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Received: Wed, 29 Feb 2012 03:05:22 PM EST
From: The Medieval Review <[log in to unmask]>
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Subject: TMR 12.02.27 Edgar, The Vulgate Bible, Volume II (Bruce)
Edgar, Swift, ed. and trans. <i>The Vulgate Bible, Volume II, Parts A
and B: The Historical Books: Douay-Rheims Translation</i>. Dumbarton
Oaks Medieval Library 4. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011.
Part A: Pp. 1,168. $29.95. ISBN: 0674055349, ISBN-13: 9780674996670.
Part B: Pp. 816. $29.95. ISBN: 0674996674, ISBN-13: 9780674060777.
Reviewed by Scott G. Bruce
University of Colorado at Boulder
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As of 2011, Harvard University Press can boast a century-old tradition
of making Greek and Roman literature available to the general reader
in translation alongside the original text. With over 500 volumes in
print, the Loeb Classical Library (founded in 1911) is universally
acknowledged as the most convenient and accessible source for
classical texts of all genres for non-specialists who read English.
As a graduate student, I hoarded secondhand copies of the small number
of Loebs dedicated to Christian authors of late antiquity and the
early Middle Ages--Augustine, Jerome, Prudentius, Sidonius
Apollinaris, Boethius, and Bede--"those church fathers" whose rather
dubious inclusion in the series was allegedly warranted by their
"particular use of pagan culture." [1] I never held out hope, however,
for a medieval equivalent of the Loeb Classical Library; the sheer
multitude of potentially relevant texts, both in Latin and in a
dizzying array of vernacular languages, piled too high in my mind to
contemplate without a sense of intellectual vertigo. Fortunately, Jan
Ziolkowski is made of stronger stuff than I am. With a team of
learned editors, Ziolkowski has begun to publish the Dumbarton Oaks
Medieval Library (hereafter DOML), an exciting new series of medieval
sources with facing page translations in English. [2] At its outset,
the DOML will concentrate on premodern texts in Latin, Byzantine Greek
and Old English, but hopefully that focus will eventually extend to
other vernacular languages as well. The initial offerings of the
DOML--there are currently eleven volumes in print with another four
expected in the spring of 2012--give a strong sense of the ambition of
the series and the lengths to which the editors have gone not only to
present little known texts to a new generation of readers, but also to
provide fresh perspectives on some of the classics of medieval
literature. [3]
The centerpiece of the DOML is the publication of the entire Vulgate--
the Latin Bible prepared by Jerome in the late fourth and early fifth
centuries--in six volumes over the next two years. This is by far the
most ambitious project of the series. Sadly, the idiosyncratic
approach taken to this seminal text represents a serious misstep by
the editors. [4] The mission statement of the DOML expresses two
fundamental mandates: (a) "it will offer classics of the medieval
canon as well as lesser-known gems of literary and cultural value"
accompanied by (b) "accessible modern translations based on the latest
research." [5] Of all the volumes published in the DOML to date, only
those devoted to the Vulgate have ignored these mandates. Let us
begin with the translation, for reasons that will become clear further
on. The English translation that accompanies the Latin text in these
volumes is by no means modern. Rather, it is a revision of the Douay-
Rheims translation, an early modern rendering of the Vulgate into
English that has a long and complicated history. The Catholic Church
undertook the Douay-Rheims translation of the Bible in the 1570s as a
defense of Catholic traditions in the wake of the Protestant
Reformation. [6] The New Testament volume was published in Rheims in
1582; the Old Testament volumes were published somewhat later in Douay
in 1609/1610. The story does not end there. The Douay-Rheims
translation of the Vulgate was a ponderous affair, heavy with Latin
cognates and laborious to read, and thereby invited the scorn of
critics like William Fulke, who compared it unfavorably with
Protestant-sponsored English language translations, like the Bishops'
Bible published in 1568. For this reason, more than a century later
Bishop Richard Challoner revised the Douay-Rheims translation to make
it more readable, ironically taking cues from the popular King James
Bible (1611). Challoner's revisions appeared in print in 1749/1750.
It is an 1899 printing of Challoner's mid-eighteenth-century revision
of the Douay-Rheims translation that appears in the DOML Vulgate.
While this translation has its charms, its idiom often falls quite
heavily on the modern ear. Here are some examples from the volume
under review, which comprise the "historical books" of the Old
Testament, namely Joshua, Judges, Ruth, 1-4 Kings, 1-2 Paralipomenon
(= 1-2 Chronicles), 1-2 Ezra, Tobit, Judith and Esther:
1. "And the men of the city that pursued after Joshua, looking back
and seeing the smoke of the city rise up to heaven, had no more power
to flee this way or that way, especially as they that had
counterfeited flight and were going toward the wilderness turned back
most valiantly against them that pursued." (Joshua 8:20)
2. "Now his parents knew not that the thing was done by the Lord and
that he sought an occasion against the Philistines, for at that time
the Philistines had dominion over Israel." (Judges 14:4).
3. "And the house when it was in building was built of stones hewed
and made ready so that there was neither hammer nor axe nor any tool
of iron heard in the house when it was in building." (3 Kings 6:7)
We could debate whether these excerpts are cumbersome or merely
quaint, but no one would argue that they are modern or based on "the
most recent research." The volume's editor, Swift Edgar, makes the
case that "Challoner's English is important to scholars of many
disciplines, and it's proximity to the literal translation of the most
important book of the medieval period--namely, the Latin Bible--makes
it invaluable to English-speakers studying the Middle Ages" (xxv), but
I have to disagree. There are very few medievalists who would find
Challoner's English important for the simple reason that it is not
relevant to the Middle Ages. Rather, I think that most would agree
that a modern English translation of the Vulgate couched in a
contemporary idiom would have been much more useful to the target
audience of the DOML than a reproduction of the Douay-Rheims
translation improved by Challoner's revisions.
Now to the Latin. The inexplicable conceit of the DOML Vulgate is the
choice of the editors to give primacy to the Douay-Rheims translation
of the Bible rather than to the Latin text itself. There are several
excellent modern editions of the Vulgate, which represent the Latin
Bible in various stages of its development throughout the Middle Ages.
[7] But the exemplar that served as the source for the Douay-Rheims
translation no longer exists. Rather than choosing a near
contemporary printing of the Vulgate which may have been at odds in
some places with the Douay-Rheims translation, like the late
sixteenth-century Sixto-Clementine Bible promulgated by the papacy,
the editors of the DOML have opted instead for an "artificial" Vulgate
(xxiv), that is, "a reconstructed text of the lost Bible used by the
professors at Douay and Rheims" (ix). [8] This is a serious
miscalculation, because it severely limits the utility of these
volumes for anyone doing scholarly research that depends on the Latin
text of the Vulgate. While Edgar concedes that his reconstituted
Vulgate "[i]n large part... corresponds to Robert Weber's edition"
(xiii), that is, to the fifth edition of the Stuttgart Bible published
in 2007, it is neither a medieval text nor a critical edition of one.
And although Edgar is correct to point out that medieval Bibles are by
nature "heterogeneous [and] cobbled together over centuries" (xxiv),
they at least have the virtue of being cultural products of the Middle
Ages. The same cannot be said of the DOML Vulgate.
It is disappointing that a series with such promise should miss the
mark so widely with a text that is the cornerstone of medieval
Christian thought and culture. A reprint of a standard critical
edition of the Vulgate accompanied by a modern English translation
would have been much more useful to the audience of scholars and
general readers who will buy books in this series. As it stands, the
DOML Vulgate will find its place as a novelty, rather than a classic.
Its artificial Latin text will not replace any modern critical edition
of the Vulgate as an authoritative instrument of reference and general
readers will likely turn to much less stilted translations of the
Bible, irrespective of the historical importance of Challoner's
revisions to the Douay-Rheims translation. Fortunately, the DOML
Vulgate seems to be an anomaly in a series that has already presented
some splendid volume and promises many more. The DOML is the one of
the most exciting undertakings in contemporary medieval scholarship
and it is sure to broaden the horizons of specialists and non-
specialists alike for many years to come.
--------
NOTES:
1. The quotation is from the homepage of the Loeb Classical Library
on the Harvard University Press website:
http://www.hup.harvard.edu/collection.php?cpk=1031 (accessed on 16
January 2012).
2. Equally promising is Ziolkowski's new series <i>Dumbarton Oaks
Medieval Humanities</i>, also published by Harvard University Press,
the first volume of which has recently appeared: Michael McCormick,
<i>Charlemagne's Survey of the Holy Land: Wealth, Personnel, and
Buildings of a Mediterranean Church Between Antiquity and the Middle
Ages</i> (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011).
3. Less well known works in the early volumes of the series include
the Latin lyrics of Hugh Primas (vol. 2) and the satires of Sextus
Amarcius (vol. 9). The Beowulf poem was among the first volumes
published in the series (vol. 3), but it was creatively presented as
<i>The Beowulf Manuscript</i> and includes all of the surviving
contents of MS Cotton Vitellius A.xv, which allows readers to ruminate
on the poem in its manuscript setting.
4. In what follows, I am largely in agreement with Richard Marsden's
review of the first volume of the DOML Vulgate published for <i>The
Medieval Review</i> on 26 June 2011 at
http://hdl.handle.net/2022/13352.
5. These quotations are from the DOML homepage on the website of
Harvard University Press:
http://www.hup.harvard.edu/collection.php?recid=594 (accessed on 16
January 2012).
6. The translation took place at the English College, an important
haven of learning for English-speaking Catholics in northern France.
The College was situated in Douay until 1578, when it was moved to
Rheims at the outbreak of the Eighty Years' War. It returned to Douay
in 1593.
7. Medieval historians tend to favor the Stuttgart edition known as
the <i>Biblia sacra iuxta vulgatam versionem</i>, which is based on
the earliest Vulgate manuscripts and includes all of the letters
written by Jerome that became de facto prologues to the individual
books of the Bible in the Middle Ages. The fifth edition appeared in
2007.
8. The Sixto-Clementine edition of the Latin Bible comprised four
editions published in 1590, 1592, 1593, and 1598, during the papacies
of Pope Sixtus V (1585-1590) and Pope Clement VIII (1592-1605). This
edition postdates the translations of the Vulgate made at Douay and
Rheims in the 1570s.
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