Middle English Bible translations covers the age of Middle English (c. 1100–1500), beginning after the Norman Conquest (1066) 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 numerous translations of sections and verses in published sermons and commentaries. The cost and translation effort of complete bibles (pandects) favoured the production of selections and compilations of significant passages.
Sources of Scripture
Historian Richard Marsden notes a mediated bible: "Although it is true that there was almost no direct translation of the Bible into the vernacular before the Wycliffites, we simply cannot ignore the astonishingly large and varied corpus of Bible-based vernacular works which had begun to appear from the very early years of the 13th century onwards, under ecclesiastical influence (largely in response to the demands of the Lateran Council of 1215 for a more proactive approach to educating the laity in spiritual discipline). They included universal Bible histories[...], metrical paraphrases of Old Testament biblical books, devotional texts, versions of the Psalms, Gospel narratives (canonical and apochryphal), and so on."
Historian James Morey, looking at "all Middle English poetry and prose that consisted largely of biblical material" wrote that "when taken as a whole nearly all of the Old and New Testaments exist in Middle English before the Wycliffites began their project in the 1380s," Glossed (e.g. Wycliffite Glossed Gospels)|| Word-for Word translation (e.g., Wycliffite Early Version); the common word book Interpretation of Hebrew Names
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| Poetic ||Prayers; dramas; song; recited poems ||Alliterive (e.g., Ormulum); metrical (e.g English metrical homilies from manuscripts of the fourteenth century); Book of Hours || Psalters; Metrical (e.g., Middle English Metrical Paraphrase of the Old Testament), Stanzaic Life of Christ
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| Prosodic || Sermons; memorized passages; sayings; stories || Scholarship; commentary;
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According to some historians, the culture was saturated with key biblical knowledge. For example, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales contains over 700 biblical allusions. the population of England used numerous dialects of four main languages: Old then Middle English, Old Norse and Cornish. Cumbric may still have been spoken in some places in the North. The Anglo-Saxon royal courts were replaced by the Anglo-Danish, then the Anglo-Norman. In the early 1000s, following King Canute's ban, any residual use of English runes ceased, in favour of Latin script augmented with several runic characters, and some Old Norse features of the Northern dialects seeped Southwards. There was a lingering strong Anglo-Scandinavian influence on literature and culture.
The Norman Conquest caused a suppression of Anglo-Saxon (the last poem in Old English dates to 1104) and Anglo-Norman language contact influenced the development of Middle English.