Abstract
Abstract The arrival in England of Tyndale’s New Testament in the 1520s is still widely heralded as a transformative moment. This article argues that the lingering effects of triumphalist Protestant rhetoric concerning the ‘Word of God’ have obscured the many other contexts in which it was possible for the laity to encounter the Bible in early Tudor England. They have also glossed over some of the difficulties of transmitting Scripture to a largely illiterate populace. Protestant insistence on the literal interpretation of vernacular Scripture should chiefly be seen as propaganda for the evangelical cause. Early Tudor print culture demonstrates that the reading of Scripture was understood as a complex process involving a spiritual encounter shaped by faith, imagination and emotion, not just a textual encounter. In practice, Tyndale and other reformers, no less than their more conservative opponents, taught the laity that the Bible needed to be ‘unlocked’ and explained. For the lay reader encountering works of religious devotion and instruction, the ways in which early Tudor print culture mediated the Bible remained heavily indebted to late medieval religious practice. This shaped the context in which the ‘Great Bible’ of 1539 was conceived and published and this first official English Bible should be recognised as a contested text, which in its final form may have been as much a reflection of late medieval attitudes as the achievement of English Protestants.
Highlights
THE BIBLE IN TUDOR ENGLAND read Scripture, and that our understanding of this encounter still needs to shake off some of the constraints imposed by a Protestant narrative in large part created by Tyndale and later compellingly reinforced by John Foxe
A third vowed to ‘speake that the gospelle, the very worde of god provoketh me to’, while a fourth, writing in 1543, observed that ‘the holy scriptures are so plenteously sette forth in oure Englysh tonge, that even the very ydiot maye nowe become learned in the kyngdom of God’.3. Comments like these are usually associated with the advance of Protestantism in England, and with the central importance of vernacular Scripture, the translation of which, beginning with William Tyndale’s New Testament of 1526, has been called ‘a profoundly “democratizing” act’
The three quotations above are taken from works penned by Catholic or conservative authors: the first, by Thomas Paynell, in a work of 1550 dedicated to the future Queen Mary I, the second in 1533 prefacing a translation of Erasmus, and the third in a sermon by the conservative cleric Simon Matthew in 1535
Summary
‘For what is more excelent, or more precious the word of god? What thyng maybe be estemed equall unto it?’1 Declamatory questions of this nature were a common feature of the English Reformation. Caxton himself described his work as ‘storyes of the byble’, and, as Morgan Ring has shown, the original author Jacobus de Voragine later acquired the reputation of having been an early Bible translator.[85] Prayer books conveyed Bible text: Nigel Morgan has counted over 800 surviving manuscript copies of books of hours made for English use, and Mary Erler has found twenty-nine surviving printed editions of the Sarum book of hours published before 1500.86 These prayer books, based on the monastic offices, usually contained a quantity of the psalms as well as passages from the gospels, framed by prayers, and were increasingly appearing in the vernacular at the start of the sixteenth century.[87] This may seem like a characteristically Catholic form of devotion, but it was the basis for the Book of Common. This work envisaged that children might be among its readers; one edition of the work was bound together with an ABC for children teaching them their letters, the Paternoster, Ave and Creed in both Latin and English: Go lytle boke amonge mens chyldren
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