Lore and text

The Bible at the end of the Middle Ages presents a paradox: it is the central book of medieval culture but it is a closed book. Its lore pervaded all the arts and almost all aspects of life, but the text itself – now, in spite of many changes and changes yet to come, in the form we know as the Vulgate – existed for the great majority as ritually intoned fragments of familiar but incomprehensible sounds. Jerome's Latin, intended to be understood by the people, was now the preserve of the educated few. These two forms of the Bible, the text and the lore, are so divergent as to have almost nothing in common for the historian of the idea of the Bible as literature. To put the matter too simply, the Bible text itself had no literary existence, but there was a strong sense of the biblical stories, along with legends and lives of the saints, as literature. Much of medieval literature is the Bible as literature in the sense that material from the Bible is its principal source.

A major aspect of the Reformation is that it changed the basis of religion not only, to speak in extremes, from the accumulated tradition of the Church to private intercourse with the text of the Bible but also from biblical lore to the Bible text. These closely related changes inevitably involved the changing of the Bible from a closed to an open book.