Introduction

To this day, establishing the medieval history of the Bible in Italian remains a complicated task. Only in recent years has there been systematic research on the manuscripts and, although the first critical editions have been produced, it is still not possible to draw up a fully coherent picture of the translation tradition. This tradition was born with the beginning of literature in the Italian vernaculars, and grew vigorously in the fourteenth century. It produced hundreds of witnesses in the fifteenth century, before generating an impressive printed output. The process went through numerous variations and revisions of the translated text but an underlying continuity persisted, so that for some books of the Old and New Testaments the first translation of the thirteenth or fourteenth century was copied and reused for some 200 years, until it became the basis of the earliest printed versions. The reconstruction of this process, however, can be only partial, and it still greatly depends on the direct study of the manuscripts.

The spread of scripture in the vernacular

The sacred text was the object of translation from the beginnings of written literature in Italian. In 1226, Francis of Assisi's Laudes creaturarum contained a paraphrase of several verses from Daniel, and in the same period a homily from Padua recorded pericopes from Matthew (manuscript PS60, still unpublished), while a version of the Pater noster was inserted in the Sermoni subalpini, perhaps as early as the twelfth century. The para-liturgical or homiletic context of these first occurrences was probably also that in which the first translations of complete biblical books were produced. But the circulation of the sacred text's vernacular version was far more widespread than this, as it was already the norm in the societas Christiana of medieval Europe.