Introduction

In the early fifteenth century, Archbishop Arundel issued his famous decree prohibiting the translation of the Bible into English without official approval:

Though stopping short of banning English biblical translations outright, Arundel’s decree gave voice to anxieties over the association of the vernacular with Lollardy and heresy in late medieval England.5 See further Nicholas Watson, ‘Censorship and Cultural Change in Late-Medieval England: Vernacular Theology, the Oxford Translation Debate, and Arundel’s Constitutions of 1409’, Speculum 70 (1995), 822–64; Vincent Gillespie and Kantik Ghosh, eds, After Arundel: Religious Writing in Fifteenth-Century England (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011); Maureen Jurkowski, ‘The Selective Censorship of the Wycliffite Bible’, in The Wycliffite Bible: Origin, History and Interpretation, ed. Elizabeth Solopova (Leiden: Brill, 2016), pp. 371–88. At the opposite end of the medieval period, in the late ninth century, King Alfred wrote a letter to his bishops – known as the Prose Preface to the Old English Pastoral Care – reflecting a very different attitude to the practice of translating the Bible into English:

Significantly, whereas Arundel writes in Latin, the official language of Church and state, Alfred writes in Englisc (Old English) at a time when knowledge of Latin was in decline among the Angelcynn (English people). Alfred justifies his proposal to have certain ‘essential’ books rendered into English by reminding his readers that the Latin Bible (i.e. the Vulgate) itself is a translation of a translation.7 The first major biblical translation was the Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures commissioned by Ptolemy II Philadelphus (r. 309–246 B.C.), known as the Septuagint because it was said to have been made by seventy (or seventy-two) elders of the tribe of Israel. Jerome’s dissatisfaction with the Septuagint saw him return to the Hebrew sources in preparing the Latin Vulgate (383–404 A.D.). For the debates surrounding early biblical translation leading to Jerome’s Vulgate, see Stanton, Culture of Translation, pp. 107–15; Barton, The Word, pp. 9–27. On the medieval Bible more generally, see van Liere, Introduction to the Medieval Bible. In Alfred’s letter, Englisc therefore sits comfortably alongside Hebrew, Greek and Latin (the three so-called ‘sacred languages’) and the other vernaculars of Christian peoples as a suitable vehicle for the dissemination of Scripture and other serious writing.8 As Tristan Major has recently pointed out, references to Hebrew, Greek and Latin in Old English and Anglo-Latin sources lack any use of the adjective ‘sacred’ traditionally applied to these languages, suggesting ‘an understanding of the practical function of language for communicating the message of salvation, which extends to the vernacular’: ‘Awriten on þreo geþeode: The Concept of Hebrew, Greek, and Latin in Old English and Anglo-Latin Literature’, JEGP 120 (2021), 141–76, at 176. See also Tristan Major, ‘Rebuilding the Tower of Babel: Ælfric and Bible Translation’, Florilegium 23 (2006), 47–60; and Roberta Frank, ‘Some Uses of Paronomasia in Old English Scriptural Verse’, Speculum 47 (1972), 207–26, at 223. However, a colophon in the earliest manuscript copy of the Old English Pastoral Care (Oxford Bodleian Library, MS Hatton 20) demonstrates some limited re-engagement with the three sacred languages in the early tenth century: see Daniel Anlezark, ‘The Trilingual titulus crucis Tradition in Oxford, Bodleian Library, Hatton 20’, in The Embroidered Bible: Studies in Biblical Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha in Honour of Michael E. Stone, ed. Lorenzo DiTommaso, Matthias Henze and William Adler, Studia in Veteris Testamenti Pseudepigrapha 26 (Leiden: Brill, 2017), pp. 64–78. Indeed, the availability of biblical writings in the English language (geðiod) appears to be central to Alfred’s vision of the Angelcynn (‘English people’) as a Christian nation (ðiod).9 On connections between language and national identity in Alfredian writing, see esp. Sarah Foot, ‘The Making of the Angelcynn: English Identity Before the Norman Conquest’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 6 (1996), 25–49. See further below, pp. 20–1, 150, 244–53.

What evidence is there to support Alfred’s claim that ‘all the other Christian nations’ (ealla oðra Cristna ðioda) had already translated ‘a certain portion’ (sumne dæl) of the Bible from Latin into their own languages? Bede records that King Oswald of Northumbria (r. 634–42) first encountered ‘the heavenly word’ (uerbi […] caelestis) of the Gospels through the Irish-language preaching of Bishop Aidan; having spent part of his youth in Ireland as an exile, Oswald was able to translate Aidan’s words into English for the benefit of his ealdormen and thegns (HE III.3).16 Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors, ed. and trans., Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, rev. edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), pp. 220–1. An Irish verse paraphrase of Genesis, other parts of the Old Testament and the life of Christ was produced in the late tenth or early eleventh century.17 See Brian Murdoch, ‘An Early Irish Adam and Eve: Saltair na Rann and the Traditions of the Fall’, Mediaeval Studies 35 (1973), 146–77. Parts of a prose redaction of this work are extant in the late fourteenth-century Book of Uí Maine and the early fifteenth-century Leabhar Breac.18 See Myles Dillon, ‘Scél saltrach na rann’, Celtica 4 (1958), 1–43. However, while Irish glosses were added to Latin biblical books as early as the seventh century, no substantial written translations of Scripture into Irish survive from the early medieval period.19 Fearghus Ó Fearghail comments: ‘there is little evidence of an interest in a vernacular Bible in Ireland before the mid-sixteenth century’: ‘Translating the Bible into Irish 1565–1850’, in Ireland and the Reception of the Bible: Social and Cultural Perspectives, ed. Bradford A. Anderson and Jonathan Kearney (London: T. & T. Clark, 2018), pp. 59–78, at 59. On biblical allusions in Irish bardic poetry from the thirteenth to seventeenth centuries, as well as biblical influence on early Irish saints’ lives and other texts, see Salvador Ryan, ‘The Bible and “the People” in Ireland, ca. 1100–ca. 1650’, in Ireland and the Reception of the Bible, ed. Anderson and Kearney, pp. 43–58. For biblical influences on early Irish literature, see Elizabeth Boyle, History and Salvation in Early Ireland (Abingdon: Routledge, 2021). For early Irish biblical glossing, commentary and exegesis, see Martin McNamara, The Bible in the Early Irish Church 550–850 (Leiden: Brill, 2022). I am grateful to Prof. Máire Ní Mhaonaigh for these references. The earliest extant translation of Scripture into a medieval European vernacular is the Gothic Bible produced in the fourth century by Bishop Ulfilas (Wulfila). Ulfilas played a key role in the conversion of the Goths following their migration into former Roman territory north of the Danube in the mid-fourth century, and his translation was designed to make Scripture accessible to these newly converted people. Ulfilas is said to have translated the entire Bible except for the Books of Kings from the Greek of the Septuagint into Gothic, though only the Gospels and parts of the Pauline epistles now survive.20 The text was edited in 1908 by Wilhelm Streitberg, Die Gotische Bibel, 7th edn (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag C. Winter, 2000). For a detailed study, see Carla Falluomini, The Gothic Version of the Gospels and Pauline Epistles: Cultural Background, Transmission and Character (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2015). Unlike most other early Germanic translations of Scripture, Ulfilas wrote in prose rather than verse, sticking very closely to the wording and syntax of his Greek source, while making some ‘domesticating’ concessions to Gothic idiom.21 On domesticating vs foreignising translations, see above p. xii. For Ulfilas’ approach to translation, see Hans Stolzenburg, Zur Übersetzungstechnik des Wulfila (Halle a S.: Buchdruckerei des Waisenhauses, 1905). Ulfilas employs some rhetorical and literary techniques such as variatio – the technique of varying an element of a repeated referent – and there are occasional instances of alliteration, though it is unclear whether this is intentional or accidental.22 Falluomini cites the examples of Mt 7.15: wulfos wilwandans; Col 2.16: in draggka aiþþau in dailai dagis dulþais (pp. 87–8). See further J. M. N. Kapteijn, ‘Die Übersetzungstechnik der gotischen Bibel in den Paulinischen Briefen’, Indogermanische Forschungen 29 (1911–12), 260–367. This largely word-for-word, formal-equivalence approach is evident in his rendering of the opening words of the Gospel of Mark (with Greek text and modern English translation supplied underneath the Gothic): 23 On the distinction between formal and functional equivalence, see above, p. xii.

It is a source of shame for Otfrid’s patrons that while pagan poets such as Virgil, Lucan and Ovid had celebrated the deeds of their people in their own language, and early Christian poets such as Juvencus, Arator and Prudentius had already turned the Bible into Latin verse, the Franks are yet to produce any scriptural translations of their own:37 On the Latin biblical verse epics, see Michael Lapidge, ‘Versifying the Bible in the Middle Ages’, in The Text in the Community: Essays on Medieval Works, Manuscripts, Authors, and Readers, ed. Jill Mann and Maura Nolan (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005), pp. 11–40; Patrick McBrine, Biblical Epics in Late Antiquity and Anglo-Saxon England: Divina in Laude Voluntas (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017).

As is the case with Alfred’s preface cited above, there is nothing in this letter to suggest that Otfrid regarded his vernacular as inferior to Latin or unsuitable for the translation of Scripture. Indeed, Otfrid not only translates the Gospels, but he also confidently interprets them for his readers under sections labelled ‘Spiritaliter’, ‘Mystice’ and ‘Moraliter’.39 The classic study of medieval biblical exegesis is Beryl Smalley, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Blackwell, 1952). See further van Liere, Introduction to the Medieval Bible, pp. 110–40. Otfrid’s Evangelienbuch is therefore what we might call a functional equivalence translation, which aims to bring across the meaning of the source text rather than imitating its form. This communicative approach is determined by the work’s purpose: a dedicatory poem to King Louis the German (r. 843–76), together with other prefatory and epistolary addresses to various churchmen, indicates that Otfrid intended for his work to reach a mixed audience of lay and clerical readers.40 See Rosamond McKitterick, The Carolingians and the Written Word (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 227–35.

The earliest reference to the composition of Old English biblical poetry is Bede’s famous account of Cædmon, preserved in his Historia Ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum (Ecclesiastical History of the English People) completed in 731. According to Bede, Cædmon was a lay brother at the Northumbrian double-monastery of Streanæshalch (modern-day Whitby) during the abbacy of Hild (657–680) (HE IV.24). Not knowing the songs that were routinely sung in the monastery during feasts, Cædmon went out to tend to the cows and fell asleep, whereupon he received a vision in which a man instructed him to sing of Creation. Thus inspired, Cædmon began to sing in laudem Dei Conditoris uersus quos numquam audierat (‘verses which he had never heard before in praise of God the Creator’).44 Colgrave and Mynors, pp. 416–17. Although Bede provides only a Latin summary of the song, a short Old English poem now known as Cædmon’s Hymn is preserved in multiple manuscripts of the Historia in both the original Northumbrian dialect and a later West Saxon recension, which reads as follows:

In this short poem, the traditional techniques of Germanic alliterative verse which had formerly been used to praise secular heroes are now (Nu) repurposed for the praise of the Christian God.46 See E. G. Stanley, ‘New Formulas for Old: Cædmon’s Hymn’, in Pagans and Christians: The Interplay between Christian Latin and Traditional Germanic Cultures in Early Medieval Europe, ed. Tette Hofstra, L. A. J. R. Houwen and Alasdair A. MacDonald, Medievalia Groningana 16 (Groningen: Egbert Forsten, 1995), pp. 131–48. For example, the poem features structural alliteration (e.g. Nu sculon herigean heofon-rices weard/ meotodes meahte and his mod-geþanc), variation (e.g. heofon-rices weard,/meotodes meahte […] moncynnes weard) and compound diction (e.g. heofon-rices, mod-geþanc, wuldor-fæder), while the proximity of the verb sceop (‘created’) and the noun Scyppend (‘Shaper/Creator’) suggests that the song sung by the poet (Old English scop) Cædmon is itself divinely inspired.

At the end of his Historia Ecclesiastica, Bede tells us that from the age of seven, when he entered monastic orders at Wearmouth-Jarrow, he applied himself omnem meditandis Scripturis operam (‘entirely to the contemplation of the Scriptures’).56 HE V.24; Colgrave and Mynors, pp. 566–7. Bede’s monastery was responsible for the production of the earliest extant complete Bible (pandect) containing the Latin text of the Old and New Testaments – the Codex Amiatinus57 See Celia Chazelle, The Codex Amiatinus and Its Sister Bibles: Scripture, Liturgy, and Art in the Milieu of the Venerable Bede (Leiden: Brill, 2019). – and the majority of his own writings took the form of Latin scriptural commentaries and exegesis.58 On the celebration of Bede’s career as biblical exegete and translator in the thirteenth-century First Worcester Fragment, see Conclusion, pp. 244–6. However, as André Crépin notes, Bede was not ideologically opposed to the use of the vernacular for scriptural translation and preaching.59 André Crépin, ‘Bede and the Vernacular’, in Famulus Christi: Essays in Commemoration of the Thirteenth Centenary of the Birth of the Venerable Bede, ed. Gerald Bonner (London: S.P.C.K., 1976), pp. 170–92, at 182. Hence, Bede states in his Letter to Ecgbert that he made his own English versions of the Creed and the Lord’s Prayer (Matthew 6.9–13) for the benefit of ignorant priests who did not know Latin.60 For Ælfric’s criticism of unlearned priests in his Preface to Genesis, and the possibility that such figures were among the intended audience of the Old English Heptateuch, see Chapter Four below. The tenth capitulary at the second Council of Clofesho in 747 similarly decreed that priests should learn how to construe and explain the Creed and Lord’s Prayer in their own tongue, as well as the words used in the sacraments of mass and baptism: for the text, see Arthur West Haddan and William Stubbs, eds, Councils and ecclesiastical documents relating to Great Britain and Ireland, 3 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1869–78), III, pp. 362–76, at 366; for a translation, see John Johnson, trans. A collection of the laws and canons of the Church of England from its first foundation to the conquest, and from the conquest to the reign of King Henry VIII, 2 vols (Oxford: John Henry Parker, 1850), I, pp. 242–63, at 247; for discussion, see Simon Keynes, The Councils of ‘Clofesho’ (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1994); Catherine Cubitt, Anglo-Saxon Church Councils, 650–850 (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1995), pp. 91–152. It is not known if Bede’s translations of the Creed and Lord’s Prayer were done in Old English verse or prose.

No trace of either work survives. The Isidorean work may have taken the form of a series of excerpts in the manner of the popular genre of the florilegium. As for Bede’s translation of John, scholars are divided as to whether this was done in verse or prose. Bede was familiar with the Latin biblical verse epics, such as Juvencus’ Euangelia and Sedulius’ Carmen paschale,62 For citations from these two works in Bede, see Michael Lapidge, The Anglo-Saxon Library (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 219, 224. while Cuthbert reports that he knew nostris carminibus (‘our [Old English] poems’). Indeed, immediately prior to his description of Bede’s translation of John, Cuthbert quotes a five-line Old English alliterative poem, now known as Bede’s Death Song, which he says Bede composed in nostra […] lingua (‘in our own language’) in preparation for death.63 Colgrave and Mynors, pp. 582–3. It is certainly possible, then, that Bede translated the opening of John into Old English verse in the Cædmonian style.64 See Godden, ‘Why did the Anglo-Saxons switch from Verse to Prose?’, pp. 567–8. Indeed, given the fashion for adapting Scripture into vernacular poetry at the time, Cuthbert may have assumed that any biblical translation Bede made would be done in verse.65 See Christine Rauer, ‘The Earliest English Prose’, Journal of Medieval History 47 (2021), 485–56, at 489–91. A verse translation or paraphrase of the Gospel of John might have proved a useful impetus to prayer and meditation for Bede himself as well as his fellow monks and nuns, comparable with his Latin verse Life of Cuthbert.66 Michael Lapidge argues that this work serves as a ‘meditation on the spiritual significance of the events described prosaically by the [anonymous] Lindisfarne author’: Anglo-Latin Literature, 600–899 (London: Hambledon Press, 1996), p. 333. On the suitability of Bede’s verse Life of Cuthbert for monastic ruminatio, see Britton Elliott Brooks, Restoring Creation: The Natural World in the Anglo-Saxon Saints’ Lives of Cuthbert and Guthlac, Nature and Environment in the Middle Ages 3 (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2019), pp. 67–122.

One of the most remarkable features of the literary culture of pre-Conquest England is the unusual prestige attached to the written form of the vernacular and the concomitant rise of lay literacy from the time of Alfred.70 See esp. Patrick Wormald, ‘Anglo-Saxon Society and its Literature’, in The Cambridge Companion to Old English Literature, ed. Malcolm Godden and Michael Lapidge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 1–22, at 16–19. In an earlier article, Wormald had downplayed the importance of lay literacy: see ‘The Uses of Literacy in Anglo-Saxon England and Its Neighbours’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th series, 27 (1977), 95–114. For further discussion of the importance of the vernacular in the late Old English period, see Susan Kelly, ‘Anglo-Saxon Lay Society and the Written Word’, and Simon Keynes, ‘Royal Government and the Written Word in Late Anglo-Saxon England’, both in The Uses of Literacy in Early Medieval Europe, ed. Rosamond McKitterick (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 36–62 and 226–57; Mechthild Gretsch, The Intellectual Foundations of the English Benedictine Reform, CSASE 25 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Elaine Treharne, ‘The Authority of English, 900–1150’, in The Cambridge History of Early Medieval English Literature, ed. Clare A. Lees (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 2013), pp. 554–78; Helen Gittos, ‘The Audience for Old English Texts: Ælfric, Rhetoric and “The Edification of the Simple”’, ASE 43 (2014), 231–66; Mark Atherton, The Making of England: A New Literary History of the Anglo-Saxon World (London: I. B. Tauris, 2017), pp. 59–74. See also more generally, Stanton, Culture of Translation. English laws had been written out in vernacular prose since the seventh century, but by the turn of the tenth century charters, wills, letters and other administrative documents previously composed in Latin were now increasingly done in the vernacular. In the wake of Alfred’s educational reforms, and building on earlier developments in the kingdom of Mercia, major Latin works of history, science, philosophy and theology were translated into Old English prose.71 For a recent overview, see Amy Faulkner and Francis Leneghan, ‘Introduction: Rethinking English Literary Culture c. 850–950’, in The Age of Alfred: Rethinking English Literary Culture, c. 850–950, ed. Amy Faulkner and Francis Leneghan, SOEL 3 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2024), pp. 17–48. Moreover, whereas in the centuries after the conversion Latin saints’ lives and homilies had been routinely adapted into Old English verse, by the tenth century it had become more fashionable to turn them into vernacular prose.72 See Malcolm Godden, ‘Why did the Anglo-Saxons switch from Verse to Prose?’, in Age of Alfred, ed. Faulkner and Leneghan, pp. 565–91. The same switch from verse to prose that seems to have taken place in the ninth century would determine the shape of Old English biblical translations. Where Old English verse had been the preferred medium for biblical adaptation in the age of Bede, during Alfred’s reign prose translations of the Psalms and parts of Exodus and Acts were made, while the tenth and eleventh centuries saw the production of prose translations of all four gospels and the first seven books of the Old Testament, as well as a proliferation of vernacular prose homilies and biblical summaries.73 Although dwarfed by the corpus of Old English biblical prose, vernacular biblical poetry continued to be produced in the later period: for example, Judith and the Metrical Psalms were both composed in the late ninth or tenth centuries. Other biblical poems such as Christ and Satan and Christ III (Christ in Judgment) are of unknown date. For the possibility that Genesis B was composed in or around the Alfredian period, see above, pp. 12–13 n. 43.