This valuable study examines vernacular appeals to the English public during the years when William Tyndale (1494-1536) was trying to establish his Bible translation in the English language. Brad Pardue focuses on Tyndale's life and work, but also on the resistance by Thomas More who was zealous for the Roman Catholic faith. Before he fell from power, More was joined in this opposition by King Henry VIII who became head of the English Church while embroiled in his desired divorce and who feared that letting the people read the scriptures “in the vulgar tongue” would only feed “the inclination of the people to erroneous opinions” (187). Chief of these could be disobedience to their sovereign prince.
Tyndale's goal was to imbue public discussion of his project, confident that if the scriptures could be read by the whole of English society, great blessings would accrue to the church and nation. Tyndale sought a “democratization of the Bible” (31; the phrase of David Ginsberg) in the face of conservative critics who believed the church had a primary interpretive role in handling the scriptures and that “even laymen with good will would be led astray by unmonitored reading of the scriptures” (26). On the broader scale, Pardue explores how “the activities of Tyndale and his contemporaries in the 1520s and 1530s helped to lay the groundwork for the later evolution of the public and the central place it now occupies in contemporary Western society” (15).
Theological conflicts were at the core of the clashes between Tyndale and More. While More—and Henry—supported the traditional national hierarchical view of society, complemented by the parallel hierarchy of the church (“hierarchical complementarity” in Charles Taylor's phrase; 6), Tyndale challenged this assumption. Tyndale “actively cultivated an independent discursive sphere that stood apart from the coercive power of church or state” (14). Behind this was Luther's doctrine of “the two regiments.” For Tyndale, “the church as an institution manifests itself in both the temporal and spiritual spheres” (50). The outcome was that “the consistent tendency of his thought was to undermine the hierarchy that was so fundamental a feature of both the political and religious structures of his time” (50). Tyndale and his fellow reformers critiqued the Roman church, theologically and structurally, as well as for the involvements of clergy in political matters. Tyndale referred to Cardinal Thomas Wolsey as “the shipwracke of all England” (54).
For More, “ecclesiology lay at the core of the religious debates of the sixteenth century, what More called “‘the very brest [for example, heart] of all this batalye’” (41). For the first generation of English reformers, it was “the local church, the local community of believers, which was of primary concern” (56). For More, it was the church as a whole, expressed in its hierarchy, tradition, and especially the sacraments—to be administered only by priests—that constituted the only way that “salvation and grace were mediated to individual Christians” (52). Tyndale believed the words of scripture brought certainty to individual believers and, as such, “Tyndale's church was always a church of individuals” (68).
Pardue's chapter on “Implications of Media” explores the how vernacularization and printing shaped the content of Tyndale's and More's writings as well as how they were received by the public. For “the arguments of More and Tyndale were primarily textually mediated” (72). More was bent on the suppression of Tyndale's writings, considering them heretical and seeking to refute them in print. Estimates are that “an average price of 2s 2d for Tyndale's New Testament would cost approximately four and a half days’ wages for a skilled laborer and six day's wages for an unskilled laborer” (82). Yet, English people were willing to save and sacrifice to acquire an English Bible.
As the story of Tyndale and More emerged, Henry and More became at “cross-purposes” (chapter 4). Henry sought support for his divorce—a support More's conscience did not permit him to give. Pardue tells of Henry's efforts to reach out to exiled reformers, including Tyndale. Henry's hope was that though Tyndale also could not support the divorce, his writings—particularly his The Obedience of a Christian Man (1528)—might be coopted to encourage English people to be obedient to their sovereign; and to question papal authority (122). But these efforts failed. The increasing distance between Henry and his Chancellor, More, was exacerbated by Henry's command for More to appear before Parliament and support Henry's divorce petition (141). Henry demanded the clergy accede to his demands about their Convocation; and More resigned the next day (142).
In the next two years of the Royal Supremacy, with Henry as head of the English church, More produced additional polemical works against Tyndale and the reformers. In the end, More was convicted of treason and executed (1535). While the Henrician settlement sought to use reformers’ ideas on obedience to the sovereign in the secular regiment, tensions with the monarch emerged from Tyndale's view that the king's authority in the spiritual regiment is limited, for Jesus Christ is Lord.
When the royally sanctioned Great Bible (1539) appeared, the title page showed King Henry at the top, hierarchically distributing the scriptures. This Bible was “largely the work of the English reformer, revised by his associate and friend Miles Coverdale” (188). Tyndale had been executed in Belgium in 1536, just after the first complete Bible in English was published in Antwerp. Yet within the year, his translation had begun to “circulate with Henry's consent in England” (191).
Pardue's splendid study fully examines the twists and turns of the three protagonists and the ongoing combinations of religious concerns with political struggles. Through it all, the theological underpinnings point us toward “the centrality of the individual and to the importance of public debate” (216).
