Encountering the Word of God in Early Tudor England

Abstract

Abstract The arrival in England of Tyndale’s New Testament in the 1520s is still widely heralded as a transformative moment. This article argues that the lingering effects of triumphalist Protestant rhetoric concerning the ‘Word of God’ have obscured the many other contexts in which it was possible for the laity to encounter the Bible in early Tudor England. They have also glossed over some of the difficulties of transmitting Scripture to a largely illiterate populace. Protestant insistence on the literal interpretation of vernacular Scripture should chiefly be seen as propaganda for the evangelical cause. Early Tudor print culture demonstrates that the reading of Scripture was understood as a complex process involving a spiritual encounter shaped by faith, imagination and emotion, not just a textual encounter. In practice, Tyndale and other reformers, no less than their more conservative opponents, taught the laity that the Bible needed to be ‘unlocked’ and explained. For the lay reader encountering works of religious devotion and instruction, the ways in which early Tudor print culture mediated the Bible remained heavily indebted to late medieval religious practice. This shaped the context in which the ‘Great Bible’ of 1539 was conceived and published and this first official English Bible should be recognised as a contested text, which in its final form may have been as much a reflection of late medieval attitudes as the achievement of English Protestants.