Text and Context in Jerome's Psalters: Prose Translations into Old, Middle and Early Modern English

The objective of this book is to provide an illustrative presentation of the development of the English language over seven hundred years, by offering an edition of a selection of carefully chosen English prose translations of Psalms 1-50, based on Jerome’s Latin Psalters and executed between the Old English period and Early Modern English. Bible translations in general offer excellent insights into the language of a particular period, as the intention of a translator is always to achieve close adherence to the text of the original. It is, however, crucial to be able to point to the originals underlying the translations, in order to see whether the differences between the translations represent language change, or whether they simply reflect a difference between source texts.