More like, as Western Christendom’s everyday languages kept evolving away from Latin (or even being substituted with Germanic tongues), the Church “froze” Vulgate Latin (Roman dialect) as of a certain date as the standardized common language of business AND the ritual language, lest the multinational organization fragment. This stayed so for centuries but eventually it was the languages of world trade and empire —French, English— that displaced Latin as the “international” standard in the Modern Era so eventually it only remained ritual. And again, this was one of those things that was not part the teachings of Faith, but an organizational SOP.
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Purgatory as a place of short-time hell-lite torment seems to be another one of those things that some important Church Fathers wrote their opinion about, and people assumed that must be official because nobody more famous fact checked them right away. (see also: Pope Gregory labeling Mary Magdalene as a prostitute)
As I understand it, there was more to it than just an objection to the Bible being made available in English. It was a specific translation or translations that were banned because they were supposedly heretical and corrupted.
I did a little googling and found this, which is definitely from a Catholic point of view but which as far as I know is not inaccurate—if anyone knows otherwise, fight our ignorance!
IIRC, in England specifically, from 1407 until the Reformation period in the 1530s-1540s, unauthorized English Bible translation was indeed illegal and considered heretical.
My understanding is not that the translation was particularly wrong. It was that it existed.
Again, the priests were the keepers of the “secret knowledge” and you had to go to them to get enlightened. The translation meant anyone could read the “secret knowledge” and no longer needed the priests. They were not cool with that.
I’m not sure how the “Wycliffe Bible” on Bible Galeway relates to the original, but it looks awfully modern for Middle English, and it has a copyright date of 2001.
Here, for what it’s worth, is the Wikipedia article on Wycliffe’s Bible:
AFAIK, no printed english versions, altho of course other translated versions did exist. But it wasnt the act of translation that banned them, it was the “bad/wrong” translations.
In the olden (pre-Gutenberg) days, books (including Bibles) were rare and expensive. And the clergy were among the few who were educated enough to be able to read them.
Although, Gutenberg wasn’t as big a change as you might think. He didn’t invent the printing press; he invented the movable type printing press. You could still print a book; it’s just that you had to carve each page. Which was only practical if you were going to print a LOT of copies of that book. So printed Bibles might have been workable pre-Gutenberg; what he enabled was printed everything else.
