By Carol Symes, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
A pathway through which the medieval laity could access Bible stories and Christian teachings was through the allegorical cycle known as the Physiologus, or “Natural lore”. This later took the popular form of the bestiary—an illustrated text depicting the mystical meanings of the natural world, and especially of both real and mythical animals.
Christian Significance of Animal Images
When animal images were depicted, singly or in clusters, on a church wall or the margins of a book, they prompted reflection on the ways that God invited men and women to ‘read’ the ‘Bible of Creation’ by imbuing the world around them with Christian significance.
The unicorn, for example, represented the pure Incarnation of Jesus in his mother’s womb; for, according to the Physiologus, a unicorn could only be trapped by laying his head in a Virgin’s lap and falling asleep there. The pelican was the Pelican in Her Piety for, allegorically it was held that she would feed her hungry young with blood from her own breast; she was therefore a Christ figure.
Many of these allegories and motifs are present in an Old French Bible known as the Bible historiale—a translation of the Latin Vulgate with explanatory notes and illustrations composed in the late 13th century by a Flemish canon called Guyart des Moulins. Guyart, however, explicitly edited materials that he felt should not be translated for the laity, and reorganized others to make them more accessible. Another popular Bible was dominated by pictures, the Bible moralisée, and this one was even more heavily edited. Similar translation projects were undertaken in both Catalan and Castilian.
This article comes directly from content in the video series The Medieval Legacy. Watch it now, on Wondrium.
Hardening of Church Doctrine
Because these French adaptations and their romance counterparts were vetted by theologians, they escaped what was otherwise a hardening of Church doctrine with respect to translation, among many other matters.
At the beginning of his pontificate in 1199, Innocent III banned all versions of the Bible not authorized explicitly by the papacy, as part of his larger program of centralized power and a crackdown of lay heretics. In 1234, Church synods in Toulouse and Tarragona (Spain) even banned the possession of unauthorized versions. These moves were aimed to suppress communities of Christians whom the Church condemned as Cathars, and who were the target of a brutal military campaign known as the Albigensian Crusade.
Many so-called Cathar groups were led by women, and many advocated for the reading and interpretation of the Bible by average laypeople, in their own languages. So, within the space of a generation, what had been relatively uncontroversial became highly ideological and extremely dangerous.
The Middle English Bible
Yet, this did not put a stop to ever more audacious and openly defiant translation projects in the 14th and 15th centuries, especially after the Black Death’s social leveling had revealed the fiction behind any elite claims to inherent superiority.
The most famous of these translation projects is the Middle English Bible championed by the Oxford-trained theologian John Wycliffe. Wycliffe and his followers, derisively known as Lollards, were motivated by concerns for economic and political justice, as well as by evangelical fervor; they were among many outspoken European critics of the Church’s wealth and corruption—a movement known as anti-clericalism—and they preached in public that Church property should be liquidated and distributed to the poor.
In the prologue to the Wycliffite translation, equal access to the Bible is represented as a necessary element of this wider mission.
Reforming and Conservative Clerics
By the beginning of the 16th century, when the widespread availability of printed books was making reading easier, cheaper, and more accessible, the Church’s prohibition against translation was emerging as a major flashpoint in debates among reforming and conservative clerics.
John Wycliffe had been posthumously condemned at the Council of Constance and his younger counterpart, Jan Hus of Prague, had been burned at the stake in 1415 when his championship of the Czech Bible was declared heretical. So, when Martin Luther published his translation of the New Testament in German, in 1522, he was throwing the weight of his newfound Protestant influence behind a much, much older trend.
Indeed, like so many of the other Protestant teachings that caused a permanent rift within the medieval Church—the marriage of priests, the condemnation of corruption and the sale of indulgences—this would not have been controversial prior to the 12th century. As we have so often seen, much of what might be seen as characteristic of the Middle Ages as a whole, tends to be an aberration of the later three centuries of that period, when the ecclesiastical and secular rulers had more power to articulate and enforce their policies.
The Mass Became a Vernacular Event
The Counter-Reformation Roman Catholic Church would, in the end, double down at the Council of Trent in 1550s and ’60s, rejecting all the improvements that had been made to the text of the Latin Bible by scholars versed in new critical methods and knowledge of the ancient Hebrew and Greek texts.
Instead, it insisted that the laity should have no direct access to scripture via the vernacular. That position did not begin to change until the Second Vatican Council of the 1960s when, for the first time, the Mass itself became a vernacular event. Yet such restrictions, imposed from the top down, did little to hinder the Catholic layperson’s practical access to the Bible.
And meanwhile, the emphasis on direct access to the scriptures became the shared hallmark of all Protestant denominations, to varying degrees. Daily readings, the use of the Bible for everyday guidance and even divination or fortune-telling, and the emphasis on Bible study are all outgrowths of the vernacular Bible’s ubiquity after the Reformation. But the groundwork for this popular reception had already been laid centuries earlier, and is another fundamental medieval legacy.
Common Questions about the Church’s View of the Many Translations of Bible
The unicorn represented the pure Incarnation of Jesus in his mother’s womb.
Bible historiale is an Old French Bible—a translation of the Latin Vulgate with explanatory notes and illustrations composed in the late 13th century by a Flemish canon called Guyart des Moulins.
John Wycliffe was one of the many outspoken European critics of the Church’s wealth and corruption. He preached in public that Church property should be liquidated and distributed to the poor.
