Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-6bf8c574d5-8gtf8 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-02-19T04:58:29.399Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Chapter IV - English Versions of the Bible, 1525–1611

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2008

By
S. L. Greenslade
Edited by
S. L. Greenslade
Get access

Summary

Tyndale

The survival of some two hundred manuscripts of the Wycliffite versions, most of them written after the synods of Oxford and London, A.D. 1407–9, is sufficient evidence of a demand for the Scriptures in English which legislation could not stifle. With the invention of printing (even if that did not immediately bring cheap and plentiful copies of the Bible) the galling knowledge that vernacular versions were circulating, sometimes with the consent of the Church, in most European countries must have stiffened determination to get an English translation into print. Further stimulus came from the teaching of Colet at home and from the Reformation in Germany and Switzerland. Simultaneously the quickening of scholarship manifest in the Complutensian Polyglot and Erasmus's Greek Testament meant that no mere rendering of the Vulgate would suffice, although one made from the original languages must provoke greater opposition from ecclesiastical authority. England was fortunate to have in William Tyndale the man who could do what was wanted, a man of sufficient scholarship to work from Hebrew and Greek, with genius to fashion a fitting English idiom and faith and courage to persist whatever it cost him.

Publication

With an Oxford education behind him (B.A. 1512, M.A. 1515), followed by a period of study at Cambridge, Tyndale went as tutor to the family of Sir John Walsh of Little Sodbury, Gloucestershire, where he not only found himself countering the arguments of Walsh's guests (abbots, deans, archdeacons and divers doctors, says Foxe) by open and manifest Scripture, but also translated Erasmus's Enchiridion Militis Christiani.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge History of the Bible , pp. 141 - 174
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1963

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Anderson, C., The Annals of the English Bible (London, 1845, 1862).Google Scholar
Ballinger, J., The Bible in Wales (London, 1906)Google Scholar
Barlow, William, The summe and substance of the conference (1604).
Bruce, F. F., The English Bible (London, 1961).Google Scholar
Butterworth, C. C., The Literary Lineage of the King James Bible, 1340–1611 (Philadelphia, 1941).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Campbell, W. E., Erasmus, Tyndale and More (1949).Google Scholar
Carleton, J. G., The Part of Rheims in the Making of the English Bible (Oxford, 1902).Google Scholar
Chambers, R. W., On the Continuity of English Prose, E.E.T.S. no. 186 (1932)
Cotton, H., Edi⃛ions of the Bible and Parts thereof in English, 1505–1850 (Oxford, 1852).Google Scholar
Daiches, D., The King James Version of the English Bible…with special reference to the Hebrew Tradition (Chicago, 1941).Google Scholar
Darlow, T. H. and Moule, H. T., Historical Catalogue of the Printed Editions of Holy Scripture in the Library of the British and Foreign Bible Society, part 1 (London, 1903).Google Scholar
Davidson, R. T. in Macmillan's Magazine (1881)
Dickens, A. G., Lollards and Protestants in the Diocese of York (Oxford, 1959).Google Scholar
Dix, E. R. M., The Earliest Dublin Printing (Dublin, 1901)Google Scholar
Eadie, J., The English Bible, 2 vols. (London, 1876).Google Scholar
Fry, F., Description of the Great Bible of 1539 (London, 1865).Google Scholar
Fry, F., The First New Testament Printed in the English Language (Bristol, 1862). [Facsimile of the 1526 N.T.]Google Scholar
Handover, P. M., Printing in London (London, 1960). [Especially valuable for the Bible trade in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.]Google Scholar
Hutchison, F. E., ‘Sir Thomas More as a Translator of the Bible’, Review of English Studies, xvii (1941)Google Scholar
Hutson, H. H. and Willoughby, H. R. in the Crozier Quarterly (1939).
Lovett, R. (ed.), The English Bible in the John Rylands Library (Manchester, 1899).Google Scholar
Mombert, J. I., A Hand-book of the English Versions of the Bible (New York, 1883).Google Scholar
Mombert, J. I., English Versions of the Bible (London, 1906).Google Scholar
Mombert, J. L., Wm. Tyndale's Pentateuch…1530 (London, 1884).Google Scholar
Mozley, J. F., Coverdale and his Bibles (London, 1953).Google Scholar
Mozley, J. F., William Tyndale (London, 1937).Google Scholar
Nijhoff, W. and Kronenberg, M. E., Nederlandsche Bibliographic, 1500–1540 (The Hague, 1923, 1940, 1942).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
O'Cúiv, Shan, Irish Ecclesiastical Record, LXXVI (1951).
Parry, Thomas, A History of Welsh Literature, transl. from Welsh by Idris, H. Bell (Oxford, 1955).Google Scholar
Pollard, A. W. and Redgrave, G. R., A Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, and Ireland and of English Books printed abroad, 1475–1640 (London, 1926).Google Scholar
Pollard, A. W., Records of the English Bible (Oxford, 1911).Google Scholar
Pollard, A. W., The Beginning of the New Testament translated by William Tyndale (Oxford, 1926). [Facsimile of the 1525 fragment.]Google Scholar
Pollard, A. W., The Holy Bible: an exact reprint of the Authorised Version 1611 (Oxford, 1911).Google Scholar
Pope, O.P., English Versions of the Bible, revised and amplified by Rev. Sebastian Bullough, O.P. (London, 1952).Google Scholar
Robinson, H. W. (ed.), The Bible in its Ancient and English Versions (Oxford, 1940), rev. ed. 1954, chaps. VI, VII (Isaacs, J.).Google Scholar
Sheppard, L. A. in The Library, 4th ser. XVI (1935).Google Scholar
Taft's, A. I. edition of the Apology, with introduction and notes, E.E.T.S. no. 180 (1930)
Wallis, N. H., The New Testament Translated by William Tyndale 1534 (Cambridge, 1938).Google Scholar
Weigle, L. ed.), The New Testament Octapla (New York and Edinburgh, 1962). [This contains Tyndale, The Great, Genevan, Bishops' and Rhemes versions, James, King (A.V.), American Standard Version, Revised Standard Version.]Google Scholar
Westcott, B. F., A General View of the History of the English Bible (London, 1868), 3rd ed. revised by Wright, W. A. (1905).Google Scholar
Westcott, B. F., A General View of the History of the English Bible, 3rd ed., revised by Wright, W. A. (London, 1905).Google Scholar
Whitley, W. T., The English Bible under the Tudor Sovereigns (1937)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×