One of the things I’ve been realizing is that the picture we have (or at least that I was taught) of the Catholic Church and the Bible at the time is mostly a myth. To sketch that picture briefly: the Catholic Church used the Latin Vulgate and suppressed any alternatives, especially those translations into the vernacular. This might be illustrated by William Tyndale (who is actually a Reformation figure).Ken wrote: ↑Wed Jun 28, 2023 12:42 amThe number I found for the early 1500s was 10% literacy not 1%.
I threw the 1% number out there as a random guess as to how many ordinary Germans in the 1530s would have been literate enough in Latin to be able to walk into a Medieval church and read the Bible, which would have been written in Latin. And then to be proficient enough in Latin to be able to understand the nuances of Biblical teachings.
One of the things that piqued my interest in the first article was the Brethren of the Common Life read the Bible in vernacular (see the end of the line I quoted above). It seems like vernacular Bibles were not all that uncommon, especially in the years before the Reformation. The Wikipedia article is helpful for German, listing several early translations as well as eighteen different German editions printed in the seventy years before Luther (i.e. post-Gutenberg).
To take this further, the Brethren of the Common Life seem to be one of several renewal-minded movements in the years and even centuries before the Reformation, among which others would include the Lollards, Franciscans, Hussites, and Moravians. Luther was in some ways just the latest in a series. I think the picture we should have of pre-Reformation Europe is not one of illiterate benighted peasants being chanted at in a language they don’t understand, waiting for the Luther to come blaze the way. Rather we should picture people that were familiar with the Bible and very engaged in religious questions and who offered fertile ground for Luther and, later, the Anabaptists (as well as Catholic reformers too).
