From the teachings of each pretender the good turned away. The religious sentiment which had been shocked at the outrageous behavior of the anointed teachers forsook the old altars. It sought out new faiths and founded new sects.[1]
The teachers of the new sects were unwittingly preparing the people for the coming of printing by enforcing the duty of more careful reading and study of the Holy Scriptures. In the year 1380, Wickliffe completed a translation in English of the entire Bible. At the beginning of the thirteenth century, copies of a translation of the Scriptures in Provençal French, made by or under the direction of Peter Waldo, a wealthy merchant of Lyons, and the founder of the Waldenses, were circulated in Burgundy and upon the borders of the Rhine. There were many new translations, or at least of the gospels and psalms, in other European languages.[2] Men and women
- ↑ The ecclesiastical history of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, says Hallam, teems with sectaries and schismatics, various in their aberrations of opinion, but all concurring in detestation of the established church. The heresy which began during the twelfth century, or earlier, with the Manichees of Bulgaria, was made more and more formidable by the Albigenses of Languedoc, by the Waldenses of France and Germany, by the Vaudois of the Alps, by the Lollards of the Netherlands and England, and afterward by the disciples of John Huss of Bohemia, until the faith of the mass of the people was uprooted from its foundation. In Germany, enthusiastic but mystical priests like Eckhardt, Tauler and Suso, keeping themselves within the pale of the church, weakened its rigid discipline by preaching against the arrogant prerogatives of the clergy, and by commanding a higher worship of the heart and life.
- ↑ The British Museum contains a Bible in Flemish verse, known as the Rym Bible, written by Jacob von Maerlandt of Damne, near Bruges in Flanders. It is a manuscript of the fifteenth century, upon vellum, with ornamented capitals, and is one of many copies of a version of the Scriptures made in the year 1270.
Except the Waldensian translation in the Provençal language, this version is, consequently, the most ancient in existence, in the vernacular, and must have preceded by a century the versions of Raoul de Presles, of John Trevisa or the Hermit of Hampole. ... The British Museum had another manuscript in prose, of parts of a Bible in Flemish, written in the fifteenth century. It is part of a translation made in the early part of the fourteenth century, and was the text used for the Bible printed in Delft in 1477. Sotheby, Principia Typographica, vol. iii, p. 123.
The British Museum has, also, a manuscript in Flemish of five books of the Old Testament, made in the fourteenth century.
