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The Bible as Book: The First Printed Editions (review)

This volume, dedicated to the late Leonard Boyle and introduced by Anthony Kenny, is the second in the series The Bible as Book. The twelve contributions vary greatly in length and style but most markedly in each author’s decision about whether to offer new scholarship, a summary of older work, or something in between. In two of the shortest entries, for example, J. P. Gumbert describes the fit of gloss to page, drawing largely on C. F. R. de Hamel’s 1987 study, while A. K. Offenberg, in an original and technically complex argument, redates the first biblical printing in Hebrew. Overall, the entries represent the traditional span of European evidence, with a slight prejudice in favor of England and against Italy and a near-complete absence of attention to Scandinavia and to Central or Eastern Europe. They are well arranged to draw in the nonspecialist reader, to represent a multiplicity of contemporary interpretive techniques, and to offer a roughly chronological sequence that extends, in the case of William Sherman’s study of manuscript notes in English printed editions, to ca. 1600. At the early end, K. Froehlich, who with Margaret T. Gibson edited a facsimile edition of Adolph Rusch’s four-volume Biblia Latina cum Glossa Ordinaria (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 1992), summarizes Rusch’s achievement, while Nigel Palmer argues that early publishers intended for devotional blockbooks of dissimilar content to be bound together. Tightening the focus of his 1996 investigation of how print changed reading habits (Bulletin du Bibliophile 11), Paul Saenger traces the evolution of more precise readers’ aides in printed Bibles, especially the marginal alphabetical concordance and the numeration of verses. Paul Needham emphasizes the variety of incunable editions of the Bible to point up the formal insufficiencies of the Gutenberg Bible but also underlines the persistence of the Gutenberg text itself. Needham’s article, along with J. Martín Abad’s on the sixteenth-century Alcalá de Henares press, are the most intellectually generous in the collection, insofar as both warmly suggest areas for research. K. Van Kampen explores the problem of what was not printed—a vernacular Bible—in fifteenth-century England, emphasizing the intellectual consequences of censorship. Her subject provides a transition to a group of entries that consider textual reception at the elite level. Among these are Guy Bedoelle’s pronouncement on the educational novelty of humanist attention to word-forword explaining of, rather than commenting on, the biblical text (drawing on his guide to Lefèvre d’Étaples’s Quincuplex Psalterium [Geneva: Droz, 1979]) and David Steinmetz’s sensitive evaluation of exegetical revisionism and the problem of the insecure text in both Protestant and Catholic camps.