Antwerp Polyglot

According to R. Wilkinson, the Planten Bible published in the Netherlands belonged to the Spanish tradition of biblical publications. Its printing was determined by the experience of publishing the Complutensky Polyglot , funded by the Spanish court, scientific editing was carried out by a Spanish theologian, and the Spanish Inquisition served as censorship ^[1] . The motivation for the publication of the new Polyglot was two circumstances: firstly, part of the circulation of the Compluten publication died during transportation to Italy ^[2] . Secondly, by the mid-1550s, there was a need to publish a Syrian version of Scripture , the main researcher of which was the Dutch Hebraist . In 1554, he announced in draft correspondence with Cardinal Piteo a draft of a new polyglot, which would include the Syrian text ^[3] . This idea was realized very slowly: only in 1566 did Mazius turn to Christopher Plantin , who proposed to supply all books of the Old Testament with targums with parallel Latin translation, while in Komplutensky Polyglott the targum was printed only for the Pentateuch ^[4] .

There were also more general considerations: The Compluten publication was based on the concept of primacy of the Vulgate in relation to all other linguistic versions of Scripture . This concept, put forward by Cardinal Jimenez de Cisneros , was fully confirmed by the Council of Trent . The question of the Bible was examined at a 1546 session from February 8 to April 8: in the light of the Protestant schism, the question of the authority of the Catholic Church was inseparable from the question of the authority of Scripture ^[5] . The result was a decision to publish a standard Bible without errors, equally necessary for liturgical, missionary and theological needs. However, the question of Scripture was again raised at the final session of 1562, when the bull De delectu librorum was published (February 26) and a special papal commission was created to reconcile church books, whose work was not completed by the end of the cathedral. The same bull sanctioned new editions of the Breviaria , missal , catechism and the Vulgate itself ^[6] . Even during the period of the Council’s work, the Index of Banned Books was published ^[7] ; Benito Arias Montano ^[8] was also involved in the preparation of his Spanish publication.

The reason for contacting Christopher Plantin , the leading publisher of Antwerp, was due to his successful biblical publications: in 1559 he printed the Latin Bible (based on the Louvain edition of Gravius ​​1547), in 1564 the Greek New Testament, and by 1566 he printed the Hebrew text. In his biblical publications, the first breakdown of verses proposed in 1555 by Robert Etienne was widely used ^[9] . Guillaume Postel in 1563 invited him to equip a Jewish printing house, similar to the one founded in Venice by Daniel Bomberg ^[9] . In those same years, he tried to implement a multilingual Bible in Hebrew, Latin, and Flemish ; this project was supported by the University of Louvain , whose scientists were ready to provide editing of texts and writing scientific comments. However, such a publication was extremely expensive and did not bode well, therefore, after the death of one of the initiators of the project, Plantin postponed the publication ^[10] .

The draft of the Antwerp Polyglot was mentioned in a letter from Plantin to A. Mazius of February 26, 1566, in which he requested 3,000 ecu for printing works. Soon, Frankfurt authorities offered him funds for the implementation of the Bible, but for this the printer had to move to Germany. He received similar offers from the Elector of Saxony, as well as from the University of Heidelberg ; test pages were sent to all interested parties. In other words, work began even before Benito Arias Montano arrived in the Netherlands ^[11] . However, in the same 1566, an anti-Catholic uprising took place in Antwerp, which led to a sharp change in the policy of the Spanish authorities. Workers of the Plantin printing house, who held Calvinist views , fled the city, but their patron was suspected by the Inquisition of sympathy for Calvinism, and already on December 19, Plantin in a letter to Madrid inquired about the possibility of patronizing the Spanish monarchy over the biblical project ^[12] .

Philip II , having read the trial pages of the publication, was impressed and approved the project, after consulting with the theologians from Alcalá and Salamanca , including A. Montano. Representatives of Spanish universities spoke out positively, saying that the repetition of the Compluten publication would serve the glory of the Catholic monarch. On May 5, 1567, the highest permission was given, and the king not only promised to finance the publication (in the amount of 6000 escudos ) ^[13] , but also sent the chief scientific editor and censor Benito Montano. Mazius remained the chief editor in philology - it was he who prepared the dictionaries and grammars included in the publication ^[14] . Plantin demanded a substantial fee for those times: 1000 ducats of advance payment, as well as 500 ducats for every three months of work, but the wait for an answer was excessively long ^[15] . The publication was also watched by very high-ranking officials: Cardinal Granvela and Margarita Parmskaya , Vice-Regent of the Netherlands — they helped to copy the manuscripts necessary for publication in Rome ^[16] .

Arias Montano received royal instructions on March 30, 1568 and already arrived in Antwerp on May 18. Plantin was then on a business trip in Paris; in his absence, Montano traveled to Brussels and Louvain, gaining the support of secular and spiritual authorities. Already at that time, he was faced with the stiff opposition of Leon de Castro, who, before starting work, accused the creators of Polyglotte of “Judaizing” and abandoning the Vulgate tradition ^[17] . In 1570, Leon de Castro launched an active campaign against an unpublished book, which led to the arrest of his Spanish opponent, Luis de Leon, in 1572 ^[18] .

The initial intention to repeat the Compluten publication was significantly transformed after Montano joined the project, while preserving the didactic tasks of the first Polyglot. The Antwerp Polyglot was supposed not only as a scientific publication of ancient texts, but also as a book for reading ^[16] , however, it was censors from Louvain who insisted on the inclusion of dictionaries and grammars in the Polyglot ^[18] . The editorial board was composed of French and Dutch scholars of the time, including mystics and Kabbalists : Guy Löfevre de la Baudry , Guillaume Postel , Jan van Gorpe , Francis Rafeleng - a relative of Plantin ^[19] . The editorial board included a baptized Jew, a professor at the University of Louvain Johannes Isaac Levita, the author of "Jewish Grammar" ^[20] . Baudry wrote in the preface to the sixth that the Leuven scholars rendered the project invaluable services: the censor Harlemius for three months compared the Greek and Syriac text word for word ^[21] .

To print the Greek text, Plantin cast the font according to the sketches and under the supervision of , he also reproduced the Syrian extrangelo , used both in the biblical text and in the dictionary and grammar ^[22] . The Hebrew text was written under the direction of ; the font was used by the Jewish first printer Daniel Bomberg , bought from his great-grandson Cornelis van Bombergen ^[23] . Printing work began on August 7, 1568, the first volume was completed on March 12, 1569, the second - on October 8 of that year ^[24] . In 1570, the question arose of including grammars in the Syriac and Aramaic languages, for which Plantin took the Caninius grammar, published in 1554 in Paris ^[25] . Polyglot printing took up almost all of Plantin’s printing facilities: 18 printing machines were involved in the enterprise; in preparing the text, a total of 80 people were employed for four consecutive years ^[26] .

Editorial work on the texts was completed by May 1570, however, it took another six months to finalize all the texts and their layout. It took a long time to reconcile Montano's preface with the universities of Paris and Louvain, but problems were only just beginning ^[27] . In May 1572, the king expressed a desire to present a new edition of the Bible in Rome, which was entrusted to Pedro de Fuentidouenhas, who acted through the Spanish ambassador de Zoonig. The College of Cardinals announced that the Talmud and the treatises of Sebastian Munster used by Mazius to comment on Aramaic and Jewish texts are included in the Index of Banned Books. King Philip then urgently sent Montano to Rome, and Mazius wrote several letters of exoneration. However, the death of Pope Pius V and subsequent events drastically delayed the matter ^[28] . In 1574, when the question of the publication of Polyglot appeared in the air, Leon de Castro launched a fierce attack against the publishers. At the very end of the year, he appeared before the king in Madrid and declared the need for a complete revision of the six-volume edition, since its editors preferred Jewish texts to Latin, which should be eradicated from the comments and the scientific apparatus. The king was deaf to his words, and de Castro turned to the Inquisition. ^[29] It was decided that the Inquisition would be guided by the decisions of Rome, where Montano was still located. In January 1576, the congregation, under the leadership of Cardinal Bellarmin, adopted a decree on the primacy of the Latin text and the impossibility of correcting it in any other way. Pope Gregory XIII , not wanting to quarrel with the Spanish king, sympathetic to the publication, transferred the right of final decision to the Spanish theologians ^[30] .

In Spain, Juan de Mariana (1535–1624) was appointed the chief inquisition censor; officially this happened on August 16, 1577 ^[31] . The situation with the publication of Polyglot was as follows: in terms of textology, no one attempted to attack the Vulgate, Montano's foreword also emphasized the priority of the Latin Bible, but in the scientific apparatus, articles and dictionaries, the number of citations from the Talmud, rabbinic comments, and other things exceeded the number of references to the Holy Fathers . Mariana concluded that the editorial board was too small, and the inclusion of Mazius, Baudry and Postel was a mistake. However, no doctrinal principles or canonical decrees were violated ^[31] . In general, censorship resolution had to be expected for more than 10 years ^[32] . Ultimately, the Antwerp Polyglot was allowed to be distributed throughout the Spanish possessions, but censorship warnings about the dangers of studying the Targums and some other texts were placed on some copies ^[33] .

In addition to the theological and political, serious problems of the Antwerp edition were financial. After finishing the work, Plantin was awarded a royal pension of 400 florins a year, but this was a rent from confiscated estates. The former owner of these estates challenged the confiscation in court, so the printer never received anything ^[34] . Plantin himself claimed that he had suffered significant financial losses, and estimated the publication costs at 35,175 florins, despite the fact that since 1568 the royal treasury had not transferred any funds. By royal decree, Plantin received a monopoly on the publication of liturgical literature in Spanish possessions and the title of Royal Printer ^[35] , which allowed him to leave 135,718 florins to the heirs of property ^[36] .

The complete set of the Polyglot publication includes 8 volumes of in folio format (42 × 28 cm) ^[37] , each of which has about 700 pages. The first four volumes contain the Old Testament , printed as follows: on the left page in two columns, the text is in Hebrew (left) and the parallel text of the Vulgate (on the right), on the right page in two columns is the text of the Septuagint (on the right) and parallel Latin translation (on the left) . The text in Aramaic ( Targum Jonathan ) was printed in the “basement” of the left page, and its Latin translation was printed in the “basement” of the right page. The Hebrew text is printed in fonts received from the heirs of Daniel Bomberg , the Jewish first printer; vocalizations were indicated there. Deuterocanonical books were published only in Greek and Latin versions (including the Latin translation of the Septuagint). The Syrian text was only partially vocalized ^[22] .

The fifth volume contains the Greek New Testament , Peshitta and their Latin translation, in the “basement” is a translation of the Syrian text of the New Testament into Hebrew. They are constructed as follows: the left column of the left page is the Syrian text, accompanied by its Latin translation, on the right page of the Vulgate and the Greek text. As in the Compluten publication, they were provided with cross-references and, in controversial moments, comments and options (as in Acts 9:14 ). The chapters of the Syrian text were indicated by the Syriac entry, but the verses were numbered in Arabic numerals. Lacunae in the Syriac text were designated in Latin according to the pattern: “25 verses are missing” (in chapter 25 of the Acts of the Apostles ) ^[22] . If the corresponding book was completely absent in the Syriac text, only columns with Latin translation and Greek original were on the pages ^[38] . The New Testament was opened with a message from Jerome to Pope Damasius, each biblical book was accompanied by his prologues and commentaries. This was extremely necessary to justify the value of the Hebrew text, since it was in the Prologue to the Gospel of Matthew that it was originally written in Hebrew. This point was demanded to remove the censors, but B. Montano defended ^[39] .

Volume 6 (in two parts) contains the full text of the Bible (Old Testament - in Hebrew, New Testament - in Greek) with Latin interlinear translation. Latin translations were made by Alfonso Zamora and edited by Arias Montano. The Greek text was printed from the fourth edition of the Erasmus of Rotterdam Bible. The seventh volume contained dictionaries and grammars of all languages ​​in which the Bible was published: first Greek grammar and a dictionary, then the Hebrew Thesaurus and the Chaldean Grammar of Rafeleng, Baudry's Syro-Aramaic Dictionary; Syriac Grammar of Mazius ^[40] . The last R. Wilkinson called one of the greatest achievements of philology of the XVI century ^[41] . The eighth volume contained a theological commentary, information on the history of biblical texts and biblical realities (18 articles in total) ^[16] . Each volume had a luxuriously decorated title page engraved on copper. Первый том содержит три иллюстрации и оформленный фронтиспис — гравированные по меди, третий и четвёртый тома имеют ксилографические фронтисписы. Кроме того, Библия была снабжена картой полушарий, на которой было изображено странствие колен Израилевых , от которых, по мнению издателей, произошли индейцы Испанской Америки ^[42] .

Было отпечатано 1200 комплектов Полиглотты стоимостью в 300 гульденов каждый. 13 комплектов были отпечатаны специально для королевской библиотеки на пергаменте ; королю для представительских подарков было передано ещё 129 восьмитомников ^[43] . 960 комплектов было отпечатано на французской бумаге из Труа ; 200 комплектов — на тонкой бумаге из Лиона форматом фр. raisin (50 × 65 см); 30 комплектов — на бумаге формата «имперского фолио» (50 × 33,8 см); 10 комплектов — имперского фолио из тонкой итальянской бумаги ^{[13] [44]} . Отдельный экземпляр имперского фолио с художественно раскрашенными гравюрами и картами, переплетённый в тёмно-багровую кожу, был подарен Плантеном лично Ариасу Монтано, о чём свидетельствует посвящение ^[45] . Всего, по подсчётам Т. Дункельгрюна, сохранилось 458 экземпляров Полиглотты, в том числе полных 210 комплектов, из них не менее пяти — на пергаменте (из королевских экземпляров в Испании осталось 3 полных комплекта) ^[46] . Три полных комплекта Полиглотты экспонируется в Музее Плантена-Моретуса ^{[47] [48]} .

Тексты Королевской Библии без изменений воспроизводились в последующих многоязычных изданиях — Гейдельбергской Полиглотте Бонавентуры Бертрама (1586—1599), и Парижской Полиглотте (1628—1645) ^[49] . Есть основания полагать, что текст Полиглотты использовался и при подготовке Сиксто-Клементинского издания Вульгаты. Во всяком случае, Мишелю де Монтеню , посетившему в 1581 году Ватиканскую библиотеку , продемонстрировали Полиглотту с посвящением Папе Григорию от короля Филиппа ^[50] . Миссионеры - иезуиты преподнесли комплект (неполный, в 7 томах) Королевской Библии в 1580 году индийскому падишаху Акбару и использовали научные материалы для полемики с индусами и мусульманами, о чём свидетельствовал Антонио Монсеррате ^[51] . По-видимому, стиль гравюр Полиглотты в определённой степени воздействовал на придворное искусство Великих Моголов ^[52] . Антверпенская Полиглотта была среди даров, поднесённых Маттео Риччи китайскому императору в августе 1604 года, причём факт, что она была спасена во время кораблекрушения на день Успения Богородицы , был использован иезуитами для проповеди ^[53] .

• The Aramaic Bible: Targums in Their Historical Context / Ed. by Derek Robert George Beattie, Martin McNamara. — Dublin : A&C Black, 1994. — 470 p. — (Journal for the study of the Old Testament: Supplement series. The Library of Hebrew Bible/Old Testament Studies (Vol. 166)). — ISBN 9781850754541 .
• Bécares Botas V. Arias Montano y Plantino: el libro flamenco en la España de Felipe II (исп.) . — León: Secretariado de Publicaciones de la Universidad de León, 1999. — 360 p. — (Humanistas españoles, 19). — ISBN 84-7719-772-5 .
• Brekka Pamela M. The Antwerp Polyglot Bible (1572): Visual Corpus, New World, Hebrew — Indian Map, and the Religious Crosscurrents of Imperial Spain . — Ph.D. dissertation. - Univ. of Florida, 2012. — 264 p.
• Dunkelgrun TW The multiplicity of Scripture: The confluence of textual traditions in the making of the Antwerp Polyglot Bible (1568–1573) . — Ph.D. dissertation. — The University of Chicago, 2012. — 579 p.
• Hebrew Bible, Old Testament: From the Renaissance to the Enlightenment [1300-1800 ] / Magne Sæbø (Hg.). - Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprech, 2008. - Ch. 12: From the First Printed Hebrew, Greek and Latin Bibles to the First Polyglot Bible, The Complutensian Polyglot: 1477-1517. - P. 277-291. - 1248 p. - ISBN 9783525539828 .
• Hendricks, D. Profitless Printing: Publication of the Polyglots // The Journal of Library History. - 1967. - Vol. 2, no. 2 (April). - P. 98-116.
• Maas, Anthony. Editions of the Bible : The Catholic Encyclopedia. - New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1911. - Vol. five.
• Werner Thomas, Robert A. Verdonk. Encuentros en Flandes: relaciones e intercambios hispanoflamencos a inicios de la Edad Moderna (Spanish) . - Leuven University Press, 2000. - ISBN 9789058670878 .
• Wilkinson, R. The Kabbalistic Scholars of the Antwerp Polyglot Bible. - Brill, 2007 .-- 156 p. - ISBN 9789047422532 .
• Zur Shalev. Sacred Geography, Antiquarianism and Visual Erudition: Benito Arias Montano and the Maps in the Antwerp Polyglot Bible // Imago Mundi. - 2003. - Vol. 55. - P. 56-80.

• 1571 Arias Montanus Map of the World (Neopr.) . Geographicus Rare Antique Maps (2016). Date of treatment June 27, 2016.
• Biblia Sacra, hebraice, chaldaice, graece & latine (Italian) (link not available) . Vatican Library. Catalog - Printed books. Date of treatment June 27, 2016. Archived July 25, 2017.
• Harry Ransom Center Acquires Rare Plantin Polyglot Bible (Neopr.) UT News (April 29, 2008). Date of treatment June 27, 2016.
• Montanus, Arias [Hrsg.] (German) . Griechische Bibelübersetzungen . Date of treatment January 2, 2016.
• Plantin Polyglot Bible (unopened) (link unavailable) . Chetham's Library . Date of treatment January 2, 2016. Archived on February 10, 2016.