latin and the vernacular at the dawn of the english reformation

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Latin and the Vernacular at the Dawn

of the English Reformation

i

Perhaps the most significant feature of the religious

reform movement of the first half of the 16th

century was

the aim of getting behind the Latin of the Vulgate, much

of which the early reformers dismissed as nothing but ashadow, a translation – often a translation of a translation

– and laying bare the very word of God as it was revealed

in the ancient texts. This was particularly so in England,

where the translation of the Bible into English had been

proscribed since Wycliffe. By contrast, in Germany there

had been fully twenty translations of the Bible between

1466 and 1522, the most notable being the Mentel Bible, aliteral translation of the Vulgate, while in France des

Moulins‟ Bible Historiale – again based largely on the

Vulgate, but with adaptations, summaries and omissions – had circulated since medieval times, and went through

eight printed editions from 1487 to 1521 (see, e.g.,

Dickens, 32). In England, however, after the suppression



of the Wycliffite Bible in the early 15th

century no

translation of the Vulgate was attempted until well after

the Reformation; the Douay-Rheims Bible was a Catholic

response to Protestant translations of the Bible, precisely

the reverse of the situation in other Protestant countries

where, by and large, the laity already had access to

translations of the Vulgate into the vernacular before

Protestant translations began to appear.

As a result, the act of translating the Bible into English

– and, along with it, the liturgy – is seen as a more or less

uniquely reformist endeavour. However, that endeavour is

riddled with paradox. The earliest surviving form of many

parts of the Bible is itself a translation or retelling of some

lost original; the results of the Protestant reformists‟labours would be yet another translation; and the role of

the priest in mediating between God and His flock would

in some ways become, not more transparent, but more

obscure – not simply a matter of interpreting the Latin of

the Vulgate, with which (as the following pages will

attempt to demonstrate) the laity had been familiar all

their lives, but of trying to explain to the layman the

arcana of more ancient and inaccessible texts, some in

Latin, many in Greek and Hebrew, from which the

English translation was derived.

The fundamental problem is that translation

necessarily involves interpretation and this, essentially, is

why the whole issue of the translation of the Bible and the

liturgy into the vernacular was such a vexed question and

occasioned so much controversy. How does one ever

express or convey the conceptual and ideological



frameworks of a text belonging to another language and

culture except by approximations and compromise? What

determines whether, for example, the word given in the

Vulgate as “confiteri” should be translated as “to confess”or “to acknowledge”? Should the Greek ἐκκλησία

(ekklesia) be “church” or “congregation”? Is πρšσβύτερuς

(presbuteros) “priest” or “senior”? Is aγ£πη (agape)

“charity” or “love”? Is χάρις (kharis) “grace” or “favour”?These particular examples, of course, are famous as ones

that Thomas More took exception to in Tyndale‟stranslation of the New Testament, but the issue goes much

deeper than the translation of mere lexical items. Brian

Cummings (passim, but see particularly 206-213) has

written a beautifully lucid and coherent explanation of

how the debate on free will and predestination in English

hinges, to a considerable extent, on the epistemic and

deontic properties of modal verbs; biblical assertions of

what must or shall or can or cannot be are frequently

ambiguous in English, depending on whether they are

seen as observations or obligations. This ambiguity is not

there in Latin, Greek or Hebrew in the same way. Hence,

in a very real sense, the theological issue is predicated by

a grammatical or linguistic one.

Of course, in our post-Saussurean, post-Barthean, post-

Derridan, post-structuralist world, we are better placed to

appreciate that the search for “the Word” is a chimera, awill-o‟-the-wisp that eludes us all the more the more we

try to take hold of it. The Word is ineffable. We cannot

pin it down, cannot define it. But if they could not pin

down the Word the religious controversialists of the 16th



and 17th

centuries could certainly produce words, millions

and millions of them, and from those words spring

assumptions and counter-assumptions, allegiances and

betrayals, accusations and condemnations, with some

disputants resolving themselves into a nexus around one

broad set of consensual definitions, and others resolving

themselves around another.

By the 17th

century this process of separation and

distillation of Protestant and Catholic perceptions had

congealed itself pretty conclusively into two interwoven

discourses, essentially cognate and closely related, but

vehemently hostile. Thus when, for example, Toby

Matthew berates the Protestant translators of the Bible

who “expresse, poenitentiam agite , by the wordes of

Repentance only, and not of doing pennance” (****6v), he

sides with St. Jerome and a millennium of Christian

tradition in interpreting the Greek μετανοεω (metanoeo) as

an act, rather than a state of mind. The King James Bible

might be closer to the Greek in its use of “repent” and

“repentance” but Catholics, of course, remained

committed to the Latin of the Vulgate. At the same time,

though, Catholic scholars set to work in counterpoint to

their Protestant counterparts, examining the earlier sources

on which the Vulgate was backed, and so could back up

their position, in this case, with the claim that “do

penance” (as the Douay-Rheims Bible has it) is closer to

the idea of the Hebrew (nacham). By the time that

Toby Matthew was writing, Protestants and Catholics had

effectively developed into separate discourse communities.

They had consolidated their positions and developed their



own interpretations, each to the effective exclusion of the

terms of reference of the other.

During the Henrician period, however, this process

was just beginning to get under way, and the present paper

explores what Timothy Rosendale calls “the crucial role

played...by language itself ” in shaping and defining the

English Reformation (“„Fiery Toungues‟” 1143) during

the early years of the 16th

century. Unlike Rosendale,

however, I do not take at face value the view that:

For the English Reformers, Latin was a damnable sham, anobfuscatory veil behind which the Church worked itscorruption; the Latin Mass and the suppression of vernacular

Scripture were the linguistic means by which the papacymaintained its fraudulent stranglehold over the nations and

people of Europe. And, in a less polemical sense, this wasactually the case... (“„Fiery Toungues‟” 1146; c.f., Liturgy

and Literature 61)Rosendale‟s stated conceptual framework for this view ofthings is that provided by Benedict Anderson, who writes,

“The astonishing power of the papacy in its noonday is

only comprehensible in terms of a trans-European Latin-

writing clerisy, and a conception...that the bilingual

intelligentsia, by mediating between vernacular and Latin,

mediated between earth and heaven” (15-16).Rosendale and Anderson are specific in applying this

interpretation of events not only to England but to the

situation prevailing across Europe at the dawn of the 15th

century. Hence it would not be surprising that rather

similar comments have been made about the rise of the

vernacular in, for example, Italy:



The rise of the vernacular against Latin is pictured as a fight

of the lay spirit against Church authority, of democracy

against the forces of feudalism and absolutism, of patriotismagainst foreign or international influences, or of the open-minded plain citizen against the narrow professional interestof Academic cliques. (121-122)

The surprise – for some – might be that Paul Kristeller,

who made these remarks half a century ago, did so in

order to debunk them. While he concedes that such a view

“may contain a nucleus of truth,” he neverthelessconcludes that “religious and ecclesiastical interests were

not identified with the use of Latin or opposed to the

vernacular ” (122). Indeed, Brucioli had published the

Bible in Italian during the 1530s and, though there were

moves to repress vernacular translations of the Scriptures

from the 1540s on (see, e.g., Waquet 45), it was only

during the 1560s, after the Index of Trent and the prohibitions of Paul IV, that the official stance hardened

definitively (see, e.g., Putman 190).

The idea that the vernacular was a revolutionary force,

sweeping away the cobwebs of obfuscation and tyranny

woven by the use of Latin, is full of pitfalls and caveats.

In Italy, far from being the language of humanism and

democracy, “the vernacular was cultivated at many feudaland monarchical courts whereas Latin literature was often

promoted in the free republics...the development of

vernacular literature...was not merely the concern of the

plain citizen” and, of course, for Italians, “Latin could not

easily be discarded as a „foreign‟ language” (Kristeller,

122). As Hay reminds us, “Latin and the vernacular were

often used by the same writers” and “even writers who



normally wrote in a vulgar tongue were steeped in Latin at

school” (409). Latin cannot simply be seen as the

language of hegemony, whether of the church or of the

state, nor can the vernacular be seen purely as an agent of

liberation. The reality is much more complicated than that,

but the complexities have a way of being glossed over by

generalisations that obscure as much as they reveal.

This paper, then, sets out to trace some of the contours

of that complexity, giving particular emphasis to the

importance of Latin to the early English reformers and of

the vernacular to the religious conservatives. The huge

growth in the use of the vernacular, and of translation

from Latin into English, was not primarily driven by the

reform movement, but rather an inevitable result of the

invention of the printing press; Latin was by no means as

incomprehensible to the laity as is generally supposed; nor

did the Protestant reformers eschew or abandon the use of

Latin as a medium for communication, any more than

their Catholic counterparts rejected the use of English;

insofar as religious conservatives did oppose the use of the

vernacular it was largely because translations were often a

vehicle for the covert dissemination of heterodox ideas;

and – despite the best intentions of reformist and

conservative divines – the main issue at stake, during the

Henrician period at least, was not so much the question of

whether the laity understood the subtleties of the Christian

faith as whether justification and support could be found

for actions and policies which were essentially political

and mundane.



ii

The use of English as a vehicle for religious devotionhas a long pedigree, stretching back far further than the

Reformation. Richard Rolle, Walter Hilton, the author of

The Cloud of Unknowing , Julian of Norwich, and Margery

Kempe all wrote in English, and the tendency for Wycliffe

to overshadow these in some ways prefigures the situation

during the early years of the sixteenth century when, as

Bennett says, “ Nowhere was the desire to make works inforeign tongues available to Englishmen more strongly

felt than by authors of religious and homiletic works” (57;

see also 65-70), most of them firmly Catholic but

somehow eclipsed by Tyndale.

There was a steady flow of publications of religious

literature in English from the time of the invention of the

printing press on, and of the 450 or so books published inEngland before 1501 (Duff lists 432, but he has missed a

few), 88 were religious works in English (White, appendix

1), including John Lydgate‟s translation of Deguileville,

The Pylgremage of the Sowle, and his Lyf of our Lady,

John Mirk ‟s Festial of English Sermons, Nicholas Love‟stranslation of Speculum Vitae Christi, Walter Hilton‟sScala Perfecc[i]onis, The Meditatõns of Saint Bernard ,the works of John Alcock and Jacobus de Voragine‟s

Legenda Aurea. The years leading up to England‟s break

with Rome saw works by such figures as Margaret

Beaufort, Thomas Betson, William Bonde, John Fisher,

Thomas More and John Rastell, with a list of publications

that includes accounts of Christ‟s passion, of papal bulls



and indulgences, and of the life of Thomas Becket (the

latter in verse), along with such titles as the Boke of

Comfort Agaynste all Tribulacions, The Dyetary of

Ghostly Helthe and The Myrroure of Oure Lady. There

were also numerous translations during this period,

including works by Augustine, Bonaventura, Erasmus and

Vives, the Ars Moriendi, Imitatio Christi, L’ordinaire des

Chrestiens, the Sarum martyrology, St. Peter of

Luxemborg‟s The Boke Entytuled the Next Way to Heuen,

Edmund of Abingdon‟s Speculum Ecclesiæ (translated as

Myrrour of the Chyrche) and William Hendred‟stranslation of Deguileville, published as The Booke of the

Pylgrymage of Man.

This wealth of orthodox religious material in English

in the early 16th

century is frequently ignored. Targoff, for

example, acknowledges the existence of The Lay Folks’

Mass Book but otherwise makes no mention of all this

evidence of a thriving religious literature in English during

this period. On the contrary, he cites an anecdotal

reconstruction of events, written over a quarter of a

century after they happened, as evidence that such

literature was routinely suppressed. According to Targoff,

John Foxe‟s account of the persecution (in 1532) of one

Thomas Harding for possessing religious books written in

English, “accurately conveys the anxiety in the pre-

Reformation church over the unauthorized spreading of

the English word” (20). That would be fair comment if

Targoff acknowledged the extent of authorised spreading

of the English word, but he does not. Foxe‟s anecdote is – as Targoff himself says – “sensational,” and gives the



impression that the authorities hounded Harding simply

because he possessed religious works in English. There

were dozens – even hundreds – of religious books in

English which Harding could legitimately have been in

possession of, but – although Foxe gives no details – we

can presume fairly safely that what he actually possessed

were reformist works, most of which were published

abroad and smuggled into the country.

In fact, in 1532, the time of Harding‟s persecution,

there were not all that many reformist texts actually

available in English – far fewer than their conservative

counterparts. Perhaps Harding possessed Tyndale‟s The

Obediēce of a Christen M an (and how Christē Rulers

Ought to Governe), or Joye‟s Ortulus Anime. The Garden

of the Soule, which was the first of the English-language

Primers (paraliturgical texts which developed from the

medieval Horae, or Books of Hours) and had numerous

reformist features. Or perhaps he owned A Compendious

Olde Treatyse, Shewynge howe that we Oughte to Haue ye

Scripture in Englysshe, an updated version of a Lollard

translation of a medieval Latin text by Richard Ullerston,

or Simon Fish‟s translation of Henricus Bomelius, entitled

The Summe of the Holye Scripture, or A Supplicacyon for

the Beggers, a vitriolic attack on the Catholic Church. All

of these were published in Antwerp between 1528 and

1530, while Christopher Saint German‟s A Dialogue in

Englisshe, Bytwyxte a Doctour of Dyvynyte, and a Student

in the Lawes of Englande (1529) – another possible

candidate for Harding‟s collection - was published

anonymously in England.



It was not the language of these works which

occasioned their suppression by the authorities but their

reformist content ; had they been written in Latin their

circulation among the laity would doubtless have been

suppressed with equal vigour. Far from being universally

proscribed, the use of the vernacular was so prevalent that

even the spread of reformist ideas in England during the

early 16th

century was due, in part, to translations made,

not by the reformers themselves, but by orthodox

Catholics seeking to refute them. The first attempt to

translate Luther ‟s ninety-five theses (which were, of

course, written and circulated in Latin) into English was

by the conservative John Fisher and, as Cummings says,

“To dispute with Luther, Fisher had to translate him”

(188). Fisher ‟s efforts were notably followed by those of

Thomas More and even of Henry VIII himself. As Raynor

puts it, referring to the religious conservatives who

opposed Luther: “By quoting passages from Luther ‟sworks in their books, the result was that everyone who

was interested, whether for or against, could gather all that

they needed to know about the Reformation doctrines”

(47).

In many ways, the Henrician Reformation was

characterised more by a perpetuation of Catholic thought

than by any pronounced Protestant tendencies, and the

religious temper of the 1520s and 30s is perhaps best

exemplified by the Bridgettine order which, right up until

its suppression in the late 1530s, was active in promoting

both the study of the Bible and the use of the vernacular – the very features most commonly associated with



Protestant reform. The Bridgettine monk Richard

Whitford, author of Werke for Housholders and Werke of

Preparation, is hailed as “the devotional best-seller of the

1530s” (ODNB), and William Bonde, another Bridgettine

monk, author of The Pylgrimage of Perfection (1526; 2nd

,

enlarged, edition, 1531), is notable for having started to

write in Latin but then deciding instead to write in English

in order to reach a wider audience (see, e.g., Bennett 58).

Bonde‟s work has been described as a “ summa of late

medieval teachings on the religious life” (Rhodes 22, cited

in ODNB), and both these authors exemplify the

continuation, even after the Reformation, of a well-

established tradition of orthodox Catholic literature in

English.

This pattern of Catholic use of the vernacular

continues as the 16th

century progresses; even when

Catholicism was restored as the state religion under Mary,

twenty one of the thirty five Primers printed during her

reign (STC 16058-16086) were in English or English and

Latin and, from about the middle of the century on,

Catholic editions of works by or attributed to Saint

Augustine, for example, came out in roughly the same

numbers as Protestant ones and, indeed, some of the

Protestant editions were based on, or adapted from,

Catholic translations.



iii

Just as religious conservatives made use of the

vernacular so, of course, reformists made use of Latin.

There were many factors determining whether Latin or the

vernacular was used in any given publication during the

first half of the 16th century, and religion should not beviewed as the only – or even the prime – one. Obviously, a

large part of the reason for the use of Latin by Protestant

writers lies with the intended readership. Where the aim

was to debate theological issues Latin was more likely to

be the language used, and if the issue was to be opened up

to scholars in Europe then Latin was more or less essential.

Furthermore, Erasmian humanism was partly based on arejection of the supposedly “debased Latin” of the

medieval scholastics and a return to the majesty of

classical Latin, and Protestants and Catholics alike were

swept up in that trend (see, e.g., Wizeman 5).

There were changes taking place regarding the use of

the vernacular in other fields apart from the religious, and

the spread of religious literature in English is, at somelevels, part of a wider process of democratisation which

was arising naturally from the development of printing.

There were also political issues that, not infrequently,

were at least as significant as religious ones; Henry VIII‟squarrel with Luther, for example, helps explain why much



of Luther ‟s work was not published in English translation

until after Henry‟s death.

To understand how misconceptions have arisen

concerning the use of Latin by the early reformers it may

be useful to examine the way in which the historical

reality has become, as it were, mythologized over the

years. One of the most famous images that has impinged

itself on the Anglican collective consciousness is that of

Hugh Latimer refusing to address the court in Latin during

his trial, claiming that he had been, as Gilpen puts it, “very

little conversant with Latin these twenty years” (487), and

there is a host of commentary from Gilpen to Rosendale

( Literature and Liturgy 61) invoking Latimer, Cranmer

and other early reformers in support of the thesis that

English Protestantism uniformly eschewed the use of

Latin and scorned it as an “unknowen tongue” (Ridley and

Latimer, fo. A8v). One would never guess from such

commentary that, in his time, Latimer himself had

preached and published in Latin (Concio quam Habuit ,

London, 1537, and [Anglicani Pontificis] Oratio, Basle,

1537). The writers of these commentaries have taken

Latimer‟s comments – which apply specifically to the use

of Latin in the liturgy – out of context and present them as

if they were true in all contexts, failing to offer any really

coherent explanation of why, from the earliest days of the

Reformation, English Protestants were continuing, not

only to write and publish in Latin, but even to translate

English works into that language.

Such, however, was the case. Saint German‟s Dialogue,

for example, was originally written in Latin and published



as Dialogus de Fundamentis Legum Anglie et de

Conscientia (1528), while Fish‟s Supplicacyon was

written first in English and then translated into Latin

(Supplicatorius Libellus Pauperum 1530). Other early

reformist literature in Latin includes Robert Barnes‟scompilation, Sentenciae ex Doctoribus Collectae, Quas

Papistae Valde Impudenter Hodie Damnant (Wittenberg,

1530), and the years following Henry‟s break with Rome

saw such reformist publications as Robert Barnes, Vitae

Romanorum Pontificum (Basle, 1535) and Sententiæ ex

Doctoribus (Wittenberg, 1536), Edward Fox, De Vera

Differentia Regiae Potestatis & Ecclesiasticae (London,

1534), and the two works by Latimer already mentioned.

Latin publications by English Protestants during the

middle of the century (i.e., in the years immediately

following the publication of The Book of Common Prayer )

include John Foxe, De Lapis in Ecclesiam (1549), De

Censura (1551) and, of course, Rerum in Ecclesia

Gestarum (1559-1563), the Latin precursor to Actes and

Monuments; John Cheke, De Obitu...Martini Buceri

(1551) and his translation of Cranmer, Defensio Veræ et

Catholicæ Doctrinæ de Sacramento (1553); John Ponet,

Catechismus Brevis Christianae (1553); Nicholas Ridley,

De Coena Dominica Assertio, Contra Sceleratamillam

Transubstantionis Haeresim (Geneva, 1556); and Alban

Langdaile , Catholica Confutatio (1556).

Protestants not only wrote and published in Latin, but

also, overwhelmingly, continued to read in that language.

A perusal of PLRE shows that the libraries of Protestant

scholars consisted primarily of works in Latin – not least



among them the works of the very reformers who were

supposedly so opposed to Latin. And, of course, a whole

branch of Protestant discourse – Protestant scholasticism – was basically developed in Latin (with an admixture of

Greek and some Hebrew), with the result that, to this day,

as Richard Muller reminds us, “many of the standard

[Protestant] works in the field of theology continue to use

the Greek and Latin terms” (7).

Even looking ahead to the middle of the 17th

century, it

is still far from clear that, apart from the liturgy, the

Anglican Church was significantly more associated with

the vernacular and the repudiation of Latin and other

classical languages than Catholicism. Thomas Barlow,

compiling a list of recommended reading for trainee

clergymen in about 1655, not only takes a knowledge of

Latin for granted (most of the list consists of Latin texts,

even where English translations were available) but insists

that ministers of the church should „study the Language of

the Bible‟, that is, basically, Hebrew for the Old

Testament and Greek for the New, and „a convenient

knowledge in those two Tongues is necessary to a Divine,

who would be sure of what hee sayes‟ (25) – much the

same degree of scholarship as that exhibited by John Foxe

a century earlier. In a list that includes both Protestant and

Catholic writers and contemporary works as well as

medieval ones (along with a large amount of still

untranslated classical literature), Barlow recommends to

Anglican students of theology a huge amount of material

that was available in Latin but – in many cases – had not

been translated into English, ranging from commentaries



on Aquinas by Didacus Alvarez, Gregorio de Valencia,

Gabriel Vasquez and others to Bellarmine‟s Controversiae,

Calvin‟s Lexicon Juridicum, Duns Scotus‟s 8-volume

work on Aristotle, Andreas Essenius‟s defence of Grotius

and so on.

iv

In the light of this extensive and continuing use of

Latin by the Protestant reformers – and in particular thefact that the Protestant readership continued to read

predominantly in Latin – to take Latimer ‟s description of

Latin as an “unknowen tongue” at face value is at best

disingenuous and at worst utterly misleading. At the time

he said it (1556), many years had passed since the Bible

had been published in English and ordered to be placed in

every church, and even more since the old Latin Horaehad ceased to be printed and been replaced instead with

English or diglottal versions. It would be fair to say that

there were many people, by that time, who were far more

familiar with these texts in English than in Latin, and one

might claim with some legitimacy that Latin was

increasingly the language of the educated and no longer a

language with which the average lay person was likely tohave very much familiarity. However, the assumption that

it had always been thus and that, in the early 16th

century,

“lay worshippers...were on the whole unlearned in Latin”

(Targoff, 19), is open to question. They may not have

studied it formally, but they had been exposed to it all

their lives, and we need to take a closer look at the extent



to which the laity was capable of understanding Latin

during the period leading up to, and immediately

following, the Henrician Reformation.

During the 15th

century, England was slowly emerging

from a period in which, lacking a single national tongue of

its own, Latin had played a vital role. In the years

following the Norman Conquest, Latin had “offered a

lifeline of communication at some social levels of this

initially fractured society...This unifying tongue, moreover,

operated well beyond the bounds of the Church, both

among the surprising number of secular aristocrats who

had some Latin education, and through the activities of the

many clerics who served in secular law courts and cultural

capacities among the laity” (Wallace 122), and this

formed the basis of a continuing tradition. As Rigg notes,

Latin literature “thrived” in England right up until the end

of the medieval period (5).

By the late 15th

century, however, Early Modern

English was well established and, with the advent of the

printing press, the vernacular had a vital role to play. At

the same time, the continuing popularity of the Latin

Horae (or Primers, as the printed versions came to be

called), demonstrates that the language of these collections

of paraliturgical prayers and meditations was still deeply

ingrained in the very fabric of people‟s lives. The

manuscript Horae were by far the most popular book of

the Middle Ages and, during the last quarter of the 15th

century, they were also the most popular printed book in

the years leading up to the Reformation. Erler estimates

conservatively that, during the early years of printing,



around 1500 printed Horae were produced each year (505-

506), and this output did not immediately supplant the

manuscript Books of Hours, but supplemented them well

into the 16th

century; both printed and manuscript Horae

appeared “in immense quantities” during this period (496)

and were just about as common as rosary beads (Duffy 98).

As significant as the quantity of these Horae is the

pattern of their distribution. Unlike other Latin Rite

litanies, the Horae were essentially for lay use. Of 62

private libraries inventoried between 1507 and 1553 listed

in volume 2 of PLRE , 57 belonged to Oxford scholars

who, between them, owned some 45 breviaries, diurnals,

hymnals, missals and so on, but only one Horae, and yet

these went through about as many editions as all the others

combined, and the evidence suggests that the editions of

Latin Rite liturgical publications were all of roughly equal

size (Erler 505). Clearly, the Horae (which were

essentially simplified breviaries) must have circulated in

other spheres. Erler notes that, of 107 book bequests in

York lay wills from 1321-1500, 53 were Horae – mostly,

of course, in manuscript (505). She goes on to speculate

that, by the beginning of the 16th

century, “we might

imagine 1 out of every 35 London merchants, wives,

artisans and nuns being supplied with a printed Sarum

Book of Hours” (506). This is a very conservative

estimate. If we add non-Sarum Books of Hours and

manuscript Horae (which, being written on vellum, had a

long shelf life), then perhaps that figure increases to about

one in ten, and the actual number may be much higher. If



an English household during this period contained any

book at all it was likely to be a Book of Hours.

The main point to be made at this stage is that, during

the years prior to the Reformation, it is almost

inconceivable that anyone would have had any trouble

understanding, at an absolute minimum, such stock

phrases as “ora pro nobis,” or “in nomine patris et filii etspiritus sancti,” or even the more familiar longer passages,

such as the Ave Maria, the Lord‟s Prayer or the Creed.

The claim that the average person did not understand the

language of the mass grew stronger as the 16th

century

advanced, but it should not be forgotten that England at

the dawn of the Reformation was a society that had grown

up with Latin and it was virtually impossible to live in it

without understanding at least the central parts of the

Latin Rite liturgy. Ordinary people had made an

investment in understanding their religion through the

medium of Latin and, as Erler puts it, “That [the Latin

Primer or Horae] remained so long at the centre of

religious life for most people, even those usually

considered non-Latinate, argues some partial, adaptive,

complex, accommodation to a language deeply familiar to

the ear, moderately familiar to the eye” (498).

v

Familiarity with Latin during this period implies

familiarity with the Bible, and an examination of religious

literature in the vernacular adds weight to the idea that, at

the turn of the 16th

century, the Vulgate was not an



inaccessible text in an alien language but an ingrained and

essential part of the cultural landscape. A work such as

Lydgate‟s translation of Guillaume de Deguileville, The

Pylgremage of the Sowle (1483), illustrates the point. Like

much of the religious literature of the time, it makes more

sense to see it in the context of other narratives published

to fulfil popular demand than to see it as being published

in pursuit of a coherent aim to make the Christian faith

more transparent and, as the opening lines indicate, it has

a strong narrative thread. In that sense it stands naturally

alongside many other works published in English at

around the same time, such as The Saint Albans Chronicle,

Le Morte d ’ Arthur , Blanchardine and Eglantine and

Pierre de la pde‟s Paris et Vienne or Virgil‟s Aeneid :

As I laye in a seynt Laurence nyght, slepynge in my bedde,

me bifelle a full merueylous dreme, whiche I shal reherce. Methought that I had longe tyme trauayled to ward the Holy Cyteof Ierusalem, and that I had made an ende and fully fynysshed

my flesshely pylgremage, so that I myght no further trauaylevpon my foote, but nedes muste leue behynde my flesshely

careyne. Thenne come cruel Dethe and smote me with hisvenemous darte, thorugh whiche stroke bodye and sowle were

partyd a sonder. (fo. 2r )

Deguileville‟s theme of how to confront the problemof death is also perfectly conformable with such diverse

publications as manuals on how to avoid the plague and

the Governayle of Helthe, or collections of sayings culled

from the ancient philosophers and many other treatises

and chronicles of the period. That is to say, it is part of a

spectrum of texts that fulfilled a growing demand for a

wide range of vernacular publications on all kinds of



topics, supporting the thesis that the spread of religious

literature in English at this time was not intrinsically part

of a reformist agenda, but simply part of a wider process

of linguistic democratisation that was going on as a result

of the invention of the printing press.

This broader context makes it all the more significant

that Deguileville refers extensively to the Bible and the

translator assumes – both in the use of references and in

Latin citations – a fairly detailed knowledge of its contents.

For example:

To this answerd this yonglyng / myn Aungel / These wordes /quod he / whiche were sayd of the prophete Ysaye /

apperteyneth to thy mayster Lucifer / but he and hismynystres ben one in effect. wherfor I admytte these wordysseyd to the / And I graunt wel / that thou were ful of wysedom/ as the prophete seyth. and yet couthest thou no good. but

thou were of thylke that he spekyth of elles were and seith /Sapientes sunt vt faciant mala. Bonum autem facere

nescierunt ...‟ (fo. 3r )

The Latin is from Jeremiah, 4.22 (“They are wise in the

working of evil, but they know not how to do good”), and

the assumption that readers would be familiar with this

kind of material – as well as placing the reference to

Isaiah, 5.21, “wise in his own eyes” – is typical of thekinds of assumptions that can be met with frequently in

vernacular publications of this period. The reader is

expected, on the one hand, to understand the Latin and, on

the other, to be sufficiently versed in scripture to catch the

reference to Isaiah, which – in theory – could only be

accessed via a knowledge of the Latin Vulgate.



Texts written around the time of Henry‟s break with

Rome also show an expectation that the reader will have

some understanding of Latin. A typical example might be

The Mirrour or Lokynge Glasse of Lyfe (1532), attributed

to the printer John Gough. This is a proto-Protestant text

in its “evangelical representation of conversion” (Marshall

and Ryrie 24), but in other respects is essentially

conservative and doctrinally Catholic and demonstrates

how England was at this time poised, both linguistically

and culturally, between two traditions. Despite the title,

Gough‟s work is not a translation of the Speculum

(ascribed to Augustine of Hippo), but is indebted to it in

various ways, one of which is the use of the Latin of the

African Bible:

Declina a malo et fac bonum inquire pacem et sequere eam.

Davit 33. (fo. AIVv)

It is not clear here whether Gough shows a reformist

tendency by rejecting the Latin of the Vulgate (which the

African Bible precedes by several centuries), or whether

he simply lifts the passage from Augustine because he

happens to have that work to hand. Either way, he presents

it without a gloss, supposing that his readers will

understand it. However, on the very next page he cites a passage from Matthew in English, without the Latin text

(fo. BIr ), and then proceeds (fos. B II

v – B4v) to give the

Pater Noster, the Ave Maria and the Creed in both Latin

and English.

Although the Deguileville translation and Gough‟s text

both intersperse Latin along with the vernacular, there is

nevertheless a significant difference between the two. The



earlier text simply supposes that the reader will understand

the Latin – or, to put it another way, the assumption

appears to be that anyone who was literate would have at

least some grasp of Latin – while the later one provides a

gloss for most of the Latin used, even – or indeed

especially – those passages with which his readers could

scarcely avoid having some degree of familiarity. These

features of the later text can, I think, be validly seen as, on

the one hand, symptomatic of the democratising effect of

print, with the readership broadening out in such a way

that it can no longer be assumed that anyone who can read

would also be familiar with Latin and, on the other, a

process of, as it were, weaning those readers who were

familiar with Latin onto the vernacular.

A survey of other religious literature of this period will

show that these trends towards the vernacular, far from

being ideologically driven, were essentially pragmatic.

Bonde‟s Pilgrimage of Perfection (1526) was published at

a time when translation of the Bible was, technically,

proscribed, yet short passages – effectively translations – are strewn liberally throughout the text. For example, he

writes, “the charyte of god is diffused & sprede in our

hertes / by the holy goost,” together with a marginal note,

“Roma. v.” (fo. a1v), indicating the scriptural source of the

passage. Equally, in Peckham‟s Exornatorium Curatorum

(c. 1516 and reprinted nine times to c. 1534), a selection

of extracts from the work of the 13th

century Archbishop

of Canterbury, John Peckham (or Pecham, as he is called

in the ODNB), sets forth the basic articles of the Christian

faith – the commandments, the sacraments and so on –



with an assumption that the reader will understand the

basic liturgical matter in Latin, although the exposition of

each item is in English (see fig. 1, below).

Fig 1: This 1516 edition of John Peckham’ s ExonatoriumCuratorum (STC 10627.5), consisting of selections from John

Peckham, the 13th century Archbishop of Canterbury, presupposes

on the one hand that the reader will understand the seven

sacraments in Latin and, on the other, expounds on the doctrine of

the sacraments in English.

Publications such as these go a long way towards

dispelling the notion that there was any particular aversionto using the vernacular as a vehicle for religious

instruction, as well as making it clear that the basic

acceptance of the use of English extended to exposition of

biblical and liturgical passages. The idea that the Church

was clinging desperately to Latin as a means of

misguiding the masses and keeping them in ignorance of



the actual tenets of their faith simply does not stand up to

scrutiny.

vi

From the foregoing it will be clear that, by and large,

the early reformers were not simply presenting

translations of the Latin Vulgate and the quasi-liturgical

language of the Primers to a readership that had no

knowledge of the original. One obvious effect of the printing press was that the written word became much

more easily accessible to a much wider public than

hitherto, and some of that readership doubtless had

relatively little knowledge of Latin, but far from being any

kind of tabula rasa, the laity had a lifetime‟s exposure to

Latin and the average person would have had a fairly

sophisticated understanding, at least of the central textsand tenets of the Christian faith, albeit intermingled and

overlaid with a thousand years of church and folkloric

tradition, much of it – as Dickens, for example, points out

– focused on the lives of saints (31-32).

Rather than making the laity aware of things which

had been hidden from them by the veil of Latin, the efforts

of the early reformers in translating these religious textswere directed towards introducing ideas which differed

from those contained in the Latin originals. The English-

language Primers which began to appear during the 1530s

frequently imported reformist ideas by stealth, quietly

introducing additions to and changes from their Latin

counterparts without any overt comment or reference to



the innovations. Erler cites a letter from John Rastell to

Cromwell in 1534, suggesting that “heterodox ideas might

receive the widest possible dissemination if they could be

inserted in books of hours since everyone possessed such

books” (496), and this policy can be traced right back to

Joye‟s Ortulus Anime (1530), the very first English-

language Primer. Joye‟s work has numerous reformist

elements; the Passion (fos. B7r -G 8

v) is translated (without

acknowledgement) from Martin Bucer, and reflects the

reformist emphasis on the character of Jesus Christ, and

there is a Lutheran tone to several of the hymns and graces,

while the Litany of the Saints and the Office of the Dead

are omitted (see Butterworth 28-46 for a detailed account

of its contents).

Even the layout of these English-language Primers

indicates an assumption that the reader is familiar with the

Latin Primers; illustrations are placed on the same part of

the page as in the Latin Horae, the text is in Blackletter

typeface, the first letter of each section is generally

illuminated, and red lettering is used to highlight new

sections of the text, just as in their Latin precursors (see

figs. 2-4, below). By preserving the basic layout of the

Horae the English-language Primers conveyed the

impression that they were nothing more than English-

language equivalents to them, thus masking the numerous

doctrinal innovations that were being ushered in under the

guise of translation.

Unacknowledged borrowings from more overtly

reformist writings were a significant feature of English-

language Primers all through the 1530s; Butterworth notes



borrowings from Tyndale in William Marshall‟s Primer of

1545, from Luther in John Gough‟s Primer of 1536 (128),

and so on. However, the tide began to turn leading, in

1545, to Henry‟s own authorised Primer, “to be taught

lerned & read: and none other to be used throughout all

his dominions” (title page). This Primer attacks Latin as

obfuscatory in precisely the way that modern scholarship

tends to present as being the stance of the reformists

themselves:

for that the youth by divers persones are taught the Paternoster, the Ave maira, Crede, and .x. cõmaundementes all inLatine and not in Englishe, by meanes wherof the same are

not brought up in the knowledge of their faith, dutye andobedience (fo. *** 1r -v)

In fact, though, Henry had no real quarrel with the use of

Latin; as Eland points out, this Primer was not intended to

replace the Latin, but to be used to teach young people the

basics of their faith, “until they should be competent to

understand it in Latin” (44).

Essentially, Henry‟s Primer was conservative,

clamping down on other, more reformist, Primers,

“whiche,” the preface tells us, “minister occasion of

contentions & vaine disputations, rather than to edifye”

(fo. *** 1v). There are some innovations, but they are not,

on the whole, of a progressive nature; several Pslams, for

example, are added, but they are basically translated from

the Latin Vulgate, with some concessions to the Cranmer

Bible (Butterworth 261). Butterworth also notes, of the

translation of Psalm 2, “There is perhaps something

typical of Henry‟s reign in the translation of the Latin text



[adorate pure] so literally into „Get discipline‟” (262),

underlining the basic purpose of this Primer, which was to

consolidate the authority of the king. Just as reformist

attacks on Latin masked covert innovations, so Henry‟sPrimer uses Latin as a convenient scapegoat, while all the

time his real agenda is to equate faith in the other world

with “dutye and obedience” in this one.

The political significance of religious publications in

the vernacular as a means to impress upon the populace

the duty of obeying the king was something Henry was

not likely to miss, and this underpins the use of the

vernacular in religious literature all through Henry‟s reign.

Rosendale rightly says that, “concurrent with the

sacramental and other theological discourses of the

English Reformation, there was a linguistic discourse:

England, among other nations, and its language, among

theirs, had to be elevated over Rome and its language”

(“„Fiery Toungues‟” 1146), but all these discourses were

subordinate to political discourse. Henry‟s paramount

concern, prior to his break with Rome as well as after it,

was the equation of duty to God with duty to king, and the

use of the vernacular was part of the array of resources he

had at his disposal with which to establish that equation.

For example, a treatise on ignorance published in the

1520s advertises itself as “a lytell treatyse in Englysshe,”

which teaches the people “howe they are bounde to feare

god / to love god / and to honour their prince” (Bush, title

page). If the introduction of vernacular Primers and a

vernacular Bible were – along with the closing of the

monasteries – Henry‟s main concessions to reformist



ideology it was because he could see the advantage to

himself.

Fig. 2: This is a page from a Latin Primer ( Hore Beatissime

Virginis , 1535. STC 15987). Note the “ Domine Labia,” with



its introductory woodcut illustration, followed by the “ Iubilate

Deo”.

Fig. 3: Although Joye’ s Ortulus Anime is a reformist publication, it

is basically modelled on the Latin Books of Hours, with its red

lettering (faded or grey in the above), woodcuts interspersed with the

text and the Latin name by which the psalm would have been familiar

to readers. Compare fig. 2, above.



Fig. 4: Marshall ’ s A Prymer in English (second edition, [1534], STC

15986), the first English-language primer to be published in

England, is largely based on Joye’ s text (see fig. 4, above) and

follows the same page layout that will be familiar to lay readers of

the Latin Primers (see fig. 3, above).



vii

It is at this point that deconstruction of the standardargument – that the vernacular was the reformists‟ tool to

set the populace free from the yoke of religious repression

– lays bare its mirror image. To a fairly large extent, the

Church under Henry served simply as a tool to subjugate

the laity to another master, the vernacular merely as a

means to render synonymous the concepts of duty to God

and duty to king, and Latin as a way to paper over thecracks and reinforce a sense of liturgical and doctrinal

continuity during a period of upheaval and change.

In the midst of this upheaval, the switch from Latin to

the vernacular was often a means to introduce new ideas

and policies. That rendering, mentioned early on in this

paper, of poenitentiam agite as “repentance,” rather than

“doing penance” served (among other factors) to sweepaway centuries of monastic tradition, with its fasting, its

hairshirts and its mortification of the flesh. The fact that

the Bible was translated was much less a matter of

concern to religious conservatives than the manner in

which it was done. When it came to the English-language

Primers and other translations of doctrinal and liturgical or

paraliturgical material, in addition to these matters ofinterpretation, translators rocked the boat in other ways,

by selecting those parts of the original which suited a

given agenda, omitting those which did not and adding

material which was not in the original. While translation

was potentially a tool for religious conservatives as well

as for reformists, and had indeed been used as such long



before the Reformation and would continue to be so used

after it, in practice it was the reformers who had more to

gain from vernacular Primers and a vernacular Bible.

While Latin continued to be of major importance in

Protestant theology, just as in Catholic theology and every

other branch of scholarship and learning during the 16th

and 17th

centuries, in these two areas the use of English

and the spread of Protestantism went, largely, hand in

hand – always providing, of course, in these early days,

that Henry‟s own interests were served in the process.



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