Roman Catholic theologians of the late Middle Ages inherited a system of methods and sources with which to work out answers to philosophical and practical questions long held in controversy among Christian believers. Catholic interpreters of Scripture, usually university professors and higher-ranking clergy, used the Latin Vulgate version and made extensive use of patristic writings by renowned early scholars of the faith such as Augustine of Hippo (354–430). They also applied methods of pre-Christian philosophers, including Aristotle's system of categorising and applying knowledge. Other theological sources included canon law (containing conciliar decrees and patristic writings), the decretals (papal decrees since the mid-twelfth century) and multi-volume scriptural commentaries such as the Glossa Ordinaria and works by Thomas Aquinas (1225–74) and Peter Lombard (c. 1100–60). Use of such canonical sources, a single translation of Scripture (that varied among manuscript copies), and philosophical methods of sorting through all possible conclusions and objections for one presumably correct answer to a question gave rise to the term ‘systematic’ for this type of theology. While chiefly maintaining status quo doctrines and practices, such theological work, the focus of the first section of this chapter, challenged powerful forces in society and called for reform. Catholic spiritual writings of the era also exhibit a systematic, Bible-centred approach to monastic and personal devotion. In the second section I treat controversial theology: writings by Catholics aimed at a Protestant audience or meant for the instruction of Catholics in how to refute Protestant doctrines and biblical interpretation. The final section examines Catholic theology collectively from 1600 to 1750, when a demand for Scripture-focused popular theology in northern Europe contrasted with traditional works maintaining an integrated use of sources.

Systematic theology and spiritual writings before Trent

The familiar Protestant accusation that the Bible played a small role in Catholic theology would have seemed very strange to the late medieval theologian. Intellectual life revolved around the study of the Bible, from the highest degrees at universities, to the basis of legal systems, to the cornerstone of lay spirituality. Still, the complexity of the scholastic method, the inaccessibility of dense biblical commentaries in Latin and the central authority exercised over the highest levels of scriptural interpretation left the Church vulnerable to allegations that the Pope and clergy were enemies of Scripture rather than the Christian Bible's custodians and inspired exegetes since late antiquity.

Introduction: the surviving Greek New Testament manuscripts

Writings from antiquity, such as the Greek New Testament, have been transmitted to us through manuscripts that were copied and recopied numerous times until the printing press, by permitting the production of multiple identical copies, slowed and eventually brought hand-copying to an end. Currently some 5,500 different Greek manuscripts of New Testament writings on papyrus, parchment and paper have survived (as well as thousands of manuscript copies of translations in Latin, Syriac, Coptic and several other ancient languages). Only 1 per cent of these Greek manuscripts contain the entire twenty-seven books, because most manuscripts, as they were produced and circulated, contained a smaller group of writings, commonly the Four Gospels or the Pauline Letters, or Acts and the Catholic Letters. Surviving manuscripts, however, frequently have only a single book, as is the case with about 83 per cent of our manuscripts (excluding lectionaries) up to around 800 CE, while 15 per cent have two to nine books, and only seven manuscripts from this period (2 per cent) contain ten or more New Testament writings. Often it is not possible to tell how many writings originally occupied an individual manuscript, especially in the numerous cases where portions of only one or a few writings survive.

Then too, the quantity of manuscripts in use in Christian communities at any given time cannot be known or even estimated, yet the proportion of extant early manuscripts (from the first eight or nine centuries) compared to later surviving copies became a crucial point in the text-critical developments and controversies to be assessed below. The table shows that only 6 per cent of all surviving Greek manuscripts of the New Testament date prior to the period around 800 CE, and therefore 94 per cent were copied and utilised after that period. The table indicates also that manuscripts from the first eight centuries of Christianity very often are fragmentary: 90 per cent survive with only one to twenty-four leaves (written on both sides), so that a mere 10 per cent have twenty-five or more leaves. The size of a complete ancient codex depended on numerous factors, but volumes with significant portions of the New Testament generally contained 150 to 300 leaves.

In 1753 controversy broke out in Oxford over an essay published by Benjamin Kennicott (1718–83). Kennicott compared the text of 1 Chronicles 11 with that of 2 Samuel 5 and 23, which appeared to be parallel descriptions of the same set of events. In so doing he identified numerous textual discrepancies and inconsistencies, many of which appeared to derive from errors of transcription. These were compounded further when Kennicott made reference to other ancient witnesses to the text. The Greek of the Jewish Bible of the Hellenistic world, the Septuagint, was particularly poorly attested for these passages. All of which made the task of the vernacular translator, whose work Kennicott looked to improve, especially complicated. Although there were Hebraic fundamentalists in mid-eighteenth-century Oxford, including the followers of John Hutchinson who comprised some of Kennicott's bitterest opponents, these were not surprising findings to the world of early modern scholarship. Kennicott built knowingly on the work of the early seventeenth-century Huguenot critic from Saumur, Louis Cappel (1585–1658). Cappel's Critica sacra (Paris, 1650) treated the Hebrew and Greek texts of the Old Testament as parallel witnesses, and discredited the notion, commonly held by Protestants in particular, that the contemporary Hebrew Bible, including the vowel points, represented the original state of the text. Such scepticism looked back to the arguments of the foremost early sixteenth-century intermediary between Hebraic scholarship and Christian readers, Elijah Levita (1469–1549). As such, it was grounded in the scholarship that had produced the very printed texts on which later critics and translators relied – the rabbinic Bible whose third edition (Venice, 1548) Levita helped to edit; the dictionaries of Hebrew and Aramaic that he compiled – as well making use of the conclusions of Levita's studies of the rabbinical critical apparatus (or Masorah, which had codified certain earlier, oral traditions concerning the reading of the biblical text).

Later critics, notably the Oratorian Richard Simon (1638–1712), had admired Levita's work and started to extend it. They examined for themselves manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible and its principal ancient translations, and they reconsidered the authority of existing printed versions.

At the outset of the period covered by this book, the diverse forms of Christianity across the European and Mediterranean worlds had acquired distinct and in many respects deeply divided characteristics. The Western Latin mind had long been shaped by the Latin language, the appropriation of Greek and Arab philosophies in a Latinate garb and the dominance of the Vulgate Bible in the manuscript tradition. The social structures of the West reflected and also shaped its intellectual structures. A large, diffuse and diverse body of ‘clerici’ – the name designated both the learned and those living by the practice of religion – belonged to a theoretically international culture, one that was in principle (though not always in practice) institutionally distinct from the secular world that hosted and supported it.

The Eastern churches, with their greater diversity of languages and traditions, their more collegial and parallel structures of power based on the patriarchates and monastic communities, and unresolved historic divisions over doctrine, underwent a prolonged eclipse under the domination of the Ottoman Empire. Until near the end of the seventeenth century the Ottomans seemed to present an apocalyptic threat even to the churches of the West. Those Christian communities that did not become part of the Ottoman sphere of control were to some degree cut off from the rest of the Orthodox world. When a rising Russia looked for cultural resources around 1700, it looked west. There has been an unavoidable asymmetry in this volume between West and East. That is so largely because the processes that determined the structure of the book – the rise of critical textual scholarship, the Reformation divide in the Western churches, the rise of vernacular translations to challenge the ascendancy of the Latin text – were primarily Western phenomena between the fifteenth and the eighteenth centuries. The story of the Bible between c. 1450 and c. 1750 is the story of profound intellectual and cultural change shaped by the turmoil and upheavals of Western Europe.

After centuries in which thinking western Europeans thought unselfconsciously in Latin, from the fifteenth century onwards increasing numbers of adepts discovered the fascination of exotic languages.

Bibles in Italian to c. 1792

Emidio Campi

‘In Italy Holy Scripture is so forgotten that it is very rare to find a Bible’; so Luther wrote in 1539 in one of his Tischreden. This pithy statement is clearly an eloquent denunciation of the Church of Rome, which, in the judgement of the reformer, was guilty of preventing the diffusion and knowledge of Scripture. And if we consider the two centuries after the Council of Trent, when translations of the Bible were seized and burned, it is very difficult to argue with Luther's angry accusation. Nonetheless, a more measured analysis of Italian translations of the Bible of the early modern period will allow us to reassess this judgement, while filling some gaps in the historical record. The Bible in Italy was indeed little read, and the attitude of the Church was definitely oriented towards repression, but translations were anything but scarce; in fact, they constituted a phenomenon no less notable than in other European countries. However, what was unusual in Italian with respect to other languages was the fact that the majority of the actual work of translation fell not upon the established Church, but instead on the diaspora of Italian Protestant exiles who were dispersed throughout Europe.

Medieval translations into the vernacular, and fifteenth-century editions

The first attempts to translate the Bible into the different vernaculars of the Italian peninsula pre-date Dante. It seems likely that the Poor Lombards or the Italian Waldensians had a considerable role in this, but the subject is still awaiting an exhaustive study. What is certain is that such vernacularising activity did take place in the Italian Middle Ages, taking the form of versions that did not claim absolute fidelity to the source text. These tended to be accompanied by exegetical or lexical glosses in which the translator – who was usually anonymous – summarised or amplified the biblical text, sometimes even reorganising it into new chapters or adding new titles. Indeed, the textual history of Dante's Convivio, which is datable to the earliest years of the fourteenth century, offers a convincing proof of the widespread practice of vernacularisation.

Martin Luther's translation of the Bible cast a long shadow over rival attempts in the early modern period to produce German-language versions of Scripture. Widely admired for its accuracy and elegance, Luther's Bible wielded an authority unmatched by any other translation in the years from the Reformation to the revolutionary age of the late eighteenth century. Nevertheless, significant efforts were made, particularly by members of the Reformed churches, who laboured tirelessly to produce scholarly and usable Bibles that would meet theological and pastoral needs. In truth, however, the German Bibles that emerged from Zurich, Heidelberg and Herborn, for all their fidelity to the ancient languages and humanist techniques, reached only relatively small and disparate audiences, and failed to capture the imagination of broader Protestantism. The fragile and fractious world of the German-speaking Reformed churches was not congenial to the emergence of one Bible to match Luther and his heirs. The Reformed churches in the Empire were dwarfed by a Lutheran majority and gravely endangered by the Thirty Years War, in which they lost their stronghold in Heidelberg and numerous libraries. The Swiss, in turn, remained as divided as ever, unable to agree on an authoritative Bible. In the Protestant lands of the eastern part of the Confederation, as well as in the major churches of Basel and Berne, Luther's translation was preferred by many to the so-called Zurich Bible. This tendency was also strong within the Empire, where the Calvinist churches remained inclined to Luther's translation until the end of the sixteenth century: the one major attempt to produce a Reformed German translation proved a failure.

Zurich

During the early 1520s Luther's Bible translations flowed from the presses of Adam Petri and Thomas Wolff in the Swiss city of Basel, the intellectual and commercial heart of the Confederation. In the brief period between September 1522 and 1524, Petri and Wolff accounted for ten editions of Luther's New Testament. The three volumes of the Wittenberg Old Testament were reprinted by Petri in Basel, though the language was adapted for an Upper Rhine audience and Konrad Pellikan added a considerable number of philological and theological glosses, particularly for the Pentateuch.

When Johann Gutenberg successfully concluded his experiments with the new technique of multiple copying, news of the new invention spread with extraordinary rapidity. To posterity it has seemed quite natural that the text with which Gutenberg announced his new invention should be his famous 42-line Bible. Yet this choice was more daring than is sometimes recognised. The first half of the fifteenth century had seen a large increase in book production in many parts of Europe. But this growth in the production of manuscript books had not embraced texts of the Bible. The high point of manuscript production of bibles had been reached and passed in the thirteenth century. The large numbers created in this fertile period seem to have sufficed to meet demand in the succeeding two centuries. If gentry or noble households had acquired any religious texts in the first half of the fifteenth century then these were far more likely to have been books of hours, a class of book reproduced in massive numbers in this period.

Yet Gutenberg chose a Bible, perhaps not fully aware of how challenging a technical task he had undertaken. The task would consume him for over two years, and ruin him financially. Although the Bible was a technical triumph, it effectively ended Gutenberg's active career as a printer. In the years and decades that followed the Bible would continue to be among the most challenging projects that a printer could undertake; and yet many would do so, bringing to the market many hundreds of editions, in literally millions of copies, and in every variety of size, language and textual arrangement.

In consequence the Bible would come, in the 150 years after the invention of print, to occupy a special place both in the transformation of the European book world and in the cultural history of its peoples. It became a prime motivator in change in the geography of the book industry, yet for workers in the industry it also encapsulated the pitfalls that lay in wait for those who ventured too far, in a business where fortunes were as easily lost as won.

It is possible that Gutenberg's experiments with printing may have begun some years before his arrival in Mainz in 1444. During the previous five years in Strasbourg he had entered into a number of business associations.

The Renaissance recovery of the Bible in original-language texts contributed to far-reaching and revolutionary changes for European Christianity. As the other chapters in this volume indicate, text-historical scholarship resulted in different reconstructions of the Bible and fostered the formation of diverse positions on the authority and meaning of those texts. Because those innovations turned out to have profound political and social ramifications, Renaissance biblical philology has always been a prominent subject of inquiry for historians and theologians. One aspect of the rise of humanist biblical philology, however, that deserves stronger recognition is its symbiosis with the revolution in Renaissance visual arts.

After all, the phenomenon expressed by the term ‘Renaissance’ defines equally well the innovations in both biblical philology and visual representation, for the reorientation to Classical Antiquity (or idealisations of the Classical world) informed both textual and visual culture in the same fundamental ways. Artists and scholars looked to Antiquity for the substance of their work: subject matter, models of style, historiography, philosophy and theory, as well as technical methodologies. In particular, the Bible was perceived as the central discourse of the ancient world, and, as such, needed not only to be recovered in its pristine form but also to be visualised through the lenses of Classical art.

A recognisably Renaissance style emerged as artists transformed representations of the Bible from iconic to realistic (or illusionistic) images, a process that resulted from the reception of ancient artistic styles and techniques. This development is evident in both painting and sculpture from early fifteenth-century Florence, as we can see in pioneering works by Ghiberti, Donatello and Masaccio. Among the most significant biblical projects from the early Florentine Renaissance were Lorenzo Ghiberti's two sets of bronze reliefs for the doors of the Baptistery of Florence. The first set, begun in 1402–3 and sometimes described as the beginning of Renaissance art, features twenty panels, framed by medieval quatrefoils, with scenes from the life of Christ, along with portraits of the four evangelists and four doctors of the church (Ambrose, Jerome, Gregory and Augustine). The second set, which Michelangelo subsequently immortalised as the Gates of Paradise, has ten large rectangular panels with complex designs combining related scenes from Old Testament narratives in a fully developed Renaissance style.

Introduction

The Polyglot Bibles published in Europe between 1500 and 1700 offer some of the best expressions of the objectives of late Renaissance humanism. Exquisitely printed, in an increasing number of ancient and Eastern languages, edited by the greatest biblical scholars of the day, they combined the ideals of the bibliophile with those of the philologist.

The production of parts of the Bible in various languages was by no means new. Bilingual texts appear throughout the Middle Ages. They served various purposes. They could assist students of the languages or simply provide the translation into a known language of a liturgy in one no longer spoken. The Coptic monasteries of Egypt held versions of the Bible in their libraries which were in more than two languages and intended for visitors from the different parts of the vast Monophysite world. By the twelfth century, when Coptic was being replaced by Arabic, we find fragments of the New Testament in Coptic, Ethiopic, Syriac, Arabic and Armenian. The tradition continued well into the fourteenth century, as we see from the polyglot fragments of the New Testament from the Baramus monastery in the Wadi Natrun north-west of Cairo, and the Psalter at the Macarius monastery in the same area, purchased (but never received) in the early seventeenth century by the French antiquarian Nicolas Fabri de Peiresc, involved in the preparation of the Paris Polyglot Bible.

Yet another contemporary polyglot manuscript, however, also from the Monophysite world, a psalter now in the Cambridge University Library, in Hebrew, Greek, Syriac and Arabic, was intended for a more scholarly end. The compiler clearly wished to correct the Syriac version on the basis of the Hebrew. He thus seems to have been following a different tradition – one which was known in the West – and which dates back to the early third century when Origen prepared his Hexapla, an edition of the Old Testament in six different versions presented in parallel columns: the Hebrew text, the Hebrew text transcribed in Greek characters, and the four Greek versions of Aquila, Symmachus, Theodotion and the Septuagint.

The affirmation that by Scripture alone (sola scriptura) one could gain access to all the truth that God desired to reveal to humanity made Martin Luther the more scrupulous in defining the canon of sacred texts upon which to base this foundational principle. As soon as he began translating the Old Testament he consigned the contents of the Catholic Apocrypha to a status more clearly separate from the pure Word of God than it had occupied in the eyes of Holy Mother Church – which from ancient times had itself recognised the lesser legitimacy of the books that made it up. The reformer nonetheless regarded these books – Judith, the Wisdom of Solomon, Tobias (Tobit), Jesus Sirach (Ecclesiasticus), Baruch, First and Second Maccabees, Esther and Susanna (Daniel and Susanna) – as worthy of respect. He included them in his complete German Bible and composed introductions to some of them. In the complete Bible of 1534 the Apocrypha appeared as an independently paginated section entitled ‘Apocrypha. Das sind Bücher, so nicht der heiligen Schrifft gleich gehalten, vnd doch nützlich vnd gut zu lesen sind’. Other full and partial editions followed from presses in the German-speaking world, in both high and low linguistic forms.

Within the ambit of Huldrych Zwingli, Leo Jud (1482–1542) saw to press his first translation of the entire Apocrypha in 1529. The title was initially simply descriptive, but the Strasbourg edition of the following year contained an additional valuation of the content: Apochrypha: Biblical Books that, Although the Ancients Did Not Count Them as Scripture, Are Nevertheless Worthy, Useful, and in Frequent Use. Whether in Wittenberg or Zurich, the founding divines regarded the exhortations of certain apocryphal books in particular as essential to the cultivation of devotion and ethical behaviour. The one to which they referred most often is Ecclesiasticus, Jesus Sirach. The vd 16 lists, under Biblia, thirty-seven Latin and Latin-and-Hebrew editions and eighty-seven High and Low German editions, far more than the publications of all the other apocryphal books taken together. Church leaders recommended it to Latinate men at the higher end of the social spectrum, and they included it in vernacular translation in their advice to those hoped-for domestic ‘priests’, the heads of households; to pastors as a topic for preaching; and to schoolmasters and -mistresses for the inculcation of boys of a young age and girls of any age.

In February of the year 1616 a group of advisers to the Holy Office met in Rome to consider the Copernican teaching that the Earth moved around a stationary Sun. They concluded that this theory was ‘foolish and absurd in philosophy’, and that it explicitly contradicted many passages of Holy Scripture ‘according to the literal meaning of the words’. For the latter reason the doctrine was declared formally heretical. While it was the name of Copernicus that appeared in the official decree of the Holy Office, and Copernicus's De revolutionibus (1543) that was then placed on the Index of Prohibited Books, the chief target of the decree was the brilliant astronomer and mathematician Galileo Galilei (1564–1642). The famous Florentine, who for several years had openly championed the motion of the Earth, was specifically warned at this time against teaching or defending this controversial theory – a theory that was deemed to be at odds with the biblical witnesses. At first Galileo seemed content to comply with the wishes of the ecclesiastical authorities, but eventually, in 1632, he published his Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems which, in spite of its dialogue form, set out a relatively unambiguous case for Copernicanism. In the following year Galileo was tried in Rome and convicted of ‘vehement suspicion of heresy’. On 22 June 1633, in a room adjoining the church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva, he read a humiliating retraction of his views concerning the motion of the Earth. He was placed under house arrest for the remainder of his life and his Dialogue was added to the Index, where it stayed until 1835.

The well-known story of Galileo lends a certain credence to the idea that throughout history there has been a perennial struggle between a rational and enlightened scientific world-view on the one hand and the forces of religious oppression on the other. It must be said that, amongst historians of science, the myth of an ongoing conflict between science and religion now finds few, if any, adherents. Nevertheless, on the face of it the Galileo affair does suggest that the victories of the new seventeenth-century science – ‘natural philosophy’ as it was then known – were won only against a determined opposition from those who believed that the literal words of Scripture were the sole authority in scientific matters.

Fourteenth-century beginnings

Although knowledge of Greek was exceedingly rare in the West during the late Middle Ages, it never died out entirely. From the ninth to the thirteenth centuries a handful of Western scholars used their abilities in the language to make a small number of Greek works available in Latin translation. The emphasis was on philosophical, theological, scientific and medical texts, serving practical purposes and needs. What began to emerge in the fourteenth century, under the impetus of the nascent humanist movement, was a new desire to gain direct access to Greek works, including the great works of classical literature, rhetoric and history. The scholar who initiated this new attitude, along with so much else in the humanist agenda, was Petrarch. What sparked his interest were the many references to Greek literature which he encountered in his reading of classical Latin authors. His desire to learn Greek was motivated by the belief, which he bequeathed to his humanist followers, that it would give him a deeper understanding of the masterpieces of Roman antiquity.

Petrarch possessed Greek manuscripts of the Iliad (Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana, I 98 inf.) and of Plato (Bibliothèque nationale de France, gr. 1807, a ninth-century codex, which is the oldest surviving witness of the corpus and which later passed through the hands of distinguished Italian and Byzantine humanists). To his great regret, however, he was never able to read them, despite seeking the help of two scholars from southern Italy, where knowledge of Greek was kept alive in Basilian monasteries. The first of these, Barlaam of Calabria, taught Petrarch Greek, to little effect, in Avignon around 1342; the second, Leonzio Pilato, also from Calabria, he met in Padua in the late 1350s. Together with his friend Giovanni Boccaccio, Petrarch arranged for him to give public lectures on Greek in Florence, probably from 1360 to 1362, and to make a Latin translation of the two Homeric epics – in reality, a plodding, literal crib equipped with explanatory notes – on which both Petrarch and Boccaccio drew in their writings.