William Tyndale: A Biography.

For a number of years, Shakespearean scholar David Daniell has championed William Tyndale, the early Tudor Protestant martyr and biblical translator, as a largely unacknowledged hero of the development of the English language. In his modern-spelling versions of the 1534 New Testament and those portions of the Old Testament that Tyndale completed (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989 and 1992, respectively), Daniell has argued that virtually all the best and most memorable portions of the 1611 Authorized Version are Tyndale's work. In this delightfully biased new biography, Daniell amplifies these arguments and places them in the context of Tyndale's intellectual milieu.

Tyndale's native Gloucestershire, a Welsh/English border area and important trade route, taught the value of multilingual ability as well as a directness of speech grounded in practical experience. His formal education at Magdalen School and Oxford was of course also multilingual. Although it took place before the reforms inspired by Erasmus, this formal training in theology, languages, and rhetoric prepared him for the lessons of De copia and the Novum Testamentum. Through Erasmus's writings, Tyndale would have acquired a craftsman's attitude towards language - and the more revolutionary idea of challenging the established Vulgate text.

After post-graduate study (either at Cambridge or at Christ Church, Oxford) and a return to Gloucestershire, where he was tutor to the children of Sir John Walsh, Tyndale journeyed to London. With a translation of an oration of Isocrates to demonstrate his ability, he sought the support of Bishop Cuthbert Tunstall for the work of rendering the Greek New Testament into English. Denied employment and under suspicion of heresy, Tyndale completed this task in Germany. Daniell examines in detail the abortive Cologne fragment (1525) and the complete Worms New Testament (1526). Acknowledging the obvious indebtedness to Luther in these volumes, Daniell argues that Tyndale's translation is by no means merely Luther rendered into English. Tyndale felt free to use Luther's work when it was good, but also to borrow from Erasmus's Latin paraphrase or even from the Vulgate, as well as to render the Greek independently.

Daniell's discussion of the Old Testament translations is particularly valuable. He includes such works as the Pentateuch and the Prophet Jonas that appeared under Tyndale's name, and also the versions of the historical books from Joshua to 2 Chronicles that appeared in the 1537 so-called Matthew's Bible. Daniell explains in detail the obstacles to learning Hebrew in the 1520s as well as the difficulties presented by the Old Testament texts; he speculates that Tyndale may have received some formal instruction in the language at a German university before moving to Antwerp around 1528. He argues convincingly that Tyndale was an accomplished Hebraist, particularly given the paucity of available resources; his evidence includes numerous examples of passages in Tyndale that are more accurate and clearer than the corresponding places in Luther's translation. Moreover, Daniell daims that Tyndale's revision of his New Testament in 1534 reveals an insight unique among his contemporaries: an understanding - reflected both in the preface and in numerous individual passages - that Hebrew idioms, tense formations, and habits of thought influenced the Greek of the writers.

Given his focus on Tyndale as translator, Daniell gives other facets of his life - including his polemical works and his arrest, trial, and execution - relatively sketchy treatment. Like his subject, Daniell writes beautifully - and, like Tyndale, he can use devastating wit against those with whom he disagrees. These include Sir Thomas More, late twentieth-century revisionist interpreters of the Reformation, and ineffectual translators of scripture. It is easy to correct for such open partiality, and to welcome this biography as an important reinterpretation of this seminal figure.

JOHN A.R. DICK University of Texas, El Paso