The Blackfriars Bible

"One small but important problem," I derped last month, "is that no recognizable brand exists in Andalusada." I retract that statement; this is a big problem. And it's not just guns that are affected: it's everything that I love - food, liquor, philosophy. Even Bibles.

Obviously there's going to be the Günther Bible, and both Oliver Farrell's Vulgate and his translation from the Opus Transtulit. But those aren't the only ones, and the simple fact is that even if Catholicism keeps Latin as its liturgical language and does its utmost to dissuade the vernacular, the vernacular is established by the time they face competition. It's not going to go away; the most that Rome can do is have a say in its relationship to the vernacular Word.

This is particularly problematic to me because, as far as I can tell, Anglicanism doesn't exist: there's no reason to imagine that the British Isles don't stay devoutly Catholic (albeit undergoing some reforms to purge what its elites consider the worst excesses of Mariolatry and the like.) I'm not sure what the successions of kings, English or Scottish, look like - all I know is that even if there is a King James of England and Scotland (and there will be an England-Scotland, mark my words), he is NOT the same King James that gave us the 1611 Authorized Version.

So today I'm going to introduce the KJV's equivalent: the Blackfriars Bible.

The Günther Bible

Historically, the Ordensstaat actually used a dialect of Middle German in their chanceries. Why I'm not sure, because the lands of the Teutonic Order apparently didn't use it as a vernacular; IRL, after the secularization of the State into Ducal and Royal Prussia, the Teutonic Kanzelrei was completely abandoned in favor of the Low German spoken in daily life.

In Andalusada, of course, the Monastic State isn't secularized; it's overthrown. Monastic Middle German wasn't abandoned ITTL so much as consciously supplanted by the language of the rising urban population, and the Günther Bible (by establishing their Low German as a written language) was instrumental in doing this.