Latin and the Vernacular at the Dawn of the English Reformation

i
Perhaps the most significant feature of the religious reform movement of the first half of the 16th century was the aim of getting behind the Latin of the Vulgate, much of which the early reformers dismissed as nothing but a shadow, a translation often a translation of a translation and laying bare the very word of God as it was revealed in the ancient texts. This was particularly so in England, where the translation of the Bible into English had been proscribed since Wycliffe. By contrast, in Germany there had been fully twenty translations of the Bible between 1466 and 1522, the most notable being the Mentel Bible, a literal translation of the Vulgate, while in France des Moulins Bible Historiale again based largely on the Vulgate, but with adaptations, summaries and omissions had circulated since medieval times, and went through eight printed editions from 1487 to 1521 (see, e.g., Dickens, 32). In England, however, after the suppression

of the Wycliffite Bible in the early 15th century no translation of the Vulgate was attempted until well after the Reformation; the Douay-Rheims Bible was a Catholic response to Protestant translations of the Bible, precisely the reverse of the situation in other Protestant countries where, by and large, the laity already had access to translations of the Vulgate into the vernacular before Protestant translations began to appear. As a result, the act of translating the Bible into English and, along with it, the liturgy is seen as a more or less uniquely reformist endeavour. However, that endeavour is riddled with paradox. The earliest surviving form of many parts of the Bible is itself a translation or retelling of some lost original; the results of the Protestant reformists labours would be yet another translation; and the role of the priest in mediating between God and His flock would in some ways become, not more transparent, but more obscure not simply a matter of interpreting the Latin of the Vulgate, with which (as the following pages will attempt to demonstrate) the laity had been familiar all their lives, but of trying to explain to the layman the arcana of more ancient and inaccessible texts, some in Latin, many in Greek and Hebrew, from which the English translation was derived. The fundamental problem is that translation necessarily involves interpretation and this, essentially, is why the whole issue of the translation of the Bible and the liturgy into the vernacular was such a vexed question and occasioned so much controversy. How does one ever express or convey the conceptual and ideological

frameworks of a text belonging to another language and culture except by approximations and compromise? What determines whether, for example, the word given in the Vulgate as confiteri should be translated as to confess or to acknowledge? Should the Greek (ekklesia) be church or congregation? Is u (presbuteros) priest or senior? Is a (agape) charity or love? Is (kharis) grace or favour? These particular examples, of course, are famous as ones that Thomas More took exception to in Tyndales translation of the New Testament, but the issue goes much deeper than the translation of mere lexical items. Brian Cummings (passim, but see particularly 206-213) has written a beautifully lucid and coherent explanation of how the debate on free will and predestination in English hinges, to a considerable extent, on the epistemic and deontic properties of modal verbs; biblical assertions of what must or shall or can or cannot be are frequently ambiguous in English, depending on whether they are seen as observations or obligations. This ambiguity is not there in Latin, Greek or Hebrew in the same way. Hence, in a very real sense, the theological issue is predicated by a grammatical or linguistic one. Of course, in our post-Saussurean, post-Barthean, postDerridan, post-structuralist world, we are better placed to appreciate that the search for the Word is a chimera, a will-o-the-wisp that eludes us all the more the more we try to take hold of it. The Word is ineffable. We cannot pin it down, cannot define it. But if they could not pin down the Word the religious controversialists of the 16th

and 17th centuries could certainly produce words, millions and millions of them, and from those words spring assumptions and counter-assumptions, allegiances and betrayals, accusations and condemnations, with some disputants resolving themselves into a nexus around one broad set of consensual definitions, and others resolving themselves around another. By the 17th century this process of separation and distillation of Protestant and Catholic perceptions had congealed itself pretty conclusively into two interwoven discourses, essentially cognate and closely related, but vehemently hostile. Thus when, for example, Toby Matthew berates the Protestant translators of the Bible who expresse, poenitentiam agite, by the wordes of Repentance only, and not of doing pennance (****6v), he sides with St. Jerome and a millennium of Christian tradition in interpreting the Greek (metanoeo) as an act, rather than a state of mind. The King James Bible might be closer to the Greek in its use of repent and repentance but Catholics, of course, remained committed to the Latin of the Vulgate. At the same time, though, Catholic scholars set to work in counterpoint to their Protestant counterparts, examining the earlier sources on which the Vulgate was backed, and so could back up their position, in this case, with the claim that do penance (as the Douay-Rheims Bible has it) is closer to the idea of the Hebrew (nacham). By the time that Toby Matthew was writing, Protestants and Catholics had effectively developed into separate discourse communities. They had consolidated their positions and developed their

own interpretations, each to the effective exclusion of the terms of reference of the other. During the Henrician period, however, this process was just beginning to get under way, and the present paper explores what Timothy Rosendale calls the crucial role played...by language itself in shaping and defining the English Reformation (Fiery Toungues 1143) during the early years of the 16th century. Unlike Rosendale, however, I do not take at face value the view that:
For the English Reformers, Latin was a damnable sham, an obfuscatory veil behind which the Church worked its corruption; the Latin Mass and the suppression of vernacular Scripture were the linguistic means by which the papacy maintained its fraudulent stranglehold over the nations and people of Europe. And, in a less polemical sense, this was actually the case... (Fiery Toungues 1146; c.f., Liturgy and Literature 61)

Rosendales stated conceptual framework for this view of things is that provided by Benedict Anderson, who writes, The astonishing power of the papacy in its noonday is only comprehensible in terms of a trans-European Latinwriting clerisy, and a conception...that the bilingual intelligentsia, by mediating between vernacular and Latin, mediated between earth and heaven (15-16). Rosendale and Anderson are specific in applying this interpretation of events not only to England but to the situation prevailing across Europe at the dawn of the 15th century. Hence it would not be surprising that rather similar comments have been made about the rise of the vernacular in, for example, Italy:

The rise of the vernacular against Latin is pictured as a fight of the lay spirit against Church authority, of democracy against the forces of feudalism and absolutism, of patriotism against foreign or international influences, or of the openminded plain citizen against the narrow professional interest of Academic cliques. (121-122)

The surprise for some might be that Paul Kristeller, who made these remarks half a century ago, did so in order to debunk them. While he concedes that such a view may contain a nucleus of truth, he nevertheless concludes that religious and ecclesiastical interests were not identified with the use of Latin or opposed to the vernacular (122). Indeed, Brucioli had published the Bible in Italian during the 1530s and, though there were moves to repress vernacular translations of the Scriptures from the 1540s on (see, e.g., Waquet 45), it was only during the 1560s, after the Index of Trent and the prohibitions of Paul IV, that the official stance hardened definitively (see, e.g., Putman 190). The idea that the vernacular was a revolutionary force, sweeping away the cobwebs of obfuscation and tyranny woven by the use of Latin, is full of pitfalls and caveats. In Italy, far from being the language of humanism and democracy, the vernacular was cultivated at many feudal and monarchical courts whereas Latin literature was often promoted in the free republics...the development of vernacular literature...was not merely the concern of the plain citizen and, of course, for Italians, Latin could not easily be discarded as a foreign language (Kristeller, 122). As Hay reminds us, Latin and the vernacular were often used by the same writers and even writers who

normally wrote in a vulgar tongue were steeped in Latin at school (409). Latin cannot simply be seen as the language of hegemony, whether of the church or of the state, nor can the vernacular be seen purely as an agent of liberation. The reality is much more complicated than that, but the complexities have a way of being glossed over by generalisations that obscure as much as they reveal. This paper, then, sets out to trace some of the contours of that complexity, giving particular emphasis to the importance of Latin to the early English reformers and of the vernacular to the religious conservatives. The huge growth in the use of the vernacular, and of translation from Latin into English, was not primarily driven by the reform movement, but rather an inevitable result of the invention of the printing press; Latin was by no means as incomprehensible to the laity as is generally supposed; nor did the Protestant reformers eschew or abandon the use of Latin as a medium for communication, any more than their Catholic counterparts rejected the use of English; insofar as religious conservatives did oppose the use of the vernacular it was largely because translations were often a vehicle for the covert dissemination of heterodox ideas; and despite the best intentions of reformist and conservative divines the main issue at stake, during the Henrician period at least, was not so much the question of whether the laity understood the subtleties of the Christian faith as whether justification and support could be found for actions and policies which were essentially political and mundane.

ii
The use of English as a vehicle for religious devotion has a long pedigree, stretching back far further than the Reformation. Richard Rolle, Walter Hilton, the author of The Cloud of Unknowing, Julian of Norwich, and Margery Kempe all wrote in English, and the tendency for Wycliffe to overshadow these in some ways prefigures the situation during the early years of the sixteenth century when, as Bennett says, Nowhere was the desire to make works in foreign tongues available to Englishmen more strongly felt than by authors of religious and homiletic works (57; see also 65-70), most of them firmly Catholic but somehow eclipsed by Tyndale. There was a steady flow of publications of religious literature in English from the time of the invention of the printing press on, and of the 450 or so books published in England before 1501 (Duff lists 432, but he has missed a few), 88 were religious works in English (White, appendix 1), including John Lydgates translation of Deguileville, The Pylgremage of the Sowle, and his Lyf of our Lady, John Mirks Festial of English Sermons, Nicholas Loves translation of Speculum Vitae Christi, Walter Hiltons Scala Perfecc[i]onis, The Meditatns of Saint Bernard, the works of John Alcock and Jacobus de Voragines Legenda Aurea. The years leading up to Englands break with Rome saw works by such figures as Margaret Beaufort, Thomas Betson, William Bonde, John Fisher, Thomas More and John Rastell, with a list of publications that includes accounts of Christs passion, of papal bulls

and indulgences, and of the life of Thomas Becket (the latter in verse), along with such titles as the Boke of Comfort Agaynste all Tribulacions, The Dyetary of Ghostly Helthe and The Myrroure of Oure Lady. There were also numerous translations during this period, including works by Augustine, Bonaventura, Erasmus and Vives, the Ars Moriendi, Imitatio Christi, Lordinaire des Chrestiens, the Sarum martyrology, St. Peter of Luxemborgs The Boke Entytuled the Next Way to Heuen, Edmund of Abingdons Speculum Ecclesi (translated as Myrrour of the Chyrche) and William Hendreds translation of Deguileville, published as The Booke of the Pylgrymage of Man. This wealth of orthodox religious material in English in the early 16th century is frequently ignored. Targoff, for example, acknowledges the existence of The Lay Folks Mass Book but otherwise makes no mention of all this evidence of a thriving religious literature in English during this period. On the contrary, he cites an anecdotal reconstruction of events, written over a quarter of a century after they happened, as evidence that such literature was routinely suppressed. According to Targoff, John Foxes account of the persecution (in 1532) of one Thomas Harding for possessing religious books written in English, accurately conveys the anxiety in the preReformation church over the unauthorized spreading of the English word (20). That would be fair comment if Targoff acknowledged the extent of authorised spreading of the English word, but he does not. Foxes anecdote is as Targoff himself says sensational, and gives the

impression that the authorities hounded Harding simply because he possessed religious works in English. There were dozens even hundreds of religious books in English which Harding could legitimately have been in possession of, but although Foxe gives no details we can presume fairly safely that what he actually possessed were reformist works, most of which were published abroad and smuggled into the country. In fact, in 1532, the time of Hardings persecution, there were not all that many reformist texts actually available in English far fewer than their conservative counterparts. Perhaps Harding possessed Tyndales The Obedice of a Christen Man (and how Christ Rulers Ought to Governe), or Joyes Ortulus Anime. The Garden of the Soule, which was the first of the English-language Primers (paraliturgical texts which developed from the medieval Horae, or Books of Hours) and had numerous reformist features. Or perhaps he owned A Compendious Olde Treatyse, Shewynge howe that we Oughte to Haue ye Scripture in Englysshe, an updated version of a Lollard translation of a medieval Latin text by Richard Ullerston, or Simon Fishs translation of Henricus Bomelius, entitled The Summe of the Holye Scripture, or A Supplicacyon for the Beggers, a vitriolic attack on the Catholic Church. All of these were published in Antwerp between 1528 and 1530, while Christopher Saint Germans A Dialogue in Englisshe, Bytwyxte a Doctour of Dyvynyte, and a Student in the Lawes of Englande (1529) another possible candidate for Hardings collection - was published anonymously in England.

It was not the language of these works which occasioned their suppression by the authorities but their reformist content; had they been written in Latin their circulation among the laity would doubtless have been suppressed with equal vigour. Far from being universally proscribed, the use of the vernacular was so prevalent that even the spread of reformist ideas in England during the early 16th century was due, in part, to translations made, not by the reformers themselves, but by orthodox Catholics seeking to refute them. The first attempt to translate Luthers ninety-five theses (which were, of course, written and circulated in Latin) into English was by the conservative John Fisher and, as Cummings says, To dispute with Luther, Fisher had to translate him (188). Fishers efforts were notably followed by those of Thomas More and even of Henry VIII himself. As Raynor puts it, referring to the religious conservatives who opposed Luther: By quoting passages from Luthers works in their books, the result was that everyone who was interested, whether for or against, could gather all that they needed to know about the Reformation doctrines (47). In many ways, the Henrician Reformation was characterised more by a perpetuation of Catholic thought than by any pronounced Protestant tendencies, and the religious temper of the 1520s and 30s is perhaps best exemplified by the Bridgettine order which, right up until its suppression in the late 1530s, was active in promoting both the study of the Bible and the use of the vernacular the very features most commonly associated with

Protestant reform. The Bridgettine monk Richard Whitford, author of Werke for Housholders and Werke of Preparation, is hailed as the devotional best-seller of the 1530s (ODNB), and William Bonde, another Bridgettine monk, author of The Pylgrimage of Perfection (1526; 2nd, enlarged, edition, 1531), is notable for having started to write in Latin but then deciding instead to write in English in order to reach a wider audience (see, e.g., Bennett 58). Bondes work has been described as a summa of late medieval teachings on the religious life (Rhodes 22, cited in ODNB), and both these authors exemplify the continuation, even after the Reformation, of a wellestablished tradition of orthodox Catholic literature in English. This pattern of Catholic use of the vernacular continues as the 16th century progresses; even when Catholicism was restored as the state religion under Mary, twenty one of the thirty five Primers printed during her reign (STC 16058-16086) were in English or English and Latin and, from about the middle of the century on, Catholic editions of works by or attributed to Saint Augustine, for example, came out in roughly the same numbers as Protestant ones and, indeed, some of the Protestant editions were based on, or adapted from, Catholic translations.

iii
Just as religious conservatives made use of the vernacular so, of course, reformists made use of Latin. There were many factors determining whether Latin or the vernacular was used in any given publication during the first half of the 16th century, and religion should not be viewed as the only or even the prime one. Obviously, a large part of the reason for the use of Latin by Protestant writers lies with the intended readership. Where the aim was to debate theological issues Latin was more likely to be the language used, and if the issue was to be opened up to scholars in Europe then Latin was more or less essential. Furthermore, Erasmian humanism was partly based on a rejection of the supposedly debased Latin of the medieval scholastics and a return to the majesty of classical Latin, and Protestants and Catholics alike were swept up in that trend (see, e.g., Wizeman 5). There were changes taking place regarding the use of the vernacular in other fields apart from the religious, and the spread of religious literature in English is, at some levels, part of a wider process of democratisation which was arising naturally from the development of printing. There were also political issues that, not infrequently, were at least as significant as religious ones; Henry VIIIs quarrel with Luther, for example, helps explain why much

of Luthers work was not published in English translation until after Henrys death. To understand how misconceptions have arisen concerning the use of Latin by the early reformers it may be useful to examine the way in which the historical reality has become, as it were, mythologized over the years. One of the most famous images that has impinged itself on the Anglican collective consciousness is that of Hugh Latimer refusing to address the court in Latin during his trial, claiming that he had been, as Gilpen puts it, very little conversant with Latin these twenty years (487), and there is a host of commentary from Gilpen to Rosendale (Literature and Liturgy 61) invoking Latimer, Cranmer and other early reformers in support of the thesis that English Protestantism uniformly eschewed the use of Latin and scorned it as an unknowen tongue (Ridley and Latimer, fo. A8v). One would never guess from such commentary that, in his time, Latimer himself had preached and published in Latin (Concio quam Habuit, London, 1537, and [Anglicani Pontificis] Oratio, Basle, 1537). The writers of these commentaries have taken Latimers comments which apply specifically to the use of Latin in the liturgy out of context and present them as if they were true in all contexts, failing to offer any really coherent explanation of why, from the earliest days of the Reformation, English Protestants were continuing, not only to write and publish in Latin, but even to translate English works into that language. Such, however, was the case. Saint Germans Dialogue, for example, was originally written in Latin and published

as Dialogus de Fundamentis Legum Anglie et de Conscientia (1528), while Fishs Supplicacyon was written first in English and then translated into Latin (Supplicatorius Libellus Pauperum 1530). Other early reformist literature in Latin includes Robert Barness compilation, Sentenciae ex Doctoribus Collectae, Quas Papistae Valde Impudenter Hodie Damnant (Wittenberg, 1530), and the years following Henrys break with Rome saw such reformist publications as Robert Barnes, Vitae Romanorum Pontificum (Basle, 1535) and Sententi ex Doctoribus (Wittenberg, 1536), Edward Fox, De Vera Differentia Regiae Potestatis & Ecclesiasticae (London, 1534), and the two works by Latimer already mentioned. Latin publications by English Protestants during the middle of the century (i.e., in the years immediately following the publication of The Book of Common Prayer) include John Foxe, De Lapis in Ecclesiam (1549), De Censura (1551) and, of course, Rerum in Ecclesia Gestarum (1559-1563), the Latin precursor to Actes and Monuments; John Cheke, De Obitu...Martini Buceri (1551) and his translation of Cranmer, Defensio Ver et Catholic Doctrin de Sacramento (1553); John Ponet, Catechismus Brevis Christianae (1553); Nicholas Ridley, De Coena Dominica Assertio, Contra Sceleratamillam Transubstantionis Haeresim (Geneva, 1556); and Alban Langdaile, Catholica Confutatio (1556). Protestants not only wrote and published in Latin, but also, overwhelmingly, continued to read in that language. A perusal of PLRE shows that the libraries of Protestant scholars consisted primarily of works in Latin not least

among them the works of the very reformers who were supposedly so opposed to Latin. And, of course, a whole branch of Protestant discourse Protestant scholasticism was basically developed in Latin (with an admixture of Greek and some Hebrew), with the result that, to this day, as Richard Muller reminds us, many of the standard [Protestant] works in the field of theology continue to use the Greek and Latin terms (7). Even looking ahead to the middle of the 17th century, it is still far from clear that, apart from the liturgy, the Anglican Church was significantly more associated with the vernacular and the repudiation of Latin and other classical languages than Catholicism. Thomas Barlow, compiling a list of recommended reading for trainee clergymen in about 1655, not only takes a knowledge of Latin for granted (most of the list consists of Latin texts, even where English translations were available) but insists that ministers of the church should study the Language of the Bible, that is, basically, Hebrew for the Old Testament and Greek for the New, and a convenient knowledge in those two Tongues is necessary to a Divine, who would be sure of what hee sayes (25) much the same degree of scholarship as that exhibited by John Foxe a century earlier. In a list that includes both Protestant and Catholic writers and contemporary works as well as medieval ones (along with a large amount of still untranslated classical literature), Barlow recommends to Anglican students of theology a huge amount of material that was available in Latin but in many cases had not been translated into English, ranging from commentaries

on Aquinas by Didacus Alvarez, Gregorio de Valencia, Gabriel Vasquez and others to Bellarmines Controversiae, Calvins Lexicon Juridicum, Duns Scotuss 8-volume work on Aristotle, Andreas Esseniuss defence of Grotius and so on.

iv
In the light of this extensive and continuing use of Latin by the Protestant reformers and in particular the fact that the Protestant readership continued to read predominantly in Latin to take Latimers description of Latin as an unknowen tongue at face value is at best disingenuous and at worst utterly misleading. At the time he said it (1556), many years had passed since the Bible had been published in English and ordered to be placed in every church, and even more since the old Latin Horae had ceased to be printed and been replaced instead with English or diglottal versions. It would be fair to say that there were many people, by that time, who were far more familiar with these texts in English than in Latin, and one might claim with some legitimacy that Latin was increasingly the language of the educated and no longer a language with which the average lay person was likely to have very much familiarity. However, the assumption that it had always been thus and that, in the early 16th century, lay worshippers...were on the whole unlearned in Latin (Targoff, 19), is open to question. They may not have studied it formally, but they had been exposed to it all their lives, and we need to take a closer look at the extent

to which the laity was capable of understanding Latin during the period leading up to, and immediately following, the Henrician Reformation. During the 15th century, England was slowly emerging from a period in which, lacking a single national tongue of its own, Latin had played a vital role. In the years following the Norman Conquest, Latin had offered a lifeline of communication at some social levels of this initially fractured society...This unifying tongue, moreover, operated well beyond the bounds of the Church, both among the surprising number of secular aristocrats who had some Latin education, and through the activities of the many clerics who served in secular law courts and cultural capacities among the laity (Wallace 122), and this formed the basis of a continuing tradition. As Rigg notes, Latin literature thrived in England right up until the end of the medieval period (5). By the late 15th century, however, Early Modern English was well established and, with the advent of the printing press, the vernacular had a vital role to play. At the same time, the continuing popularity of the Latin Horae (or Primers, as the printed versions came to be called), demonstrates that the language of these collections of paraliturgical prayers and meditations was still deeply ingrained in the very fabric of peoples lives. The manuscript Horae were by far the most popular book of the Middle Ages and, during the last quarter of the 15th century, they were also the most popular printed book in the years leading up to the Reformation. Erler estimates conservatively that, during the early years of printing,

around 1500 printed Horae were produced each year (505506), and this output did not immediately supplant the manuscript Books of Hours, but supplemented them well into the 16th century; both printed and manuscript Horae appeared in immense quantities during this period (496) and were just about as common as rosary beads (Duffy 98). As significant as the quantity of these Horae is the pattern of their distribution. Unlike other Latin Rite litanies, the Horae were essentially for lay use. Of 62 private libraries inventoried between 1507 and 1553 listed in volume 2 of PLRE, 57 belonged to Oxford scholars who, between them, owned some 45 breviaries, diurnals, hymnals, missals and so on, but only one Horae, and yet these went through about as many editions as all the others combined, and the evidence suggests that the editions of Latin Rite liturgical publications were all of roughly equal size (Erler 505). Clearly, the Horae (which were essentially simplified breviaries) must have circulated in other spheres. Erler notes that, of 107 book bequests in York lay wills from 1321-1500, 53 were Horae mostly, of course, in manuscript (505). She goes on to speculate that, by the beginning of the 16th century, we might imagine 1 out of every 35 London merchants, wives, artisans and nuns being supplied with a printed Sarum Book of Hours (506). This is a very conservative estimate. If we add non-Sarum Books of Hours and manuscript Horae (which, being written on vellum, had a long shelf life), then perhaps that figure increases to about one in ten, and the actual number may be much higher. If

an English household during this period contained any book at all it was likely to be a Book of Hours. The main point to be made at this stage is that, during the years prior to the Reformation, it is almost inconceivable that anyone would have had any trouble understanding, at an absolute minimum, such stock phrases as ora pro nobis, or in nomine patris et filii et spiritus sancti, or even the more familiar longer passages, such as the Ave Maria, the Lords Prayer or the Creed. The claim that the average person did not understand the language of the mass grew stronger as the 16th century advanced, but it should not be forgotten that England at the dawn of the Reformation was a society that had grown up with Latin and it was virtually impossible to live in it without understanding at least the central parts of the Latin Rite liturgy. Ordinary people had made an investment in understanding their religion through the medium of Latin and, as Erler puts it, That [the Latin Primer or Horae] remained so long at the centre of religious life for most people, even those usually considered non-Latinate, argues some partial, adaptive, complex, accommodation to a language deeply familiar to the ear, moderately familiar to the eye (498).

v
Familiarity with Latin during this period implies familiarity with the Bible, and an examination of religious literature in the vernacular adds weight to the idea that, at the turn of the 16th century, the Vulgate was not an

inaccessible text in an alien language but an ingrained and essential part of the cultural landscape. A work such as Lydgates translation of Guillaume de Deguileville, The Pylgremage of the Sowle (1483), illustrates the point. Like much of the religious literature of the time, it makes more sense to see it in the context of other narratives published to fulfil popular demand than to see it as being published in pursuit of a coherent aim to make the Christian faith more transparent and, as the opening lines indicate, it has a strong narrative thread. In that sense it stands naturally alongside many other works published in English at around the same time, such as The Saint Albans Chronicle, Le Morte dArthur, Blanchardine and Eglantine and Pierre de la p des Paris et Vienne or Virgils Aeneid:
As I laye in a seynt Laurence nyght, slepynge in my bedde, me bifelle a full merueylous dreme, whiche I shal reherce. Me thought that I had longe tyme trauayled to ward the Holy Cyte of Ierusalem, and that I had made an ende and fully fynysshed my flesshely pylgremage, so that I myght no further trauayle vpon my foote, but nedes muste leue behynde my flesshely careyne. Thenne come cruel Dethe and smote me with his venemous darte, thorugh whiche stroke bodye and sowle were partyd a sonder. (fo. 2r)

Deguilevilles theme of how to confront the problem of death is also perfectly conformable with such diverse publications as manuals on how to avoid the plague and the Governayle of Helthe, or collections of sayings culled from the ancient philosophers and many other treatises and chronicles of the period. That is to say, it is part of a spectrum of texts that fulfilled a growing demand for a wide range of vernacular publications on all kinds of

topics, supporting the thesis that the spread of religious literature in English at this time was not intrinsically part of a reformist agenda, but simply part of a wider process of linguistic democratisation that was going on as a result of the invention of the printing press. This broader context makes it all the more significant that Deguileville refers extensively to the Bible and the translator assumes both in the use of references and in Latin citations a fairly detailed knowledge of its contents. For example:
To this answerd this yonglyng / myn Aungel / These wordes / quod he / whiche were sayd of the prophete Ysaye / apperteyneth to thy mayster Lucifer / but he and his mynystres ben one in effect. wherfor I admytte these wordys seyd to the / And I graunt wel / that thou were ful of wysedom / as the prophete seyth. and yet couthest thou no good. but thou were of thylke that he spekyth of elles were and seith / Sapientes sunt vt faciant mala. Bonum autem facere nescierunt... (fo. 3r )

The Latin is from Jeremiah, 4.22 (They are wise in the working of evil, but they know not how to do good), and the assumption that readers would be familiar with this kind of material as well as placing the reference to Isaiah, 5.21, wise in his own eyes is typical of the kinds of assumptions that can be met with frequently in vernacular publications of this period. The reader is expected, on the one hand, to understand the Latin and, on the other, to be sufficiently versed in scripture to catch the reference to Isaiah, which in theory could only be accessed via a knowledge of the Latin Vulgate.

Texts written around the time of Henrys break with Rome also show an expectation that the reader will have some understanding of Latin. A typical example might be The Mirrour or Lokynge Glasse of Lyfe (1532), attributed to the printer John Gough. This is a proto-Protestant text in its evangelical representation of conversion (Marshall and Ryrie 24), but in other respects is essentially conservative and doctrinally Catholic and demonstrates how England was at this time poised, both linguistically and culturally, between two traditions. Despite the title, Goughs work is not a translation of the Speculum (ascribed to Augustine of Hippo), but is indebted to it in various ways, one of which is the use of the Latin of the African Bible:
Declina a malo et fac bonum inquire pacem et sequere eam. Davit 33. (fo. AIVv)

It is not clear here whether Gough shows a reformist tendency by rejecting the Latin of the Vulgate (which the African Bible precedes by several centuries), or whether he simply lifts the passage from Augustine because he happens to have that work to hand. Either way, he presents it without a gloss, supposing that his readers will understand it. However, on the very next page he cites a passage from Matthew in English, without the Latin text (fo. BIr), and then proceeds (fos. B IIv B4v) to give the Pater Noster, the Ave Maria and the Creed in both Latin and English. Although the Deguileville translation and Goughs text both intersperse Latin along with the vernacular, there is nevertheless a significant difference between the two. The

earlier text simply supposes that the reader will understand the Latin or, to put it another way, the assumption appears to be that anyone who was literate would have at least some grasp of Latin while the later one provides a gloss for most of the Latin used, even or indeed especially those passages with which his readers could scarcely avoid having some degree of familiarity. These features of the later text can, I think, be validly seen as, on the one hand, symptomatic of the democratising effect of print, with the readership broadening out in such a way that it can no longer be assumed that anyone who can read would also be familiar with Latin and, on the other, a process of, as it were, weaning those readers who were familiar with Latin onto the vernacular. A survey of other religious literature of this period will show that these trends towards the vernacular, far from being ideologically driven, were essentially pragmatic. Bondes Pilgrimage of Perfection (1526) was published at a time when translation of the Bible was, technically, proscribed, yet short passages effectively translations are strewn liberally throughout the text. For example, he writes, the charyte of god is diffused & sprede in our hertes / by the holy goost, together with a marginal note, Roma. v. (fo. a1v), indicating the scriptural source of the passage. Equally, in Peckhams Exornatorium Curatorum (c. 1516 and reprinted nine times to c. 1534), a selection of extracts from the work of the 13th century Archbishop of Canterbury, John Peckham (or Pecham, as he is called in the ODNB), sets forth the basic articles of the Christian faith the commandments, the sacraments and so on

with an assumption that the reader will understand the basic liturgical matter in Latin, although the exposition of each item is in English (see fig. 1, below).

Fig 1: This 1516 edition of John Peckhams Exonatorium Curatorum (STC 10627.5), consisting of selections from John Peckham, the 13th century Archbishop of Canterbury, presupposes on the one hand that the reader will understand the seven sacraments in Latin and, on the other, expounds on the doctrine of the sacraments in English.

Publications such as these go a long way towards dispelling the notion that there was any particular aversion to using the vernacular as a vehicle for religious instruction, as well as making it clear that the basic acceptance of the use of English extended to exposition of biblical and liturgical passages. The idea that the Church was clinging desperately to Latin as a means of misguiding the masses and keeping them in ignorance of

the actual tenets of their faith simply does not stand up to scrutiny.

vi
From the foregoing it will be clear that, by and large, the early reformers were not simply presenting translations of the Latin Vulgate and the quasi-liturgical language of the Primers to a readership that had no knowledge of the original. One obvious effect of the printing press was that the written word became much more easily accessible to a much wider public than hitherto, and some of that readership doubtless had relatively little knowledge of Latin, but far from being any kind of tabula rasa, the laity had a lifetimes exposure to Latin and the average person would have had a fairly sophisticated understanding, at least of the central texts and tenets of the Christian faith, albeit intermingled and overlaid with a thousand years of church and folkloric tradition, much of it as Dickens, for example, points out focused on the lives of saints (31-32). Rather than making the laity aware of things which had been hidden from them by the veil of Latin, the efforts of the early reformers in translating these religious texts were directed towards introducing ideas which differed from those contained in the Latin originals. The Englishlanguage Primers which began to appear during the 1530s frequently imported reformist ideas by stealth, quietly introducing additions to and changes from their Latin counterparts without any overt comment or reference to

the innovations. Erler cites a letter from John Rastell to Cromwell in 1534, suggesting that heterodox ideas might receive the widest possible dissemination if they could be inserted in books of hours since everyone possessed such books (496), and this policy can be traced right back to Joyes Ortulus Anime (1530), the very first Englishlanguage Primer. Joyes work has numerous reformist elements; the Passion (fos. B7r-G 8v) is translated (without acknowledgement) from Martin Bucer, and reflects the reformist emphasis on the character of Jesus Christ, and there is a Lutheran tone to several of the hymns and graces, while the Litany of the Saints and the Office of the Dead are omitted (see Butterworth 28-46 for a detailed account of its contents). Even the layout of these English-language Primers indicates an assumption that the reader is familiar with the Latin Primers; illustrations are placed on the same part of the page as in the Latin Horae, the text is in Blackletter typeface, the first letter of each section is generally illuminated, and red lettering is used to highlight new sections of the text, just as in their Latin precursors (see figs. 2-4, below). By preserving the basic layout of the Horae the English-language Primers conveyed the impression that they were nothing more than Englishlanguage equivalents to them, thus masking the numerous doctrinal innovations that were being ushered in under the guise of translation. Unacknowledged borrowings from more overtly reformist writings were a significant feature of Englishlanguage Primers all through the 1530s; Butterworth notes

borrowings from Tyndale in William Marshalls Primer of 1545, from Luther in John Goughs Primer of 1536 (128), and so on. However, the tide began to turn leading, in 1545, to Henrys own authorised Primer, to be taught lerned & read: and none other to be used throughout all his dominions (title page). This Primer attacks Latin as obfuscatory in precisely the way that modern scholarship tends to present as being the stance of the reformists themselves:
for that the youth by divers persones are taught the Pater noster, the Ave maira, Crede, and .x. cmaundementes all in Latine and not in Englishe, by meanes wherof the same are not brought up in the knowledge of their faith, dutye and obedience (fo. *** 1r -v)

In fact, though, Henry had no real quarrel with the use of Latin; as Eland points out, this Primer was not intended to replace the Latin, but to be used to teach young people the basics of their faith, until they should be competent to understand it in Latin (44). Essentially, Henrys Primer was conservative, clamping down on other, more reformist, Primers, whiche, the preface tells us, minister occasion of contentions & vaine disputations, rather than to edifye (fo. *** 1v). There are some innovations, but they are not, on the whole, of a progressive nature; several Pslams, for example, are added, but they are basically translated from the Latin Vulgate, with some concessions to the Cranmer Bible (Butterworth 261). Butterworth also notes, of the translation of Psalm 2, There is perhaps something typical of Henrys reign in the translation of the Latin text

[adorate pure] so literally into Get discipline (262), underlining the basic purpose of this Primer, which was to consolidate the authority of the king. Just as reformist attacks on Latin masked covert innovations, so Henrys Primer uses Latin as a convenient scapegoat, while all the time his real agenda is to equate faith in the other world with dutye and obedience in this one. The political significance of religious publications in the vernacular as a means to impress upon the populace the duty of obeying the king was something Henry was not likely to miss, and this underpins the use of the vernacular in religious literature all through Henrys reign. Rosendale rightly says that, concurrent with the sacramental and other theological discourses of the English Reformation, there was a linguistic discourse: England, among other nations, and its language, among theirs, had to be elevated over Rome and its language (Fiery Toungues 1146), but all these discourses were subordinate to political discourse. Henrys paramount concern, prior to his break with Rome as well as after it, was the equation of duty to God with duty to king, and the use of the vernacular was part of the array of resources he had at his disposal with which to establish that equation. For example, a treatise on ignorance published in the 1520s advertises itself as a lytell treatyse in Englysshe, which teaches the people howe they are bounde to feare god / to love god / and to honour their prince (Bush, title page). If the introduction of vernacular Primers and a vernacular Bible were along with the closing of the monasteries Henrys main concessions to reformist

ideology it was because he could see the advantage to himself.

Fig. 2: This is a page from a Latin Primer (Hore Beatissime Virginis, 1535. STC 15987). Note the Domine Labia, with

its introductory woodcut illustration, followed by the Iubilate Deo.

Fig. 3: Although Joyes Ortulus Anime is a reformist publication, it is basically modelled on the Latin Books of Hours, with its red lettering (faded or grey in the above), woodcuts interspersed with the text and the Latin name by which the psalm would have been familiar to readers. Compare fig. 2, above.

Fig. 4: Marshalls A Prymer in English (second edition, [1534], STC 15986), the first English-language primer to be published in England, is largely based on Joyes text (see fig. 4, above) and follows the same page layout that will be familiar to lay readers of the Latin Primers (see fig. 3, above).

vii
It is at this point that deconstruction of the standard argument that the vernacular was the reformists tool to set the populace free from the yoke of religious repression lays bare its mirror image. To a fairly large extent, the Church under Henry served simply as a tool to subjugate the laity to another master, the vernacular merely as a means to render synonymous the concepts of duty to God and duty to king, and Latin as a way to paper over the cracks and reinforce a sense of liturgical and doctrinal continuity during a period of upheaval and change. In the midst of this upheaval, the switch from Latin to the vernacular was often a means to introduce new ideas and policies. That rendering, mentioned early on in this paper, of poenitentiam agite as repentance, rather than doing penance served (among other factors) to sweep away centuries of monastic tradition, with its fasting, its hairshirts and its mortification of the flesh. The fact that the Bible was translated was much less a matter of concern to religious conservatives than the manner in which it was done. When it came to the English-language Primers and other translations of doctrinal and liturgical or paraliturgical material, in addition to these matters of interpretation, translators rocked the boat in other ways, by selecting those parts of the original which suited a given agenda, omitting those which did not and adding material which was not in the original. While translation was potentially a tool for religious conservatives as well as for reformists, and had indeed been used as such long

before the Reformation and would continue to be so used after it, in practice it was the reformers who had more to gain from vernacular Primers and a vernacular Bible. While Latin continued to be of major importance in Protestant theology, just as in Catholic theology and every other branch of scholarship and learning during the 16th and 17th centuries, in these two areas the use of English and the spread of Protestantism went, largely, hand in hand always providing, of course, in these early days, that Henrys own interests were served in the process.

Works cited
Anderson, Benedict R. OG.. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1983; revised editions, 1991 and 2006. Bennett, Henry Stanley. English Books and Readers. Volume 1, 1475-1557. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969. Barlow, Thomas. A Library for Younger Schollers, Compiled by an English Scholar-Priest about 1655. Ed. Alma DeJordy and H.F. Fletcher. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1961. Bonde, William. Pilgrimage of Perfection. Wynkyn de Worde: London, 1531. Bush, Paul. Here Begynneth a Lytell Treatyse in Englisshe Called the Extirpation of Ignorancy. London: Richarde Pynson, [1526?]. Butterworth, Charles C. The English Primers (1529-1545). Philadelphia: University of Pennysylvania Press, 1953. Cummings, Brian. The Literary Culture of the Reformation: Grammar and Grace. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Deguileville, Guillaume de. The Pylgremage of the Sowle. Trans. John Lydgate. Westminster: Caxton, 1483. Dickens, A.G. The English Reformation. Second edition. London: Batsford, 1989. Duff, Edward Gordon. Fifteenth Century English Books. London: Bibliographical Society, 1917 Duffy, Eamonn. The Stripping of the Altars. 2nd edition. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2005.

Eland, Edwin H. The Laymans Introduction to the Book of Common Prayer. London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1896. Erler, Mary. Devotional Literature. The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain. Vol. 3, 1400-1557. Ed. Lotte Hellinga and J.B. Trapp. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. 495-525. [Gough, John?]. Here Begynneth a Lytell Treatyse Called, the (Myrrour or Lokynge Glasse of Lyfe) for Cfortyng of the soule. [London: R. Wyer, 1532?]. Joye, George. Ortulus Anime. The Garden of the Soule. Antwerp: Francis Foxe [i.e. M. de Keyser], 1530. Kristeller, Paul Oskar. The Origin and Development of the Language of Italian Prose. Renaissance Thought and the Arts. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990. 119-141. First published in Studies in Renaissance Thought and Letters (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1956). Marshall, Peter, and Ryrie, Alec. The Beginnings of English Protestantism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. More, Thomas. A Dyaloge...Touchyng the Pestylent Sect of Luther and Tyndale. London: [J. Rastell], 1529. ODNB. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Eds. Matthew, H.C.G., and Harrison, B. 60 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. PLRE. Fehrenbach, Robert J., and Leedham-Green, Elizabeth S. Private Libraries in Renaissance England. Tempe, Arizona: Medieval & Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1992-. Muller, Richard. Directory of Latin and Greek Theological Terms, Drawn Principally from Protestant Scholastic Theology. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 1985. [Peckham, John.] Exornatorium Duratorum. London: Wynkyn de Worde, [1516?].

Raynor, Brian. John Frith, Scholar and Martyr: A Biography. Otford, Kent: Pond View, 2000. Rhodes, J.T. Syon Abbey and its Religious Publications in the Sixteenth Century. Journal of Ecclesistical History 44 (1993): 11-25. Rigg, A.G. A History of Anglo-Latin Literature, 1066-1422. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Ridley, Nicolas, and Latimer, Hugh. Certayne Godly, Learned, and Comfortable Conferences. Emden: Egidius van der Erve, 1556. Rosendale, Timothy. Fiery toungues: Language, Liturgy, and the Paradox of the English Reformation. Renaissance Quarterly 54.4.1 (2001): 1142-1164. ---. Literature and Liturgy in the Making of Protestant England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. STC. Pollard, A.W., and Redgrave, G.R. Short-title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, & Ireland and of English Books Printed Abroad, 1475-1640. Second edition, revised. 3 vols. London: The Bibliographical Society, 1976-1991. Targoff, Ramie. Common Prayer: The Language of Public Devotion in Early Modern England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. Wallace, David. The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Waquet, Franoise. Latin, or, The Empire of a Sign: from the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Centuries. Trans. John Howe. London and New York: Verso, 2002. White, Robyn L. Early Print and Purgatory: the Shaping of an Henrician Ideology. Unpublished Ph.D. thesis. Australian National University, 1994. Wizeman, William. The Theology and spirituality of Mary Tudors Church. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006.