Text name Purvey's General Prologue to the Bible File name cmpurvey.m3 Manuscript Harley 1666, British Library, London (pp. 1-57) and University Library Mm. II.15, Cambridge (pp. 57-60) Date a1450 (a1397) (?Helsinki says c1388) Dialect Southern Genre Religious treatise Edition Forshall, Josiah and Frederic Madden. 1850. The Holy Bible, containing the Old and New Testaments, with the apocraphal books, in the earliest English versions made from the Latin Vulgate by John Wycliffe and his followers, Vol. 1. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Reprinted 1982 (New York: AMS Press). Sample Exhaustive Remarks John Purvey was Wycliffe's secretary and "glossator". He was probably born around 1354 in Lathbury (one mile north of Newport Pagnell, about five miles south of Olney). He was ordained priest in 1377 and was a great scholar. From 1382 he lived with Wycliffe at Lutterworth, and after Wycliffe's death in 1384, at Bristol.
Purvey is probably the author of the General Prologue and is generally believed to be a leader in the revising of the Early Version of the Wycliffite Bible that resulted in the Late Version (see the Old Testament and the New Testament (Wycliffite)).
File name CMPURVEY Text identifier M3 IR RELT WYCPROL Text name WYCL PROL Author PURVEY JOHN Period M3 Date of original 1350-1420 Date of manuscript 1350-1420 Contemporaneity NON-CONTEMP Dialect SL Verse or prose PROSE Text type REL TREAT Relationship to foreign original X Foreign original X Relationship to spoken language WRITTEN Sex of author MALE Age of author 40-60 Social rank of author PROF Audience description X Participant relationship X Interaction X Setting X Prototypical text category INSTR REL Sample SAMPLE X