Beyond Catholicism

Heresy, Mysticism, and Apocalypse in Italian Culture

Kenneth A. Loparo, S. Gilson, Kenneth A. Loparo, S. Gilson, Fabrizio De Donno

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781137342027
• eBook ISBN: 9781137342034
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: European History

The essays within Beyond Catholicism trace the interconnections of belief, heresy, and mysticism in Italian culture from the Middle Ages to today. In particular, they explore how religious discourse has unfolded within Italian culture in the context of shifting paradigms of rationality, authority, time, good and evil, and human collectivities.

Part I

Bibles, Saints, and Heresies in Medieval and Early Modern Italy

1

Romancing the Gospel: Italian Vernacular Scripture in the Middle Ages

Brenda Deen Schildgen

There was a time when all the world spoke a single language and used the same words.

Genesis 11:1

Thus it happened that even the Sacred Scripture, by which so many maladies of the human will are cured, was set forth in one language, but so that it could be spread conveniently through all the world it was scattered far and wide in the various languages of translators.

St. Augustine, De Doctrina Christiana (II.v.6)

(Ex quo factum est, ut etiam scriptura divina [. . .] ab una lingua profecta, qua opportune potuit per orbem terrarum disseminari, per varias interpretum linguas longe lateque diffusa innotesceret gentibus ad salutem [. . .], On Christian Doctrine, in Augustine 1958, p. 37)

A common assumption, even among educated and scholarly readers, is that the Catholic Church prevented anyone but the clergy from reading the Bible during the Middle Ages. Whether due to an anti-Catholic bias among protestant scholars, the rigid impositions of Latin in the liturgy and ecclesiology in the Roman Church following the Council of Trent (1545–1563), or simply a lack of research interest, this uninformed attitude persists. The erroneous presuppositions project the Counter Reformation return to a rigid Latinity and simultaneous identification of the vernacular with heresy back onto the Middle Ages. Connected to this is the conviction that the authoritative Vulgata, the Jerome Bible, was the sole version of the Bible during this long period. This bias shows up in numerous modern studies focusing on the translations of the Bible made during or just prior to the Reformation.¹ The truth, however, lies very far from these common erroneous approaches, as this chapter will show by illustrating how it was not uncommon in Italy in the Middle Ages for the Bible to be translated into the vernacular, and how such translations were not necessarily associated with reform movements and heresy, as they came to be in the sixteenth century. The French Bible of the thirteenth century, the first known Bible in a European modern vernacular, whether because it had no name attached to it or because it was not associated with heretical groups, in contrast to the more famous Wycliffite Bible, has yet to be published in a modern edition (Sneddon 1998, p. 231). Nonetheless, the French vernacular Bible was so widely dispersed, both in England and on the Continent that no less an authority than Dante, in his linguistic treatise, the De vulgari eloquentia (1304), draws attention to a French version or translation of the Bible while praising the “lingua oïl” (French-derived languages) as most suited to prose (I.x.2). While Dante appears to acknowledge the French translation, he makes no reference whatsoever to an Italian vernacular Bible even though one written in his own Tuscan dialect did in fact exist.

Although it is true that the Council of Trent confirmed Latin as the official church language in a reaction to the breakdown of Roman authority across Europe, it is also true that the three centuries leading up to the council had witnessed an explosion of biblical translations. Furthermore, recognizing the multiplicity of ethnic groups and languages under the ecclesial jurisdiction of the Roman Church, the Fourth Lateran Council (Canons 9 and 10) of 1215 had mandated ministry (sermons, administration of the sacraments, and especially confession) in the languages that the ordinary faithful would understand, even requiring the bishop to engage a prelate who spoke the local language to facilitate the episcopal charge (online at Fordham). At the same time, the Latin Bible was authoritative throughout the Middle Ages. When the Council of Vienne in 1311 installed endowed chairs of oriental languages (Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic, and Arabic) in the central studia of western Christendom (Avignon, Paris, Oxford, Bologna, and Salamanca), and ordered Hebrew exegesis when possible, the church laid the groundwork for the later philological revival of the Renaissance when the Latin Bible would be examined for textual accuracy, based on knowledge of the Greek and Hebrew original texts. The Vulgata had not sustained itself as an inviolable text, because Jerome’s text became corrupted almost as soon as it appeared, and within a century serious copying errors violated it while parts of the Vetus Latina version were also injected.² The major assaults on the authority of Jerome’s Bible came first from the Italian humanist Lorenzo Valla (1407–1457), whose philological studies led him to recognize serious errors in the Jerome translation. Erasmus (1466–1536), using Valla’s work, expanded from his philological lead, publishing Valla’s revised Collatio Novi Testamenti as Adnotationes.

While the Council of Vienne installed authorized linguistic studies of the Bible that culminated in Renaissance philology, from the thirteenth century onward, entire Bibles, as well as New Testaments, or diatessarons began to appear in Old French (Pétavel rept. 1970, Berger rept. 1977; Berger 1884; Sneddon 1979, 1998); Old Spanish (Reinhardt and Santiago-Otero 1986; Montgomery and Baldwin 1970), and Portuguese (Bíblia Medieval Portuguêsa 1958 ed. Neto), Tuscan and Venetian, which are still in manuscript form (Leonardi 1996), Old Norse (Kirby 1986), Dutch (Plooij 1929–1938), Old High German (Quispel 1975, pp. 50–107; Metzger 1977, pp. 455–60), and Middle English (Bruce 1961). Just as these languages were emerging as vehicles for secular literature, they were also being used for sacred texts—all long before the far more heralded translation efforts of the Protestant Reformation.

A number of developments contributed to the expanded interest in a vernacular Bible in the High Middle Ages. After the twelfth century, when clerical monopoly over religious life began to decline, the Bible’s influence on lay persons expanded in a number of ways. The spread of private reading and the greater availability of books due to the introduction of paper in the twelfth century, two centuries before the printing press, were important factors that led to the translation of the Bible, which, when put into “the mother tongue,” became accessible to larger audiences and to more readers. In addition to this avid translating activity, another important aspect of medieval Bible reception stems from radical developments in book production in Paris in the thirteenth century, combined with the preaching activities of the mendicant orders. Together, these developments led to the so-called exemplar Parisiensis, or “Paris Bible,” designed to meet the needs both of the student in the university classroom and of the Mendicant preacher on mission (Light 1987). There were so many of these compact single-volume Latin pocket Bibles, an innovation of the Parisian ateliers produced in the thirteenth century, that they continued to be used in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, thus slowing production down. Perhaps inspired by breviaries, this mass-produced secular book-trade Bible introduced a style of Bible publishing that persists even to our own time. Small in size, written on thin parchment or paper, this text and its thirteenth- and fourteenth-century offshoots normalized the order of the sacred books and (thanks to Stephen Langton, d. 1228), who perhaps inspired the innovation, made chapter division virtually the same as today; the numbering of verses would come later (Branner 1977, pp. 120–3). For the first time in the Middle Ages, a book was designed both for private reading and for reference. This material transformation of the text suggests changes not only in the way Scripture was read but in the readership itself. While stable, cloistered religious communities continued to favor the large volumes in monastic libraries, these newer, more portable texts became the “pocket books” of the Mendicant Orders. Many were indeed small enough to be carried among the itinerant preacher’s personal effects. The proliferation of the Paris Bible also signifies a growing number of individual (rather than communal) readers—an educated elite that gravitated to the universities and Mendicant schools, filled administrative positions in church and state alike, and actively used their Bibles in what André Vauchez has called the “diffusion of the evangelical word” (1993, p. 100). Among these Bibles, though mostly in Latin, records also show commissioned French Bibles (Branner 1977, pp. 103, 138).

There appears to have been little official opposition to the French Bibles produced in Parisian ateliers, and while large numbers of them do not exist, this is probably much more a result of economic realities than lack of interest. In other words, direct knowledge of Scripture in the vernacular was not censored (Cambridge History of the Bible I, 451). These Bibles responded to an increased lay interest in the sacred Scripture in its authoritative form. Although associated with the movements deemed heretical in this period (Catharism and Waldensianism) that appealed to popular religious interests, particularly among the emerging bourgeois class, the Bibles actually reflect orthodox rather than heterodox theologies (Poerck with Van Deyck 1968; Thouzellier 1979; Asperti 1991). In particular, the French Bible, which was diffused widely, was used liturgically and for private lay spirituality, even if only by a minority of Christians (Leclerq 1979).

Although many disputes raged in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries about the emerging vernacular Bibles, the fact remains that these Bibles did appear in many Western European languages, and specifically so that the laity could have access to the sacred texts. Not since the nineteenth century has anyone written extensively on the Romance language Bibles—and at that time, the books written were inventories of manuscripts and analysis of the relationship among them. Samuel Berger, a nineteenth-century French Lutheran, who had studied the Romance Bibles, and had argued that they served heterodox purposes (Berger 1894), produced the first inventory. Reprinted in the twentieth century, his work still provides highly reliable surveys of these Romance vernacular Bibles (Berger 1977, 1884; Sneddon 1979). The general scholarly consensus is that these translations were less due to a decline in clerical knowledge of Latin than to a resurgence of lay interest in religious issues or to monastic commitment to lay biblical education (Cambridge History of the Bible I, pp. 458–9). The Romance Bibles comprise several French translations; Provençal Bibles, several Florentine Bibles, perhaps translated from the Provençal version along with the Vulgate, Venetian Bibles, and several Iberian translations including Portuguese, Catalan, and Castilian. These productions, often the product of work patronized by monarchs or their queens (Cambridge History of the Bible I, pp. 441, 451), show that the translators were aware that their “vulgarizing” efforts were radical accommodations to popular interests. For example, in the Jean de Sy manuscript, the translator refers to Robert Grosseteste (c. 1175–1253), who had translated Genesis from Greek into Latin, as he adds, “Je mettrai en françois tout son livre” (“I will put all his book into French”: Berger 1884, p. 239). The most widespread Bible in French before the sixteenth century was the so-called Bible du XIII^e siècle, which Berger (1884) had argued was translated from the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• Part I Bibles, Saints, and Heresies in Medieval and Early Modern Italy
• Part II Religious Expansion and Pluralism in Modern Italy
• Notes on Contributors
• Index