Word, Church, and State: Tyndale Quincentary Essays

William Tyndale was the first to translate the New Testament and the Hebrew Scriptures directly from their original languages into English and to see his work produced on the early modern printing press. Born in the late fifteenth century, he was educated at Oxford and began his self-imposed exile in 1524 when he was refused ecclesiastical approval for his work of translation. Regarded as a Lutheran heretic, he eluded capture in Germany and the Low Countries for over ten years while he worked on his translation and produced ten polemical pamphlets and works of exegesis. Eventually arrested, he was condemned and executed outside Brussels.

This collection of essays-based on papers from the Washington International Conference celebrating the 500th anniversary of Tyndale's birth-contains cutting-edge work by some of the world's most established scholars currently working on Tyndale. The essays collected here address Tyndale's hermeneutics and practice as a translator as well as his pastoral concerns; treat his theological interactions with his opponent John Fisher, his disciple John Frith, and his adversary Jacobus Latomus; compare Tyndale's and Sir Thomas More's ideas on friars, Turks, and impending death; examine the role of Thomas Cardinal Wolsey in Tyndale's world and in Tyndale's works; compare Tyndale's efforts with those of John Skelton in calling for church reform; and consider how Tyndale's ideas echo in Shakespeare.

The essays make fresh linguistic, historical, and theological contributions to Tyndale studies and give theoretical or practical readings of his lesser-known compositions. The book will be of interest to students and scholars of the literature, history, and theology of the Reformation in England during the sixteenth century, as well as to those interested in Tyndale himself, Sir Thomas More, and the Bible in English.

ABOUT THE EDITORS:

John T. Day is professor of English at St. Olaf College. Eric Lund is professor and chair of the department of religion at St. Olaf College. Anne M. O'Donnell, S.N.D., is associate professor of English at The Catholic University of America.

Contributors:

Rudolph P. Almasy, Peter Auksi, Mary Jane Barnett, James Andrew Clark, Robert Coogan, Brian Cummings, David Daniell, John T. Day, Matthew DeCoursey, John A. R. Dick, Gerald Hammond, Arthur F. Kinney, Eric Lund, Germain Marc'hadour, Elizabeth McCutcheon, Clare M. Murphy, Anne M. O'Donnell, S.N.D., Douglas H. Parker, William S. Stafford, Jos E. Vercruysse, S.J., and Thomas J. Wyly.

PRAISE FOR THE BOOK:

""This collection has more coherence than many such collections partly because most of the contributors are literary scholars. . . . David Daniell's engaging paper on the artistry of Tyndale's translation is a whimsical, humanist piece, infectious with enthusiasm for the precision of Tyndale's language. Another early highlight is Brian Cummings's depiction of grammar as the serpent in the translator's Eden. Guiding the uninitiated reader through some daunting linguistic problems, he demonstrates how Luther and Tyndale were drawn into controversies by the ambiguities arising respectively from the absence of tenses in Hebrew, and the lack of a clear future tense in English. Rudolph Almasy's essay on Tyndale's use of metaphors of movement and stability is an excellent piece which opens up an intriguing perspective on attitudes toward exile, travel, service, domesticity, and honour in Tyndale and Erasmus. John Day and Eric Lund compare the work of Tyndale and John Frith; Lund's piece on the subtle differences between the two men's eucharistic theology is particularly valuable. Elizabeth McCutcheon's piece, contrasting Tyndale's and Thomas More's prison letters, draws a persuasive contract between Tyndale, serene in his exile and following a Pauline calling to martyrdom, and More, weighed down by his isolation and the shattering of his comm