John Wycliffe (1320-1384) was a Christian theologian and reformer whose early translations of the Bible in English were, first of all, considered shockingly heretical, and subsequently, instrumental to the advance of the Reformation in England.
There were many editions of the Wycliffe translations. Even though production of these illegal texts must have been a dangerous business in the 14th and 15th centuries, it is evident that the copyists could not resist making the books beautiful. The Wycliffe Testament at Lichfield Cathedral is the oldest to survive intact.
|Leah’s Transcription of the Wycliffe (here, Matthew 18:1-18:6) |
in XML format
She has been transcribing the text, reading the ornate blackletter script to capture language like this:
An othe parable Jhs spak to hem / the kyngdom of heuenes is lijk to sourdouȝ / which a woma took and hidde in there mesurisof mele; til it were al sourid / — Matthew 13.33 (Wycliffe)
Another parable spake he unto them; The kingdom of heaven is like unto leaven, which a woman took, and hid in three measures of meal, till the whole was leavened. — Matthew 13:33 (KJV)The ultimate goal for this text is a fully integrated digital facsimile with the images closely related to the transcription and to other translations. Toward this integration, Leah has been defining “regions-of-interest” on the images corresponding to particular passages in the New Testament. So we can now easily ask for the particular “quotation” of the page-image that contains Matthew 2:15 (and we can generate interactive views of passages in context ):
This work is possible because the Chapter of Lichfield Cathedral released the images under a Creative Commons License. We are extremely grateful to everyone in Lichfield, and particularly to Canon Chancellor Pete Wilcox (who has a very excellent blog !).