Daily Reading for October 6 • William Tyndale, Priest, 1536
The availability of printed Bibles in the language of the common people helped bring about what has been called a “Copernican revolution” in the history of spirituality. Although statistics are notoriously unreliable, there was clearly a symbiotic relation between literacy among the laity, Protestant piety, and the reading of the printed Bible. Popular preaching from the Bible, which had been experiencing an upsurge in the later Middle Ages; detailed portrayal of Bible stories from both the Old and the New Testament in stained glass and fresco; and narrative poems going back to Heliand and similar vernacular works—through all of these medieval channels the knowledge of the Bible had been far more extensive and thorough than Protestant propaganda usually gives it credit for being. Nevertheless, the Reformation did produce a growth in Bible-centered piety. The lives of the saints and the countless holidays and feast days devoted to their commemoration, especially the many days consecrated to legends of the Virgin Mary, slowly yielded to a church year and a devotional calendar shaped much more directly by the Bible. One index of the change was a gradual supplanting of saints’ names by biblical names (especially the more colorful and plentiful ones in the Old Testament such as Jedidiah and Hephzibah) at baptism.
Medieval warnings abut how difficult or even dangerous it was to read the Bible privately without the proper guidance of church and clergy yielded to earnest admonitions to read it between sermons, even to bring it to church—although those medieval warnings often seemed to be coming true whenever yet another sect arose, based on yet another idiosyncratic reading of the biblical text in the vernacular. The existing sources do give us occasional information about how biblically grounded the faith and life and everyday speech of common people became. It is difficult to imagine that any of this could have happened if the Bible had not been translated and printed for popular consumption.
From Whose Bible Is It? A History of the Scriptures Through the Ages by Jaroslav Pelikan (Viking, 2005).