The handwritten notes were found on sheets of the Latin Bible printed during the reign of Henry VIII. Someone pasted over all the sheets with notes made in English, and only today scientists were able to read the secret inscriptions.
Bible notes from 1535 will help shed light on the course of the English Reformation.
Only seven copies of the 1535 edition of the Bible have survived. Henry VIII personally wrote the foreword to this edition. A tome with recently discovered handwritten notes was kept in the Lambeth Palace Library in London.
Page from the Bible of 1535 in normal light.
The same backlit page.
At first glance, there was nothing remarkable about this copy of the Bible, Eyal Poleg, a historian at Queen Mary University of London, who is currently writing a book on Bible history in England, told the press. Poleg scrutinizes the handwritten notes often found in the margins of the Bible to understand how the text was used for sermons and liturgy. Looking closely, however, Poleg noticed that thick sheets of paper were pasted into the book, hiding possible entries in the margins.
The 1535 edition of the Bible was issued at a turbulent time for the English Catholic Church. The Protestant Reformation was in full swing, possession of, as they would say today, an unlicensed translation of the Bible into English, was punishable by death. Nevertheless, there were brave translators, as the English theologian William Tyndale translated the scriptures from Hebrew and Greek since the 1520s, this translation cost him death by hanging in 1536.
Promotional video:
Translation of the Bible has always been a dangerous undertaking, so in the 1380s. John Wycliffe was the first to produce a complete English translation of the New and Old Testaments. At least one of his followers was burned at the stake, which was kept aflame with the help of pages of the translated manuscript. Wycliffe died a natural death, however, later his body was dug up, burned, and his ashes thrown into the river - so the council of the Roman Catholic Church in Constance decreed.
Just a few years after the circulation of the Bible in Latin in 1535, Henry VIII announced his break with the Roman Catholic Church, which later became known as the English Reformation. Tensions with the Catholic Church began with the king during the period when he was trying to dissolve the marriage with Catherine of Aragon. Then he declared himself the head of the English church. Almost immediately, the emissaries of the king rushed to smash the Catholic monasteries, the treasures of which were rumored to have financed Henry's numerous military campaigns.
The hidden text in the Bible of 1535 was discovered quite by accident. Poleg often visited the Lambeth Palace library, where he examined one of the two Bibles in the 1535 edition. This time the librarian made a mistake and brought him a tome that was not the one he usually used. While waiting for the required copy, Poleg took a closer look at what he was holding, and noticed something strange in the margin of one of the pages. "In one place on the sheet a small hole formed through which not printed, but handwritten characters were visible," Poleg explained in an interview with Living Science, "I immediately realized that paper was pasted on the original pages."
Now Poleg was faced with the task of reading a handwritten text on which sheets of paper with printed text were glued. He could not just peel off the sheets, then the original pages would be damaged. He tried to put the pages on the backlit table, and so he could see that the pages of the Bible are literally covered with handwritten marks. In addition, the scientist was able to identify watermarks on the paper pasted over the original pages, which allow us to attribute it to 1600. But even now Poleg could not read the handwritten text.
After six months of unsuccessful attempts to decipher the handwritten marginal notes, Poleg turned to Graham Davis, a radiologist in the Department of Dentistry at the same Queen Mary University. Davis wrote a computer program that was able to separate the handwritten and printed text in the digitized images of the pages of the Bible in 1535. This was how the pasted text was read.
The notes turned out to be a reading list at the liturgy, explaining which fragment from the holy book should be read on a given day throughout the year. As it turned out later, the liturgical lists were copied from the "Big Bible", which was the first authorized translation into English, commissioned by the royal secretary, Thomas Cromwell. The Big Bible was printed in 1539, hence the Bible annotations from Lambeth Palace, according to Poleg, were made between 1539 and 1549.
A handwritten English text in the margins of the Latin Bible sheds light on the course of the Reformation in England. In 1539, Henry VIII issued a decree according to which church services should be held only in English. This does not mean, however, that everyone immediately began to pray only in English. Perhaps a study of the marginal notes of the 1535 biblical edition will help to find out how the transition from liturgy in Latin to services in English actually took place.
In addition to religious notes proper, this copy of the Bible also contained more prosaic notes. Thus, on the last page, Poleg found a pledge, written in the hand of Mr. James Alice "The Pickpocket," that he must pay 20 shillings to Mr. William Sheffin of Calais. In the event that Alice does not pay the indicated amount, he will be sent to Marshallsea Prison in Southwerk. Poleg traced the history of the Pickpocket and found out that he was hanged in July 1552. Accordingly, the commitment records were made before that date.
The Bible in 1535 was the first printed Latin Bible published in England.