Deconstructing the Protestant Liberation of the Bible: The Case of the Low Countries

Abstract The Grand Narrative of the liberation of Scripture has long taken for granted that the late medieval Catholic Church took a negative, if not repressive, attitude towards vernacular Bible reading; that the Scriptures were only opened up for the masses with the advent of Luther and the Reformers; and that the Catholic authorities reacted by intensifying their repressive policy. Though explicitly criticized in scholarly literature over the last decade, this Grand Narrative, or Protestant Paradigm, continues to pop up in confessionally-colored scholarly publications, as well as in accounts of the Reformation that are destined for a general audience. The present essay examines three incarnations of the Grand Narrative in Dutch Protestant Bible culture. Firstly, it has been argued that the Bibles published by William Vorsterman (not only the edition of 1528, but all subsequent editions) betray sympathies with the upcoming Reformation; secondly, that the printer-publisher Jacob van Liesvelt was beheaded on account of the protestantizing marginal glosses in his Bibles, especially the 1542 edition; and thirdly, that his widow Maria Ancxt continued to print Protestant Bibles from the late 1540s until the early 1560s, in obvious violation of the anti-heresy edicts, yet without being harassed by the Antwerp authorities. The aim of this article is to debunk these incarnations of the Grand Narrative.