In 1582, Barnaby Rich declared that ‘[t]he Pope is very unwilling that the Scripture should be in a known language amongst us’. Rather than the Bible, ‘[the Pope] hath bequeathed us Legenda Aurea . . . with suche other stuffe. These we maie reade in English, you maie easily gesse why, but the Scriptures we must not heare but in Latin, because thei saie it is daungerous that we should reade the Scripture in a knowne language’.Footnote 1
In fact, the man responsible for the best-known English translation of the Legenda aurea had not been paid by the pope. William Caxton began the expensive, time-consuming project on his own and finished it with support from William Fitzalan, sixteenth earl of Arundel. In his prologue to the first printed English edition, published in 1483, Caxton wrote that he undertook the translation
by cause me semeth to be a souerayn wele to Incyte & exhorte men and wymmen to kepe them from slouthe and ydlenesse / and to lete to be understonden to suche peple as been not letterd / the natyuytees / the lyues / the passions / the miracles / and the dethe of the holy sayntes . . . I haue submysed my self to translate in to englysshe the legende of sayntes . . . & I shal praye for them unto almyghty god . . . that it prouffyte to alle them that shal rede or here it rede / and may encreace in theme virtue / and expelle vyce and synne / that by the ensaumple of the holy sayntes amende theyr shorte lyf / that by their merytes / they and I may come to euerlastynge lyf & blysse in heuen amen[.]Footnote 2
Caxton's translation furthered a goal: bringing the stories and examples of the saints to a wide array of English people, to the spiritual benefit of reader and translator alike.
Nonetheless, by the turn of the seventeenth century, the contrast between the ubiquitous English Legend and the banned English Bible had become a commonplace of Protestant polemic.Footnote 3 Rich and his fellow Protestant pamphleteers made the Legenda a symbol of the late medieval Church, full of fabulous stories read by incompetent preachers to ignorant parishioners.Footnote 4 Although their verdict has proved remarkably lasting, recent work has added nuance to this narrative. As Helen Parish, Martha Driver and Alison Chapman have shown, the Legenda and other works of hagiography continued to be read and remembered after the break with Rome, often – though not inevitably – being turned to polemical ends.Footnote 5 This article will explore the relationship between the Legenda and the vernacular Bible. It seeks to complicate not only the Legenda itself, but also the real and imagined histories of Bible translation in early modern England.
From Legenda aurea to Golden Legend
The Dominican Jacobus de Voragine was archbishop of Genoa from 1292–8. A prolific writer, his most famous work was the Legenda aurea, a collection of saints’ lives and stories from the life of Christ. Although he included a handful of medieval figures, saints of the early Church predominated.Footnote 6
In writing the Legenda, Jacobus used the concepts of physical and linguistic translation to connect his saints to his readers and listeners. Stories of relic translations allowed Jacobus to tie one saint to several places and audiences. The relics of Mark, for instance, were associated with miracles in Alexandria and Venice, and those of Mary Magdalene with both Aix and Vézelay.Footnote 7 Jacobus also used translation in its literary sense, starting many vitae with explanations of the saints’ names. Different languages came together in these etymologies to reveal different aspects of a saint's character: Agnes could be derived from the Latin agna – lamb; the Greek agnos – pious, or the Latin agnoscendo – knowing. Jacobus presented each possibility as equally valid, with each one evoking a new resonance or insight.Footnote 8 These translations, physical and literal, made his saints more vivid and complex.
Jacobus's early translators rendered the text into vernacular languages and added local saints to his canon. The text was read in different formats and contexts, both public and private, and inspired works in other genres. England was a case in point. Between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries, the Legenda was available in Latin and later in French and English. Lay people owned copies, with the best documented of these manuscripts being those that belonged to elite families.Footnote 9 Medieval book catalogues suggest that the work was a standard holding of monastic and university libraries, and copies were also found in parish churches.Footnote 10
An anonymous fifteenth-century translator produced an English version, known as the Gilte Legende. This survives in several manuscript copies, with some textual variation.Footnote 11 These differences suggest that the Legenda was a flexible text: English copies include British saints like Swithin and Winifred, and many have at least one Old Testament story, such as the life of Adam.Footnote 12 The scribe of one copy of the South English Legendary, now in Lambeth Palace Library, described his work as a version of the Legenda: ‘Her endeth legenda aurea wrten by R. W. of this toun.’ The two are separate texts – the South English Legendary is entirely in rhyme and includes Old Testament lives – but the annotation suggests that the translated Legenda could serve as a concept as well as a book, encompassing works with both obvious and tenuous ties to the original.Footnote 13
In preparing his translation of the Legenda, William Caxton acknowledged a debt to three sources, ‘a legende in frensshe / another in latyn / & the thyrd in englysshe’. These were the French translation made by Jean de Vignay in the early fourteenth century and printed in Flanders between 1475 and 1477, Jacobus's Latin original, and a copy of the Gilte Legende.Footnote 14 Caxton began his work with an adapted translation of Vignay's preface to the Legenda, reproducing Vignay's ideas closely – notably that the Legenda was a means of allowing ‘such peple as been not letterd’ access to the saints’ stories – but substituting an account of his own work and patrons.Footnote 15 Of course, he was clear that ‘this sayd werke was grete & ouer chargeable’ and would have to find buyers, but translation was a pious act both for Caxton, who carried it out, and for Arundel, who paid for it.Footnote 16
Like his predecessors, Caxton departed from Jacobus in several instances. In addition to shortening many of Jacobus's careful source citations, he connected the text more strongly to his readers by including lives of medieval French and British saints and adding interpolations of his own to some of the stories. Jacobus's life of George, for instance, concluded with an account of the saint assisting the Crusaders in their siege of Jerusalem, while the medieval English version ended with stories of the healing miracles performed by his relics. Caxton, in contrast, wrote that George was ‘patrone of this royame of englond / and the crye of men of warre’, and that both the Order of the Garter and St George's Chapel in Windsor Castle were dedicated to him. He also noted that George's heart, head and other relics had all been translated to England.Footnote 17 In translating this story, Caxton made a universally acknowledged saint particular to England.
Caxton also restructured the Legenda. While both he and Jacobus began with Advent, Caxton separated the New Testament stories from the rest of the text and grouped them together at the start of the book. After the Dedication of the Church, the final feast in this New Testament section and the last story in the Latin Legenda, Caxton added a series of Old Testament stories to be read over the course of the year, beginning with Adam and concluding with Judith on the last Sunday in October. Only then did he start the saints’ lives.
Norman Blake has suggested that the restructured and expanded Legend did not make ‘a structurally satisfying whole’, and the added stories do differ markedly in length and tone from those of the Legenda proper.Footnote 18 Wynkyn De Worde's editorial decisions arguably made more sense of them. The 1493 edition, the first printed by de Worde, did not include the Old Testament stories, but the 1498 edition reinstated them and placed them before the stories of Christ's ministry. From 1498 onwards, the work was structured chronologically and typologically, with the stories of the Old Testament prefiguring the revelation of the New. The saints were part of the cycle of the Christian year, but they were also positioned within a historical framework, beginning with Adam and continuing to the saints of the recent past.Footnote 19
Introducing the Old Testament section, Caxton wrote ‘here folowen the storyes of the byble’, and he began each one by noting when in the Church year it would be read.Footnote 20 As Sarah Horrall shows, he drew on the Vulgate as well as a number of Biblical paraphrases, principally Comestor's Historia Scholastica, but also Lorens's Somme le roi and the anonymous Cursor Mundi.Footnote 21 The closeness between Caxton's stories and the Bible varies.Footnote 22 He condensed the twenty-four chapters of Joshua into one folio-length column of text but translated Tobit in its entirety, apart from missing out 6: 9 and leaving the phrase ‘in saecula saeculorum’ in Latin.Footnote 23 Other stories fell within these extremes. The life of Abraham includes both paraphrase and translation from Genesis as well as additional details probably drawn from Josephus via the Historia Scholastica, like Lot's wife becoming a pillar of salt ‘whiche abideth so in to this day’, while the history of Job is a direct translation of Job 1–2 and 42: 7–17, linked by three sentences summarizing Job's conversation with his friends and referring readers to Gregory's Moralia in Job. Footnote 24
Caxton's life of David, drawn from 1 and 2 Samuel and 1 Kings, illustrates many elements of his adaptation technique. He described it as ‘shortly taken out of the bible the most historyal maters and but litil towched’. The story recounts some episodes at length: David's meetings with Saul's Amalekite killer and with Nathan are direct translations of more than ten verses at a time. Other scriptural text appears with cuts or in the context of a paraphrase. For instance, Caxton paraphrased the first nine verses of 2 Samuel 24 before providing the full text of the tenth verse:
After this dauid callid Ioab & bad hym nombre the people of Israhel / And so Ioab walked thurgh alle the tribus of Israhel from dan to bersabee / And ouer Iordan and all the contre / And ther were founden in Israhel viii CM. strong men that were able to fight and to drawe swerd / And of the tribe of Iuda fyfty thousand fyghtyng men / And after that the peple was nombred / the herte of dauid was smeton by our lord and was heuy & said / I haue synned gretly in this dede / but I praye the lord to take away the wickednes of thy seruaunt for I haue don folyly[.]Footnote 25
There are also additions to the text, notably an account of David's penance, which Caxton claimed to have heard from a knight named John Capons while riding between Ghent and Brussels: ‘[T]his said noble man told me that he had redde that dauid dyde this penaunce folowyng for thyse said synnes / that he dalf hym in the ground standyng nakyd unto the heed so longe that the wormes began to crepe in his flesshe / and made a verse of this psalme Miserere / and thenne cam out’.Footnote 26 While Caxton cited this uncritically, he mentioned elsewhere that some stories attached to Old Testament figures were extra-scriptural. In his life of Solomon, for instance, he wrote: ‘It is sayd but I fynde it not in the bible / that Salamon repentyd hym moche of this synne of ydolatrye / & dyd moche penaunce therfor’.Footnote 27 Caxton also added a summary to the end of his life of David. Over the course of the narrative, he paraphrased, translated, added and cut.
The significance of these Old Testament stories is twofold. First, they raise questions about how Caxton's Legend was used. The readers’ notes in the margins of surviving copies suggest that these Bible stories were read aloud, and they may have been used in preaching. Many readers marked up the text for oral reading, summarizing the adjacent material and adding marginal marks akin to paragraph breaks. A copy in the British Library, for instance, is extensively annotated in this way: ‘Howe Sara conceyued ysaac . . . Sara said to Abraham cast forth Agar & hyr sone . . . Howe Abraham sent forth Agar & hyr son’.Footnote 28 A John Rylands copy has extensive underlinings and manicules as well as many of the names and ages of characters written out in different hands.Footnote 29 Still another copy has marginal summaries in both Latin and English and occasional synonyms for, or corrections to, words in the text: Samuel was ‘ruddy & fayre of vysage’ rather than Caxton's ‘rough’.Footnote 30 Such annotations are particularly frequent in the Old Testament sections of surviving copies, although they are sometimes present in all three sections of the text.Footnote 31 Some notes to the saints’ lives also suggest use in preaching. A copy in the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library survives with many marginal lines, underlinings and a hand-drawn box around a prayer to the Virgin Mary with the word ‘omit’ added.Footnote 32 While inconclusive, these give some credence to the Protestant charge that the Legend was ‘alledged in Sermons and read in the churche openly’.Footnote 33
Second, the Old Testament stories raise the issue of how the Legend fits into the historiography of Bible reading and devotional literature in the fifteenth century. In 1409, Arundel's Constitutions banned translations of Scripture made without a licence, although it became a Protestant byword that the medieval Church had banned the English Bible outright.Footnote 34 Nicholas Watson argues that the Constitutions created a climate of repression in which any written translation, even of very brief texts, could be dangerous.Footnote 35 The historiography concerning Caxton and the Bible is divided. Susan Powell notes that saints’ lives and sermon collections were comparatively rare in the first fifty years of English printing, perhaps indicating an apprehensiveness fostered by the Constitutions. Butterworth and Horrall suggest, respectively, that Caxton wanted to translate the Bible and that he wanted to write a complete biblical paraphrase but feared being taken for a Lollard. In contrast, Blake suggests that Caxton had no desire to translate the Bible and that he betrayed no anxiety that his paraphrases might be mistaken for an illegal, unlicensed translation.Footnote 36
Caxton described his work as ‘storyes of the byble’, indicating that they were paraphrased rather than translated, and de Worde also wrote that they were ‘shortly taken out of the byble’, that is, adapted.Footnote 37 At the same time, Caxton stressed the closeness of his story to the Bible, writing that his life of David was ‘but litil towched’, and the Old Testament stories include scriptural extracts ranging in length from single verses to an entire book.Footnote 38 Moreover, the Old Testament stories survive in separate printed quartos, suggesting they had an audience independent of the rest of the book.Footnote 39 The English Legend was not a Bible, a Bible paraphrase or a hagiography, although it contained elements of all three. Instead, it was a book that made many Bible stories and extracts from Scripture available to clergy and laity, along with stories of the saints. Its popularity suggests that there was both toleration of, and demand for, vernacular works that allowed access to biblical stories and text without being complete Bible translations.Footnote 40
The Legend, the Bible and the Reformation
Wynkyn de Worde printed the final edition of the Legend in 1527. Eleven years later, the work became subject to Henrician censorship. The 1538 Injunctions declaring Thomas Becket a false saint and ordering that his services be removed from service books seem to have been extended to the Legend, which included chapters commemorating both Becket's martyrdom and the translation of his relics.Footnote 41 Virtually all of the surviving copies have had one or both of the Becket feasts defaced as well as references to the pope removed, sometimes perfunctorily, sometimes with vituperative annotations from readers: ‘thomas was a knaue’ or ‘a Rancke treytor’.Footnote 42 This suggests that the Legend was being held to the standards demanded of liturgical books. The work had become politically and spiritually suspect.
Its afterlife, however, was more than a protracted rejection: its complicated relationship to the Bible remained a matter for readers and writers to debate. As Helen Parish has observed, Protestant writers turned the Legend against the Catholic Church by repeating and mocking the book's most fantastic miracle stories.Footnote 43 Such mocking also took place in the pages of the book itself, as annotators added jokes into the margins. There were, however, less expected techniques: identifying saints whose behaviour supported Protestant ideals and undermined Catholic doctrine. For instance, the Legend noted that St Paula the Widow – Pauline in Caxton's translation – spoke ‘parfyghtly hebrewe grece latyn and frenshe and redde . . . the scriptures in this foure langages’. A prolific annotator of a copy now in the Yale Center for British Art directed future readers to ‘note howe sainte paulyne spent her time in redinge of scripture & that the frenshe tonge was one’.Footnote 44 Under the pen of this annotator, the Legend could be turned against the Catholic Church not only because its inaccuracies were so glaring but also because its ancient saints made the late medieval Church appear distant from the foundations of the Christian faith.
The Latin Legenda was also connected, although indirectly, to early modern histories of Bible translation. This fluid, contentious text provoked reinterpretations of its author and his relationship to Scripture. Just as Jacobus himself had used etymology to reveal character, English Protestant writers explored the meanings of his name. Voragine is the ablative form of vorago, meaning chasm, a point not lost on William Patten, who dubbed Jacobus ‘Iames of the synkhole’ – a hole filled with unclean water.Footnote 45 The play on words resurfaced in various forms well into the seventeenth century.Footnote 46 Others, however, found a more positive resonance. Edmund Porter and John Trapp both wrote that Jacobus had been a ‘devourer’ of the Bible, with Porter writing approvingly that he took his name ‘not for gormondizing of meat, but because of [a] multitude of Bookes . . . devoured and digested’.Footnote 47
Jacobus was recast as Bible translator as well as reader. Sixtus Senensis, a sixteenth-century Jewish convert to Catholicism, authored the Bibliotheca Sancta, first published in Venice in 1566 and dedicated to Pius V. The fourth book of the Bibliotheca consists of a long list of Catholic authors, including Jacobus, referred to as ‘Iacobus, Archiepiscopus Genuensis’. Sixtus wrote that Jacobus was ‘not to be condemned as a writer of stories, and learned in the works of Augustine . . . and was the first of all that translated the divine writings into the Italian language with great faith and diligence’.Footnote 48
The Dutch Reformed theologian and classicist Gerardus Johannus Vossius repeated this claim in his De Historicis Latinis, published in 1627 and dedicated to George Villiers, citing Sixtus Senensis and noting that Jacobus ‘is praiseworthy, because he was the first of all to translate the Holy Bible into the Italian language, as Sixtus Senesis witnesses’. Vossius was critical of Jacobus: he also repeated Juan Luis Vives's metallurgical pun that ‘that golden legend . . . was written by a man of an iron mouth and a leaden heart’.Footnote 49 Nonetheless, the claim that Jacobus was an early Bible translator quickly found its way into English Protestant writing via both Sixtus and Vossius, with the latter's addition of Vives's wordplay usually cut.Footnote 50
From the early seventeenth century onwards, Protestant writers used this claim as part of an effort to show that Bible translation had a history within the Catholic Church. In his 1614 Enquiries touching the diuersity of languages, Edward Brerewood, professor of astronomy at Gresham College, London, observed that there had been several medieval translations of the Scriptures, including those ‘made by Iohn Archbishop of Siuill into the Arabique, about An. 717 . . . into the Saxon or Englise by Beda, about the same time: Into the Slauonique by Methodius about An. 860. &c. Into the Italian by Iacobus de Voragine about An. 1290, &c.’Footnote 51 Similarly, Richard Capel wrote: ‘I look on it as a special providence of God, that there were translations, and those exact too in the heart of Popery’.Footnote 52 The idea of Jacobus as translator was used to construct a providential history of Scripture translation within the Catholic Church: translation became not merely Protestant ideal but Christian tradition.
While Brerewood and Capel did not mention Jacobus's authorship of the Legenda, Peter Heylyn came closer to reconciling the hagiographer with the Bible translator. As Anthony Milton has shown, Heylyn's attitudes to Roman Catholicism and to the late medieval Church varied over the course of his career. His characterization of Jacobus, however, remained constant. In his Historie of St George, he sought to establish the saint's historicity and orthodoxy, making medieval hagiography an important, if treacherous, source of material.Footnote 53 He was critical of the Legenda and observed that ‘now the learned Papists haue rejected it with shame inough’, but he also noted that Jacobus was known for his ‘Eloquence and Learning’ and that Vossius called him ‘the first Translatour of the Bible into the Italian language’.Footnote 54 Heylyn reiterated this characterization when debating with Thomas Fuller three decades later. The Legenda contained ‘many idle and unwarrantable fictions’, but Jacobus was ‘learned for the times in which he lived’, as well as being ‘most eminent for his translation of the Bible into the Italian tongue (as we read in Vossius) a work of great both difficulty and danger as the times then were, sufficient (were there nothing else) to free him from the ignominious name of a worthlesse Author’.Footnote 55 The credulity of the Legenda was excusable in an author responsible for such a daring act of Bible translation.
The history of the relationship between the Legenda and the vernacular Bible was rewritten. Rather than crediting the English Legend with its imperfect mix of paraphrase, Bible translation and hagiography, these authors sought to write a providential history of the rise of vernacular scripture and of courage in the face of persecution, complicating the Legenda’s author but simplifying the text itself.
Conclusion
The translation from Legenda aurea to Golden Legend served to complicate an already rich, unwieldy book. William Caxton's Golden Legend was a new work. Together, he and de Worde reshaped the text, situating the saints within the Christian year and within a typological framework extending from Genesis to the Middle Ages. Much of the Reformation-era criticism of the Legend focused on its place as translated text: its vernacular language was an affront at a time when, according to Protestant writers, the English Bible had been banned. But the fact that it was in the vernacular also allowed readers to engage with the book, finding details that supported Protestant ideas and stories with spiritual value. Jacobus de Voragine was doubly reinvented, both as ‘James of the Sinkhole’ and as an early translator of the Bible.
There were complex relationships, real and imagined, between the Legenda and the vernacular Bible in early modern England. Seeking a long history of Bible translation, reformers turned to the Legenda’s author, omitting or excusing his work as a hagiographer. Ironically, in doing so they ignored the book itself and its English translator, who had used the genre of biblical paraphrase to make both Bible stories and Bible extracts in English available to clergy and laity in late medieval England.
