21 - The Bible trade

Summary

In 1557 – a century after the publication in Mainz of the forty-two-line Bible (in the Vulgate Latin version) – the complete Bible printed in English was only twenty-two years old, the Bible printed in English in England only twenty. Indeed, before 1536 the only Bible-printing in England consisted of the first volume of a projected Vulgate edition published by Thomas Berthelet in 1535. By the end of the seventeenth century British printers had produced in Latin only about nine complete Bibles and about thirty-three New Testaments, along with a handful in Greek, indicating that the demand for Bibles in those languages was not really sufficient to justify their being printed locally, the demand being met in large part by Continental editions. The story of the Bible trade in Britain is essentially, therefore, the story of the Bible in the vernacular. The earliest vernacular editions too were printed abroad, a practice dictated by ecclesiastical and political opposition at home to Tyndale’s translation. Domestic opposition, however, began to diminish with the worsening relations between Henry VIII and Rome and the subsequent confirmation of the King as ‘only Supreme Head in earth of the Church of England’, and in 1536 there appeared the first English New Testament actually printed in England – an edition of Tyndale’s version – followed in 1537 by a complete Bible in Coverdale’s version.