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).