LNAT Practice Passage 9: The Chained Bible

The Chained Bible

The image shared of the Protestant Reformation is one where ordinary Christians recovered a Bible concealed from them by a Latin-speaking Church, printing and translation carrying scripture from monasteries and universities into homes and parish churches. Although this account contains an important truth, it makes access appear simpler than it was. Most people in sixteenth-century England could not purchase a large Bible, many could not read it, and rulers who authorised English scripture did not thereby concede that every reader might interpret it without supervision. Nor did English itself settle meaning, since translation replaced one set of interpretive choices with another and made those choices newly visible to readers, hearers and rulers. The movement from Latin to English altered religious authority, but it did not abolish the question of who might explain the text.

William Tyndale's English New Testament, printed at Worms in 1526 after attempts to produce it in England had failed, treated translation as more than a scholarly convenience. Tyndale wanted scripture rendered in language understood beyond universities, and traditionally he is associated with the ambition that a ploughboy should know more of the Bible than an educated clergyman. Copies were smuggled into England, while Bishop Cuthbert Tunstall arranged for them to be bought and burned at St Paul's Cross. The destruction was not evidence that churchmen opposed every use of English, since authorised vernacular material already existed; what alarmed them was a translation produced outside recognised control and accompanied by Protestant argument. Accordingly, the dispute concerned not only whether scripture should be understood, but whether translation could detach understanding from the institutions which had previously certified it.

After Henry VIII's break with Rome, effected through statutes including the Act of Supremacy in 1534, the Crown occupied much of the authority it had denied to the papacy. Thomas Cromwell's injunctions of 1538 ordered every parish to provide an English Bible, and the Great Bible, prepared under the direction of Miles Coverdale and first published in 1539, was authorised for church use. Significantly, it was not a wholly independent royal translation: much of its New Testament language ultimately derived from Tyndale, who had been executed for heresy in 1536, the irony being that words pursued as dangerous when issued without authority soon entered a Bible displayed under the King's authority. Crowds gathered around parish copies, sometimes reading aloud to those unable to read, while complaints followed that scripture was being disputed in alehouses and interpreted by people thought insufficiently educated. Meanwhile, official policy narrowed as well as widened access. The Act for the Advancement of True Religion of 1543 restricted the reading of English scripture by several groups and forbade public reading by women, although noblewomen and gentlewomen could read privately. Reform had made the vernacular Bible a sign of royal piety, but the Crown still attempted to classify readers, places and permissible forms of attention. Under Edward VI, the first Book of Common Prayer in 1549 placed English worship more fully within parish life; under Mary I, papal authority and Latin worship returned; and under Elizabeth I, the 1559 settlement restored royal supremacy and an English prayer book. The sequence was not a smooth liberation of the written word, but repeated legislation over the conditions under which it could be heard, read and explained.

The great parish Bible was commonly secured by a chain, a practical protection for an expensive communal object which could not simply be carried away. Yet the image has acquired a larger significance. The chained book was accessible to parishioners and physically restrained; it represented scripture released from one form of custody while remaining within another. Translation enabled people to encounter biblical language directly, printing multiplied copies, and public placement created audiences wider than private ownership could have done. None of this was insignificant. Nevertheless, the English Reformation did not merely replace ignorance with knowledge. It converted the government of scripture into a visible political problem, because once sacred words could circulate in English, deciding who might read them, where, and with whose interpretation became more urgent rather than less.