Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-mkpzs Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-22T21:39:04.735Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

17 - Englishing the Bible, 1066–1549

from III - INSTITUTIONAL PRODUCTION

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2008

David Wallace
Affiliation:
University of Pennsylvania
Get access

Summary

Authority and experience

If the history of this period is seen as a long march towards a full vernacular Bible, it has few main events. Its beginning marks the decline of a long efflorescence of biblical translation and paraphrase in Anglo-Saxon England. The next three centuries form a record of at best sporadic and fragmentary activity, until the two versions of the Wycliffite Bible in the late fourteenth century. By 1401, in the statute De Haeretico Comburendo, the Wycliffte originators of the project are branded subversive. Any chance that their work would avoid the same fate is destroyed by Archbishop Arundel’s Constitutions of Oxford in 1407–8, which ban the making and ownership of English Bibles. There follows a century of repression, which is brought to an end by one man, William Tyndale – whose accomplishment is to produce a translation of the entire New Testament from Greek and much of the Old from Hebrew which will form the unacknowledged foundation of all subsequent authorized English translations until the twentieth century. Tyndale’s death as a heretic in 1536, by strangulation and burning at the hands of the Catholic Emperor Charles V’s agents but with the connivance of English spies, comes only one year before the reversal of English government policy on Bible translation, and foreshadows a complete authorized translation of the liturgy in Thomas Cranmer’s 1549 Prayer Book. Together, these translations complete the overthrow of the dominant value throughout the period, Latinity.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1999

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Berger, Samuel. La Bible française au Moyen Age. Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1894.Google Scholar
Biblia Pauperum: A Facsimile and Edition. Ed. Henry, Avril. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987.Google Scholar
Bishop, Edmund. Edward VI and the Book of Common Prayer. London: J. Hodges, 1890.Google Scholar
Bridget of Sweden, St.The ‘Liber Celestis’ of St Bridget of Sweden: The Middle English Version. Ed. Ellis, Roger. Early English Text Society (Original Series) 291. London: Oxford University Press, 1987.Google Scholar
Carruthers, Mary. The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.Google Scholar
Catto, Jeremy. ‘John Wyclif and the Cult of the Eucharist’. Studies in Church History, subsidia 4 (1985).Google Scholar
Cleanness: An Alliterative Tripartite Poem on the Deluge, the Destruction of Sodom, and the Death of Belshazzar. Ed. Gollancz, Israel. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1974.Google Scholar
Cursor Mundi. Ed. Morris, Richard. 7 vols. Early English Text Society (Original Series) 57, 59, 62, 66, 68, 99, 101. London: Oxford University Press, 1874–93.Google Scholar
Daniell, David. William Tyndale: A Biography. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994.Google Scholar
Davlin, Sister Mary Clemente OP.Piers Plowman and the Books of Wisdom’. The Yearbook of Langland Studies 2 (1988).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
de Certeau, Michel. La Fable mystique: XVI–XVII siècle. Paris: Gallimard, 1982.Google Scholar
de Certeau, Michel. The Writing of History. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988.Google Scholar
Duffy, Eamon. ‘Holy Maydens, Holy Wyfes: The Cult of Women Saints in Fifteenth and Sixteenth-Century England’. Studies in Church History 27 (1990).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Duffy, Eamon. The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400–1580. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992.Google Scholar
Fidner, Elis (ed.). An English Fourteenth-Century Apocalypse Version with a Prose Commentary. Lund: Gleerup, 1961.Google Scholar
Gilley, Sheridan, and Sheils, W. J. (eds.). A History of Religion in Britain: Practice and Belief from Pre-Roman Times to the Present.Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1994.Google Scholar
Glunz, H. H.History of the Vulgate in England from Alcuin to Roger Bacon.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1933.Google Scholar
Hamel, C. F. R.Glossed Books of the Bible and the Origins of the Paris Booktrade.Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 1982.Google Scholar
Hammond, Gerald. The Making of the English Bible.Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984.Google Scholar
Heath, Peter. Church and Realm 1212–1461.London: Fontana, 1988.Google Scholar
Hudson, Anne (ed.). Selections from English Wycliffite Writings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978.Google Scholar
Hudson, Anne, and Gradon, Pamela (eds.). English Wycliffite Sermons. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983.Google Scholar
Hudson, Anne. Lollards and their Books.London: Hambledon Press, 1985.Google Scholar
Hudson, Anne. The Premature Reformation: Wycliffite Texts and Lollard History.Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988.Google Scholar
Lawton, David A.The Subject of Piers Plowman’. The Yearbook of Langland Studies 1 (1987).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lawton, David A.Faith, Text and History: The Bible in English.London: Harvester, 1990.Google Scholar
Legge, M. Dominica. Anglo-Norman Literature and its Background.Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963.Google Scholar
Light, Laura. ‘The New Thirteenth-Century Bible and the Challenge of Heresy’. Viator 18 (1987).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lloyd-Jones, G.The Discovery of Hebrew in Tudor England: A Third Language.Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1983.Google Scholar
Marx, C. William (ed.). The Devil’s Parliament, Harrowing of Hell, and Destruction of Jerusalem. Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitätsverlag, 1993.Google Scholar
Marx, C. W.The Devil’s Rights and the Redemption in the Literature of Medieval England.Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1995.Google Scholar
More, Thomas, St. SirThe Complete Works of St Thomas More, vol. viii: The Confutation of Tyndale’s Answer. Ed. Schuster, Louis A. et al. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973.Google Scholar
Morey, James H.Peter Comestor, Biblical Paraphrase, and the Medieval Popular Bible’. Speculum 68 (1993).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nineham, Dennis. Christianity Mediaeval and Modern: A Study in Religious Change. London: SCM Press, 1993.Google Scholar
Norton, David. A History of the Bible as Literature, vol. I. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.Google Scholar
Orm, (Orrm). The Ormulum. ed. White, R. M. and Holt, Robert. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1878.Google Scholar
Paues, A. C. (ed.). A Fourteenth-Century English Biblical Version. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1902.Google Scholar
Pearsall, Derek. Old English and Middle English Poetry. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977.Google Scholar
Pickering, O. S. (ed.). The South English Ministry and Passion. Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitätsverlag, 1984.Google Scholar
Rothwell, William. ‘The Trilingual England of Geoffrey Chaucer’. Studies in the Age of Chaucer 16 (1994).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shepherd, Geoffrey. ‘Religion and Philosophy in Chaucer’. In Brewer, Derek S. (ed.) Geoffrey Chaucer: Writers and their Background. London: G. Bell and Sons, 1974.Google Scholar
Temple, Elzbieta. Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts, 900–1066.London: Harvey Miller, 1976.Google Scholar
The Lanterne of Liзt. Ed. Swinburn, Lilian M.. Early English Text Society (Original Series) 151. London: Kegan Paul, Trench and Trübner, 1917.Google Scholar
The Pepsyian Gospel Harmony. Ed. Goates, M.. Early English Text Society (Original Series) 157. London: Oxford University Press, 1922.Google Scholar
Tyndale, William. The New Testament Translated by William Tyndale (1534). ed. Wallis, N. Hardy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1939.Google Scholar
Tyndale, William. The Obedience of a Christian Man. In Walter, Henry (ed.), Doctrinal Treatises. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1848.Google Scholar
Tyndale, William. Tyndale’s Old Testament: Being the Pentateuch of 1530, Joshua to 2 Chronicles of 1537, and Jonah. Ed. Daniell, David. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992.Google Scholar
Watson, Nicholas. Richard Rolle and the Invention of Authority. Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature 13. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×