The Great Bible
The Byble in Englyshe . . . of a Holy Scripture, both of Ye Olde and Newe Testament with a Prologe therinto, Made by…Thomas, Archbysshop of Cantorbury
London: Printed by Edward Whytchurche, 1540
Folger Shelf Mark: STC 2070

The woodcut title page of the Great Bible, depicted here, tells the story of the wide dissemination of an English Bible as the keystone of a strongly united church and state. God smiles from above as Henry VIII dispenses the vernacular Scripture to Archbishop Cranmer and the prelates on his right and to the Lord Great Chamberlain Cromwell and the privy councillors on his left. In turn, Cranmer passes the word of God to his prelates and Cromwell passes it down to the nobility. The preacher in the pulpit expounds the Scripture to commoners, who receive it with shouts of "Vivat Rex" and "God save the king." Henry as head of the church liberates his people from the yoke of the papacy and in so doing unites the clergy and laity under one imperial monarchy.

Even if we acknowledge the prison in the lower right corner as the darker side of this persuasion, the story of the Great Bible's production and reception is still more complicated than the woodcut. Copies of William Tyndale's translation of the New Testament were printed abroad and flooded the English market from 1525 through 1535. Far from enjoying official support, Tyndale himself was imprisoned abroad, tried for heresy, and burned at the stake in October 1536. At that point, England was the only country in Europe without an authorized vernacular translation of the Bible. Two reformers set out to change things: Archbishop Cranmer aggressively advocated a new translation without the supposed Lutheran errors of Tyndale's version, and then Privy Councillor Cromwell prepared a royal injunction to order that Bibles in both Latin and English be purchased for every parish in England. Two rival candidates quickly emerged. Miles Coverdale, a former Augustinian friar, had an English Bible ready for the market by 1535 (like Tyndale's, it had been printed abroad). In 1537, the Matthew Bible, a conflation of Tyndale's and Coverdale's versions, also reached print. With Cranmer's and Cromwell's urging, Henry granted licenses to both.

In the face of resistance ranging from dogmatic disagreement to an insufficiency of funds and literate parishoners, Cromwell revived and issued his injunction in 1538 that all parishes set up "one book of the whole Bible of the largest volume in English." The largest in kind was neither the Coverdale nor the Matthew translation, but rather a revision of the Matthew Bible undertaken by Miles Coverdale—the Great Bible. It was first published in 1539, with a smaller version and three new editions following in 1540. The second edition, which became the standard edition, included a preface written by Cranmer that drew upon humanist principles to urge "all sortes" to read the Bible and judge the soundness of doctrine by its strictures. This translation survived the fall of Cromwell in 1540 (though his coat of arms would be erased from the woodcut). It survived, too, Bishop Stephen Gardiner's concerted attack upon it in convocation in 1542 to remain the authorized edition for church use throughout Edward's reign. Its Psalms are still the official Psalter of the Church of England.

For more information, consult Christopher Haigh, The English Reformations (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993); David Scott Kastan, "'The Noyse of the New Bible': Reform and Reaction in Henrician England" in Religion and Culture in Renaissance England, edited by Claire McEachern and Debora Shuger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Diarmaid MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996); Richard Rex, Henry VIII and the English Reformation (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1993); and Debora Shuger, The Renaissance Bible: Scholarship, Sacrifice and Subjectivity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).