What Was the Influence of the Medieval English Bible Upon the Renaissance Bible?

WHAT WAS THE INFLUENCE OF THE MEDIEVAL ENGLISH BIBLE UPON THE RENAISSANCE BIBLE? GERALD HAMMOND DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE, UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER Had the terminal date for this conference been fixed only sixty years later, it would have been an entirely different thing, having to take into consideration the major English versions of the Bible by William Tyndale, Miles Coverdale, and the Geneva Bible translators, whose work makes up virtually ninety per cent of the 1611 Authorized Version. Even an addition of only thirty years would have been enough to unbalance it, for by 1530 the first edition of Tyndale's New Testament and of his Pentateuch had already appeared and, with them, the foundations of the English biblical tradition had been laid. In many places where Tyndale translated it may reasonably be claimed that three-quarters of his work finds its way into the 1611 version; and even twentieth- century translators, with their frequent 'new' versions, are still largely using his vocabulary and his syntax. 1994 was an important year in English Bible studies, for it marked the quingentenary of Tyndale's birth, celebrated by academic conferences in Washington and Oxford. David Daniell's biography of the Reformer was also issued, completing the project which, in the last few years, had seen the publication, in some places for the first time since the sixteenth century, of all of Tyndale's biblical translation. 1 Among all of this much was made of the matter of influence, scholars examining the extent to which Tyndale influenced the translators of the next few generations and, in broader terms, assessing his influence upon our culture, notably the extent to which his words and phrases became part of the common stock, to be drawn on by the simplest readers and hearers of his text. Influence works the other way too, and 1994 encouraged others to think about the influences upon Tyndale. He certainly followed Luther's example closely, as any early sixteenth-century translator was bound 1 David Daniell, William Tvndale: a biography (London: Yale University Press. 1994). Daniell's two editions of Tyndale's translations are: Tyndale's \ew Testament (London: Yale University Press, 1989), and Tyndale's Old Testament (London- Yale University Press, 1992). 88 BULLETIN JOHN RYLANDS LIBRARY to do, but not slavishly. There is room to explore the ways in which he deviated from Luther's example; and to consider also the extent to which he drew on the advanced philological work in Hebrew and Greek which was going on in the 1520s and 1530s. What has been generally neglected, even among the 1994 celebrations, is any detailed consideration of the extent to which Tyndale may have been influenced by an existing English biblical tradition. For a long time now Tyndale studies have shown a marked reluctance to consider this matter. There is some interest in the Lollard roots of Reformation theology but virtually none in bridging the gap between the work of the Reformation translators and the many hundreds of years of English biblical culture which was the focus of this conference and which, in many respects, culminated in the version generally known as the Wyclif Bible. Such reluctance is symptomatic of one of the great divides in our discipline. In the past scholars and critics tried hard to establish continuities, such as the continuity of English prose or the continuity of poetic and dramatic traditions, but I do not detect much of this kind of thing going on now. It seems as if medieval studies and Renaissance studies are as far apart as they ever have been. I would add, as a Renaissance scholar looking over the fence at my medieval colleagues, that there is a surprising lack of interest in the medieval English Bible. We are roughly a hundred and fifty years on from Forshall and Madden's edition of the Wyclif Bible and I am only aware of isolated scholars in Scandinavia and Japan who are doing anything to use modern techniques of editing and linguistic analysis to bring our knowledge of it into the twentieth century as we approach the twenty-first. 2 British and American medievalists seem more interested in what Tyndale would doubtless have dismissed as tales of Robin Hood. For any one concerned to explore possible continuities between an earlier, pre-Reformation English biblical tradition and the new one there does not seem much encouragement coming from the medievalists. Such neglect of the Wyclif Bible might be right and proper. If it is demonstrable that the English Bible, however we construe that phrase, had little cultural significance or impact in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, then it would be idle to do much work on it and idler still to try to demonstrate any real influence. It would be very odd, however, if such were the case. The survival of so many manuscripts of the Wyclif Bible is prima fade evidence for the strength of a fourteenth-century English biblical culture so deep rooted that it could not easily be 2 Namely, Conrad Lindberg and Hiroshi Yonekura. For Yonekura, see note 12. Lindberg has edited three volumes of the VC'yclif Bible: Prefatory Epistles of St Jerome (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 1978;, The Book of Baruch (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 1985); The Book ofludga (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 1989)..

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