The Impetus of the Jansenist Milieus in France and the Low Countries to Bible Reading in the Vernacular

In the seventeenth century, the Jansenists with their strong emphasis on the need for a Christian revival, presented themselves as advocates of Bible reading in the vernacular. The translations that originated from the Jansenist milieu associated with Port Royal, wanted to spread a new ideal of "spiritual devotion" among laypeople and meant a break with the restrictive post-Tridentine rules regarding Bible reading in the vernacular. Together with this new ideal, the Bible translations of Port-Royal presented a new approach: the "spiritual" readings of the Middle Ages were replaced by a historical, critical and moral reading of Scripture. In a word, they constituted a plea strongly in favor of a more scholarly approach of the Biblical texts. For the translation, they relied on the Tradition and more specifically on the Vulgate, the Church fathers and ecclesiastical authors. Also in the Jansenist milieus of the Low Countries this new approach slowly filtered through. This paper focuses on the place of the Bible in the religious life from the perspective of the controversy between the Jansenists and the Roman Catholic Faction in the Low Countries between 1660 and 1735. I will concentrate on two main topics of research: (1) The attitude of Louvain theologians to translations of the Bible in the vernacular in the 17th century. I include, as a way of a case-study, an overview of the controversy on vernacular Bible reading between two protagonists: Johannes van Neercassel, the vicar apostolic of the Catholic Church in Holland, and Cornelius Hazart, an anti-Jansenist Jesuit, also known as Antonius Suivius. (2) In the second part of this paper I discuss the printed Dutch and French Bibles between 1660 and 1735, this being the period of the Jansenist controversy.