PIMSPontifical Institute
of
Mediaeval Studies

The very idea of a polyglot bible, especially one that included the Hebrew Bible and Aramaic Targums of Jewish tradition, ran counter to the Council of Trent’s decree that the Latin Vulgate was the only authentic version of Christian Scripture. In the middle of the sixteenth century, biblical philology and Catholic orthodoxy turned onto a frightful course of collision, and the pages of the Antwerp Polyglot Bible formed the force field at their crossroads.

Combining the history of the book with the history of scholarship and drawing on primary sources from archives and libraries across Europe, The Multiplicity of Scripture reconstructs the editorial history of Christopher Plantin’s masterpiece from within his printing shop. Set in the contexts of fierce biblical controversies in Tridentine Europe and the fraught afterlife of Jewish traditions in post-expulsion Spain, it tells a story of crisis and craftsmanship, of ink-stained proofs in four different alphabets and the extraordinary team of scholars and printers that made this monument of Renaissance printing and scholarly endeavour.

Author

Theodor Dunkelgrün is assistant professor of Jewish History at the University of Antwerp. He was educated at Leiden University and the University of Chicago, where he received his doctorate in 2012 from the Committee on Social Thought. From 2012 to 2023 he held several research fellowships at the University of Cambridge, where he taught for the faculties of History, Divinity, and Classics, and co-founded the Seminar in Early Modern Scholarship and Religion. The co-editor of five volumes, his work has appeared in The International Journal of the Classical Tradition, Journal of the Bible and Its Reception, Jewish Historical Studies, Studia Rosenthaliana, European Journal of Jewish Studies, and De Gulden Passer, as well as in several collections, including most recently The Mishnaic Moment: Jewish Law among Jews and Christians in Early Modern Europe, edited by Piet van Boxel, Kirsten Macfarlane, and Joanna Weinberg (2022). He is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

Endorsement

“A quarter of a century ago, Ann Blair published her path-breaking book on Jean Bodin’s Theatrum naturae. Working with precision and imagination from a source base that included few documents, she constructed a ‘total history’ of Bodin’s book – a history that traced the work from conception to reception, shedding light on every aspect of its passage from the author’s mind to the world of readers and critics. Previously, only social historians had aspired to create total histories, mostly of communities. Blair’s work inspired a vast range of inquiries into the history of reading, the history of book production, and their connections with intellectual history. But it found few imitators – not surprising, given the many skills that such inquiry demands. Theodor Dunkelgrün has now materialized as Blair’s first real successor. Working on a very different project and excavating a far richer mine of documents, he has now produced something very close to a total history of the extraordinary Polyglot Bible edited by Benito Arias Montano, Franciscus Raphelengius, and a number of others for Christopher Plantin. He sheds a brilliant light on too many aspects of the project to catalogue, from the original publishing plan to the variant lists that appeared at its very end, where they powerfully suggested, to readers who understood, something of the multiplicity of Scripture. Drawing together documentary, manuscript, and printed evidence, and synthesizing a vast range of older and newer scholarship in a great many fields, Dunkelgrün takes readers into the composing room, Montano’s lodgings, and a great many other places. There we have the chance to stand at the shoulders of his actors and watch them at work. This is a fantastic piece of work, one of the finest examples of humanistic scholarship I have ever had the privilege to read.” — Anthony Grafton, Princeton University

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