Vernacular Bible Reading in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe: The "Catholic" Position Revisited

On the eve of the Council of Trent, there was no outright ban on vernacular Bible reading in the Catholic world, but only regionally diversified positions. In Germany, the Low Countries, Bohemia, Poland, and Italy, vernacular Bibles circulated and were widely read since the Middle Ages. Censorship measures, however, existed in England and Spain, where the official Church had to deal with what it considered erroneous "Bible-based" faith-systems. In France, it was the advent of l'évangélisme in the 1520s that gave cause to more restrictive measures. In all cases, however, the question should be asked to which degree such censorship measures were effective or whether the laity anyway continued to read their Bibles.