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Middle English Bibles, translated from the Vulgate by John Wycliffe in the late fourteenth century, were still in manuscript circulation in Tudor England when William Tyndale sought to translate the Bible from its original languages. Tyndale finally succeeded in exile in 1526, producing three related publications of major consequence to the history of the Bible and religious controversy. First, Tyndale sought to print an elaborate vernacular New Testament that would be longer and more detailed than Luther’s 1522 New Testament, but the project came to a nearly tragic end. On word that the press in Cologne would be raided, Tyndale and his assistant William Roy stole away with all they had printed—a pamphlet-sized “New Testament” consisting only of its preface and Matthew and perhaps part of Mark—and shipped it to England, where Henry VIII condemned the prefatory material and the work’s “pestilent” marginal glosses. Tyndale and Roy then went to Worms, printing the full New Testament in octavo, this time without prefaces or glosses. Working with the same Worms printer, Peter Schöffer, Tyndale also published separately the prologue to Romans, which became one of the most frequently reprinted biblical paratexts in Tudor England and significantly shaped sixteenth-century Protestant culture. The New Testament that emerged from the trials of 1526 had an astonishing impact, with as much as eighty to ninety percent of the wording remaining in the King James Translation of 1611. The Tyndale New Testament’s colloquial language and its distinctive word choices—such as “love” instead of “charity,” “congregation” instead of “church,” and “elder” instead of “priest”—shook the foundations of established beliefs and institutions. Commemorating the 500th anniversary of the first printed English New Testament, this special issue of JMEMS seeks essays that engage with this significant moment in book history and English religious culture. Topics might include, for example, the relationship between the Wycliffite Bible and Tyndale; the role of literalist hermeneutics in shaping translation; the relationship between Tyndale’s biblical work and his subsequent polemical writing; the controversies about translation, as between Thomas More and Tyndale; the role that Luther played in shaping either the translation or, more obviously, the prefaces and prologues of 1526; or the role that Erasmus played in shaping Tyndale’s thought. Essays need not necessarily focus on 1526, but should endeavor to speak in some way to the events of the 1520s, either in England, northern Europe, or beyond.
For this open-topic issue of the journal, the editors invite articles that are both informed by historical inquiry and alert to issues raised by contemporary theoretical debate. We expect that essays will be grounded in an intimate knowledge of a particular past and that their argumentation reveal a concern for the theoretical and methodological issues involved in interpretation. We are particularly committed to work that seeks to overcome the polarization between history and theory in the study of premodern Western culture.