HMC Research Fellow wins major research grant

The Principal and Fellows of Harris Manchester College send their congratulations to Research Fellow, Dr Elizabeth Solopova, who has been jointly awarded (with Professor Freimut Löser, University of Augsburg) a major grant by the UK-German Funding Initiative in the Humanities (UK Arts and Humanities Research Council—Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft).

Dr Solopova, Professor Löser and their research team will be studying ‘Medieval Vernacular Bibles as Unity, Diversity and Conflict’.

Synopsis of the research

During the Middle Ages, Western and Central Europe was united by the common Christian faith and the common use of the Latin Bible. The work on the translation of the Vulgate into the vernacular, attested everywhere in Europe in this period, was also a common European project. Translators were aware of each other’s work and, despite the diversity of their languages and cultural traditions, used similar arguments to promote their endeavour. They pointed to the existence of biblical translations in different European languages as a precedent to their own work, and supported their claims to unity with references to shared history, literature and values, and even the common origin of several of their languages.

Yet this international movement brought with it not only the sense of common purpose and interest in the common past, but also conflicts and divisions. Translators had to defend their work against numerous critics, debating such questions as who should have access to the vernacular Bible, how it should be understood, and how and by whom it should be translated. Participants in these debates, both laymen and clerics, produced not only the renderings of the biblical text, but also commentaries, scholarly tools and polemical works. They wrote treatises where issues of biblical translation, as well as much wider issues of religious practice and religious difference, lay access to knowledge and education, and the organisation and government of the church and society were deliberated.

This research project will study these texts and the movement that gave rise to them, focussing on the German and English late medieval traditions. The aim is to study and compare the traditions of biblical translation, and surrounding theological and political debates, as foundational to the development of national languages, literatures and academies, but also as a common European process.