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Innocent III and Vernacular Versions of Scripture

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 February 2016

Leonard E. Boyle
Leonard E. Boyle*
Affiliation:
Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana
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Extract

Lothario dei Conti di Segni became pope as Innocent III in 1198, at the age of thirty-seven, and for the eighteen years of his pontificate he had two chief preoccupations: to regain the Holy Land for the Church and to restore the true Faith in Europe. It is with the latter that I am concerned here, and with just one moment in his endeavour to counter the heretical tendencies and movements which had been threatening the stability of the Church for a century or more by 1198. This is the problem of vernacular versions of the Scriptures, a problem which arose, seemingly for the first time ever at this level, at the very beginning of Innocent’s pontificate. It is a well-known if not celebrated moment, and has had a place in every modern discussion of the question of vernacular versions of the Bible in the Middle Ages, since the days when S. Berger first gave it prominence in his La Bible française au moyen âge (Paris, 1884).

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Church History Subsidia , Volume 4: The Bible in the Medieval World , 1985 , pp. 97 - 107
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 1985 

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References

1 Notably, Rost, H., Die Bibel im Mittelalter (Augsburg, 1939), pp. 73–9Google Scholar, Poerck, G. De and Deyck, R. Van, ‘La Bible et l’activité traductrice dans les pays romans avant 1300’, in Grundriβ der romanischen Literaturen des Mittetalters, VI. 1: La littérature didactique, allégorique et satirique (Heidelberg, 1968), pp. 21–48, especially pp. 31–7Google Scholar, Robson, C.A., ‘Vernacular Scriptures in France,’ CHB, ii, pp. 436–52.Google Scholar

2 Mayer, H.E., The Crusades, trans. Gillingham, J. (Oxford, 1972), p. 207.Google Scholar

3 Die Register Innocenz’ III 2: Pontifikatsjahr, 1199/1200, ed. O. Hageneder, W. Maleczek and A.A. Strnad (Rome, 1979), pp. 271-6, 432-4.

4 The Lollard Bible, pp. 32-3.

5 Hargreaves, H., ‘The Wycliffite Versions,’ CHB, ii, pp. 387–415, at p. 391.Google Scholar

6 The Lollard Bible, p. 31.

7 Register lnnocenz’ 111, p. 271.

8 Ibid., p. 272.

9 Ibid., p. 273.

10 Ibid., p. 276.

11 The Lollard Bible, p. 32.

12 Register Innocenz’ III, p. 433.

13 Chronica Albrici monachi Trium Fontium, ed. P. Scheffer-Boichorst MGH Scriptorum, XXIII (Hanover, 1874), pp. 631-950, at p. 878.

14 The Lollard Bible, p. 34.

15 Ibid., p. 33.

16 See also Sneddon, C.R., ‘The “Bible du XIIIe siècle”: Its Medieval Public in the Light of its Manuscript Tradition’, in The Bible and Medieval Culture, ed. Lourdaux, W. and Verhelst, D. (Louvain, 1979), pp. 127–40.Google Scholar

17 Conciliorum Oecumenicorum Decreta, ed. Centro di Documentazione, Istituto per le Scienze Religiose, Bologna (Freiburg, 1962), pp. 209-11.

18 The Lollard Bible, p. 32.

19 Register Innocenz’ III, p. 272.

20 Hargreaves, ‘The Wycliffite Versions’, p. 391.