 |
| London Polyglot of 1657 |
The Newberry Library in Chicago has recently created a website (actually just a page with popups) that provides excellent visuals and descriptions of three of the great polyglot Bibles of the 16th and 17th centuries: the Complutensian (1517), Antwerp (1571), and London (1657). The goal of the site is not to provide access to the texts (you cannot look up passages) but to provide an overview of the layouts of the Bibles. It explains not only what is in each section of a page spread but also why it was included. It's a great way to see what was going on with these "Cathedrals of Print." It reminds me of a few hours I spent back in the day when I was working on my dissertation on Psalm 22 and perused the 1645 Paris Polyglot in the Beinecke Rare Book Library at Yale. These Bibles were certainly magnificent publications, and the amount of work required to print them is staggering. We have so much in digital formats these days, and we can be thankful for the much broader access provided, but we can be grateful for the work that preceded it.
HT: John Linebarger in Anglican Biblical and Theological Languages Forum on FB with a HT to Peter Gurry at the Evangelical Textual Criticism blog