ABSTRACT
During the second half of the fifteenth century, the Renaissance spirit, together with the availability of 'lost' resources, gave rise to a renewed interest in the Holy Scriptures. This interest and scholarship flowered gently throughout western Europe, and then in the early sixteenth century, with the development of the printing press and a concern to renew the Church on the basis of biblical scholarship, there was a visionary impetus for a rapid increase in new translations into the vernacular, and the spread of the knowledge of the text of the Scriptures beyond the confines of what later was to be called 'the clerisy'.
