Thomas Cranmer, Translator and Creative Writer

Abstract

The thirty years before the appearance of The Book of Common Prayer in 1549 were marked, from the liturgical point of view, by an outburst of translation into the vernacular. First and foremost, William Tyndale in the 1520s and Miles Coverdale in the 1530s produced translations of the Bible which resulted in 1539 in the licensed version known as the ‘Great’ Bible, to which Cranmer wrote a preface in which he set out the reasons for the use of the vernacular Even more relevant to the texts of the services was the series of reforming Primers which began in 1530 with the publication of George Joye’s Hortulus Animae and continued up to the fully official King’s Primer of 1545. Manuscript primers in English had been available for many years to those who could afford to pay for them, but no tradition of polished translation had been created. C.S. Lewis provides a number of examples of their infelicities.¹ The reforming books, of which about fifty different issues have been recorded, contained the traditional Hours of Our Lady in English, and therefore the first printed versions in English of the canticles and several of the collects which would finally appear in The Book of Common Prayer.