The Wycliffite Bible as a Source for Caxton’s Legend of Judith

ABSTRACT

This paper argues that numerous fragments of the Wycliffite Bible found their way into print, within Caxton’s Golden Legend. Though the only published discussion has dismissed the possibility of a Wycliffite source for Caxton’s set of Old Testament legends, the final one, of Judith, in fact shows some highly idiosyncratic lexical agreements, as well as clusters of lexical agreements in passages which also reproduce the structures of the Latin in a way that is far more typical of the Wycliffite Bible than of Caxton’s Old Testament. The source proves, unexpectedly, to be the Early Version rather than the Later Version. The generally free translation makes a decision difficult, but there are signs that the recourse to the Wycliffite Bible had begun at least as far back as the preceding legend, of Tobias.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 ISTC ij00148000; BMC XI 144; currently available only in modernised form. Mayumi Taguchi, Satoko Tokunaga and I are preparing an edition of the Temporale and Old Testament for the Early English Text Society, and this article depends on that collaborative work. The text is based on a copy in Cambridge University Library, Inc.2.J.1.1 [3781], and we are grateful to the Department of Rare Books and the Syndics of Cambridge University Library for the provision of high-resolution images. We have also made use of a transcription provided by Early English Books Online (EEBO-TCP Phase I).

2 Greenwood, 335.

3 Painter, 145.

4 Blake, “The Biblical Additions,” 241 and 246.

5 Horrall, 97. While these words imply different authors, the statement by Horrall quoted in the following paragraph, which cannot refer only to the legends of Tobias and Judith, suggests ambivalence on this point.

6 Scahill, “Caxton’s Golden Legend”, passim. Preliminary observations indicate that the Sanctorale agrees with the Temporale in sources and language.

7 Horrall, 91.

8 At least 47 d–h in Blake, Caxton’s Own Prose.

9 This is the Somme le Roi, relevant only to the exposition of the Ten Commandments added to the legend of Moses. Horrall, 93, acknowledges that what was actually used was the Somme text included in the Légende Dorée, and there seems to be no impediment to supposing the immediate source to be the same Low-Country edition of the Légende Dorée (ISTC ij00151500) that the Temporale is primarily based on. The edition in preparation will set out the evidence for the statements about sources in this paragraph, as well as noting a number of passages in which GL is closer to Josephus’ Jewish Antiquities than any other text identified.

10 Blake, “The Biblical Additions,” 245.

11 Cited from Forshall and Madden, eds., The Holy Bible. In quotations from GL, punctuation, word-division and capitalisation are modern, and abbreviations are silently expanded, in accordance with Early English Text Society guidelines. The folio references in the tables are to the signatures of the Cambridge University Library copy.

12 The Vulgate is cited from Weber and Gryson, eds., Biblia Sacra, with line-breaks replaced by forward slashes and selective citation of its variant readings.

13 Hudson, 136.

14 Blake, “The Biblical Additions,” 240.

15 Ibid., 246.

16 In MS BL, Royal 19 D iii of the unpublished Bible Historiale, the shorter version of Job (243^v–244^v) – which precedes the longer one (244^v–256^r) – is cut in the same way.

17 Dove, 192.

18 Morrison, 410.

19 Ibid., 408.