31 - The Bible in the fifteenth century

Summary

The medieval Bible was hardly a book at all, but a collection of ancient writings in translation. Even when unadorned by glosses or other commentary, which was rare, the Bible’s sixty-six books and eight apocryphal writings were still difficult to separate from layers of interpretation. The translations of Jerome and others made the first layer (several books of the Vulgate were taken from the Latin version that predated Jerome; and the Vulgate’s Psalms were in Jerome’s second translation, from the Greek Septuagint, not the original Hebrew). Prologues made a second layer. The Old Testament prologues were taken from various of Jerome’s writings. The New Testament prologues came from diverse sources but circulated under the saint’s name. This rare, less adorned Vulgate was the form taken by early printed Bibles: text with prologues, often traditional but, as in the case of the German and Czech translations, sometimes new. Usually the Bible was read in parts with commentary or in the form of semi-biblical narratives. It was less a book than a body of ancient literature at the core of past and present attempts to repeat, adapt, fathom and replicate its discourse, the ‘base text’ of ‘highly imaginative commentaries, moralisations, and figures used to illumine the biblical significances’.

It was also a controlled literature. Henry of Langenstein, while professor of theology at Vienna in the 1380s, lectured on Jerome’s prologue to the Bible, before turning to the Pentateuch prologue and the book of Genesis. He made a fascinating observation. The meaning of biblical language involved both authorial and reading intentions. The souls of both writers and readers came to their tasks with certain interests and moral powers. This implied a textual community stretching over time and a mingling of wills subject to the agency of the Holy Spirit, who was responsible for inspiration at both ends of biblical literacy, the textual source and the human target.