Bibles

Several kinds of Bible translations from the Middle Ages and later periods are included in the Old French Bible project. These include translations of individual books such as the Psalms, loose translations of Bible stories and passages into French verse, and large-scale prose translations of many books or the entire Bible.

The first stage of the project focuses on the 13^th-century Old French Bible, a translation produced probably between 1220 and 1250 in Paris or somewhere nearby. We don't know exactly who produced it, although it has been proposed that it was commissioned either by the University of Paris or by the French royal family (see Sneddon, Clive R. 2019. The Old French Bible. In Jeanette Beer (ed.), A Companion to Medieval Translation, 23–36. Amsterdam: Arc Humanities Press).

The name of our project, Old French Bibles, is intended to evoke not only Bibles translated into one of the historical language varieties known as Old French, but also any French translations of the Bible that are old in the broad sense. This includes Bible translations into Middle French and Classical French.

Here are some of the other Bible translations that we intend to eventually include in a parallel corpus:

Eadwin Psalter (c. 1120)
Etienne de Ansa and Bernard Ydros partial translation of the Bible (1179, known as the Waldo Bible)
Pierre de Paris translation of Psalms (c. 1200)
Anonymous Latin-French Psalter (early 14^th century)
Raoul de Presles Bible translation (1377)
Anonymous Lorraine Psalter (late 14^th century)
Jehan de Blois translation of Psalms (15^th century)
Jean du Vignay translation of the Gospels and Epistles (15^th century)
Jacques Lefèvre d'Étaples translation of the Bible (1530)
Nicolas Coëffeteau partial translation of the New Testament (17^th century)
Lemaistre de Saci translation of the New Testament (1736)
Charles-François Houbigant translation of Psalms (1783)
Louis de Carrières translation of Job (18^th century)

At a later stage, we also hope to provide digital editions of some of the various early translations of the Bible that adapt biblical stories in French verse, such as those by Everat, Macé de la Charité, or Hermann de Valenciennes.