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Notes
Thomas Arnold, Select English Works of John Wyclif, 3 vols. (1869-71); F. D. Matthew, English Works of Wyclif Hitherto Unprinted, EETS o.s. 74 (1880, rev. 1902). I refer to "writings we know publicly," since following Anne Hudson, Lollards and their Books (1985), p. 181, something like eighty per cent of the corpus remains unprinted.
I need to acknowledge here that I have never handled Corpus 296, owing to the current Librarian's intractable policy to render American readership well nigh impossible. Montague Rhodes James, as part of his indefatigable efforts at cataloguing Cambridge libraries, published a very helpful description; see A Descriptive Catalogue of the Manuscripts in the Library of Corpus Christi College Cambridge, volume II (1912), pp. 74-75. I am very grateful to a British scholar, who must in the circumstances remain anonymous, for loan of a complete microfilm, which confirms James's observations and on which I base all statements about the codex. I am similarly grateful to the Librarian of Trinity College, Dublin for courteous and generous access to volumes in his care. In an appendix I offer brief descriptions of the two manuscripts central to my argument.
See, for example, my description of Bodley 416, at Studies in Bibliography 41 (1988): 211; or of Huntington HM 148, at Mediaeval Studies 49 (1987):434.
The break in the Trinity text of PKP occurs at very nearly the same point as the textual disruption in Corpus, but I think this almost certainly accidental. The Trinity copy ends at Arnold's p. 520/17, but in mid-word ("world—"); the conclusion of this word would have appeared on the subsequent lost leaf (the last of a quire). Moreover, the following quire, now lost, if an eight, as most of the remainder of the Trinity manuscript, would have been sufficient to contain the subsequent tracts now extant in Corpus. Following these losses, Trinity resumes in the middle of a text and continues to parallel Corpus in contents for another forty folios.
Although I take exception to this particular interpretation of the evidence, I am extremely grateful to Hudson and Vander Meulen for both information and suggestions which have, inevitably sharpened my sense of what I am about here—and hopefully, sharpened my argument as well.
For a parallel instance where the scribe should probably be exculpated, cf. John Shirley's unfortunate bout with Chaucer's Boece in British Library, Additional 16165. Shirley apparently never realized that two consecutive quires in his exemplar had been
Although a copy of the Latin source survives; I. H. Stein provides an edition at Speculum 7 (1932):87-94.
As I argued in "Booklets in Medieval Manuscripts: Further Considerations," Studies in Bibliography 39 (1986):100-111.
The two sets of copies in Trinity College, Dublin MS. 246 were made in the sixteenth century, presumably from one of the three extant manuscripts.
See "Some Aspects of Lollard Book Production," in Lollards, pp. 181-191, particularly pp. 183-184; and The Premature Reformation (1988), pp. 200-203. For Cosin V.iii.6, see "A Lollard Quaternion," in Lollards, pp. 193-200 (for comments on book-production, see particularly pp. 199-200).
The most notable studies of direct ties between Oxford and dispersed Lollard communities include: Hudson, Premature Reformation, pp. 60-81; her article "A Wycliffite Scholar of the Early Fifteenth Century," Studies in Church History, subsidia 4 (1985):301-315; and A. K. McHardy, "The Dissemination of Wyclif's Ideas," Studies in Church History, subsidia 5 (1987):361-368. These studies identify possible suspects, but none has yet attended to Oxford forms of book-production and whether these might provide a model for a text like the Corpus/Trinity exemplar.
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