Middle English Bible translations covers the age of Middle English (c. 1100–1500), beginning after the Norman Conquest (1066) and ending about 1500.
The most well-known and preserved translations are those of the Wycliffean bibles.
Between two and four Middle English translations of each book of the New Testament still exist, mainly from the late 1300s, and at least two vernacular Psalters, plus various poetic renditions of bible stories, and numerous translations of sections and verses in published sermons and commentaries. The cost and translation effort of complete bibles (pandects) favoured the production of selections and compilations of significant passages.
Sources of Scripture
Historian Richard Marsden notes a mediated bible: "Although it is true that there was almost no direct translation of the Bible into the vernacular before the Wycliffites, we simply cannot ignore the astonishingly large and varied corpus of Bible-based vernacular works which had begun to appear from the very early years of the 13th century onwards, under ecclesiastical influence (largely in response to the demands of the Lateran Council of 1215 for a more proactive approach to educating the laity in spiritual discipline). They included universal Bible histories[...], metrical paraphrases of Old Testament biblical books, devotional texts, versions of the Psalms, Gospel narratives (canonical and apochryphal), and so on."
Historian James Morey, looking at "all Middle English poetry and prose that consisted largely of biblical material" wrote that "when taken as a whole nearly all of the Old and New Testaments exist in Middle English before the Wycliffites began their project in the 1380s," though "these contents are idiosyncratic and eclectic." The catalogs of medieval libraries show "frequent entries" for manuscripts of glossed books of the Bible. For Morey, "the Wycliffites are ‘first’ in their coordinated efforts to produce a complete scholarly English Bible" and their project was characterized by "care, prestige, and organization" rather than operating in a vernacular vacuum.
+ Sources of Scripture Oral Interspersed in written works Collated Vocabulary Dialect; custom; sermons Interlinear; Glossed (e.g. Wycliffite Glossed Gospels) Word-for Word translation (e.g., Wycliffite Early Version); the common word book Interpretation of Hebrew Names Poetic Prayers; dramas; song; recited poems Alliterive (e.g., Ormulum); metrical (e.g English metrical homilies from manuscripts of the fourteenth century); Book of Hours Psalters; Metrical (e.g., Middle English Metrical Paraphrase of the Old Testament), Stanzaic Life of Christ Prosodic Sermons; memorized passages; sayings; stories Scholarship; commentary; written sermons; histories; literature; summaries (e.g. Middle English Bible Summary) Gospel Books; New Testaments (E.g. Paues' Middle English Fourteenth Century New Testament); Bibles (e.g., Wycliffite Later Version); Gospel harmonies; Life of Christ paraphrases, anthologies
According to some historians, the culture was saturated with key biblical knowledge. For example, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales contains over 700 biblical allusions.
Times Linguistic diversity and flux Language in Britain in the early second millennium was in considerable flux and diversity:In Wales in the 1100s, not only was Welsh spoken but also Flemish in Pembrokeshire enclaves. Also English around Cardiff, especially in the Welsh Marchers, arisocratic French. the population of England used numerous dialects of four main languages: Old then Middle English, Old Norse then Anglo-Norman French, Medieval Latin, and Cornish. Cumbric may still have been spoken in some places in the North. The Anglo-Saxon royal courts were replaced by the Anglo-Danish, then the Anglo-Norman. In the early 1000s, following King Canute's ban, any residual use of English runes ceased, in favour of Latin script augmented with several runic characters, and some Old Norse features of the Northern dialects seeped Southwards. There was a lingering strong Anglo-Scandinavian influence on literature and culture.
The Norman Conquest caused a suppression of Anglo-Saxon (the last poem in Old English dates to 1104) and Anglo-Norman language contact influenced the development of Middle English.
A psaltery glossed with Anglo-Norman exists from about 1160. "About the middle of the fourteenth century — before 1361 — the Anglo-Normans possessed an independent and probably complete translation of the whole of the Old Testament and the greater part of the New." There are several references to a 14th century Cornish translation which, if it existed, was soon lost.
Factors against vernacular translation into Early Middle English Early Middle English biblical literature was limited because the synthetic Anglo-Saxon Old English dialect continuum had broken down and was transitioning inconsistently to the analytic Middle English dialect continuum, in part with simplifications from Anglo-Norse in the Danelaw, with a duplicate Frenchified vocabulary, from 1066 to c. 1400 Anglo-Norman French was the official language of courts and government in quadrilingual England (which, from the 1300s evolved into Law French, only spoken in law courts and eventually only written), and the preferred language of the elite who could fund vernacular book production, Latin was the preferred classical, academic and church language throughout medieval Western Europe, poetic forms suited for oral transmission were more relevant to the partly-literate general population than prose, even by the late 1300s, writers doubted the expressiveness of Middle English: the writer of Chastisyng of Goddis Children preferred but did not insist on the view that biblical passages may not be translated into any vulgar word as the word stands without great circumlocution after the feeling of the first writers, which translated into Latin by the teaching of the Holy Ghost; and Cost. Even in the new, small Paris Bible format, over 50 animal skins were needed for the New Testament alone. Some historians see a rise of a literate middle class following the Black Death: this increased wealth and independence may have promoted demand for personal Bibles after the 1350s.
Format In and before the 1000s, most Bible codexes were the enormous corporate Great Bibles in Latin suited for display and public reading even at night. The 1100s saw the development of personal breviaries in Latin containing only readings in the liturgy. The 1200s saw an explosion of Bible production, in the Latin, in Europe as copying moved from being a monastic enterprise to also a commercial one. A pandect Bible format intended for personal use (liturgical, preaching, pastoral, university), the Paris Bible, was developed by the relatively new preaching orders and frequently copied as small, portable "pocket Bibles." However, the 1300s was the only fertile time for Middle English Bible translation, as now-stable Middle English became usable in court pleadings, and gained vocabulary and respectability under the influence of writers such as Chaucer. In the 1400s in England, publication of new unauthorized translations were banned, following the Lollard violence, and Middle English then transitioned to Early Modern English.
Partial translations Early The focus of vernacular biblical material was the vivid or presentation of edifying or notable contents, rather than the provision of an exhaustive facsimile of the originals. This favoured treatment of narrative episodes and psalmody over abstract theology, and the use of poetic forms that aided memorization and oral recital. For a largely illiterate or semi-literate laity, vernacular scripture was always mediated orally, visually or melodically.
The 19,000 line Ormulum, produced by the Augustinian canon Orrm of Lincolnshire around 1150, includes partial translations and paraphrases of parts of the Gospels and Acts of the Apostles from Latin into the dialect of the East Midlands, perhaps intended as declaimed sermons. The manuscript is written in the iambic septenary meter.
Sample of Early Middle English from the Ormulum (Luke 1:5):
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A notable example of the transmission of biblical stories in a vernacular in flux is the c. 1850-line La Estorie del Euangelie, a Middle English poem that paraphrases the Nativity and Passion texts; it was reformulated in least seven quite different versions between the early 1200s to the early 1400s, each in different English dialects (East, West, South Midlands version, Northern, Southern and Southwest) and vocabularies (with Scandinavian words being replaced by French words over time). Some of the versions show signs of oral transmission with re-composition, and one of the versions may have been transcribed by a non-speaker of Middle English. Material from it found its way into the Northern Passion from the English South-West.
Mid Paraphrases of many biblical passages are included in the 30,000 line Cursor Mundi, a world chronicle written about 1300.
The Stanzaic Life of Christ is a 10,840 line poem derived in large part from two Latin works Polychronicon (c. 1350) and the Golden Legend (c. 1260) and then quoted loosely in at least seven of the Middle English plays of the Chester Mystery Plays in the late 1300s.
Richard Rolle of Hampole (or de Hampole) was an Oxford-educated hermit and writer of religious texts. In the early 14th century, he produced English glosses of Latin Bible text, including the Psalms. Rolle translated the Psalms into a Northern English dialect, but later copies were written in Southern English dialects. Around the same time, an anonymous author in the West Midlands region produced another gloss of the complete Psalms: the West Midland Prose Psalter.Psalms Through the Centuries, Volume One, Susan Gillingham, John Wiley & Sons, Mar 28, 2012Midland Prose Psalter, Middle English Compendium, University of Michigan In the early years of the 14th century, a French copy of the Book of Revelation was anonymously translated into English. Prose works such as the Book to a Mother exist which are largely composed of biblical material.
Late The late 14th century saw many independent or parallel efforts to translate biblical books. The preface to the King James Bible (1611) mentions "even in our King Richard the second's days, John Trevisa translated them [the Gospels] into English, and many English Bibles in written hand are yet to be seen that divers translated, as it is very probable, in that age." A long tradition exists that John Trevisa made a translation of at least the Gospels in the late 1300s, under the patronage of Thomas, Baron Berkeley. No trace of these now exists, unless they are related to e.g., the Wycliffite Later Version.
Anna Paues (1904) edited a 14th century translation of most of the New Testament: the Epistles, Acts and part of the Gospel of Matthew which does not seem to be derived from the Wycliffite versions.Selwyn Coll. Cambridge 108 L.1, Parker 434, CUL Dd.12.39, Bodleian Douce 250, Holkham Hall 672 She subsequently published yet another translation of the Catholic epistles. Historian Andrew Kraebel has suggested that the material was in part collated from various prior translations of individual books, as the main translator found works that would relieve his effort. The Paues book also discusses other manuscripts, such as MS. Pepys 2498 (Magdalene College, Cambridge) which has a Life of Jesus (or Gospel harmony) formed from Middle English translations of the 112 readings from the church evangeliary, perhaps itself though a French translation.