On the Earliest Printed Editions of the Vulgate with a Text-Critical Apparatus. Paper from the 11th Birmingham Colloquium on the Textual Criticism of the New Testament, 5th March 2019. Text. (original) (raw)

On the earliest printed Editions of the Vulgate containing a Text-Critical Apparatus Ladies and Gentlemen, The Sixtine Vulgate of 1590 and the Clementine edition of 1592 were published with a minimum of paratextual additions. The author of the preface to the Clementina, Robert Bellarmine, makes some remarks on this feature of the edition. The Apostolic See, he says, does not forbid the addition of helps for readers and students, such as parallel passages, prologues of Saint Jerome or arguments at the beginning of the biblical books. However, Bellarmine concludes, "By no means, variant readings must be noted in the margin of the text proper." According to Bellarmine, the Apostolic See was opposed to marginal critical apparatuses in Bibles, but did not condemn the work itself of those who had recorded variant readings in earlier editions. Bellarmine himself was aware of the value of the text-critical work on the Latin Bible as laid down, for instance, in the Vulgate editions of Robert Étienne, published from 1528 onwards. The successive papal commissions, who prepared the Roman Vulgate editions, intensively used Johannes Henten's Louvain Vulgate which, provided with a marginal critical apparatus, was published in 1547. Reprints of Henten's Vulgate edition were published from 1574 onwards by Francis Lucas of Bruges who was held in the highest esteem in Rome. Clearly, Rome was not opposed to text-critical work on the Vulgate. Here, however, I shall not pursue the history of the Vulgate editions of Étienne and Henten and their reception, which are well known. Rather I want to discuss the less known history of the Vulgate provided with a critical apparatus as edited by Albertus Castellanus and first published in 1511.