The Bible as we know it today is composed of two collections of books, the ‘Old Testament’ and the much shorter ‘New Testament’.
The history of the Bible reached a turning point when it was translated into Latin by St Jerome (d. 420). Jerome’s ‘Vulgate’, so named because Latin was the popular language of the day, slowly became the standard text of the Bible in western Europe, displacing a number of variants. It became the key to the Christian culture that lay at the heart of the kingdoms that grew up following the collapse of Rome’s empire.
Via the medieval Church, the Vulgate reached into and shaped the lives of everyone from the peasants in the fields, to kings and emperors. In 1453-55 it became the first major beneficiary of Johann Gutenberg’s newly invented process of printing with moveable type.
