Thursday, October 23, 2008

John Wycliffe: Anna-Claire Simpson

John Wycliffe was an early Catholic dissident and reformist, founder of the Lollard movement which pre-dated and preceded the Protestant Reformation in its attempt to clean up the corruption in the Catholic church. In the 14th century, he, with a team of translators, produced what is now known as the Wycliffe Bible, which was translated from the Latin Vulgate into English. While this is not the same translation that became known as the King James Bible which Shakespeare would have surely been acquainted with, it does represent the early democratization of the Bible. This democratization was a long and slow process that eventually led to the landmark publishing of the Gutenberg Bible, but what it signified was a breakdown between religion, the written word and the poor. For centuries, the Bible as the most well-known text in England was in Latin, which meant only those who studied and spoke Latin could interpret it. Once that barrier started to break down, the road was paved for the Protestant Reformation, which brought salvation back into the realm of the individual.

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