Translating the Bible in the Middle Ages

A One-Day Symposium at Harvard University

held at

Real Colegio Complutense (26 Trowbridge St.)

Friday, April 20, 2012

Organizers: Nicholas Watson and Luis Girón-Negrón, with the assistance of Michelle De Groot

Sponsored by the Provostial Fund for the Humanities, the Medieval Studies Committee,

the Medieval English Colloquium, and the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures

Wednesday, March 14, 2012

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Program
Panel One: The Arragel Bible Project and Spanish Bible Translation Studies
Panel Two: The History and Current State of British Translation Studies
Panel Three: What Is Vernacular Bible Translation?
Panel Four: The Audiences and Social Contexts of Vernacular Bibles
Handouts
Participants
Links

Questions? Contact degroot@fas.harvard.edu.

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About the Symposium

The history of vernacular Bible translation before the Reformation is complex, local, and often controversial, still not entirely free of the ideological pressures of Reformation and counter-Reformation polemic on the one hand, the nationalist and sometimes racialist biases of literary and linguistic history on the other. From the outside, the field is dogged by the assumption that it does not exist. Most general histories of the Bible, even scholarly ones, still affirm that there was no such thing as vernacular Bible translation before the last century of the middle ages, or represent the minute proportion of the myriad of Bible translations whose existence they acknowledge as inherently dangerous or heterodox. From the inside, the field remains dogged by the lack of a comparative approach that would take into account a swathe of vernacular languages as well as of sophisticated discussion as to what we mean by Bible translation in the first place. Given a culture whose exposure to the Bible was in large part through the liturgy, it seems too narrow to restrict the term “Bible translation” to literal prose translation of the entire Christian Scripture. Medieval vernacular Bibles might be fragmentary, written in verse, performed on a stage, or be pictoral, as well as textual. But the field of Bible translation studies has been reluctant to cast the net this wide. Thus does the myth of an exclusivist, deeply unfamiliar ‘Latin Middle Ages’, radically different in its attitudes from the communicative, populist, egalitarian modern era that displaced it, persist.

The original occasion of the workshop is the chance confluence in Cambridge this academic year of two groups of scholars at work on different vernaculars who rarely have the chance to talk to one another: scholars of the Romance languages of the Iberian peninsula, especially Spain; and scholars of Bible translation in northern Europe, especially England and France. The Hispanist group are at Harvard this year to continue their work editing the Arragel Bible, Rabbi Moses Arragel’s early fifteenth-century translation --- with commentary --- of the Hebrew Bible into Castilian, a translation of profound religious, linguistic, and literary importance to European cultural history. The northern European group is more disparate, but includes scholars working on Middle English and Anglo-Norman French, one of the several “missing links” in the history of the pre-Reformation vernacular in Britain. With the help of funding from various sources, we have been able to invite several other scholars whose work is with the vernacular biblical literature of medieval Britain, France, and Spain, to form a total of four panels, two of which will deal with the history of Spanish and British vernacular Bibles, two with questions of definition, genre, and audience that arise from that history.

Attendance at the conference is free, but pre-registration is required, if at all possible by April 1. By preregistering you are both reserving a seat at the event – seating is flexible but limited – and declaring your interest in participating in it fully, offering your own thoughts as well as questions, and, if at all possible, staying for the entire day. Please book your place by emailing degroot@fas.harvard.edu, giving both your name and institution and a sentence or so about your interests for inclusion on our website and final program.

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