The Bible almost universally used in the medieval period was the Latin Vulgate, a name which denotes the version accepted by the vulgus, or common people. A recurring source of contention among many church writers and clergy was the question of whether one should or should not make its narratives directly available to the ordinary person – and to priests unable to read Latin – by putting them into vernacular languages. The problem would persist right up until the Reformation, when it was finally resolved in favour of the translators, though not before several of them or their supporters had suffered martyrdom in the cause of vernacular scripture. The Vulgate itself had originally been a ‘vernacular’ version, made for a Latin-speaking world, but soon its language was considered to be as sacred as the Hebrew and Greek in which the Old and New Testaments, respectively, had been written. Those dedicated to communicating the word of God had two main concerns: first, whether tampering with the ‘original’ language at all might be sacrilegious, given that the words and the very structure of the sentences (so it was believed) had been dictated by God; and, second, whether it might be dangerous anyway to allow direct access to the text of the Bible to people untrained in the complexities of scriptural history and interpretative disciplines such as ‘typology’ (the method by which events in the Old Testament are interpreted as prefiguring those in the New).