OXFORD, BODLEIAN LIBRARY, BODLEY 647 has always been central to forming perceptions of vernacular Lollardy; indeed, until just over twenty years ago and publication of a broader conspectus, this book stood as the primary example of Lollard polemical texts. The book was a major source of information for the founder of modern studies, Walter W. Shirley (1828–66), after a spell as maths tutor at Wadham College, Regius Professor of Ecclesiastical History from 1863. Shirley had planned the contents, and received the endorsement of Clarendon Press, for several volumes of what he took to be the central texts, Select English Works of John Wyclif. However, owing to his premature death, these seminal volumes were only produced and finished by his amanuensis Thomas Arnold (see I: i–ii). Between them, Arnold's third volume and two items included in F. D. Matthew's later collection put into print nearly all of the book's English texts (the one exception is item 7 in the descriptive appendix below). The early publication and continued availability of these writings has always provided the primary evidence for vernacular Lollard interests.

I have treated this book before, somewhat peripherally in that context. I then associated the volume's production with that of two other important Wycliffite manuscript anthologies, Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 296 and Dublin, Trinity College 244. All of them, I argued, showed access to a common Lollard copying centre or ‘library’. There, a variety of materials, especially vernacular ones, were available, probably in thematically linked fascicles; from these, interested parties might produce further combinations of texts, to meet specific needs and interests.

Date and Origin of Bodley 647

The Bodley manuscript is, in the main, the work of two scribes, whose hands one would date s. xvin. The first is responsible for nearly all of Booklets 1–2, fols. 1–65v, text items 1–5, written in informal textura; the second, initially, for nearly all of Booklets 3–4, fols. 71–106, items 10–13, written in anglicana formata. The two scribes are, given similarities of format, probably partners: the first uses a writing area 150 x 95–100, with 29 or 30 long lines; the second, a writing area 142–4 x 97, with 31 long lines.