189J      Anonymous; attributed to George Joye (1495-1553)

Our sauiour Iesus Christ hath not ouercharged his chirche with many ceremonies.       

[At Zijrik] [i.e. Antwerp : Widow of C. Ruremond?], M.D.XLIII. in Febru. [1543]                                  $11,000

Octavo,   First and only edition A-B8 C6 . this copy is nicely bound in modern red Morocco. 

Like Coverdale, Joye was probably also employed in the printing business as proofreader, translator, and author of religious books.

His first, now lost publication was a Primer, the first Protestant devotional book ever published in English Based on contemporary accounts, it probably contained the translation of the seven penitential psalms, “Mattens and Euensong” with the Commendations (Psalm 119). The book was criticized by Thomas More for omitting the Litany of the Saints, the hymns and anthems to the Blessed Virgin, and the Dirge.

After the publication of his Primer, containing perhaps as many as thirty psalms, Joye set out to translate the rest of the Book of Psalms, which appeared in 1530. Joye used Martin Bucer‘s recent Latin translation of the Hebrew text, which was published under the pseudonym Aretius Felinus. In the same year Joye produced a revised version of his earlier primer with the title Ortolus animae. The garden of the soule.

In 1531, Joye’s translation of the Book of Isaiah appeared, which seems to have been intended as a twin volume to Tyndale‘s translation of the Book of Jonah. In 1531 Joye also published a defence countering the charges of heresy put against him by Ashwell in 1527.

By 1532 he married. Butterworth and Chester suggest that Joye published the translations of the Book of Proverbs and of Ecclesiastes in 1533 in Antwerp, of which only later London reprints have survived It is now also believed that Joye is the author of an anonymously published treatise entitled The Souper of the Lorde, which was earlier attributed to Tyndale. In this Joye described his position on the Eucharist, based on that of Zwingli.

Joye’s translation of the Book of Jeremiah, of Lamentations, and a new translation of the Psalter followed (this time from the Latin Psalter of Zwingli, whose Latin commentaries and translations had also served as source texts for Joye’s translations of the other books of the Old Testament). All these translations were the first of these books ever printed in English.

In 1534 Joye undertook the proofreading of Tyndale‘s New Testament edition that had been reprinted three times without any English-speaking corrector by the Flemish printing firm of the family Van Ruremund. Joye, however, not only corrected the typographical errors, but he also changed the term “resurreccion” as found in Tyndale’s text by expressions such as “the lyfe after this” in some twenty occurrences of the word. Joye believed, as he later explained, that the original term in the Bible in those places did not refer to the bodily resurrection but to the intermediate stateof the soul At the same time, Joye retained Tyndale’s original formulation at the some 150 other occurrences of the word, where he agreed with Tyndale that the term did refer to the bodily resurrection. Tyndale reacted by bringing out his own revised version of his New Testament in November 1534, in which he inserted a second foreword attacking Joye and his editorial work. Tyndale accused Joye of promoting the heresy of the denial of the bodily resurrection and causing divisions among Protestants. After an inconclusive attempt to reconcile the parties, Joye published an apology to refute Tyndale’s accusations in February 1535.

STC (2nd ed.), 14556  Copies  N.America

Folger ,Pierpont Morgan Library , University of Illinois

Much of this information is from “Charles C. BUTTERWORTH, & Allan G. CHESTER, George Joye (1495?–1553). A Chapter in the History of the English Bible and the English Reformation, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1962” and Graham Hardy’s Wiki page on Joye.