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Cross-Referencing in Wyclif’s Latin Works

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 February 2016

Anne Hudson*
Affiliation:
University of Oxford
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Extract

One of the most immediately striking features of all of Wyclif’s major writings, whether philosophical, theological, or polemical, is the frequency with which cross-references are found both between different chapters or parts of the same work and between works other than the current one. The frequency of cross-referencing is variable. In the philosophical works and the intermediate tracts traditionally placed before the twelve-part Summa theologie, links are not enormously numerous. The first text to show a plethora of them is De civili dominio: here on average one instance occurs roughly every other page, more frequently in parts I and III, in other words some 600 in all. This habit continues with slight abatement in De veritate sacre scripture, and into De ecclesia. Thereafter the remaining parts of the Summa show a diminishing number, still further reduced in the De eucharistia. Cross-referencing is relatively common in the three long sets of sermons composed after Wyclif’s retirement to Lutterworth, and in the Sermones quadraginta written dum stetit in scholis. The device is obviously in origin an academic one, and it is worth observing that some of the major works which were written after Wyclif left Oxford have few if any: in the Trialogus the virtually complete absence of internal Unkings could be explained as the result of a perception that the orderly organization of the whole obviated the necessity for such an aid, but this explanation does not seem relevant to the final Opus evangelkum. Cross-referencing has previously been observed by students of Wyclif, and has traditionally been used in the attempt to order his vast output chronologically, and to put dates to individual works. But this is to jump to conclusions – to assume that the references are authorial and that the works in which they occur were composed as a whole at one time. The discussion here will suggest that there are questions to be answered in regard to the former assumption, and substantial objections to the latter. More modestly, I hope here to use the cross-references to throw light on the ways in which Wyclif’s works were written, put together, and ‘published’.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 1999 

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References

1 In this study Wyclif’s works are quoted from the editions of the Wyclif Society (WS: 1883–1921), with the addition of De officio pastorali, ed. G. V. Lechler (Leipzig, 1863); Trialogus, ed. G. V. Lechler (Oxford, 1869); Summa de ente libri primi tractatus primus et secundus, ed. S. H. Thomson (Oxford, 1930); De trinitate, ed. A. du P. Breck (Boulder, 1962); De universalibus, ed. I. J. Mueller, with A. Kenny and P. V. Spade, 2 vols (Oxford, 1985). Texts in the WS editions are cited by title, followed if necessary by volume name (Op. mitt. = Opera minora, Pol Wks = two volumes of Polemical Works). As far as possible, references are given by (volume), page and line number, the last being supplied if necessary, without counting any headings. W. R. Thomson’s The Latin Writings of John Wyclyf: An Annotated Catalog (Toronto, 1983), though its details need some correction, provides an invaluable catalogue of the manuscripts of the texts; Thomson’s numbering of the texts is used here, prefixed with T. In references to manuscripts I use ‘Vienna’ to refer to those in the Ósterreichische Nationalbibliothek there, ‘Prague MK’ to refer to the Metropolitan Chapter Library there, and ‘Prague UK’ to refer to the National, formerly the University, Library there; BL is used for London British Library, TCC for Trinity College Cambridge.

2 I have considered the implications of those in the Sermones quadraginta and Sermones viginti in ‘Aspects of the “publication” of Wyclif’s Latin sermons’, in Middle English Religious Texts and their Transmission: Essays in Honour of A. I. Doyle, ed. A. J. Minnis (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 121–9.

3 There seems to be only a single internal link in the Trialogus: this is the unspecific one in bk ii.14 (123/16) back to sententia primi libri.

4 The most notable examples have been Thomson, S. Harrison, ‘The order of writing of Wyclif’s philosophical works’, Ceskou Minulostípráce (Festschrift in honour of V. Novotny), ed. Odložilík, O., Prokes, J., and Urbánek, R. (Prague, 1929), pp. 146–65Google Scholar; Mueller, I.J., ‘A “lostSumma of Wyclif’, John, SCH.S, 5 (1987), pp. 179–83Google Scholar. Thomson (Latin Writings) draws together the evidence from this source with other scraps of internal and external testimony.

5 Thus, for instance, the three complete manuscripts of De ecclesia, all allegedly used by Loserth, all unambiguously give references to chapter 22 despite the text’s 20 at 257/1, and all have 25 as against the text’s 27 at 467/29 (no variants given at either place).

6 One defect in my first investigations that it has been impossible completely to remedy was my failure to record whether a manuscript had the usual Arabic or less commonly Roman numerals (or spelt out the word); this turned out very occasionally to be of interest. The various editors’ usage does not follow that of their base manuscripts.

7 Lettered subdivisions of chapters or sermons are provided in many but not all of Wyclif’s works, but not in all copies; the evidence suggests that this device, necessary for the provision of indexes, was added very soon after Wyclif’s own lifetime. For a provisional statement about the device and the indexes see my PR, pp. 104–8; a fuller analysis will be published soon.

8 This numbering implies the twelve-part order, as known from Thomson and the WS editions; for questions about the date when that order was established see below, pp. 207 ff.

9 Mueller, ‘A “lost” Summa’, and the introduction to his edition of De universalibus, pp. xxxiii-xxxviii, covers some of the problems, and suggests the original existence of a third summa, of which only parts survive.

10 Doyle, E., “William Woodford, O. F. M-, and John Wyclif’s De religione’. Speculum 52(1977). pp. 329–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 The first is to De civ. dom. iii. 19/36–20/2, the second more vaguely to De civ. dom. iii cap. 1; the first involves a reference forward (for which see below pp. 210 ff).

12 Similarly ‘ut patet libro 50 capitulo 3’ (De blasphemia 203/19) incorporates the book number of De civili dominio iii within the Summa théologie-, ‘ut expositum est 2° capitulo De apostasia’ (220/11) must involve a scribal error in the chapter number (albeit found in all extant copies), since the material in question seems to be chapter 3, p. 31.

13 The title appears as a running title on fols 151r-156r above chapters 12–16, and chapter 12 begins with an illuminated capital of a kind normally found in the manuscript only for a new item.

14 The Prague copy, fols 16r and 51r, does not mark off in any way the start of De sciencia dei and De potencia productiva respectively.

15 See Mueller, ‘A “lost” Summa’, and intra, to De universalibus. It should be noted that a reference in De trinitate 166/19 establishes De ente predicamentali as the fifth tract of De ente book 1, even if this was not its original status.

16 A reference in De civili dominio ii.113/12 ‘considerara dicta de heresi vii capitulo’ seems to be to chapter 7, ii.58/8 ff. of the same book, and not to the De heresi specified in De ecclesia.

17 Wyclif knew this work, as is evident from De ventate sacre scripture iii.104/10-14, 106/ 12–107/4 and elsewhere.

18 Scriptorum Illustrium maioris Brytannie … Catalogus (Basel, 1557–9) i-452. Grosseteste i.306.

19 11 appears in Vienna 1294 and Vienna 3929, 20 in Prague UKX. D.11; for a possible cause of the discrepancy in the last see below p. 201. The punctuation given, recognizing a title, is my own, Loserth’s being inconsistent; manuscript rubrication can here, as elsewhere, not be regarded as significant because of its frequent omission even with undoubted titles.

20 With the addition ‘et in materia de composicione continui’.

21 See the opening words of this chapter, p. 129/2.

22 Mueller, ‘A “lost” Summa’, p. 182; Wyclif’s commentary on Aristotle’s Physics survives in one copy now in Venice (T6 Biblioteca San Marco, Marciana lat. VI. 173, fols ira-58vb), and his commentary on the Meteora once existed in the Prague Carolinum library (list 2, no. F7 in the facsimile in Bečka, J., Benda, J., Katalogy Knihoven Koleji Karlovy University (Prague, 1948)Google Scholar.

23 The context of the first is entirely unhelpful; for the second the editor, R. Buddensieg, suggests tentatively De benedicta incarnacione 36/15 ff.

24 See Thomson, pp. 58–60, and references there given; the historical background to this text, and to other allusions by Wyclif to the case, are being studied by Peter Griffin (Trinity College, Cambridge). The full textual problems cannot be set out here.

25 The sigils are Loserth’s, and reflect his belief that the second was a copy of the first. The incomplete versions are respectively Wolfenbiittel Herzog August Bibliothek, Guelf 1126 fols 46–84v, Trinity College Dublin 24.2, pp. 398–403 and Florence Biblioteca Laurenziana, Plut. XDC33 fols 30–32V. Vienna ÓNB 3934, fols 148r-151r contains notes from various Wyclif works including this.

26 These details are those of Loserth’s base text without his emendations, Vienna ONB 1294; variants to them are as follows: 388/5 all copies, despite Loserth’s record, have 14; 223/ 12 Ai has 6; 276/14 A and Ai have 11 as is correct by the printed text but B has 20; 340/26 A’s reading 13 is a marginal correction to 22, Ai has 22, B has 13; 343/18 A’s reading is again a correction of 22 to 13, Ai and B have 22; 372/23 A’s reading is again 22 corrected to 13, with 13 in die margin, Ai has 22, B 13; 516/27 again A corrects 22 to 13, with 22 and 13 both in the margin, Ai along the line crosses through 22 and writes 13, B has 13.

27 His De ecclesia et membris eius is T48, now called the Supplementum Trialogi, or De ¿otocione ecclesie; see Doctrinale Antiquitatum Fidei Catholicae Ecclesiae, ed. B. Blanciotti, 3 vols (Venice, 1757–9).

28 On fols 2V-3 appear L159/1-167/8 with the marginal note capitulam 8, then on fols 3- 3v pp. 151/19-158/20 with no indication of misplacement; the order perhaps reflects an exemplar two of whose leaves had been reversed from their proper order (the two chunks of material each run to 208 lines in print).

29 See colophon fol 1 içvb ‘in vigilia Purificacionis Sánete Marie Oxonie per Nicolaum Faulfiss et Georgium de Knyehnicz’.

30 The text ends incomplete in chapter 18 (i.287/8).

31 Chapters i-i I are correctly marked, allowing for the inclusion of the passage; chapter 12 is again numbered 11, and the remaining chapters are one too low for the text – though sporadically visible plummet notes record the correct form.

32 Whether these analyses were authorial or scribal is not entirely clear, but, as is evident in the present case, the origin of many if not all can be proved to be English, since they are found in both insular and Bohemian copies in identical form.

33 Analysis fols 125va-127rb, index fols 120ra-125rb; the whole forming quire 13 of eight leaves, as opposed to the ten-leaf quires elsewhere.

34 Prague UK IV. G.27 fols ira-35vb and Vienna 4522 fols 24–108V; the first is dated 1461, the second is itself undated though another item in die manuscript was copied in 1423.

35 A fifth possible case is at iii.256/9 where ‘ut exponitur supra capitulo 18’ refers to ii.100 chapter 19; but only B has a number here, whilst ACDKOQZ leave a gap, but B should read 19.

36 Thus De ecclesia 239/13 refers to chapter 25 (edited text iii.55/11 chapter 26), 257/15 to chapter 24 (iii.12/5 chapter 25), 297/33 to chapter 20 (ii.155 ff. chapter 21); De potestate pape 1/7 refers to chapter 14 (i.375 chapter 15); all available manuscripts of each text offer the same number.

37 The Hussite catalogues are printed (with some mistakes and the omission of the second half of the last copy) by Buddensieg in Pol. Wks i.lix-lxxxiv; the earliest manuscript is dated c. 1415. Some consideration of their evidence appears in my article. The Hussite Catalogues of Wyclif’s Works’ in Husitství, Refórmate, Renesance i (in honour of Frantisek Smahel), ed. J. Pánek, M. Polívka, N. Rejchrtová (Prague, 1994), pp. 401–17.

38 Arguments against articles of the abbas de Cartesii have not yet proved enlightening (98/6 ff, 128/35 f£, 130/18 fE); John de Usk was Abbot of Chertsey from the 1370s to 1400, but no text by him seems to survive.

39 The printed edition is based on Vienna 4514 with correction from Vienna 3933; Prague UK X D.i 1, which may be earlier than these, was known to, but not used by, the editors.

40 Cf. Catto, “Wyclif’, pp. 206–7.

41 Paris Bibliothèque nationale lat.15869 contains (pace Thomson, Latin Writings, pp. 49, 51) book i, book ii caps.1-12 (lacking ii. 110/21-129/1), book iii. 512/21-538/18, 626/19- 647/31 somewhat disordered.

42 Thus De potestate pape 9/14 ‘ut tangitur 21 capitulo s libri’ to De civ. dom. iii. 425, or to De ventate in De officio regis itself as ‘libro 6’ (52/29). For the 1411 condemnation see Wilkins, , Concilia, 3, pp. 339–49Google Scholar; the items from De civili dominio are nos. 176–219.

43 Those I have noted are in the sermons, and are recorded by Loserth in his footnotes to i.309/27, 347/12, 354/6, 362/18, ii.13/11, 107/31, iii.27/29, no/31, 220/3.

44 Thomson, S. H., ‘A Note on Peter Payne and Wyclyf’, Medievalia et Humanística, 16 (1964), pp. 60–3Google Scholar, sought to associate marginalia in seven Vienna manuscripts that he thought to be in a distinctively English hand with Peter Payne, the fugitive Lollard who reached Prague in 1415. Thomson’s hypotheses are open to question on a number of fronts.

45 An instance of visual confusion is De mandatis 40/5 where a forward reference to ‘tractatu 3 capitulo io’ (i.e. De civili dominio i cap. 10) leads to fourteen manuscripts’ reading of the chapter as 14; this probably goes back to an exemplar like Gonville and Caius Cambridge 337/565 which indeed here has Arabic 10 where the second numeral could readily be read as 4. The forms of certain numerals, notably 5 and 7, in Bohemian script, equally misled several of the Wyclif Society’s editors, and produced errors in the printed texts.

46 De statu innocencie 524/19-25; it should be noted that all five continental manuscripts of the text end before this point, chapter 10 only existing in the English manuscripts Trinity College Dublin 243 and Gonville and Caius Cambridge 337/565.

47 See references above, nn. 4 and 9; for the effects of this reorganization on the availability of exemplars to at least one scribe see my paper Trial and error: Wyclif’s works in Cambridge, Trinity College MS B.16.2’, in New Science out of Old Books: Studies … in Honour of A. I. Doyle, ed. R. Beadle and A. J. Piper (Aldershot, 1995), pp. 53–80.

48 Accepting the view of S. H. Thomson, ‘Order of writing’, p. 161 (c), and his suggestion of chapter 5 of that text

49 See above p. 198. For reasons of space full references to the other cases cannot be given; most are deducible from S. H. Thomson and Mueller’s articles above n.4 and from W. R. Thomson’s observations on his texts T7-19 (though some cases in each that seem to me dubious have been ignored here).

50 See 204/26, 224/12 and 255/20; the first has a future verb, the second and third know that this is a ‘third book’ and the third that the matter is to be found in chapter 7.

51 Respectively 40/5 ‘tractatu 3 capitulo 10’, 316/32 ‘infra tercio huius capitulo 43’; 360/ 1 ‘de ista materia cum tangit potestatem pape dicetur inferius’, 380/17 ‘quomodo autem omnes simoniaci sunt hcrctici est alibi longus sermo’ (all manuscripts arc unanimous in their witness to the books).

52 See L315/17. 33°/28. 337/4 (repeated 14, 27) 341/14 (linked to 345/7), 393/5; i.394/5 (repeated at 20), 394/13; ii.209/26, 212/20.

53 See above pp. 208 ff for details.

54 Respectively 278/6 and 382/10 (for which see above p. 195); 110/27; 22/31.

55 The extracts from Sermones quadraginta in Exeter College Oxford 6 (for which see J.van Banning, JThS, ns, 36 (1985), pp. 338–49) omit the only reference ‘ut alias ostendi’.

56 See Mueller, ‘A “lost” Summa’ and intro. to De universaUbus for material on the former.

57 Wilks, M., ‘The early Oxford Wyclif: papalist or nominalist?’, SCH 5 (1969), pp. 93–4Google Scholar; it should be noted that the date 1383 (iii.183/39) appears in all four surviving manuscripts (written out as ‘mille trecenti octoginta 3’ in Assisi Biblioteca Communale 662), and so is unlikely to be a scribal error (as Dziewicki i.vii, knowing only one manuscript, suggested).

58 See Wilkins, , Concilia, 3, p. 346Google Scholar, and for some of the notes of the investigators Hudson, PR, pp. 83–5.

59 See ‘Aspects of the “publication” of Wyclif’s Latin sermons’.

60 Pollard’s edition provides a conflated text with few variants, and used only nine of the twenty-five manuscripts now known.

61 The Hussite catalogues provide further indications, as I have shown in ‘Aspects of the “publication” of Wyclif’s Latin sermons’; the evidence provided by the passages duplicated from one work to another will be considered elsewhere. Allusions to Wyclif by near contemporary writers, whether friends such as Hus or foes such as Woodford, are rarely detailed enough for use in this matter; Netter’s evidence is an exception to this general rule.

62 In addition to the examples already given, T391 is another clear instance: this snippet, surviving in only one manuscript, is not a ‘letter’ (as suggested in Thomson’s, article ‘John Rylands Library MS Eng.86: an unnoticed piece by John Wyclyf’, MS 43 (1981), pp. 531–6Google Scholar and repeated in the Catalog p. 241) but two extracts from Sermona auadraginta (Sermones iv.200/27-201/5 plus 233/10-26) strung together with a few words at the beginning and middle.

63 See PR, pp. 104–6 for a preliminary statement