw the production of the Glossa Ordinaria, the compendium of patristic glosses in Latin that was largely the work of French theologian Anselm of Laon and his school. In its wake, the production of Apocalypse commentaries multiplied throughout the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, many of the most prominent written by members of monastic and fraternal orders: the Benedictine Rupert of Deutz, the Cistercian Joachim of Fiore, the Augustinian Richard of St. Victor, the Dominican Hugh of St. Cher, and Franciscans such as Alexander of Bremen, Peter John Olivi, and Nicholas of Lyra.

Robert Boenig, in his survey of apocalyptic traditions in medieval England, describes deployments of the Apocalypse in late medieval rhetoric as “counter-cultural,” in that they frequently targeted institutional power structures their writers viewed as oppressive. In the case of the monastic and fraternal orders, one of those targets was the corruption of the institutional church, from which they saw themselves standing apart. The church would also be a ripe target in the commentaries of the Lollards, who had perhaps more of a reason than members of religious orders to view themselves as alienated. The commentary in the Anglo-Norman Apocalypse is almost certainly Franciscan in origin, and Franciscans in the thirteenth century shared the later Lollard movement’s concerns about corruption in the secular priesthood. The Anglo-Norman Apocalypse commentary’s frequent invocations of “false prelatis” and “false clerkis” (false prelates and false clerics; see 14.¶7, 16.¶11, and 17.¶¶3, 9) refer not to the friars themselves, of course, but to the clergy and other officials within the church’s hierarchy, who need to be raised from their moral degradation lest they face the same divine judgment as hypocrites and heretics. Lollard polemicists were accustomed to attacking not only these hypocritical priests but the religious orders themselves in their sweeping critiques. Their wide-ranging anticlericalism swept up secular priests, monks, and friars alike — which is part of what makes their attraction to an Apocalypse commentary with Franciscan roots noteworthy.

Scholars looking for explanations for the sudden proliferation of Apocalypse books and commentaries in thirteenth-century England and France frequently point, at least in part, to the emergence of apocalyptic ideas among friars specifically. The two most recently established fraternal orders in the thirteenth century, the Franciscans and the Dominicans, had a particular reason to be attracted to the Book of Revelation — they saw themselves in it, particularly in the description of “two witnessis” in chapter 11 who preach for 1,260 days while dressed in sackcloth, shortly before the Beast appears on the earth in the end times (see 11.¶¶4–5 of the English Apocalypse, which interprets the two witnesses as the prophets Enoch and Elijah). This passage was important to the new orders, Nigel Morgan writes, because they “saw themselves as the new apostles of the thirteenth century.” This interpretation can be traced to the writings of Joachim of Fiore, the Cistercian monk who founded his own branch of the order in the late twelfth century and predicted that a new age in the history of mankind, the Third Age or Age of the Holy Spirit, would begin in the year 1260 — an echo of the 1,260 days of Revelation 11:3. Joachim may or may not be primarily responsible for the Apocalypse’s surge in interest — after all, lay readers outside the religious orders who likely did not read Joachim engaged with these texts as well — but it was shortly after the dissemination of his prophecies and his death in 1202 that vernacular prose translations of the Apocalypse, with their accompanying commentaries, began to appear in England and France.

These commentaries did not, as noted above, always keep their interpretations safely ensconced in the future of end times events, but used them to critique people and institutions in the present. The Franciscan Peter John Olivi, for example, drawing on Joachim’s prophecies, described in his Apocalypse commentary a “double Antichrist” who would come in the future, but who would capture the papacy because the contemporary institution was already corrupt and open to Satan’s wiles — a claim, among others, that led to his posthumous condemnation by Pope John XXII in 1326. Much of the interest in the Apocalypse at this time revolved around the figure of the Antichrist, and the question of who in the contemporary world he might represent. One likely candidate in the thirteenth century was Frederick II, the Holy Roman Emperor who ruled much of Europe and was frequently at war with the papacy. Drawing on language from the Apocalypse, Pope Gregory IX wrote in a letter to Archbishop of Canterbury Edmund Rich in 1239, “The beast filled with the names of blasphemy has risen from the sea . . . this beast Frederick, called emperor.” But monarchs and nations in conflict with the church were not the only potential targets — by the late fourteenth century, virtually any leader in the church or government might earn the label of Antichrist, either as a prophetic precursor to the figure in the Apocalypse or as the very man.

John Wyclif began referring to the pope as Antichrist as early as the 1370s, in treatises such as De Civili Dominio [On Civil Dominion] (ca. 1375), De Dominio Divino [On Divine Dominion] (ca. 1376), and De Ecclesia [On the Church] (ca. 1378). Pope Gregory XI reigned during this stretch of Wyclif’s career, but the papacy itself would soon be divided in 1378, with separate lines at Rome and Avignon, a schism which no doubt encouraged Wyclif, his Lollard followers, and other English anticlerical writers increasingly to view the institution as illegitimate. The Antichrist in their view was not a vague future threat but an active present danger to the church — to be precise, the “ghostly” or spiritual church made up of true Christian believers, to whom the pope and other officials might not even belong. “The high priests of Antichrist,” Wyclif wrote in De Simonia, “are able to condemn and destroy Christ’s members because the latter universally reprove their sins.”

The central difference between Wyclif’s polemic and that of the Franciscans and other apocalyptically- inclined friars who came before him is that Wyclif’s targets included the fraternal orders, whom he believed had fallen from the purity of their founders’ original intentions. One of the short texts that accompanies the New Testament in the Plimpton manuscript is a good example of this type of critique — a prophecy attributed apocryphally to the twelfth-century Hildegard of Bingen, which cites Osee 4:8 in predicting that “ther schal rise a maner of folk . . . holdynge the ordres of begeres, walkyng withouten schame, finding many new wickidnessese,” a reference the prophecy’s commentary applies to friars. The later Lollards would extend and intensify this type of critique so that by the fifteenth century, the Lollard tract The Lanterne of Light would include friars in its depiction of Antichrist as a giant serpent, with the pope at its head, bishops as its body, and the “sects” of religious orders as its tail. The tract gives the following reading to the image of the Beast in Revelation 16:

That is to mene archebischopis and bischopis ben the seet of the beest Anticrist, for in hem he sittith and regneth over othir peple in the derknes of his heresie; and in this thei deliten hem . . . in the court of Rome is the heed of Anticrist and in archebischopis and bischopis is the bodi of Anticrist. But in thise cloutid [rag-tag] sectis, as mounkis, chanouns, and freris [friars] is the venymous taile of Anticrist.

The commentary in the Plimpton manuscript’s English Apocalypse is not quite so explicit in making these connections, but it does describe the Antichrist as a type of seductive preacher, drawing followers to him with the power of his speech and false teaching, and it describes some of those followers as various types of clergy. For example, the gloss for verses 13:11–18 that appears in 13.¶9 features a substantial length of commentary that is original to the English Apocalypse — it does not have an Anglo-Norman source — centering around the Antichrist and his disciples, all of them “ypocritis and eretikis,” and many of them “prelatis,” or church officials. These prelates “doone her synne of leccherie priveli” while hypocritically keeping a righteous outer appearance, and the commentary goes on to accuse the church of rampant simony and claim that men “go to the ordre” — join the priesthood or a religious order — “to han bodili delites.” The gloss for verses 14:9–10 in 14.¶7 makes a further connection between the Antichrist and the church: “alle that ben drawun to the fals techyng of Anticrist and conformith hym to the vices of his discipils, tho [those] ben the false profetis and false clerkis that ben proud and coveitouse and leccherouse and losengouris [flatterers].” These false prophets and clerics play a role in bringing the future end-times horrors of the book, but they are just as clearly meant to represent contemporary church officials.

The gloss’s invocation of the Antichrist, as well as its multi-pronged attack on the clergy’s pride, greed, lechery, and other vices (see explanatory note 14.¶7 on the wide range of meanings for the insult “losengouris”), drew inspiration from the French Apocalypse commentaries produced by religious orders in generations past, but it would also have sat comfortably alongside the most strident Lollard critiques of the late fourteenth century — as the Lollard compiler of the Plimpton manuscript clearly intuited.

The Early History of English Bible Translation

Anglo-Norman’s popularity as a literary language in England in the centuries following the Norman Conquest explains in part why Middle English translations of Scripture do not appear in great volume until the middle of the fourteenth century. The English Apocalypse does not appear until approximately one hundred years after the Anglo-Norman Apocalypse translation, long after the heyday of the great illuminated Apocalypse books in Old French. This history also explains why a Middle English translator might choose a French text as the source for a biblical translation and view it as trustworthy. Neither the class distinctions of the late fourteenth century, which came to see French as primarily a courtly or diplomatic language, nor the anti-French antipathies of the Hundred Years’ War, which began in earnest in the 1340s with Edward the Black Prince’s incursions into France, were likely to be relevant to an English translator in the first half of the fourteenth century. Translating a biblical text from French to English was clearly not viewed as problematic, either socially or politically. But language practices in England were changing, and the great flourishing of Middle English biblical material that would culminate in the Wycliffite Bible editions at the end of the century was well underway by even the earliest possible date of the first English Apocalypse manuscript in ca. 1340.

English translations of the Bible have their own separate historical track, dating back to the emergence of the English language. King Alfred in the ninth century commissioned a Pentateuch and a Psalter in the dialect we now call Old English, and other parts of the Bible such as the Psalms and Christ’s Passion survive in Old English as well, though by the fourteenth century, these texts could not be understood by most readers. In Middle English, several verse adaptations of Latin abridgements of Scripture appeared starting in the thirteenth century — for example, the rhyming metrical Genesis and Exodus (ca. 1250) and Iacob and Iosep [Jacob and Joseph] (ca. 1250). The massive Cursor Mundi [Runner of the World] (ca. 1300), with its 29,555 lines of mostly rhyming couplets, covers the entire Bible in paraphrase, as well as an apocryphal account of Jesus’s childhood. Many other works of Middle English poetry retell stories from the Bible and on occasion directly translate portions of Scripture. These include the works of the Gawain-Poet, anonymous author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight as well as Pearl, whose vision of the heavenly New Jerusalem quotes directly from Revelation; Patience, which retells the Book of Jonah and quotes from the Beatitudes; and Cleanness, which recounts several stories of God’s wrath from the Books of Genesis and Daniel. Other Middle English biblical translations include Gospel harmonies, Gospel commentaries with quotations and paraphrases, a stanzaic Life of Christ, a translation of Matthew and Acts in a Midlands dialect, a Southwestern dialect translation of the Pauline and Catholic Epistles, a metrical paraphrase of the Old Testament (ca. 1380), and numerous editions of the Psalms, including the Surtees Psalter (ca. 1300) and the Midlands Glossed Prose Psalter (ca. 1350), which features alternating lines in Latin and English.

Psalters of all kinds were immensely popular throughout the fourteenth century and were often produced in stand-alone editions for a variety of liturgical uses. In her book-length study of English psalters in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Annie Sutherland mentions several produced in England which contain both Middle English and Anglo-Norman Psalms alongside their Vulgate originals, to produce a “three-fold Psalter.” The popularity of these trilingual biblical productions may provide another glimpse into the origins of the English Apocalypse, and further explanation for why an English translator might be interested in translating the biblical text from French. In the early decades of the fourteenth century, both languages appear to have had equal status for a broad range of readers, and occasionally shared space within the same manuscript. The translators of the English Apocalypse no doubt had similar goals to the later Wycliffite translators — to make texts that were already widespread and popular, but perhaps becoming inaccessible to a growing number of readers, available to all.

It is unclear which of these earlier translations, paraphrases, and poetic renderings of the Bible the Oxford translators in the late fourteenth century would have known about and read. Any debt they may owe to them as inspirations or models for their own translations does not appear overtly in the biblical texts. However, one work of English Bible translation we can say with certainty the Wycliffite translators knew, in addition to the English Apocalypse, was the Psalter translated by the mystic Richard Rolle of Hampole. Extant in forty manuscripts, Rolle’s prose translations were completed sometime shortly before his death in 1349. They are a valuable resource for any student of medieval translation theory, since in addition to recording Latin and English verses on alternating lines, Rolle also includes commentary on each verse and occasionally on his reasons for particular translation choices.

Rolle’s Psalter was a particular favorite of the Lollards, who reproduced the text in their own glossed versions. Nearly half of Rolle’s extant manuscripts contain Lollard interpolations in addition to his own commentary, many of which express anticlerical attitudes and heighten Rolle’s more generalized suspicion of the institutional church. As a translation that predates the Wycliffite versions, Rolle’s work had the benefit for later Lollards of prior approval from church authorities — since his translations long predated fifteenth-century restrictions on new Bible translations, owning and copying and even annotating his works were not practices likely to run afoul of church censors or confiscators. In fact, until the Wycliffite versions appeared roughly forty years later, Rolle’s Psalter was, according to Margaret Deanesly, “the standard English version of the psalms.” Rolle’s Psalter as glossed and expanded by the Lollards provides an interesting parallel to Plimpton’s English Apocalypse, as in both cases an already popular biblical text was appropriated and placed within a new, and newly dissident, context.

Sutherland explores a range of theoretical positions that guided various translations of the Psalms in the English fourteenth century, from Rolle to the Wycliffite versions. The “close literalism” of Rolle’s Psalm translations, for instance, suggests that he had a reading audience in mind who was at least somewhat familiar with Latin and may have used it as a supplement for learning the language. This speculation parallels what some scholars have claimed about the Wycliffite EV and its sometimes awkward Latinate phrasing, for example Henry Ansgar Kelly, who argues against the idea that the EV was merely a first draft and instead was “foreseen as having a permanent value in assisting persons with only elementary Latin, particularly run-of-the-mill clergy, to use as a guide to understanding the Latin text.” In the case of Rolle, a reader who found his literal translation confusing could also have recourse to “the more idiomatic translation often embedded in the commentary,” an interesting parallel to the more idiomatic English of the Wycliffite LV, which in Kelly’s words “systematically de-Latinizes EV.”

In general, though, rather than conceptualizing the English psalter translation tradition as a “chain,” with one text simply influencing the next, Sutherland imagines instead “a nexus of connections in which texts have the freedom to respond to each other critically as well as imitatively,” often in unexpected ways. A similar imagination must be deployed to understand the potential connections between the English Apocalypse and the Wycliffite translations of Revelation. The former was produced definitively earlier in history, and our natural inclination might be to imagine its influence moving chronologically forward toward the later texts. However, despite the Oxford translators’ almost certain knowledge of the English Apocalypse, it does not appear that they used it in any discernible way as a foundation or model for their own Apocalypse version. If anything, the textual evidence in Plimpton and other manuscripts suggests that influence flowed in the other direction — as scribes used the Wycliffite LV to revise and refine the English Apocalypse that was part of their New Testament. The Wycliffite translators were apparently scrupulous about keeping their Latin-to-English translation project separate from the French-to-English translation they likely had access to, even if the compilers and producers of their Bibles were more liberal in their willingness to blend texts.

The Apocalypse and Middle English Poetry

A familiarity with the imagery and themes of the biblical Apocalypse is exceedingly valuable for students of Middle English literature, given the profound influence it had for centuries on the medieval Christian imagination, in particular on the poetic literature composed at roughly the same time as the English Apocalypse. The great Middle English dream vision poem Pearl, for example, renders the Apostle John’s description of the heavenly city of New Jerusalem in highly elaborate poetic verse, in the service of a grieving father’s vision of the afterlife. In her analysis of the poem, Susanna Fein discusses the traditional medieval association of the Apostle John with jewelry, derived from his cataloging of the city’s precious gems in Revelation 21:18–21 (21.¶¶8–10 in the English Apocalypse), a process the “jeweler” narrator of Pearl echoes in his own descriptions of the heavenly city. Fein also draws attention to the ways the Pearl poet drew visual inspiration from the illuminated Apocalypse volumes in Old French. Ann Meyer’s work on medieval allegory and the Apocalypse examines Pearl as well and explores the ways that even church architecture, in addition to other cultural and literary productions, can be “understood as earthly representations of the New Jerusalem.”

Piers Plowman, William Langland’s epic dream vision in alliterative Middle English verse, composed in at least three stages in the final decades of the fourteenth century, also makes numerous allusions to the Apocalypse, as Morton Bloomfield details in his influential study Piers Plowman as a Fourteenth-Century Apocalypse. Bloomfield highlights Langland’s role as a social and ecclesiastical reformer, who employs apocalyptic imagery to describe clerical corruption and express hope for a renewal of the church — concerns shared by both the gloss commentary of the English Apocalypse and Langland’s Lollard contemporaries. In particular, Bloomfield draws attention to the poem’s Harrowing of Hell scene — Christ’s descent after his crucifixion to release captive souls, also a popular subject in medieval art and drama — which he describes as a “foreshadowing of the Last Judgment,” after which Langland depicts the coming of Antichrist and the triumphant return of Christ. Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, in a book that both challenges and expands on Bloomfield’s work, traces Langland’s many predecessors and influences who were both exegetes of the Apocalypse and apocalyptic visionaries themselves — Hildegard of Bingen, Bridget of Sweden, William of St. Amour, and Joachim of Fiore, among others — and outlines Langland’s own “ideology of reform” for the church, a new form of apocalypticism which she argues is both apocalyptic and optimistic about the future.

As much of the scholarship cited here makes clear, it was not only biblical texts and commentaries but the physical, visual presentation of illuminated manuscripts that spurred the imaginations of Middle English poets — and a consideration of both text and visual art is essential for understanding the enduring resonance of apocalyptic imagery for medieval English readers. In addition to the many digitized images of manuscripts available through institutions such as the Bodleian Library in Oxford and the British Library in London (a complete set of images from the oldest extant copy of the English Apocalypse, MS Harley 874, is freely available on the British Library’s website), many recent publications have also helped to make this rich primary material more accessible to students and scholars. These include facsimiles and illustrated editions of manuscripts like the Abingdon Apocalypse and Trinity Apocalypse, as well as scholarship on Apocalypse material which features visual reproductions of select manuscript pages.

Production of the Wycliffite Bible

The English translations of the Bible produced at Oxford University in late fourteenth century, known collectively as the Wycliffite Bible, survive in more manuscript copies than any other work produced in Middle English. These 253 manuscripts include twenty full Bibles and hundreds of partial copies, in many cases constituting only the Old or New Testament, the Psalms, the Gospels, or single books of the Bible, and including four manuscripts that contain the Apocalypse alone. By comparison, the second most well preserved Middle English text, the anonymous poem Prik of Conscience, has 131 copies extant in several different versions, followed by Nicholas Love’s The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ with sixty-one copies. Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales has fifty-five. Manuscripts of the Wycliffite LV outnumber the EV by more than five to one, but the Wycliffite EV alone still far outstrips most other works of Middle English literature in popularity.

The survival of so many copies of the text speaks to a huge production and distribution network, one that likely could only have been achieved at Oxford with multiple translators and the institutional support of the university. The survival of so many complete New Testaments, Old Testaments, and whole Bibles also attests to a philosophy of translation and biblical completeness and coherence not seen in any Middle English translation project prior to that point. According to Lawton, the Oxford translators’ “project of comprehensive vernacular Bible translation was probably an inevitable response to the Paris Bible as disseminated by friars from the 1240s.” As with the Old French Bible production of the thirteenth century, the process had to begin with establishing a complete and relatively stable text of the Latin Bible.

The self-named “symple creature” who wrote Chapter 15 of the Wycliffite Bible’s General Prologue — who may or may not have been one of the project’s translators, as he claims — describes the next step in the translation process as consulting several Bible commentaries, with a possible reference to the Glossa Ordinaria or “common gloss”:

a symple creature hath translatid the Bible out of Latyn into English. First this symple creature hadde myche trauaile with diuerse felawis and helperis to gedere manie elde biblis, and othere doctouris and comune glosis, and to make oo Latyn bible sumdel trewe; and thanne to studie it of the newe, the text with the glose, and othere doctouris as he mighte gete . . .

The simple creature claims that the Bible is translated solely from the Latin, but he also mentions glosses and commentaries which help to establish a stable Latin text. Given that the Wycliffite translators knew of the earlier English Apocalypse, it seems at least possible that its gloss is one of these documents — though any evidence from the text of the Wycliffite Apocalypse versions, if it exists at all, is likely impossible to retrieve.

Prior to the late fourteenth century, the institutional church was not hostile to Bible translation into vernacular languages. Pope Innocent III gave the practice explicit approval in 1199, with the caveat that only qualified readers should attempt to interpret Scripture. At around the same time as Pope Innocent’s approval, complete editions of the Bible became popular in churches and among the wealthy laity in France, including large two-volume Bibles designed for public reading from church lecterns, and a relatively compact volume for individual readers known as the Parisian Bible. All of these Bibles, however, were in Latin. The appearance of the first Old French Bible is a mystery, as no preface explains where or why it was produced, but it was likely connected with the University of Paris and completed at least a few years before its earliest extant manuscript copy in ca. 1260. The Old French Bible thus predated the Wycliffite Bible by more than a century, and it was used both by readers in France and French-speaking readers in post-Conquest England, as was the Anglo-Norman Apocalypse and the English Apocalypse when they appeared in the fourteenth century, with no apparent condemnation from the church.

The English church’s eventual hostility toward vernacular Bible translation in the late fourteenth century had less to do with any threat from the Bibles themselves and more to do with the perceived threats of the men who produced them, and their heretical positions on theological subjects only indirectly related to Bible translation. The Blackfriars council of 1382, convened by Archbishop of Canterbury William Courtenay, condemned twenty-four positions of Wyclif and his followers as erroneous, starting with their belief that the elements of the Eucharist retained their “substance” as bread and wine after consecration — the first three of the council’s condemnations dealt with this heretical position against the doctrine of transubstantiation. Other errors that followed in the list included the belief that priests could not effectively administer sacraments while in a state of mortal sin (a heresy known as Donatism), that the pope has no authority if he is evil, that every Christian may preach the gospel without license from the church, that civil authorities have the right to dispossess clergy of their possessions, that monastic and fraternal orders are illegitimate, and that friars should live by the work of their hands rather than by begging for alms. None of these condemnations made any mention of English Bible translation. Only when some of the same men whose views had been condemned by the council — John Purvey, Nicholas Hereford, John Trevisa, and possibly Wyclif himself — became involved in producing an English Bible translation at Oxford did church officials take notice and add it to the long list of Lollard errors they believed endangered the orthodox faithful.

Wyclif was not formally charged by the Blackfriars council nor even named in their condemnation, and he would not be convicted of heresy in his lifetime, though the Council of Constance would declare his works heretical in 1415, more than twenty years after his death. Nevertheless, the Blackfriars condemnation forced him to resign his position at Oxford and he retired to his parish at Lutterworth. In the months that followed, his associates Nicholas Hereford and Philip Repingdon, in the words of historian John Dahmus, “proceeded to turn Oxford into a hotbed of Lollardy.” Hereford, Repingdon, and Purvey were all eventually found guilty of heterodox beliefs and imprisoned, and under threat of death they eventually recanted — though Purvey would later recant his recantation and flee, possibly to join forces with the famous Lollard rebel Sir John Oldcastle. This history set the stage for Arundel’s Constitutions in 1407, which expressed the church’s new fear of a heretical uprising directly connected to the new English Bible translation and its disseminators.

The Influence of Arundel’s Constitutions

The precise connections between Wyclif’s teaching on subjects such as the Eucharist and civil dominion and his championing of an English Bible are fraught and debatable to modern scholars, but to church officials in the early fifteenth century, the link between Wyclif’s heresies and Bible translation seemed to become increasingly clear. The extent of his involvement in the translation project itself is doubtful — this question will be addressed more thoroughly in the next section below — but the Oxford philosopher had an explicit and persistent belief in the importance of biblical material being made available to lay readers directly, in part to counteract what he viewed as corrupt interpretations from officials in the church, from parish priests to monks and friars and even to the pope. In his treatise On the Truth of Holy Scripture from ca. 1378, Wyclif argues that “in order to prevent some pseudo-disciples from pretending that they have received their understanding directly from God, God established a common Scripture which is perceptible to the senses, by means of which the catholic sense should be comprehended.” The General Prologue to the Wycliffite LV offers a similar defense of the English translation project as beneficial for the “lewd” or uneducated laity:

For though couetouse clerkis ben wode [driven mad] bi symonie, eresie and manie othere synnes, and dispisen and stoppen holi writ as myche as thei moun [can], yit the lewid puple crieth aftir holi writ to kunne [learn] it and kepe it with greet cost and peril of here [their] lif.

Wyclif and his followers pitted themselves directly against the church’s representatives — and if the connection between the translation project and Wyclif’s sacramental heresy was tenuous, the church would nevertheless err on the side of caution. Spurred by the perceived threat of Lollardy, Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Arundel presided over a convocation at Oxford in November 1407 which published ten proclamations against the Lollards known as Arundel’s Constitutions. Among other strictures, the Constitutions ruled that both ownership of the new English translation of the Bible and production of any future English translations would be restricted to those who secured a license in advance. After passing at Oxford, the Constitutions were confirmed at a later convocation in London and published on April 13, 1409.

The sixth of Arundel’s Constitutions, which sets the limits on English Bible translation, is worth quoting at length, to determine what exactly it purports to ban and under what circumstances:

It is dangerous, as St. Jerome declares, to translate the text of Holy Scripture out of one idiom into another, since it is not easy in translations to preserve exactly the same meaning in all things . . . We therefore command and ordain that henceforth no one translate the text of Holy Scripture into English or any other language in a book, booklet, or tract, and that no one read any book, booklet, or tract of this kind lately made in the time of the said John Wyclif or since, or that hereafter may be made either in part or wholly, either publicly or privately, under pain of excommunication until such translation shall have been approved and allowed by the diocesan of the place, or (if need be) by the Provincial Council. He who shall act otherwise let him be punished as an abettor of heresy and error.

The eighteenth-century English translator of the Constitutions, John Johnson, whose editorial commentary indulges in anti-Catholic polemic, observes that the language of “book, booklet, or tract” (libri, libelli, aut tractatus) could potentially encompass texts beyond mere Bible translation and is both broad and vague enough that “this net seems to be made for the catching or letting go whomsoever and whatsoever they pleased.” At the same time, the decree does not appear to condemn Wyclif directly, but merely any translation made “in his time” or afterward. The Constitutions do not condemn all English Bible translations, only unlicensed ones, and even then the potential crime is not owning them but “reading” them before they have been approved by proper authorities. Arundel’s central motive appears to be preventing future translation efforts that might introduce heretical elements into the text. What is unclear, and a running debate for historians of the early fifteenth century, is whether existing translations, namely the Wycliffite Bible versions which do not feature openly heretical material, are meant to be included in the strictures. Was it dangerous, after 1409, to produce or own a manuscript with an already existing English translation of Scripture?

In a hugely influential 1995 article entitled “Censorship and Cultural Change in Late Medieval England: Vernacular Theology, the Oxford Translation Debate, and Arundel’s Constitutions of 1409,” Nicholas Watson made the case that Arundel’s decrees were “the linchpin of a broader attempt to limit religious discussion and writing in the vernacular,” and that their dissemination marked a major shift from the late fourteenth century, when works of vernacular theology flourished, to the early fifteenth century, when self-censorship hampered this burgeoning literary movement. Debates about Arundel’s legacy since then have tended to position themselves in relation to Watson’s argument. While many have quibbled over the contention that vernacular theology all but disappeared after 1409, for reasons detailed below, most agree that something happened to change the landscape for vernacular religious writers.

The anthology After Arundel, the published culmination of an Oxford University conference on the Constitutions on their 600th anniversary, spotlights a variety of perspectives on Arundel’s legacy. The volume’s co-editor Vincent Gillespie, while making the case that Arundel’s successor Archbishop Henry Chichele ultimately exercised more lasting influence on the English church, concedes that the Constitutions nevertheless “cast a long shadow across the following decades and encourage a sense that the role of the vernacular in innovatory religious writing was diminished, and its advocates cowed and anxious.” One institution in which the Constitutions’ influence could be seen immediately was Oxford, which the tenth constitution had singled out as “blemished with the new damnable brand of Lollardy, to the great scandal of the university itself” — Arundel used the biblical imagery of an infected vineyard, sour grapes, and a crumbling wall to describe the university’s departure from orthodoxy. In response, Oxford presented its own self-directed program for reform in 1414, which included attempts to curb “simony, the appropriation of benefices, exemptions, plurality of benefices, the abuse of privileges, clerical apostasy, and the holding of secular office.” Gillespie observes the irony that “most of these had been on Wyclif’s own reform agenda.”

The concerns with clerical and institutional corruption expressed by the gloss of the English Apocalypse and echoed by Wyclif and the Lollards were clearly not the concerns merely of a heretical group or a minority of agitators, but issues that were being discussed, with an eye to reform, within the church itself and across a broad swath of the laity. Though the church and the university were also clamping down on Lollardy and highly aware of the movement’s dangers in the early fifteenth century, particularly its heterodox sacramental theology, the substance of their critiques implied that “the calls for reform made by Wyclif himself, particularly in his earlier work, remained valid and needed addressing.”

Kelly, in an alternate view of Arundel’s censorship and the Wycliffite Bible more broadly, speculates that it may not have been Wycliffite Bibles themselves that prompted Arundel to hold the convocation that led to the Constitutions, but specifically the treatise on English translation that appears in its General Prologue, which he titles Five and Twenty Books. Kelly pushes this suggestion further into speculation about the church’s tolerance of the translation project that had already been accomplished:

I suggest that Arundel and his colleagues were familiar with both EV and LV, and, recognizing their orthodoxy, believed them to antedate, at least in their inception if not completion, the Wycliffite stratagem of making a new translation, and therefore to fall outside the mandate to be vetted by bishops. The bishops and clergy were to be on the alert for any translations that, unlike EV and LV, distorted the text in ways that would promote Wyclif’s malignant teachings.

Perhaps the strongest evidence in favor of Kelly’s view is that the sixth constitution speaks first of future translations and the need to license them in advance, and only afterward makes reference to recent translations. The fourth constitution forbids any public or private debate at Oxford on the church’s teachings on the sacraments, and the fifth bans the teaching of any “book or treatise composed by John Wicklif” without prior examination by a university council, but it is unclear, and in fact seems unlikely, whether the already existing Oxford Bible translations would fall in the category of books “composed by John Wicklif” — they certainly do not, even upon close scrutiny, belong in the same category of sacramental heresy as Wyclif’s treatises which openly state his opposition to the doctrine of transubstantiation.

There is also little evidence to suggest that owners of Wycliffite Bibles were persecuted for that ownership alone. Records of the interrogations of Lollard dissidents, such as William Thorpe, Walter Brut, and Hawisia Moone, to the extent that their transcriptions are accurate, indicate that while their access to banned materials might have been a concern and the material might have been confiscated, Arundel and other church officials were primarily interested in their beliefs and their engagement in “sowynge . . . fals doctryne” through preaching with these texts, rather than mere ownership. In his personal examination of Thorpe in 1407, for example, Arundel lists the heresies the Lollard preacher is accused of spreading — denying the sacrament of the altar, opposing pilgrimages, etc. — but the list includes no mention of English translation of Scripture. Arundel mentions having confiscated Thorpe’s Psalter — presumably an English translation, since Thorpe claims to know no Latin — but says he will return it if Thorpe agrees “fulli to be gouerened by holi chirche.”

The Oxford call for reforms in 1414 included a section titled “de anglicatione librorum” (on the Englishing of books), which called for the confiscation of incompetent translations that would mislead the laity, at least until superior translations could be produced by Oxford’s scholars. Gillespie notes that this request “probably reflected the aspiration in chapter 6 of Arundel’s decrees for a university-based system of examination and distribution of such texts through exemplars held by university stationers” and that Oxford’s leaders were arguing “only for a deferral of translation, not a prohibition of it.” It also implies that access to English translations of Scripture and other religious texts was widespread among the laity and not being vigorously prosecuted, even five years after Arundel’s ban.

English Bible production also did not completely cease in the years following the Constitutions. If nothing else, the sheer number of surviving copies serves as evidence that many people either secured the Archbishop’s approval for ownership or were simply tolerated — as noted above, King Henry VI himself owned a copy, and Lawton observes that “Wycliffite Bibles were preserved without great risk in otherwise aristocratic households.” The Carthusian monk Nicholas Love secured Arundel’s approval, and according to Love his blessing and encouragement, to produce and distribute his translation of an Italian commentary on the Gospels titled The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ in 1410. Love’s expanded commentary included attacks on the Lollards, and according to Kantik Ghosh’s assessment of the text, Love hoped his Mirror would become “an official alternative to the Lollard Bible.”

All the same, the Wycliffite Bible manuscripts of the fifteenth century do tend to have a muted appearance, at least in comparison to Bible productions in Latin or other languages like the lavishly illuminated French Bibles moralisées or Apocalypse books described above. Illuminated Wycliffite Bibles like Bodley MS 277 — King Henry’s Bible — with its decorated borders and gilded initial letters, are the rare exception. The Plimpton manuscript is far more typical — a small codex containing a New Testament with no illuminations and only small rubricated initials, the biblical text embedded within other tracts and sermons so that only a close examination would reveal the book’s contents. Whether the book was literal contraband, or whether its production was merely pared down in a precautionary way, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the Constitutions, or at least the threat of church sanction, had an adverse effect on the production of Plimpton and other English Bibles.

The Gloss and Lollard Anticlericalism

Though the Wycliffite Bible would come to bear his name in popular parlance, the level of John Wyclif’s actual involvement with the Oxford Bible translation project is an open question. Dove begins her study of the Wycliffite Bible with the speculation “that Wyclif instigated the project, that work began in the early 1370s, in the Queen’s College, Oxford, and that Wyclif, [Nicholas] Hereford, and [John] Trevisa all played a part in the translation.” David Fowler takes a more cautious view, observing that only two Wycliffite Bible manuscripts contain any attributions of authorship at all, to “N,” “J and other men,” and “Nicholay de herford,” and he concludes, “The most that can be said from manuscript evidence is that the Early Version was made by Nicholas Hereford, J.___, and other men.” The first fourteenth-century reference to Wyclif as a translator appears only after his death, in the Augustinian canon Henry Knighton’s Chronicle (ca. 1390), in the context of warning about his dangerous heresies:

Master John Wyclif translated from Latin into the English language — very far from being the language of angels! — the gospel that Christ gave to the clergy and doctors of the church, for them to administer sweetly as mental nourishment to laypeople and to the infirm, according to the necessity of the time and the people’s need. As a consequence, the gospel has become more common and more open to laymen and even to women who know how to read than it customarily is to moderately well-educated clergy of good intelligence. Thus the pearl of the gospel is scattered abroad and trodden underfoot by swine.

Debates between Lollards and church officials over the orthodoxy and desirability of English Bible translations would rage in the following years, but Knighton’s early response summarizes well the church’s primary objections — the English language is less suitable than Latin as a conduit for Scripture, the right and duty to convey Scripture to the people and interpret it belongs solely to the clergy, and the laity should only access it directly as necessity demands, since they are incapable of understanding or rightly using the knowledge it contains. The note of anxiety about “laymen and even . . . women” gaining access to the gospel over “moderately well-educated clergy” serves as a reminder that the Lollard movement’s leaders, despite their veneration of Wyclif and other figures connected to Oxford as their intellectual forebears, were themselves much less educated, and their ranks included many women.

From the perspective of Wyclif and his Lollard followers, the education of the laity through unmediated Scripture was a positive development. As early as his treatise De Ecclesia, which predates the EV by several years, Wyclif had presented an anti-papal argument for why every Christian should be thoroughly familiar with the Bible. Scripture, he argued, is “the glass by which heretics may be discerned,” including the pope, and it is the layman’s duty to determine whether the pope’s commands are in accord with Scripture and therefore lawful. Wyclif viewed the primary purpose of biblical education among the laity as protection from heresy, especially from “pseudo-disciples” in the clergy who would claim direct authority from God, a view echoed by the Wycliffite Bible’s General Prologue, which claimed it was the fear of being caught in simony, heresy, and “manie othere synnes” that motivated the clergy’s opposition to English translation.

If one of the central motivations of Wycliffite translators was suspicion of the corrupted clergy, and a desire to circumvent their monopoly on biblical interpretation by making Scripture available to the laity directly, the decision of the Plimpton manuscript compilers to use the English Apocalypse and its commentary as the concluding text of the New Testament makes perfect sense. As the gloss was translated from Anglo-Norman into Middle English, it was revised and expanded with additions that amplified its anticlerical critiques. The Lollard producers of the Plimpton manuscript made even further changes; unlike the biblical text, which required a high level of accuracy and fidelity to the original, the gloss could serve as a platform from which they expressed the concerns of their movement. The most prominent of these is the critique leveled at “prelates,” a catch-all term for officials of any rank in the church hierarchy.

As the Explanatory Notes detail, the first reference to “holi prelatis” in the gloss (1.¶11) describes their duty to preach and “conseile men after Goddis lawe,” the Plimpton manuscript’s revision of the commentary’s original description of priests hearing confessions and absolving congregants of sin through the sacrament of penance. This curious alteration may reflect a general Lollard suspicion about the necessity of sacraments, especially those performed by a priest in mortal sin, and a corresponding veneration of preaching and teaching as the most important elements of a clerical vocation. Later additions to the gloss unique to Plimpton spell out exactly how a priest might fall into the sin that would corrupt his office — the gloss in 13.¶9 describes “false profetis” and “prelatis that doone her synne of leccherie priveli [privately]”; who earn money from “londis” and “rentis” and “symonye,” the selling of church offices; who join “the ordre” (whether the priesthood itself or a monastic or fraternal order is unclear) so that they can “han bodili delites”; who are “Anticristis discipils and his ypocritis and eretikis”; and who, like their leader Antichrist who appears as an angel of light on the outside but is a devil on the inside, ultimately “disceyven the folk and leden hem to perdicioun.” A later gloss describes clerks and prelates as beholden to three of the Seven Deadly Sins, “pride, coveitise [greed], and leccherie,” and compares their false preaching to the croaking of foul “froschis [frogs]” (16.¶11). In a gloss on the biblical passage in which merchants weep over the destruction of Babylon, Plimpton rejects the original gloss’s interpretation of the merchants as usurers, a sin that anyone lending money could commit, and instead accuses them of “symonyes” (18.¶9), a sin specific to high-ranking clergy, who enrich themselves by selling ecclesiastical offices for money.

One final example of an anticlerical passage, unique to the English translation of the gloss though not to Plimpton, gives a striking glimpse into the author’s sense of the priesthood’s absolute corruption:

His [the Antichrist’s] profetis been coveitouse men of holi chirche, proude men and losengeris [flatterers], men lecchoures. But the losengeris ben worst of alle that maken hem [themselves] holi outher [either] for drede outher fore love, outher for ler [loss]. That thei hopen thei schulden nothing han of hem [their parishioners?] yif thei seiden hem the sothe [truth]. These han taken undirhond [in hand] to speke the develis langage to disceyven Goddis children and binyme [rob] God his eritage, and which ben strenger and werse than any devel in helle. (20.¶3)

The precise sense of a few phrases in this passage is obscure, and the explanatory note in the text presents a few interpretive possibilities. But its overall message is that these proud flatterers and lechers have taken holy orders for all the wrong reasons — out of fear or a desire for flattery or material gain — and that they tell lies to God’s people knowing that the truth will not earn them as much. The final sentence of the passage in particular is crystal clear — the clergy who deceive God’s children in this way are worse than any devil in hell.

In addition to conveying many of the central concerns of anticlerical polemicists in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, these examples from the gloss illustrate another key aspect of the Lollards’ practice of biblical interpretation, already mentioned in the section on “Apocalypse Commentaries” above. Like the Franciscans and other Apocalypse commentators before them, the Lollards did not view the Book of Revelation as merely a set of obscure prophecies about futuristic end times, unrelated to their daily concerns. Rather, they believed that it contained a set of teachings with direct relevance to their contemporary lives. With the production of translations like the English Apocalypse, lay readers could now access biblical texts directly, without the potentially corrupt mediation of false teachers those very texts warned them against.

Conclusion: Why the Plimpton Manuscript?

In some respects, using the Plimpton manuscript as the base text for a new edition of the English Apocalypse is an unusual choice. It is not the oldest extant copy of the text — that distinction likely belongs to British Library MS Harley 874 (H), dating from roughly 1340 to 1370, which Fridner used as the base text for his 1961 edition and which this edition uses for secondary readings. As noted above, none of the early manuscripts that predate the Wycliffite Bible contain verses 1:1–8, and many contain other lacunae — H, for instance, is missing what appears to be a full leaf, which required Fridner to use a secondary manuscript for that section of the text, Cambridge University, Magdalene College MS Pepys 2498 (P). P is a later manuscript production, possibly as late as 1400, but its text does not appear to have been influenced by Wycliffite material. Another possible candidate for earliest manuscript, Cambridge University, Caius College MS 231/117, starts at verse 1:21 and is missing enough pages throughout to be considered fragmentary. These gaps are not insurmountable obstacles to producing a critical edition, of course, and Fridner is remarkably thorough in cataloging manuscript variants, apart from the absence of Plimpton. They illustrate, however, that there is no perfectly stable base text, and that any edition of the English Apocalypse in its original form — to the extent that an original form is possible to access — will be to some degree a patchwork of multiple witnesses.

Among the later manuscripts of the English Apocalypse which draw on Wycliffite material to create a more complete hybrid text, however, Plimpton is a strong candidate for the base text of a critical edition, even apart from its unique placement within a blended Wycliffite New Testament. It represents a complete version of the English Apocalypse, not in spite of its reliance on Wycliffite material but because of it — any potential gaps in its copy text are plugged with passages from the Wycliffite LV, and even seemingly minor issues with the parent text are occasionally papered over by what appears to be scribal consultation with the Wycliffite text. For an example, see the explanatory notes for 5.¶3 and 5.¶4, as well as the note above in the section “The Manuscript” about the biblical text’s mistranslation of the Anglo-Norman “phioles” (vials) as “fithelis” (fiddles), and its subsequent correction in the gloss with apparent assistance from the LV. For a similar scenario in reverse, see the explanatory note for 10.¶2, where the biblical text in verse 10:4 follows the LV in using “marke” (seal, conceal) while the gloss remains keyed to its Anglo-Norman source. Also see the explanatory note for 12.¶2, where Plimpton alone among English Apocalypse manuscripts follows the LV in using “aperide” (appeared) rather than “shewed,” in a section that may parallel the LV more generally. On other occasions, Plimpton offers wholly unique translations — for a compelling and somewhat mysterious example, see the explanatory note for Prol.¶2, where an unusual word, “asilen” (assail?), appears to serve as both a thematic and visual parallel to the later word “arisen” (arise).

With all of these emendations in mind, an appropriate alternate title for this edition might be The English Apocalypse in Transition. It is not an authoritative text from a single uncorrupted source with an unbroken line of transmission, but rather a snapshot of the Apocalypse as it was being produced in England at a specific moment in time — an especially intriguing moment, as a popular and influential new translation was emerging but simultaneously being suppressed, and as scribes and manuscript compilers had access to multiple English translations, which had travelled a variety of paths through the languages of Europe, and which they could now fit together to form the strongest possible version of the English Apocalypse in their judgment. The text is complete, but it is also contingent, neither permanent nor the last word in the Apocalypse’s development in England.

As the histories of both French and English Bible translation make clear, the concept of a “Bible” as a single, stable volume of divinely inspired texts, while it may have been a conceptual ideal, has rarely reflected the practical reality of manuscript and book production. From the emergence of the early Christian church to the late fourteenth century in England, the experience of most Christian readers with biblical texts was most often fragmentary and mediated. Even Wycliffite Bible texts, the most standardized biblical productions of their era, frequently appear in manuscripts that contain just one or only a few books of the Bible, often alongside paraphrases, Gospel harmonies, poems, devotional works, polemics, and/or liturgical aids, to create what Mary Raschko calls “an alternative form of New Testament.”

The Plimpton manuscript as a whole obviously fits squarely in this category. But so does Plimpton’s copy of the English Apocalypse specifically — an apocalyptic Scripture originally written in Greek and translated to Latin, translated again to Anglo-Norman French (with the possible intervention of Old French in between), then again to Middle English, revised with the aid of another Middle English edition translated directly from the Latin by a group of dissident university scholars and newly declared heretics, with a commentary featuring freshly sharpened critiques of the institutional church and its clerics, all contained within a potentially contraband codex with two more English translations of biblical material, proverbs, a prophecy against the friars, sermons, poetry, a lectionary calendar, and a Lollard polemic against the papacy. Could there be a text more representative of its time and place, a fractured and fractious England at the close of the fourteenth century?

Editorial Practice

This edition follows the METS practice of silently converting all Middle English letters and scribal abbreviations to modern English equivalents, adding modern punctuation, and standardizing certain spellings for ease of reading, as detailed below.

The Middle English letter thorn (þ) is replaced in every case with th. The yogh (ȝ) is replaced with gh, y, g, or z, depending on its position in a word and the word’s modern English spelling. Words such as ȝeven (give) and aȝen (again or against) are pronounced with a y sound and are often rendered in Middle English edited texts as yeven and ayen, but this edition standardizes the spelling with a g to more closely resemble modern English equivalents. The main texts of the edition replace all Middle English letters, but the textual notes that quote the secondary manuscripts retain them.

The letter u is replaced with v when its modern English equivalent does so.

Ampersands (&) are replaced with the word and.

Proper names, such as “God,” “Jesus,” “Israel,” “Patmos,” etc. are inconsistently capitalized in the manuscripts; this edition capitalizes them in every case. Capitalized proper names include the word “Apocalips” when it refers to the title of the biblical book, but do not include personal pronouns for God and Jesus, which are left in lowercase.

Throughout the Apocalypse manuscripts and many other religious texts in Middle English, the name for Jesus is often written ihū, with a penstroke called a tilde over the u to indicate an abbreviated es. This edition changes the initial letter to a capital J and expands the abbreviation: Jhesu. In other places, the manuscripts spell the name jesu without abbreviation, and this edition follows by simply capitalizing the initial letter: Jesu.

Scribal abbreviations in the primary and secondary manuscripts, including superscript letters to indicate insertions, short and long tildes to indicate en or em, crossbars below p to indicate per or pro, and crossbars across double-l to indicate a terminal e, are silently expanded. The edition occasionally ignores scribal abbreviations for the sake of consistency and readability, if the additional letters do not change the meaning of the word. For example, the words erthe (earth) and prechour (preacher) occasionally include a superscript r to indicate an insertion, but since the notation is applied inconsistently and the additional letters would not change the meaning of the word, the edition ignores the notation and standardizes their spelling.

Chapter divisions in the Apocalypse are marked in all of the manuscripts and follow chapter divisions in the Vulgate, which are mirrored in the Vulgate’s modern English translation, the Douay-Rheims version of the Bible. In two instances, the openings of Chapters 12 and 13, the chapter divisions are slightly different from those in many modern editions of the Bible, and these are explained in the Textual Notes. Verse numbers, however, are not marked in the original manuscripts, and for these the edition follows the Douay-Rheims. Chapter headings appear in bold at the start of each chapter, and verse numbers appear in brackets before each verse.

The indented paragraph breaks in this edition do not appear in the original manuscripts and are fully editorial decisions. In some cases, the paragraphs break to conform with modern dialogue convention — starting a new paragraph for each speaker in a dialogue exchange — and in other cases, the breaks are simply thematic transitions to enhance readability. Paragraphs also break in the transitions from the biblical text to the glossed commentary and back, and each of these sections is marked with the heading “Texte” or “Glose,” respectively. The manuscript marks the beginning of each section of biblical text (with the exception of chapter beginnings) with the word texte or tixte in red; this edition standardizes the spelling. The manuscript is less consistent about placing the word glose at the start of each glossed section, but this edition silently adds the heading for consistency wherever it is missing.

Because the English Apocalypse alternates between biblical passages and commentary, the edition uses paragraph numbers rather than verse numbers in citations. The paragraphs are numbered in bold at the start of each indented line, and Textual and Explanatory Notes are keyed to these paragraph numbers — for example, a note on chapter 1, paragraph 5, is cited as 1.¶5.

Extratextual elements in the manuscript, such as enlarged capital letters, rubrication, and marginalia, are not represented visually in the edition but are catalogued in the Textual Notes. The edition largely ignores the punctuation that appears in the original manuscripts — including slashes, interpuncts or middle dots, and colons — and silently replaces it with modern English punctuation — periods, commas, quotation marks, paragraph indentation, etc. All punctuation in the text is an editorial decision made solely for ease of reading, and any interpretation of the text that relies on that punctuation is therefore speculative.