Dear Yngve Nordgaard,
I've been waiting for one of our resident specialists to answer your
question, which they may have done privately for all I know. However, in
case not: you may want to try Carol Kaske's article on the Bible in The
Spenser Encyclopedia. It lists the Bibles in currency at the time and
suggests one or two probabilistic arguments for Spenser's preferences,
citing along the way some research on the subject. To your list you could
sensibly add, in English, the Rheims New Testament.
You might want to worry about your question, though--Spenser may have
preferred, for all we know, a Latin or Greek version of the Bible, and even
polyglott editions were in Pembroke by 1560 (see Elisabeth Leedham-Green,
Books in Cambridge Inventories, p. 93). Popular Latin versions (here I'm
citing Kaske) included the Vulgate, the Erasmus parallel-text translation
of the New Testament, and the Junius-Tremellius-Beza Bible.
andrew zurcher
>Spenser used conceits from the Song of Salomo. But which bible translation
>did he use? The Geneva Bible, the Great Bible or the Bishop's Bible?
>
>Yours sincerely,
>
>--
>Yngve Nordgaard, graduate student of comparative literature
>University of Oslo, Norway
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