Alternative Histories

Very quickly – a couple of excerpts from previous posts with Reformation-related material.

In both cases, the point of bringing them forward is to remind you that the historical sketch of the Reformation – before, during and after – that we’ve all been taught as part of our high school and even college classes is just that – a sketch. And the deeper you dig, the more you see how…sketchy that sketch is and how skewed or even straight-up wrong all the related assumptions can be: All pre-Reformation Catholics were ignorant of the Bible and in fact, prohibited from reading it; Everyone welcomed the teachings of Luther and subsequent reformers;the Reformation was about freedom and individual liberty….

So let’s start with the Bible – and the assumptions about pre-Reformation European Christians and the Bible.

(first – as an aside – take a look at this Twitter thread from earlier today on the wealth of pre-Reformation vernacular Scripture translations that existed.) 

1/Today seems to be a good day to dispel the myth that Bible was not translated into vernacular before the #Reformation (img: OE Hexateuch) pic.twitter.com/D6UGPsfXQy

— Mateusz Fafinski (@Calthalas) October 31, 2017

This past May, I shared an article about vernacular Bible reading in the medieval period:

……it all comes down to a European landscape that was politically and ecclesially diverse, even before the Reformation. In some countries, Bible-reading was discouraged, in others, it flourished. Most of the time when individual Bible-reading or production was discouraged or prohibited, it was because of burgeoning or actual heretical movements that used and manipulated Scripture as part of their agenda. Most interesting to me was how in some areas even after Luther, it wasn’t Bibles that were prohibited by Catholic authorities – it was Bibles with Lutheran glosses. Aha.

Also important to note: during these centuries, when talking about the relationship of individual Christians to Scripture, it is useful and even necessary to broaden our sense of what “the Bible” is beyond a volume containing all the books of the Old and New Testaments. These were rare and expensive, but far more common were volumes that contained portions of Scripture: psalters, of course, but also the Gospels, or books with the Scripture readings from Mass or even books with, say, the Biblical accounts of the Passion.

So:

On the eve of the Council of Trent, there was no outright ban on vernacular Bible reading in the Catholic world, but only regionally diversified positions. In Germany, the Low Countries, Bohemia, Poland, and Italy, vernacular Bibles circulated and were widely read since the Middle Ages. Censorship measures, however, existed in England and Spain, where the official Church had to deal with what it considered erroneous “Bible-based” faith-systems. In France, it was the advent of l’évangélisme in the 1520s that gave cause to more restrictive measures. In all cases, however, the question should be asked to which degree such censorship measures were effective or whether the laity anyway continued to read their Bibles.

 

Recent scholarship has re-emphasized that the late medieval Catholic Church did not forbid the reading of the Bible in the vernacular, and that there was simply no central roman policy pertaining to Bible reading in the vernacular—let alone an outright ban—that could have been in force everywhere in Western europe, and that biblical books circulated in most of late medieval Western europe’s linguistic regions. the manifold copies containing (parts of) the Bible, both in manuscript and in print form that are still preserved in libraries and archives everywhere in europe are testament to this historical fact.4 the most interesting copies show traces of intensive use, names of owners, and marginal annotations (next to sporadic interventions of censorship). taken together with book lists, found in the inventories of libraries, wills, and estate recordings, as well as other testimonies, both archival and printed, the picture emerges of a community of readers, consisting of (lay) members of religious orders, Beguines and tertiaries, in addition to lay people in the medieval towns, who took an interest in the Bible for their spiritual edification. and although the practice of silent reading became more and more prevalent with the emergence of late medieval spiritual reform movements, which precisely promoted personal Bible reading, one should not lose sight of the continued practice of reading aloud in (smaller) groups, so that the “illiterate” could also hear and profit from this reading. in this sense, one copy of a book usually reached multiple “listeners” or “passive readers.”

Recent scholarship has also prompted a reflection on what the notion of “Bible” might include. since the reformation era (and modern research dealing with this period), there is a tendency to consider the Bible in the strict sense as a complete collection of canonical books of the old and/or new testament. it should, however, be observed that the Middle ages leave us with a broader understanding about what the notion of the “Bible” might include. apart from separate books (the Gospels, the apocalypse etc.), the notion “Bible” also relates to collections containing the epistle and Gospel readings from the Mass—sometimes accompanied with short explanations—and Psalters, viz. books that were destined to prepare or to follow the liturgy in the church. in addition, History Bibles should be mentioned, which contain mainly the narrative matter of the Bible, albeit supplemented with extra-biblical and even apocryphal material. apart from “Bibles,” in which the “canonical” text of the scriptures is dominant, “Bible-based material” also circulated widely in the Middle ages, such as Gospel harmonies, lives of Jesus—containing either a text that was close to the canonical scriptures as well as clear-cut retellings—next to postils in which the extensive explanations and glosses overshadowed, to a certain extent, the biblical text itself.

And then, in January, I took a look at an article about a woman who fought the Reformation any way she could – including through poetry:

Bijns was one of the very few Catholic lay people in the Low Countries who was prepared to take her fight for the Catholic cause into the public domain, and she was the only one to do this in vernacular print. The work of many rederijkers reflected the growing interest in evangelical ideas, or attempted to find a middle ground between old and new ideas, but there are very few examples of zealous defences of the Catholic faith in rederijker circles. There is only one rederijker play from before the Dutch Revolt which takes up the gauntlet against the Reformation. In this play entitled, Tspel van de Cristenkercke (c. 1540), a character called Dr. Genuine Scriptural Proof introduces a plot in which the virgin Honest Simple Faith holds out against the advances of Self Regard, the son of Heresy. Its author, the Flemish bookbinder Reynier Pouwelsz, may have written it to reaffirm his loyalty to the Catholic faith as he had been charged with selling forbidden books a few years earlier. Although we know of many Catholic poems that derided the Reformation, these were rarely published in print, and mostly date from after 1560. The first author genuinely to follow in Bijns’s footsteps was another woman, Katarina Boudewyns, whose Prieelken der gheestelyker wellusten [Bower of Spiritual Joy] appeared in Brussels in 1587. Like Bijns, Boudewyns presented both (Marian) devotional poems and spirited attacks on the heretics, especially the Calvinists who had ruled Brussels in the early 1580s. So why was work like that of Bijns such a rarity?

The article explores that last question – and concludes that up to a point, heresy had been presented as a moral problem – one was a heretic because of pride – and therefore a problem for clerics and spiritual directors. A lay person didn’t interfere in another lay person’s spiritual battle. But then, eventually, the issue came to be seen as one of principle and ideas, and could  – and should be – argued in the public square.

Note that at one point, though, Bijns complains about the way in which the clergy are not picking up the slack and doing their job:

Decades earlier, Bijns had also expressed her frustration at the perceived lack of leadership in a struggle for which she declared herself willing to die. One of her refreinen in Book II responded to the praise heaped on her by a Flemish cleric:

When I let my eye dwell over the various estates, I am amazed that there are so many learned men today who do almost nothing to resist Luther’s arrogant teachings [. . .] and however much I try, one person can’t make a dance. Heretics may note my work, but they make fun of it, thinking it’s just woman’s work [. . .]. So put your mind to it, priest, as a brave champion, take up the pen, and it will easily have an impact. You have been appointed watchman, let your trumpet sound, seeing the enemies surrounding the people of God.