A dense darkness hangs over the origin and authorship of the translation ascribed to Wyclif. It is certain that Archbishop Arundel, at the Council of Oxford in 1408, prohibited the making or keeping of unauthorised English versions, and that he condemned “any book, booklet, or tract of this kind made in the time of the said John Wyclif or since.” It is equally certain that manuscript copies of an English Bible were in possession of such orthodox Catholics as Thomas of Woodstock, Henry VI, Humphrey Duke of Gloucester, and the Brigittine nuns of Syon. English Bibles were bequeathed by will, and given to churches or religious houses. From all this it has been argued, on the one hand, that authority tolerated the use of a version which was due to Wycliffite sources; on the other, that a Catholic version must have existed, and that the copies mentioned above contain it. Sir Thomas More, disputing against Tyndale, affirms that no translations executed prior to the Lollards were forbidden. “I myself have seen and can show you,” he says in his Dynlogue, “Bibles fair and old, written in English, which have been known and seen by the bishop of the diocese, and left in the hands of lay men and women whom he knew to be good and Catholic people.” More himself was decidedly in favour of vernacular versions; but “the New Testament newly-forged by Tyndale, altered and changed in matters of great weight,” he judged worthy of the fire. The extant copies of an earlier Bible, to whomsoever due, exhibit no traces of heretical doctrine. Cranmer and Foxe the martyrologist both allude to translations of the whole body of Scripture, “as well before John Wyclif was born as since,” says the latter. In the destruction of libraries these have perished and nothing of them is now known.
To Latin readers the Bible would be familiar. Coberger of Nürnberg had set up in London a warehouse for the sale of the Vulgate as early as 1480. To English readers Caxton offered the Golden Legend in 1483; it contained nearly the whole of the Pentateuch and a large portion of the Gospels. The Liber Festival(tm) included Scripture paraphrases. But it was in Germany that the printer had become the evangelist. No censorship interfered with the ordinary course of instruction; and this contemplated the whole duty of a Christian man; it was a comment on Holy Writ which all were at liberty to keep in their hands. Fifty-nine editions of the Imitation of Christ were brought out in less than fifty years. Prayer-books in heartfelt and instructive speech, the Gate of Heaven, the Path to Paradise, and a hundred more, were sold in all book-markets. Numerous as are the specimens that survive, those who have examined them agree that on points afterwards violently disputed,—as the doctrine of indulgences and prayers to the Saints,—they lend no countenance to superstition or excess. Were we to form our view of German religion from these prayers, hymns, and popular manuals, it would be eminently favourable. In language as in sentiment they have never been surpassed. The Deutsche Theologie, named and published in part by Luther (1516-18) is an admirable instance, perfectly orthodox and profoundly spiritual, by an unknown author, perhaps of the fourteenth century. We must look to other sources of information- among them Innocent VIIFs bull Summis desiderantes qffectibus against witchcraft (1484) and the Malleus Maleficarum of Jacob Sprenger and Heinrich Krämer (Institoris) (before 1487) hold a conspicuous place-if we would understand that with much outward ceremony and not a little genuine devotion, the phenomena of diseased fancies, ancient heathenism and growing luxury, were mingled in unequal proportions. But there is no reason for alleging that the Hierarchy or the religious Orders in general directly opposed themselves to the progress of learning. They considered that the Christian faith had much to gain and nothing to lose by the arts, inventions, and discoveries which the new inspiration called the Renaissance had carried to so marvellous a height. The enemy was not erudition but unbelief.
It would be as unreasonable to suppose that the rank and file of the monks were classical scholars, as that the personal influence of the prelates was for the most part edifying. But bishops who lived in open defiance of decency enacted excellent laws in synod; and there were few monasteries in which a serious effort to attain learning would be absolutely in vain. The scholastic philosophy was now overladen with futile expositions and had sunk to unprofitable wrangling. But Erasmus, the glory of Deventer, is a witness beyond exception to the spirit which prevailed among churchmen of high degree, from Oxford to Basel, and from Cambray to Rome. In his Colloquies, his Encomium Moriae, and throughout his correspondence, he mocks or argues against many superstitions, irregularities, and fantastic opinions, which he had observed in the course of his travels. But nowhere does he hint, under no provocation is he tempted to imagine, that authority frowns upon “good letters,” while he addresses the Archbishop of Mainz and the Pope himself in favour of reform. On these subjects the evidence of his residence in England is particularly instructive.
Erasmus (1466-1536) owed a little to Hegius; he had been remarked by Rudolf Agricola; his patron was the Bishop of Cambray. After making trial in Paris of the student’s joys and sufferings, since he despaired of reaching Italy, he came in 1499 to Oxford, and tarried there two or three months. He won the friendship of Colet and More; he became acquainted with Grocyn and Linacre. These were the lights of English learning, the chief guides in English religion, before the King’s “great matter” brought in a new world. “Colefs erudition, More’s sweetness,” to which an Erasmian letter alludes, have become proverbial. But the movement had not begun with them. Out of the new impulse, during or after the mid-course of the century, colleges at Oxford had sprung into existence or received a fresh life. They were rivalling or surpassing the monastic hospitia. In the classic revival Oxford rather than Paris took the lead. Grocyn, More’s teacher, was not the first Englishman who studied Greek. He received lessons, indeed, from the exile Chalcondylas in 1491; but twenty-five years earlier two monks of Canterbury, Hadley and Selling, were students at Padua, Bologna, and Rome (1464-7). According to Leland, Selling attended the lectures of Politian; at Bologna the Greek masters appear to have been Lionorus and Andronicus. To Canterbury the Benedictine monk brought Greek manuscripts and converted his monastery into a house of studies, from which the knowledge of Hellenic literature was carried in more than one direction.
His most celebrated pupil was Linacre. Sent to Oxford about 1480, Linacre studied in Canterbury College, became Fellow of All Souls’, and went with Selling in 1486 on an embassy from Henry VII to Pope Innocent. At Florence he shared in the lessons given by Politian to the children of Lorenzo de Medici. From Chalcondylas he learned more Greek than Selling had taught him. It was when Linacre had passed a year in Italy that he persuaded William Grocyn, whom he had known in Oxford, to come out and share his studies. Such was the origin of those famous lectures attended by Sir Thomas More. Of the names we have mentioned two, therefore, represent the Benedictine cloister at Canterbury; Grocyn was a doctor in theology, “almost superstitiously observant,” says Erasmus, “of ecclesiastical custom”; Linacre, after graduating in the medical schools at Padua, became physician to Henry VIII, and in the decline of life took priest’s orders. Selling translated a sermon of Chrysostom’s from Greek into Latin as early as 1488. And the complete Homer as well as the plays of Euripides, once associated with the memory of Archbishop Theodore, which are still preserved in the library of Corpus Christi, Cambridge, may have been among the manuscripts which Selling brought from Italy. In like manner the Livy, the Greek Psalter of the fifteenth century, and the Hebrew and Latin Psalms, in Trinity College Library, were Benedictine treasures.
With this learned Prior we may reckon his friend Langton, in 1483 Bishop of Winchester, from whose “domestic school” came the still more learned Robert Pace, well known as a diplomatist and man of letters. Langton sent Pace to study at Padua and Rome; he was assisted by Cuthbert Tunstal and William Latimer, and was taught by Leonicus. Few among Englishmen, except the clergy, were, as a Venetian traveller observed in 1500, at this time addicted to literature. In religious houses, as at Reading, Ramsey, and Glastonbury, distinct evidence is forthcoming of zeal in scholarship. To these examples may be added Richard Charnock, Prior of St Mary’s, Oxford, with whom Erasmus stayed. The registers of the University from 1506 to 1535, the era of Dissolution, prove that the Benedictines kept up a high average of graduates. To the same effect are details gleaned elsewhere, as at Gonville Hall, Cambridge, between 1500 and 1523. Help was constantly given to poor students by monastic houses; hence, when these were swept away, not only did the secular clergy lack recruits, but the Universities showed a falling off in their scholars. It is remarked that in 1547 and 1550 not a single degree was taken at Oxford. In 1545 Cambridge petitioned the Crown for fresh privileges in apprehension