Petrus Sutor · Paris, 28 February 1525
De tralatione Bibliae, et novarum reprobatione interpretationum
On the translation of the Bible, and the rejection of new versions. The Latin text beside a new English translation, which is being made one chapter at a time.
Petrus Sutor (Pierre Cousturier, d. 1537), a Paris doctor of theology and Carthusian prior, wrote this book against the new Latin versions of Scripture by Erasmus and Lefèvre d'Étaples, and against putting the Bible into the vernacular at all. It came out in February 1525, dedicated to his colleagues of the Paris Faculty of Theology. Erasmus answered it within months. The book is well known from those replies and from brief summaries, but it has never been translated into English.
The last chapter, on vernacular translation, is the first one put up here:
Chapters 1–21 deal with the original languages of Scripture, the Septuagint, Jerome and the Vulgate, and the new translations. They will follow if the first chapter proves useful.
A draft, put up for comment
This is a working draft. The Latin was read from the page images by OCR and corrected by machine against the images. The English is a machine translation that no Latinist has checked yet. Every paragraph is labelled with how far it has been checked. If you read sixteenth-century Latin, a correction to any paragraph, however small, improves it for everyone who comes after. How the text was made, and how to help.