ABSTRACT
The earliest history of children’s literature in English is dominated by translations. Versions of the Christian scriptures and the Bible in Old and Middle English were for centuries the translated texts children encountered most frequently, especially after the publication of John Wycliffe’s translation of the Bible from Latin in the fourteenth century, William Tyndale’s from Greek and Hebrew (1524 onwards), and the enduring King James version of 1611. Once the band of forty-seven translators appointed by James I had reworked existing versions with reference to Hebrew, Greek, and Latin sources to create a poetic text, its sonorous cadences became familiar to children in church, school, and home. Moreover, children’s earliest reading primers, alphabets covered with thin layers of sheep’s horn and tacked to paddles in so-called ‘horn books’, included a translation of the Lord’s prayer.
