This volume takes up the story of the Bible where volume II left off, near the end of what is conventionally known as the Middle Ages in Europe. As that volume amply demonstrated, the Bible had saturated the intellectual, literary and artistic culture of Europe and the Near East for centuries, through its presence in Judaism, Christianity, and also in Islam. It had seen the rise of structures and systems that regulated the relationship between Scripture and people, and then the emergence of forces that challenged those systems. Progressively greater assertiveness on the part of the eleventh-century Roman papacy contributed to the mutual excommunications of 1054 and confirmed a long-standing trend for the cultures of the Greek East and the Latin West to diverge, though they never entirely lost contact. From the so-called Gregorian movement of the eleventh century in the Latin West, the clergy had distinguished itself from the laity by layers of sacramental and legal privilege. That separateness had contributed to an educational and scholarly system where the Bible was normally interpreted within cathedral, monastic and later university communities, all composed in one sense or another of ‘clergy’. The Bible remained the fundamental source text for both Christian theology and canon law in the Middle Ages. However, as both these disciplines developed their own superstructures of philosophical elaboration and circumstantial exegesis, the whole Bible had tended somewhat to recede into the background, reached through the filters and layers of tradition and authoritative interpretation rather than directly. That perceived ‘eclipse’ of the Scriptures helped to provoke movements of dissent and heresy by the end of the medieval period, though none of those offered a comprehensive replacement for the prevailing religious system. John Wyclif and Jan Hus challenged the academic mode of theology from within, to some extent in the name of Scripture and its authority. Similarly, movements of lay literacy and lay piety infringed or questioned the separation between the literate, Latin-reading clerical elite and the rest of the people. However, these challenges mitigated and challenged the structural exclusiveness of medieval religion: they did not bring about decisive structural change.

One translation of the Bible towered above the others in sixteenth-century Europe. It was by no means the first vernacular Bible, nor even the first complete vernacular Bible to appear from the Reformation movements. However, the translation of Martin Luther wielded enormous influence throughout the German-speaking world and beyond it. It was overwhelmingly the proto-reformer's own work, even if he was assisted by colleagues in certain key areas. It powerfully embodied Luther's core theological insights, not only through the translation itself, but also in the prefaces and annotations that accompanied it. The text constantly developed, undergoing multiple revisions and enhancements during Luther's lifetime. It was, finally, an outstandingly powerful piece of prose writing by any imaginable standard. The history of the vernacular Bible in the Lutheran traditions is, fundamentally, the story of the Luther Bible.

German Bibles before the Luther translation

The first Bible known to have been printed in High German was published by Johann Mentel or Mentelin at Strasbourg in 1466. This edition derived from a fourteenth-century translation of the Vulgate in its Spanish recension, rendered into the dialect of the late medieval Nuremberg area. This very wooden and in some respects archaic translation appears to have been intended to help clergy understand their Vulgate better. Around 1475 Günther Zainer, a printer–publisher based in Augsburg, issued a revised edition, which claimed to have eliminated incomprehensible words from the translation, and incorporated a number of technical advances over its predecessor. The enterprise was sufficiently successful for similar translations based on the Vulgate to appear in a total of fourteen editions by 1518, published by a variety of printers in Strasbourg, Ausgburg and Nuremberg. These complete Bibles were often quite lavishly illustrated folio volumes. Additionally, at least four editions of the Bible were published in Low German in Cologne, Lübeck and Halberstadt before 1522. At least three separate printings of the Psalms in German were issued over the same period.

There was therefore no great difficulty in obtaining some sort of German Bible before the Reformation, given the limited literacy and the likely appeal of these translations principally to the clergy. Neither, apparently, was there a shortage of purchasers.

At the outset of the period covered by this book, the diverse forms of Christianity across the European and Mediterranean worlds had acquired distinct and in many respects deeply divided characteristics. The Western Latin mind had long been shaped by the Latin language, the appropriation of Greek and Arab philosophies in a Latinate garb and the dominance of the Vulgate Bible in the manuscript tradition. The social structures of the West reflected and also shaped its intellectual structures. A large, diffuse and diverse body of ‘clerici’ – the name designated both the learned and those living by the practice of religion – belonged to a theoretically international culture, one that was in principle (though not always in practice) institutionally distinct from the secular world that hosted and supported it.

The Eastern churches, with their greater diversity of languages and traditions, their more collegial and parallel structures of power based on the patriarchates and monastic communities, and unresolved historic divisions over doctrine, underwent a prolonged eclipse under the domination of the Ottoman Empire. Until near the end of the seventeenth century the Ottomans seemed to present an apocalyptic threat even to the churches of the West. Those Christian communities that did not become part of the Ottoman sphere of control were to some degree cut off from the rest of the Orthodox world. When a rising Russia looked for cultural resources around 1700, it looked west. There has been an unavoidable asymmetry in this volume between West and East. That is so largely because the processes that determined the structure of the book – the rise of critical textual scholarship, the Reformation divide in the Western churches, the rise of vernacular translations to challenge the ascendancy of the Latin text – were primarily Western phenomena between the fifteenth and the eighteenth centuries. The story of the Bible between c. 1450 and c. 1750 is the story of profound intellectual and cultural change shaped by the turmoil and upheavals of Western Europe.

After centuries in which thinking western Europeans thought unselfconsciously in Latin, from the fifteenth century onwards increasing numbers of adepts discovered the fascination of exotic languages.

The Latin Bible occupies a paradoxical space in the history of the Bible in the early modern period in Europe. On one hand, all scholars from the sixteenth century onwards were acutely aware that the Latin Bible was a translation; it was not the authentic text, the fons et origo, for any of the biblical books. On the other hand, it was certainly not a translation like any other. Latin occupied a unique place in the culture of Europe. Until at least around 1700, while Latin had long since ceased to be the living language of a people, it remained the shared vehicle for scholarly communication across the Latin churches – including those that became reformed – and those regions where the Roman alphabet prevailed. Scholars of only modest education would at least be able to read Latin. Consequently, the faithful of Europe had a stake in the Latin Bible which vastly exceeded the level of interest in Bibles in any one regional vernacular. Latin translations could expect to be used – and to be criticised – on an international scale.

Moreover, though not original, the Latin Bible was an ancient text. More than a thousand years of exegesis, glossing and theology had grown from its words, often quite literally interpreted, as though it were no translation at all. That carapace of interpretation loaded the most commonly received translation, the Latin Vulgate, with some of the authority and responsibility of a sacred text. In the course of the sixteenth century the Roman Catholic Church would canonise this special status of the Vulgate for centuries to come. Consequently, and uniquely of all the translations to be discussed in this section, the Latin Vulgate experienced two kinds of scholarly attention at the same time. On one hand, as an ancient text it called for textual editing: biblical scholars aimed to retrieve it in its most authentic, original form (however that was conceived). In effect, the Vulgate underwent textual criticism and recovery in a way quite analogous to the scriptural texts in their original languages, or indeed to the sources of classical literature where textual criticism had first begun. A ‘corrected’ Vulgate became an objective of scholarly endeavour in itself.