Milner

Queens MS 27, John Wycliffe (1330–84), De veritate scripturae [The truth of the scriptures]. Fifteenth-century copy, hand-written on vellum (calf skin).

Living in Queens’, Milner claimed that he had ‘access to materials and to sources of knowledge which were unknown, or inaccessible’ to his brother Joseph. It was, in part, due to this that Isaac felt well qualified to complete the History. In preparing the lengthy treatment of one his great heroes, the fourteenth-century English reformer and translator of the bible, John Wycliffe, it seems certain that Isaac Milner would have consulted Queens’ MS 27.

In De veritate scripturae Wycliffe was prescient in putting forward what would be a principal Reformation tenet: that knowledge of the scriptures is necessary for salvation and that no human book differing from it can have pretentions to authority. Such ideas would also be fundamental to Milner’s late eighteenth-century evangelical view of Christianity.

Although never owned by Milner the volume did come to Queens’ in the eighteenth century via the Cambridge classicist and natural philosopher Joseph Wasse (1671-1738).