From monastery to market place. Towards a new history of New Testament translations and urban religious culture in the Low Countries (c. 1450-1540)

Stereotypical representations of medieval townspeople as illiterate and learning from pictures need to be reconsidered. This project will re-evaluate conventional views on medieval urban religious culture by innovatively studying the dissemination of Bible translations among urban networks of readers in the period of 1450-1540. This will be accomplished by analysing how scribes, printers, and readers in the towns of the Low Countries transferred and appropriated the Dutch New Testament, which originated in the monastic Modern Devotion reform movement. This New Testament was the most popular medieval Bible translation. It crossed the boundaries between cloister walls and secular world, manuscript and print, and even between Catholics and Protestants. This project aims at challenging two paradigms that shaped historical writing about Bible translations and urban religious culture of the Low Countries. First, it contests the view that solely the upcoming Protestantism in the 1520s brought Bible translations to laypeople. Medieval Bible translations already circulated on a large scale in 1522, when the first Dutch translations of Luthers Bible were delivered. They continued to be transmitted after that date, especially in printed editions, which were spread via the market. This project will build upon my previous research on the dissemination of Bible manuscripts by studying these printed editions. Second, by concentrating on the market, it challenges the paradigmatic view that all religious writing and reading activities in the Low Countries were connected to the Modern Devotion movement. Bible translations have been studied mainly within this monastic context. However, as studies on urban literary culture show, Biblical knowledge was highly present outside monastic walls. This project will reassess conventional views on laypeople as superficial believers by analysing how they transferred and appropriated, i.e. interiorized, the New Testament. Reading the Bible was part of the daily lives of laypeople already before the Reformation.