Переводы Библии на среднеанглийском языке (1066-1500 гг.)

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Middle English Bible translations (1066 1500) covers the age of Middle English, beginning with the Norman conquest and ending about 1500. The most well known and preserved translations are those of the Wycliffean bibles. Between two and four Middle English translations of each book of the New Testament still exist, mainly from the late 1300s, and at least two vernacular Psalters, plus various poetic renditions of bible stories and translations of verses in published sermons and commentaries.

Aside from the decades of the late 1300s this was not a fertile time for Bible translation, especially the Old Testament. English literature was limited because from 1066 to c. 1400 Anglo Norman French was the preferred language of the elite who could fund book production, synthetic Anglo Saxon Old English had broken down and was transitioning to analytic Middle English with a Frenchified vocabulary, and Latin was the preferred literary and church language throughout Medieval Western Europe. In the 1400s in England, new unauthorized translations were banned, following the Lollard violence, but Middle English then transitioned to Early Modern English.

William Caxton translated many Bible stories and passages from the French, producing the Golden Legend (1483) and The Book of the Knight in the Tower (1484). He also printed The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ by Pseudo Bonaventure, translated by Nicholas Love, OCart.

All translations of this time period were from Latin or French. Greek and Hebrew texts would become available with the development of the Johann Gutenberg's movable type printing press which coincided with the development of Early Modern English, making English a literary language, and would lead to a great increase in the number of translations of the Bible in the Early Modern English era. Humanism of the Renaissance made popular again the study of the classics and the classical languages and thus allowed critical Greek scholarship to again become a possibility. Under the influence of Erasmus and his kind, with their new insistence on classical learning, there came necessarily a new appraisal of the Vulgate as a translation of the original Bible. Since the proclamation of the Latin Vulgate as authentic by the Council of Trent, there had been little new study of the original Biblical languages in Europe. But a renewed interest on the biblical languages threw scholarship into debate regarding the sources of the text. In the early 16th century Erasmus published a single volume of the Greek texts of the New Testament books, and republished more precise editions of this volume until his death. Erasmus's commentating and eventually re writing a Latin New Testament (prior to publishing the one volume Greek New Testament) challenged the authority of the Latin Vulgate. The other great event of that same century was the invention, in Europe, of printing with movable type. It was in 1455 that Johannes Gutenberg printed his first major work, an edition of the Latin Vulgate, now called the Gutenberg Bible. These developments would lead to the more fertile time for English translations in the Early Modern English period.