Bibles in Italian to c. 1792

Emidio Campi

‘In Italy Holy Scripture is so forgotten that it is very rare to find a Bible’; so Luther wrote in 1539 in one of his Tischreden. This pithy statement is clearly an eloquent denunciation of the Church of Rome, which, in the judgement of the reformer, was guilty of preventing the diffusion and knowledge of Scripture. And if we consider the two centuries after the Council of Trent, when translations of the Bible were seized and burned, it is very difficult to argue with Luther's angry accusation. Nonetheless, a more measured analysis of Italian translations of the Bible of the early modern period will allow us to reassess this judgement, while filling some gaps in the historical record. The Bible in Italy was indeed little read, and the attitude of the Church was definitely oriented towards repression, but translations were anything but scarce; in fact, they constituted a phenomenon no less notable than in other European countries. However, what was unusual in Italian with respect to other languages was the fact that the majority of the actual work of translation fell not upon the established Church, but instead on the diaspora of Italian Protestant exiles who were dispersed throughout Europe.

Medieval translations into the vernacular, and fifteenth-century editions

The first attempts to translate the Bible into the different vernaculars of the Italian peninsula pre-date Dante. It seems likely that the Poor Lombards or the Italian Waldensians had a considerable role in this, but the subject is still awaiting an exhaustive study. What is certain is that such vernacularising activity did take place in the Italian Middle Ages, taking the form of versions that did not claim absolute fidelity to the source text. These tended to be accompanied by exegetical or lexical glosses in which the translator – who was usually anonymous – summarised or amplified the biblical text, sometimes even reorganising it into new chapters or adding new titles. Indeed, the textual history of Dante's Convivio, which is datable to the earliest years of the fourteenth century, offers a convincing proof of the widespread practice of vernacularisation.