Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
  1. Home
  2. Search

Refine search

Refine search

Access:
Content type:
Publication date:
Apply   From and To filters
Subject: Show more
Journals Show more
Publishers: Show more
Societies Show more
Series: Show more
Collections: Show more

Actions for selected content:

Select all | Deselect all
  • View selected items
  • Export citations
  • Download PDF (zip)
  • Save to Kindle
  • Save to Dropbox
  • Save to Google Drive

Save Search

You can save your searches here and later view and run them again in "My saved searches".

Please provide a title, maximum of 40 characters.
Cancel
×

3 results

  • Epilogue: John Bale’s Dilemma

  • Andrew Kraebel, Trinity University, Texas
  • Book:
    Biblical Commentary and Translation in Later Medieval England
    Published online:
    22 February 2020
    Print publication:
    05 March 2020, pp 176-187

  • Summary

    The relationship between scholastic biblical commentary and translation recovered in the foregoing chapters posed problems for reformist Tudor writers, who sought precedents for their vernacular biblicism in Middle English writings. This Epilogue focuses on the work of John Bale, describing the tensions in Bale’s commitment to cataloguing the literature of medieval England, including the commentaries studied here, and his desire to identify medieval English translators as early coreligionists. Although Bale is able to find a place for commentary (even some medieval scholastic commentary) in reformist biblical reading, his approach to vernacular exegesis and translation leads him to obscure the place of medieval biblical translation in the larger project of scholastic exegesis. The resulting distinction between the work of commentary and translation has had a long scholarly afterlife, one which this study seeks to set right.

Biblical Commentary and Translation in Later Medieval England
  • Experiments in Interpretation
  • Andrew Kraebel
  • Published online:
    22 February 2020
    Print publication:
    05 March 2020
  • Drawing extensively on unpublished manuscript sources, this study uncovers the culture of experimentation that surrounded biblical exegesis in fourteenth-century England. In an area ripe for revision, Andrew Kraebel challenges the accepted theory (inherited from Reformation writers) that medieval English Bible translations represent a proto-Protestant rejection of scholastic modes of interpretation. Instead, he argues that early translators were themselves part of a larger scholastic interpretive tradition, and that they tried to make that tradition available to a broader audience. Translation was thus one among many ways that English exegetes experimented with the possibilities of commentary. With a wide scope, the book focuses on works by writers from the heretic John Wyclif to the hermit Richard Rolle, alongside a host of lesser-known authors, including Henry Cossey and Nicholas Trevet, and many anonymous texts. The study provides new insight into the ingenuity of medieval interpreters willing to develop new literary-critical methods and embrace intellectual risks.

  • An English Bishop Afloat in an Irish See: John Bale, Bishop of Ossory, 1552–3

  • Stephen Tong
  • Journal:
    Studies in Church History / Volume 54 / June 2018
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    14 May 2018, pp. 144-158
    Print publication:
    June 2018

  • The Reformation in Ireland has traditionally been seen as an unmitigated failure. This article contributes to current scholarship that is challenging this perception by conceiving the sixteenth-century Irish Church as part of the English Church. It does so by examining the episcopal career of John Bale, bishop of Ossory, County Kilkenny, 1552–3. Bale wrote an account of his Irish experience, known as the Vocacyon, soon after fleeing his diocese upon the accession of Queen Mary to the English throne and the subsequent restoration of Roman Catholicism. The article considers Bale's episcopal career as an expression of the relationship between Church and state in mid-Tudor England and Ireland. It will be shown that ecclesiastical reform in Ireland was complemented by political subjugation, and vice versa. Having been appointed by Edward VI, Bale upheld the royal supremacy as justification for implementing ecclesiastical reform. The combination of preaching the gospel and enforcing the 1552 Prayer Book was, for Bale, the best method of evangelism. The double effect was to win converts and align the Irish Church with the English form of worship. Hence English reformers exploited the political dominance of England to export their evangelical faith into Ireland.