Vernacular scripture translation predated and was independent of the Reformation

Evidence

There is no point in attempting any exhaustive listing. From the examples quoted that from the late fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries there was under way a Europe-wide process of acquisition of scriptures and devotional works in the various vernaculars. What lay behind this Europe-wide rendering of the scriptures into the vernaculars is by no means clear, and none of the explanations commonly adduced fits all cases. The spread of printing, and the ferment of the Reformation (or the reformations) certainly played their part, but the trend to translate had begun in some parts of Europe (England in particular) very early, before the Reformation, before printing, and independently of it. That Spain’s Muslims should also have wished in this general period to acquire their own holy books in their own mother tongue, and have in the process created a new written language (just as Luther set for German a new standard) is, in such a perspective, hardly surprising at all; and it is very European. Spain’s Muslims need understanding as Muslims with a distinctive culture they inherited from the East, but they also need to be understood as Europeans participating in many aspects of the common culture of the lands where they were born. — L. P. Harvey, Muslims in Spain, 1500 to 1614, 649

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s interest in language-creation and identity; parallels the way minority communities develop distinct written registers. — connects to: Economic mystification parallels medieval theology and requires a grassroots Reformation. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1813
• SEED: Angle: the Aljamiado scriptures as a Muslim analogue to Luther’s German — a minority constructing a literary written language as an act of cultural self-preservation and European participation simultaneously.