Religious Prose

The only Bible in common use during the middle ages was the Latin “vulgate” text, which had been prepared by St. Jerome about the year 400. Wyclif’s agitation for an English translation which the unlearned people could read was only the reiteration of a desire that had been recognized and partially satisfied in Anglo-Saxon times; but Wyclif antagonized the church authorities, and the association of the idea of an English Bible with Lollardry postponed the licensed production of such a thing for another century and a half. 1 It was Erasmus’ great edition of the Greek New Testament (1516), largely prepared at Cambridge, which released the spring. This was a work of infinite labor and great intellectual courage; it offered a text much more authoritative than had previously existed and enriched it with new Latin annotations which piqued men’s desire to know and explain what the Bible really meant.