Penalty for reading non-latin translation of scripture?

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BartholomewB said:
was his translation of the Bible condemned as such, or was it placed on the Index, or anything of that kind?
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The Council of Constance condemned all his books and forbade all Catholics from reading any of them except in order to refute them. Here is the relevant excerpt: “This holy synod, therefore, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ…repudiates and condemns for ever, by this decree…the books of John Wyclif called by him Dialogus and Trialogus, and the same author’s other books, volumes, treatises and pamphlets (no matter what name these may go under, and for which purpose this description is to be regarded as an adequate listing of them).” (Council of Constance Session 8)

Note particularly that it condemns them “no matter what name these may go under.” That seems inclusive enough to condemn his bible too. They go on: “[This council] forbids the reading, teaching, expounding and citing of the said books or of any one of them in particular, unless it is for the purpose of refuting them. It forbids each and every Catholic henceforth, under pain of anathema…to teach, approve or hold the said books, or to refer to them in any way, unless this is done, as has been said, for the purpose of refuting them. It orders, moreover, that the aforesaid books, treatises, volumes and pamphlets are to be burnt in public, in accordance with the decree of the synod of Rome, as stated above.” (Council of Constance Session 8)

An interesting footnote regarding this prohibition is that some of Wycliffe’s bibles ended up getting approved by Catholic clergy in England, and these approved editions were often used by both the lay faithful and the clergy. Even the kings of England owned one. They don’t appear to have done this in intentional defiance of the Council of Constance, either, but thought they were legitimate Catholic bibles. It is worth remembering that vernacular Bibles were not prohibited altogether in England; only Wycliffe’s bibles were prohibited. It appears that some of the printers of the Wycliffe Bible, in order to get around this prohibition, changed the title page on his book and altered the date of publication to be before Wycliffe was born.

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This manipulation of the facts fooled some people, which is understandable since there were a lot of non-Wycliffe versions of the Scriptures in varying degrees of completion going back long before he made his bible. The fact that there was both an “early edition” Wycliffe bible and a “late edition” Wycliffe bible probably didn’t help, because they were significantly different from one another, and a person who compared them could easily conclude that one or the other of them wasn’t a Wycliffe bible, especially if the title page and date of publication identified them as non-Wycliffe bibles.

Thus King Henry VI and King Henry VII, who reigned in the late 1400s and early 1500s, both had an approved Wycliffe bible. (Today Henry VI’s bible is in the Bodleian Library in England.) The Duke Humphrey of Gloucester also had a copy (this is in the British Museum’s Egerton collection), as did Bishop Bonner, Fr. William Weston of St. John’s in Clerkenwell, a convent of nuns overseen by Mother Katherine Methwold, and a monastery called our Lady of Syon (this bible is now known as the Ashburnham Manuscript). The bibles which were owned by the kings even had the royal seal on them – which would have caused a scandal if anyone had realized these books were forbidden Wycliffe bibles.

These Catholic Wycliffe Bibles (and perhaps some of the earlier, partial Catholic bibles) were discussed in the literature of the time period and nobody seems to have realized they were Wycliffe Bibles. St. Thomas More appears to have referred to them in order to demonstrate to a university student that approved English Catholic bibles existed and were not forbidden. This occurs in his Dialog Concerning Heresies Book 3:

“[Forsooth, I] myself have seen and can show you Bibles fair and old written in English, which have been known and seen by the bishop of the diocese, and left in laymen’s hands and women’s too, such as he knew for good and Catholic folk that used it with devotion and soberness.” (Dialog Concerning Heresies Book 3 Chapter 14)

“I have showed you that [the English bishops] keep none from them but such translation as be either not yet approved for good or such as be already reproved for naught, as Wycliffe’s was, and Tyndale’s. For as for other old ones, that were before Wycliffe’s days, remain lawful, and be in some folks’ hands had and read.” (Dialog Concerning Heresies Book 3 Chapter 16)

“[W]hen the clergy…agreed that the English Bibles should remain which were translated before Wycliffe’s days, they consequently did agree that to have the Bible in English was none hurt. And in that they forbade any new translation to be read till it were approved by the bishops, it appeareth well thereby that their intent was that the bishop should approve it if he found it faultless, and also of reason amend it where it were faulty.” (Dialog Concerning Heresies Book 3 Chapter 16)

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St. Thomas More is not the only witness to the existence of approved Catholic English Bibles before the Douay Rheims. A book written before 1401 A.D., called The Chastising of God’s Children, the author of which is unknown, says:

“some now in these days…say [in] English their psalter and mattins of our Lady, and the seven [penitential] psalms, and the litany… Many men reproveth to have the psalter, or mattins, or the gospel in English, or the Bible, because they may not be translated into no vulgar word [literally], without great circumlocution, after the feeling of the first writers, which translated that into Latin by the teaching of the Holy Ghost. Nevertheless I will not reprove such translations, [nor] I reprove not to have them [in] English, [nor] to read [from] them where they may stir you to more devotion, and to the love of God.”

This book, btw, the Chastising of God’s Children, was a manual of piety for English lay people, and it encourages them to read approved Catholic Bibles long before the Douay Rheims existed. Presumably these were either Wycliffe bibles which got unwittingly approved, or they are the partial Catholic bibles that preceded it.

Similar praise for Bible reading can be found in the Myroure of Our Lady from Sion Abbey, written by an anonymous author (but possibly Thomas Gascoign, chancellor of Oxford) before 1450 A.D. and after 1421 A.D. It says:

“And forasmuch as it is forbidden under pain of cursing that no man should have nor draw any text of holy scripture into English without license of the bishop diocesan: and in divers places of your service are such texts of holy scripture: therefore I have asked and have license of our bishop to draw such things into English to your ghostly comfort and profit, so that both our conscience in the drawing, and yours in the having, may be the more sure and clear. … Of psalms I have drawn but a few, for ye have them of Richard Hampole’s drawing, and out of English Bibles, if ye have license thereto.”

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A third text approving of Bible reading by the English laity before the Douay Rheims bible comes from a Wycliffe New Testament. Inside, it has this note: “A lytel boke…[which] was over seyne, and redd be Doctor Thomas Ebb…and Doctor Ryve…my modir bought hit.” That is: “A little book…[which] was overseen, and read by Doctor Thomas Ebb…and Doctor Ryve…my mother bought it.” Here we have an example of a Wycliffe bible that made it through the Church’s approval process – I personally suspect this is due partly to the confusion surrounding the fact that there were two editions of the Wycliffe Bible, and people might not have realized that, and the fact that there were partial bibles made long before Wycliffe, and it would be easy to confuse one of his editions with those.

A fourth text on this subject deserves special consideration. The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ was written by Nicholas Love and was explicitly anti-Wycliffite in its content. It was written in about 1400 A.D. with the purpose of giving Catholics in England solid devotional material that differed strongly from Wycliffe’s works, and contains spiritual meditations on various episodes from the life of Jesus. Bishop Thomas Arundel, the archbishop of Canterbury, approved the book for publication and in fact commanded it to be propagated to fight the Wycliffite heresies.

And you know what it does? It constantly quotes from the Bible and sometimes refers its readers there for more information, even encouraging them to keep a copy of the Gospels with them at all times and often assuming that they’ll have access to the Scriptures. You can read it here. Note particularly that, on page 10, the author commends to us the example of St. Cecile, who “bore always…in her breast…the blessed life of our Lord Jesus Christ written in the gospel… In the same manner I counsel that thou do.” In fact he calls this “most necessary and most profitable” on the same page. In his section on the Magnificat, on page 38, he merely quotes the first two lines, puts in an “etc.” and says that the rest can be found “contained in the gospel.”

English Catholic apologists of the 1400s, in response to Wycliffe and his followers, cited from the Bible, encouraged Catholics to go there for more information, encouraged them to read it for devotional purposes, and promoted such copies of the Bible as were available, sometimes not realizing that some of the ones they approved of Were Wycliffe bibles.

So that’s a long answer to your question, but yes, the Council of Constance did condemn the Wycliffe Bible, but – because of confusion – it ended up getting used among unwitting Catholics for a long time, along with some partial bibles of non-Wycliffe origin, up until the Douay Rheims Bible was published.
 
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Thank you, @dmar198, for taking the trouble to write such a long, detailed answer to my question. I didn’t realize I was asking you to do so much work! My apologies.

Wycliffe was a prolific author, with books such as De officio regis, De civili dominio, De incarcerandis fedelibus, the Trialogus, the Dialogus, and the Opus evangelicum, among many others, in addition to his pamphlets and published sermons. Apparently, from what you quote St. Thomas More as saying, there can be no doubt that it was the Council’s intention to include his Bible translation among his banned books. The idea that had occurred to me was that, since the Council fathers didn’t specifically mention the Bible on their list, that would suggest it was exempt from the ban. It’s curious, in any case, that so many people went on openly reading it. That can be explained, I suppose, by the printers faking the dates!

Thanks again for your help.
 
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First, I don’t know what the literacy rate was back then. second, there were translations of parts of the Bible, in English, for example. So, the prohibitions of reading the Bible were for incompetent translations, and I’ve only heard of one such. I’m no expert on history about the death penalty.

That seems improbable since various “rites” in the Church had different translations, Greek, for example. Hard to imagine any penalty, esp. the death penalty.

Your’s is the kind of question that begs me to ask where exactly was the source of this rumor. There are/were a lot of rumors about the Catholic Church – against the Catholic Church. This sounds like one of them.
 
Yes, he was, at the Council of Constance, thirty years after his death. He lived and died a Catholic priest in good standing. Please see @dmar198’s four long posts, #21 to 24 above.
 
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I’ve never heard of such a penalty, but I did know there were restrictions on the reading of scripture.
 
Well what I mean was there were not as many approved translations as there are now.
 
He lived and died a Catholic priest in good standing.
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In one sense he died in good standing; he was not punished during his lifetime. But he had powerful enemies in the Church because some of his teachings clearly contradicted the Church’s defined dogmas. His denial of transubstantiation and his Donatist leanings were examples of this. But yeah, the Church is slow-moving, and during his lifetime he was not punished, so you’re right to say he died a Catholic priest in good standing, assuming by “good standing” you mean “not punished.” But the people in charge knew he was a dissident priest with schismatic tendencies and a lot of them therefore didn’t like him.
 
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Well, sure. That’s sort of like saying there’s restrictions on helicopters. 😛 You probably know where to go see someone else’s helicopter, and you know where to go to have someone fly you in their helicopter, but it’s unlikely that you’ve got enough money/skill/education to have your very own personal helicopter parked in your backyard to go tootle off in whenever you feel like it.

If you could afford a book, there was a good chance you didn’t need a translation— because you had been educated, and could at least understand Latin, even if you couldn’t necessarily write it, or if your speaking wasn’t so great.

It wasn’t until the advent of the printing press (1440) that books really became available to ordinary people, and that’s when translation efforts really stepped up. But even then, you’ll see they were expensive— some copies of Gutenberg’s Bible sold for 30 florins, which was equal to three years’ wages for a clerk. Out of all the Gutenbergs that were sold in the 15th c., almost all of them were owned by institutions, like monasteries or universities, or the super-wealthy royalty/nobility. Only one was known to have been owned by a private individual.
 
midori said:
Out of all the Gutenbergs that were sold in the 15th c., almost all of them were owned by institutions, like monasteries or universities, or the super-wealthy royalty/nobility. Only one was known to have been owned by a private individual.
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Is there a citation that you can provide for this assertion? It seems like something I want to have in my back pocket, so that if I use this info, I can back it up.

Thanks!
 
I didn’t see a stand-alone citation, but the citation for the next sentence was ISBN 978-0712304924 , so I’d probably look for it there.

If it wasn’t there, then the citation in the previous sentence, also on the same subject, was for ISBN 978-1859281147. So I’d check that one second.

I had actually thought it was a cool factoid, and I would have liked to have seen it better-sourced as well. 🙂
 
dmar198 said:
In one sense he died in good standing; he was not punished during his lifetime.
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Yes, that’s what I meant. He was a highly controversial priest and he got into a lot of quarrels with his fellow-clerics, but as far as I know he was never penalized or disciplined by the hierarchy in his lifetime. He was never laicized, his right to preach, to teach, and to celebrate Mass was never suspended or withdrawn.
 
Actually, before there was a printing press, there was the scribal “press.”

Anywhere with a large literate population (such as cities with merchants and traders; or capital cities with lots of lawyers and accountants; or university cities with lots of clerical, medical, and law students) attracted booksellers.

How did they get books to sell?

They had a staff of scribes working in a book manufactory, or book factory for short. Very often, the scribes were women and other laypeople, although it was also a job that clerics without posts might hold for a while.

Basically, you just sat all day in a well-lit room, copying books. If you were an artist, you might copy illustrations, too.

Later, it got to be customary to have woodcut pictures. If you paid extra, the scribe/artists would color it in for you. There were different prices for more elaborate color schemes. (The woodcut business already involved a printing press and sometimes printed book pages; Chinese printed books were already all woodcut blocks. But that was too slow and woodcut blocks wore out, so it eventually led to the movable type printing press, which was Gutenberg’s innovation.)

Some of these books were made to order, or at least bound to order. (A nice calfskin binding was more expensive than cloth, and there were different kinds of cloth. And there were other customizations, like binding two books together for convenience.) Others were popular enough that they could be copied out for bookstore stock, and sold according to demand. (Like the Bible, or the Sententiae of Peter Lombard.)

(Also, there’s a theory that bookselling arose out of the custom of buying copies of lecture notes from other students. This was totally legal, especially since it was the students who paid the professors to lecture. A good set of extensive notes for a famous professor’s classes often became a book in itself. It may also have been an imitation of businesses in Constantinople, though.)

Like other kinds of businesses in Europe, medieval booksellers and manufacturers had to be licensed by the civic authorities, and were sometimes under scrutiny by the Church. But they could usually publish anything that they felt like copying out, and that they thought could sell. So vernacular books and poems became a thing, as did holy cards and holy pictures.

So anyway… Yes, normal people could afford books, including vernacular books. It depended on demand and volume production. The movable type printing press just made it cheaper and faster – although there was a long time when scribes were still cheaper and faster than messing with type.
 
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For sure.

Even knowing Latin, reading medieval Latin is a whole 'nuther exercise! Especially with all the abbreviations they used. 🙂 Plus, while they were used to dealing with an absence of punctuation, or with medieval punctuation marks, it’s remarkably difficult to read without the little subtle signals we rely on. 🙂

I once tried doing a translation project on a text I wanted to read that wasn’t available in English, and I realized before I could even start it, I had to learn how to “see”. Ultimately, I had to translate the page from “their” abbreviated Latin into “my” longhand/modernly-punctuated Latin, and then translate the translation into English! It never got past the first couple of paragraphs. I don’t have a copy of the page I was working with-- but here’s a random sample.

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You can catch bits and pieces— but there’s always that critical word or two or three that just-- doesn’t-- quite-- make-- sense as it’s presented. 🙂

And, of course, while calligraphy is always nice and tidy, not all handwriting was as comfortable to read as we’d prefer! Imagine if this was a passage from Paul-- trying to follow his ideas–! (Hint: It’s in English. The second line starts off as “Take a handfull of”.)

25747dff76843ebfe1eab04557ebf6c5f5895a59.jpeg
 
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