Translation in Western Europe during the

Renaissance: An Overview of Renaissance as

the European Rebirth. Translation in Germany
during the Renaissance: Martin Luther’s Bible
Translation and his Views on Language and
Translation

Yuliia Tkachenko
Pa11-16
 Renaissance as the European Rebirth
 The Renaissance is a period of European history that existed in
the period from the 15th to the 16th century, but according to
some sources, it is possible that this period was longer - from
the 14th century to the 17th century - the long Renaissance.

 The Renaissance literally means Rebirth in French. The period

Michelangelo
is called by this name because at that time, people started
taking an interest in the learning of ancient times, in particular,
the learning of Ancient Greece and Rome. The Renaissance
was seen as a "rebirth" of that learning. The Renaissance is
often said to be the start of the "modern age".
 The Renaissance was a cultural movement that profoundly
affected European intellectual life in the early modern
period. Beginning in Italy, and spreading to the north, west
and middle Europe during a cultural lag of some two and a
half centuries, its influence affected literature, philosophy,
art, politics, science, history, religion, and other aspects of
intellectual enquiry.

Botticelli

Leonardo da Vinci

Paolo Uccello
 It was an age of growth in Europe. New, powerful city states
emerged. A new middle class had more and more money to
spend. Great artists, writers and thinkers lived during this time.
 During the Middle Ages many people who lived in the
countryside worked on the land that they got from the
noblemen. In return, they were protected by them.
 City life changed towards the end of the Middle Ages. There was
a small middle class population and people had more freedom
than in the countryside.
 The Plague
 Between the middle and the end of the 14th century, the
plague, also called “Black Death” killed almost half of Europe’s
population. It spread most rapidly in the larger cities where
many people lived.

 This led to economic depression. Merchants and traders

had fewer people to sell their goods to, so they lost a lot of
money.
 The New Middle Class
 When the plague slowly decreased in the 15th century, the
population in Europe began to grow. A new middle class emerged
—bankers, merchants and tradespeople had a new market for
their services.
 People became wealthier and had more than enough money to
spend. They began to build larger houses, buy more expensive
clothes and get interested in art and literature.

 The middle class population also had more free time, which they
spent learning foreign languages, reading, playing musical
instruments and studying other things of interest.
 The Renaissance was especially strong in Italian cities. They
became centres of trade, wealth and education. Many cities,
like Venice, Genoa and Florence had famous citizens who were
very rich and gave the city a lot of money.
 Exploration and Trade
 Exploring the seas and sailing to other continents became very
important during this era. Sailors had better instruments
and maps, ships were built so that they
could endure longer journeys. Most of them had big sails that
were driven by strong winds.

 Portuguese navigators started to explore the western coast

of Africa from which they brought gold and ivory home. Later
on they discovered that sailing around the
southern tip of Africa would bring them to India and Asia.
These places offered spices, valuable cloths and silk. Explorers
brought them home and sold them to wealthy families in
Europe.

 After Columbus had discovered America in 1492, many

Spanish, French and Italian explorers followed. The Spanish
were the most successful. They conquered much of Central and
South America and brought home gold and silver from
the Inca and Aztec empires.
 Printing
 In 1445 the German
Gutenberg invented the printing
press. He changed the lives of millions
of people throughout Europe. For the
first time, bookmaking became cheap
and Gutenberg was able to print many
books very quickly.
 The printing press spread within several
decades to over two hundred cities in a
dozen European countries. By 1500,
printing presses in operation
throughout Western Europe had
already produced more than twenty
million volumes .
 In the Middle Ages books were very
expensive because they were written
by hand. Only priests
and monks could read them because
most of them were written in Latin.
 In Renaissance Europe, the arrival of
mechanical movable type printing
introduced the era of mass
communication, which
permanently altered the structure of
society. The relatively unrestricted
circulation of information and
revolutionary ideas transcended
borders, captured the masses in the
Reformation and threatened the
power of political and religious
authorities. The sharp increase in
literacy broke the monopoly of the
literate elite on education and
learning and bolstered the emerging
middle class. Across Europe, the
increasing cultural self-awareness of Recreated Gutenberg press
its peoples led to the rise of proto-
nationalism.
 In the Renaissance the middle classes had the money to buy
books but they wanted books that they could read in their own
language. A publishing boom broke out and buying and selling
books began to prosper in many European countries. People
bought travelbooks, romances, poetry and almanacs. They
read more and became better educated.
 Humanism
 The term Renaissance Humanism was first advanced to define
the philosophical thought that radically transformed the
15th and 16th centuries. Driven by the rediscovery of the
humanities - the classical texts of antiquity - Renaissance
Humanism emphasized "an education befitting a cultivated
man," and saw the human individual "as the measure of the
universe.“
 Church leaders, scholars, and the ruling elite practiced and
promoted the understanding of classical ethics, logic, and
aesthetic principles and values, combined with an
enthusiasm for science, experiential observation, geometry,
and mathematics.
 Originating in Florence, a thriving center of urban commerce,
and promoted by the Medici, the ruling family of the Italian
city-state, the philosophy was connected to a vision in a new
society, where the individual's relationship to God and divine
principles, the world and the universe, was no longer
exclusively defined by the Church.
 Cultural Upsurge
 As a cultural movement, the Renaissance
encompassed innovative approaches to
Latin and vernacular literatures,
beginning with the 14th-century
resurgence of learning based on
classical sources, which
contemporaries credited to Petrarch. It
has also brought gradual but widespread
humanitarian educational reform based
on the study of five humanities:
poetry, grammar, history, moral
philosophy and rhetoric.
 In politics, the Renaissance contributed
to the development of the customs and
conventions of diplomacy. Italian has
eventually become the language of
diplomacy.
 Religious Upheavals and Bible Translations
 The late Middle Ages was a period of political intrigue surrounding
the Papacy and of rampant church corruption. Churchmen such as
Erasmus and Luther proposed the reform to the Church, based on the
humanist textual criticism of the New Testament.
 In 1517 Luther published The 95 Thesis, challenging the papal
authority and criticizing its perceived corruption, particularly with
regard to instances of sold indulgences to “Assist in the salvation of
the souls of the Christian world”. 
 The 95 Theses in a way triggered the process of Reformation, a
break with the Roman Catholic Church that previously claimed
hegemony in Western Europe. Humanism and the Renaissance played
a direct role in sparking the Reformation, contemporaneous religious
debates and conflicts.
 In 1522-1534 Martin Luther produced his translation of the Holy
Scriptures into the Lower Saxon dialect of German thus emerging as
the Father of the Literary German Language.
 At the Trent Church Council of 1545-1563, the Vulgate was
proclaimed the official text of the Biblical canon.
 The Council commissioned the creation of a new standard
version, condemned the German/Luther’s Reformation, and
forbade the Bible in any other but the King’s languages, i.e. in
Hebrew, Greek, or Latin in which the Holy Scriptures were
first written. Those texts were incomprehensible for most of
West and East Europeans.
 Despite the Counterreformation rulings and prohibitions of the
high Roman Catholic clergy, the vernacular translations of
Gospel had been widely used.
 Martin Luther
 Martin Luther was an Augustinian monk and
university lecturer in Wittenberg when he
composed his 95 Theses, which protested the
pope’s sale of reprieves from penance, or
indulgences. Although he had hoped to spur
renewal from within the church, in 1521 he
was summoned before the Diet of Worms and
excommunicated. Sheltered by Friedrich,
elector of Saxony, Luther translated the Bible
into German and continued his output of
vernacular pamphlets.
 When German peasants, inspired in part by (1483-1546)
Luther’s empowering “priesthood of all
believers,” revolted in 1524, Luther sided
with Germany’s princes. By the
Reformation’s end, Lutheranism had become
the state religion throughout much of
Germany, Scandinavia and the Baltics.
 The Martin Luther Bible Translation
 Martin Luther's Bible introduced mass media, unified a nation,
and set the standard for future translations.
 No other work has had as strong an impact on a nation's
development and heritage as has this Book.
 Martin Luther began translating the Bible while he was held
prisoner at the Wartburg castle by Frederick the Wise of Saxony
from May, 1521 to April, 1522.
 He completed the translation of The New Testament from the
original Greek in four months – between November 1521 and
March 1522.
 But Martin Luther did more than translate the Bible. For instance,
he judged whether certain passages and even entire books should
be included, in addition to helping determine the order in which
those books would appear. He also took an interest in how his
book would appear – its font and layout, so to speak.
 He was not even the first person to translate the Bible into
German. That process had begun as far back as 1350 C.E. – 130
years before Luther was born. He was also not the first person to
translate the Bible into what is known as Low German, let alone
into a couple of other regional dialects. That remained for
somebody else to do.
 To the extent that he did work on translating the Bible into German, Luther did
not work alone. Obviously, he was dependent on earlier versions of the Bible in
Hebrew, with some Aramaic, Greek, and the Latin Vulgate from which to
translate.
 He also became dependent on a coterie of scholars and editors, not to mention
the printers who distributed his translation far and wide, swiftly.
 Most important among his collaborators were Philip Melanchthon and Mattäus
Aurogallus, but eventually there was an entire committee for the 1531 and 1534
versions. Some portions of the eventual publication, such as the Apocrypha, were
not even translated by him at all. It is also the case that he did not just sit down to
do the work all at once and emerge sometime later with a finished product.
 Luther kept making edits throughout his lifetime – so much so that after his death
there was some confusion which draft was in fact the final and authoritative
version. A number of changes were made by other people after he died, but the
casual reader was none the wiser.
 Between 1522 and his death, there would be 443 whole or partial editions in
circulation.

Philip Melanchthon Mattäus Aurogallus

 All of editions is to say that Martin Luther did not retire to
Wartburg castle in 1521 and emerge three months later with a
fresh beard on his face and a German New Testament in his
satchel. That is not how it happened. Yet something very
much like that did happen.
 Luther’s translations soon had their rivals. Roman Catholic
scholars tried to catch up with their own authorized versions.
Jerome Emser, for example, found so many errors in Luther’s
version that he decided to publish his own – also in 1522.
 Nevertheless, it is widely held that it was simply Luther who
translated the Bible into German.

1720 Martin Luther

BIBLE
 What is to be gained by singling out this one man and his exertions,
from out of the flow of world events? The problems he faced were not
unique to him. Other men across Europe faced them, also, and to
some extent these problems had existed for some time before he was
even born. Luther’s response to these problems was not unique,
either. Other men had translated the Bible into their own vernacular,
going back to Pentecost, and translations were afoot in other parts of
Europe as he began.
 He was not even the first to translate the Bible into German! Yet there
was something original in his contribution. Although part of what
made his story unique were the circumstances of his time and place
(such as the printing press and the rise of nationalism), his response
was — for all intents and purposes – original.
 In the same fashion, poets rarely invent the languages they use, yet
they bring a certain style to their compositions – a style that is both
novel and fitting, like a composite that other men are compelled to
notice and affirm, even as it is constructed of familiar elements. It
might be said that Luther may not have created anything new, but he
fashioned a response in a creative way.
 One way that Luther led others from within his context is that he
released others not so much to mimic him as to develop themselves
after their own fashion, to take up the project of individuality. This
would be true in two ways. First, it would be true in the narrow sense
of interpreting scripture for themselves in the so-called priesthood of
all believers, now that the text was available in their native tongue.
Any literate lay parishioner had unmediated access to scripture.
Second, though, it would be true more broadly that Luther released
others to develop themselves in the sense of living their peculiar
vocation, whatever that happened to be, just as he had been trying to
live his.

1534 Martin Luther

BIBLE
 Conclusion
 Leadership seems to have occurred in the process of
translating the Bible into the vernacular, but isolating these
individual exertions becomes incredibly artificial. So many
other things were also going on. This person and that person
influenced what was to happen, and we can try to study their
individual impact, even though as a matter of intellectual
honesty we have to acknowledge the larger flow of events.
 The Bible was being translated into many languages at
roughly the same time. It is not simply a matter of widening
our historical lens to take in more data, to appreciate the full
sweep of an era (although that would also be prudent).
 At the very moment of leadership, no matter how narrowly
drawn – even the wrangling over every jot and tittle in the
text — multiple forces were at work, impinging on the social
actors bent over their manuscripts.
 In fact, one reason Luther’s example can be seen to be so
compelling is that despite the crushing tensions he so
evidently felt, his experience in Wartburg Castle, hidden away
at an undisclosed location, with time on his hands, safely
hidden and at risk of boredom, he chose to undertake a task
that was to have enormous implications – not only for the
church, but also for the German language and national politics.
 The Western world was different. Its culture was never the
same. A mature analysis of such a colossal shift could
profitably be told from either the micro or the macro
perspective, inasmuch as they are complementary.
 There is little reason to adopt one perspective to the exclusion
of the other, for that way lies reductionism and an imperfect
understanding of social change.
Thank You for Attention!