The Vulgate is the Latin Bible that the Roman Catholic Church used as its standard text for well over a thousand years. Around AD 382 a scholar called Jerome was asked to fix the Latin Bibles then in use, which disagreed with each other; he revised the Gospels and later translated much of the Old Testament from Hebrew. The version that grew out of his work slowly became THE Bible of the western Church, and at the Council of Trent (1546) the Church declared it the official text. Note two things students often miss. First, it is almost always written with a capital V and with 'the' in front: 'the Vulgate', not 'a vulgate'. Second, it is a name for one particular book, so you cannot say 'a Latin vulgate' meaning any Latin Bible. Since the 1970s Catholics have mostly used newer translations in their own languages, and there is even a revised Latin version called the Nova Vulgata, so the old Vulgate now belongs mainly to history, to scholarship, and to church music, where Latin texts are still sung. The word is rare in everyday English and belongs to books about religion or history. Very occasionally, in academic writing about literature, 'vulgate' with a small v means the ordinary, commonly accepted version of a text — but a student will meet the Bible meaning far more often. The name itself is worth knowing: the Latin behind it means 'made common', 'given out to everybody'. It was called that not as an insult but as a compliment — this was the Bible ordinary people could hear in the language of their daily life. That is a nice irony, because centuries later Latin became the language that ordinary people could NOT understand, and reformers attacked the Vulgate for exactly the opposite reason.