Medieval Vernacular Bibles as Unity, Diversity and Conflict

During the Middle Ages Western and Central Europe was united by the common Christian faith and the common use of the Latin Bible. The work on the translation of the Vulgate into the vernacular, attested everywhere in Europe in this period, was also a common European project. Translators were aware of each other's work and, despite the diversity of their languages and cultural traditions, used similar arguments to promote their endeavour. They pointed to the existence of biblical translations in different European languages as a precedent to their own work, and supported their claims to unity with references to shared history, literature and values, and even the common origin of several of their languages. Yet this international movement brought with it not only the sense of common purpose and interest in the common past, but also conflicts and divisions. Translators had to defend their work against numerous critics, debating such questions as who should have access to the vernacular Bible, how it should be understood, and how and by whom it should be translated. Participants in these debates, both laymen and clerics, produced not only the renderings of the biblical text, but also commentaries, scholarly tools and polemical works. They wrote treatises where issues of biblical translation, as well as much wider issues of religious practice and religious difference, lay access to knowledge and education, and the organisation and government of the church and society were deliberated. The proposed project will study these texts and the movement that gave rise to them, focussing on the German and English late medieval traditions. The aim is to study and compare the traditions of biblical translation, and surrounding theological and political debates, as foundational to the development of national languages, literatures and academies, but also as a common European process.

Since several German and English texts, widely regarded as essential for understanding the translators' work and its background, have never been edited, we will produce their scholarly editions and publish them in print and online. We will develop a common editorial policy based on our previous experience of editing Bible translations and polemical works. We will publish them jointly, using common technologies, based on the experience of such work in the UK and Germany and methods recently developed by ourselves. We will also publish a volume of studies reporting the results of our research into the edited texts, and broader comparative research into the two traditions of biblical translation, and their intellectual, social and political background. We will organize workshops in Augsburg and Oxford that will support our collaborative work and allow us to benefit from the involvement of colleagues and students at our institutaions, and the participation of a broader circle of European researchers. We see the proposed work as a step towards integrating studies of several national European traditions.