Romancing the Gospel: Italian Vernacular Scripture in the Middle Ages

Abstract

A common assumption, even among educated and scholarly readers, is that the Catholic Church prevented anyone but the clergy from reading the Bible during the Middle Ages. Whether due to an anti-Catholic bias among protestant scholars, the rigid impositions of Latin in the liturgy and ecclesiology in the Roman Church following the Council of Trent (1545–1563), or simply a lack of research interest, this uninformed attitude persists. The erroneous presuppositions project the Counter Reformation return to a rigid Latinity and simultaneous identification of the vernacular with heresy back onto the Middle Ages. Connected to this is the conviction that the authoritative Vulgata, the Jerome Bible, was the sole version of the Bible during this long period. This bias shows up in numerous modern studies focusing on the translations of the Bible made during or just prior to the Reformation.¹ The truth, however, lies very far from these common erroneous approaches, as this chapter will show by illustrating how it was not uncommon in Italy in the Middle Ages for the Bible to be translated into the vernacular, and how such translations were not necessarily associated with reform movements and heresy, as they came to be in the sixteenth century. The French Bible of the thirteenth century, the first known Bible in a European modern vernacular, whether because it had no name attached to it or because it was not associated with heretical groups, in contrast to the more famous Wycliffite Bible, has yet to be published in a modern edition (Sneddon 1998, p. 231).

There was a time when all the world spoke a single language and used the same words.

Genesis 11:1

Thus it happened that even the Sacred Scripture, by which so many maladies of the human will are cured, was set forth in one language, but so that it could be spread conveniently through all the world it was scattered far and wide in the various languages of translators.

St. Augustine, De Doctrina Christiana (II.v.6)

(Ex quo factum est, ut etiam scriptura divina […] ab una lingua profecta, qua opportune potuit per orbem terrarum disseminari, per varias interpretum linguas longe lateque diffusa innotesceret gentibus ad salutem […], On Christian Doctrine, in Augustine 1958, p. 37)