When Manuscripts Meet: Editing the Bible in Greek During and After the Council of Trent

chapter 15 When Manuscripts Meet: Editing the Bible in Greek during and after the Council of Trent

Scott Mandelbrote

In or around 1599, Thomas James (ca. 1573–1629) studied an unfamiliar Latin Bible, probably in the shop of the stationer John Norton in Saint Paul’s Churchyard in London. He read the preface, which was ascribed to Pope Sixtus v:

and viewed it well, considering the singular care that was taken in the mending of it; the supreame Authoritie whereby it was done; the Parties imployed in the dooing of it; the Chiefe Pastor of the Church, sole Iudge of all controuersies; his assistance of a Colledge of Cardinalls; helpe of the best Learned men that could be gotten throughout all Europe; of rare Manuscripts; the best printed Copies; vse of Originals and Fathers; cor- rection of it both before & after the printing; imployment of Correcters and Compositors for the same purpose. Lastly, the approprobation of it by the Church, and in the Church to be read, forbidding all other Bibles, how little soeuer swaruing from this, to be read; commaunding them, whether printed or written, to bee made away: or at the least, to be made of none effect, and not to bee accounted of in respect of this.1

James may already have been acting for Sir Thomas Bodley, who in February 1598 had taken it upon himself to restore the library of Oxford University. Certainly, he lost no time in comparing this new Bible to an earlier printed copy of the Vulgate, “which it was my chance to buy of a Souldier, that was at

1 Thomas James, A Treatise of the Corrvption of Scripture, Councels, and Fathers (London, 1611), 27–28. Cf. Biblia sacra vulgatae editionis ab Concilii Tridentini praescriptum emendata et a Sixto v p.m. recognita et approbata (Rome, 1590); T.H. Darlow and H.F. Moule, Historical Catalogue of the Printed Editions of Holy Scripture in the Library of the British and Foreign Bible Society, 2 vols. (London: bfbs, 1903–11),[hereafter cited as dm], no. 6181. See also Paul Maria Baumgarten, Die Vulgata Sixtina von 1590 und ihre Einführungsbulle (Münster: Aschendorff, 1911). For the identification of Norton, see G.W. Wheeler, ed., Letters of Sir Thomas Bodley to Thomas James (Oxford: Clarendon, 1926), 4–5; for the location of the shop, see Peter W.M. Blayney, The Bookshops in Paul’s Cross Churchyard (London: Bibliographical Society, 1990), 53–54. The copy viewed by James is probably now shelf mark Bib. Lat. 1590 c. 1, Bodleian Library, Oxford.

252 Mandelbrote the sacking of Cales, whose bootie was books.” James rapidly noticed the differences in the two texts, moving on to compare them with another Bible, printed in 1593 at Rome under the authority of Clement viii and edited by Roberto Bellarmino:

I found, by a diligent comparing of both Bibles, that the two Popes did notoriously differ amongst themselues; not onelie in the number of the verses, but in the bodie of the Text, and in the Praefaces & Bulls themselues. I should hardly haue beleeued so much, vnlesse I had seene it with mine eyes…2

Following this discovery, James immediately began exploiting such apparent disagreement over the text of the Latin Bible for the purposes of Protestant polemic: “for what talke is there of peace, or hope of amendement, as long as the two Popes, the Holy Fathers of the Church, are at as great enmitie…one Pope against another; Sixtus against Clement, Clement against Sixtus, disput- ing, writing & fighting about the… Bible.”3 In a book that he published in 1600, James drew attention to the discrepancies between the Sixtine and Clementine editions of the Vulgate and to their differences from earlier editions of the Bible sanctioned by the Catholic Church, from rabbinic tradition, and from the consensus of the underlying Greek and Hebrew sources of the text.4 He was far from being the first to notice the problems about which he now gloated:

2 James, Treatise, 228–29. The Bibles used for comparison were dm 6129, printed at Louvain in 1547, endorsed by the Faculty of Theology there, and edited by Johannes Henten on the basis of the work of Robert Estienne, and the quarto editio of dm 6184 (the so-called Sixto- Clementine Bible, originally published in an edition of five hundred copies in folio in 1592). James’s text states that the Louvain Bible came from Calais, but the context makes clear that it was in fact spoil from the Jesuit library at Cadiz. The Earl of Essex sacked Cadiz in July 1596, and his ships also carried off the library of Fernão de Mascarenhas from Faro. See Wheeler, Letters of Bodley to James, 4–5, where Essex is identified as the donor of Bodley’s own copy of the Sixto-Clementine Bible (1592, now shelf mark Bib. Lat. 1592 c. 1, Bodleian Library); K.M. Pogson, “A Grand Inquisitor and His Library,” Bodleian Quarterly Record 3 (1920–22): 239–44; P.S. Allen, “Books Brought from Spain in 1596,” English Historical Review 31 (1916): 606–10; Paul Maria Baumgarten, Neue Kunde von alten Bibeln (Rome: For the author, 1922), 316–22. A later revision of the Louvain Bible (Antwerp, 1583) had in fact been used as the copy-text for the work that James was examining: see mss Vat. Lat. 12959–60, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vatican City. 3 James, Treatise, 31. 4 Thomas James, Bellvm papale, sive concordia discors Sixti Qvinti, et Clementis Octavi, circa Hieronymianam editionem (London, 1600), sig. C3v.