From Chaucer to Tennyson: With Twenty-Nine Portraits and Selections from Thirty AuthorsBeers, Henry A. (Henry Augustin)
History
From Chaucer to Tennyson: With Twenty-Nine Portraits and Selections from Thirty Authors
Beers, Henry A. (Henry Augustin)
English literature -- History and criticism
and Latin classics, and with that perpetual reference to the authority
of antiquity on every topic that he touches, which remained the fashion
in all serious prose down to the time of Dryden.
One speedy result of the new learning was fresh translations of the
Scriptures into English out of the original tongues. In 1525 William
Tyndal printed at Cologne and Worms his version of the New Testament
from the Greek.
[Footnote 18: Surely; a corruption of the Anglo-Saxon _gewis_.]
Ten years later Miles Coverdale made, at Zurich, a translation of the
whole Bible from the German and Latin. These were the basis of numerous
later translations, and the strong beautiful English of Tyndal's
Testament is preserved for the most part in our Authorized Version
(1611). At first it was not safe to make or distribute these early
translations in England. Numbers of copies were brought into the
country, however, and did much to promote the cause of the Reformation.
After Henry VIII. had broken with the pope the new English Bible
circulated freely among the people. Tyndal and Sir Thomas More carried
on a vigorous controversy in English upon some of the questions at issue
between the Church and the Protestants. Other important contributions to
the literature of the Reformation were the homely sermons preached at
Westminster and at Paul's Cross by Bishop Hugh Latimer, who was burned
at Oxford in the reign of Bloody Mary. The English Book of Common Prayer
was compiled in 1549-1552. More was, perhaps, the best representative of
a group of scholars who wished to enlighten and reform the Church from
the inside, but who refused to follow Henry VIII. in his breach with
Rome. Dean Colet and John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, belonged to the
same company, and Fisher was beheaded in the same year (1535) with More,
and for the same offense, namely, refusing to take the oath to maintain
the act confirming the king's divorce from Catharine of Arragon and his
marriage with Anne Boleyn. More's philosophy is best reflected in his
_Utopia_, the description of an ideal commonwealth, modeled on Plato's
_Republic_, and printed in 1516. The name signifies "no place" [Greek:
oy thopst], and has furnished an adjective to the language. The _Utopia_
was in Latin, but More's _History of Edward V. and Richard III._ written
1513, though not printed till 1557, was in English. It is the first
example in the tongue of a history as distinguished from a chronicle;
that is, it is a reasoned and artistic presentation of an historic
period, and not a mere chronological narrative of events.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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