Two Gutenberg Bibles Used as Compositor's Exemplars

Although the Morgan copy is bound in a single volume, for ease of comparison with the Burgos copy I will follow the conventional foliation of the Gutenberg Bible in two volumes, in which the second volume starts at the beginning of Proverbs. When a Morgan folio in the conventional second volume is mentioned, it is followed in brackets by the actual folio number of this copy.

Trends in Statistical Codicology

Sacred text par excellence and supreme attestation of the Divine Word, the Bible enjoyed a wider dissemination than any other text throughout the entire Western Middle Ages. Without doubt, it was the most read-and probably the most transcribed-text of the time, even if we still lack an exhaustive census of Latin Bibles. The transposition of the 'Book'-a message laden with profound meanings-into the 'book', an object bearing less explicit but in any event equally important cultural connotations, did not countenance imprecise or amateurish solutions; rather, it constituted the ultimate expression of professionalism in the creation of a manuscript. This insistence on the utmost quality also represents an aspect of conservatism-in fact, more than any other book the Bible had to conform scrupulously to the ideals of uniformity and harmonious proportions that were customarily aimed at by book manufacturing artisans. Such an objective demanded as little deviation as possible from the precepts established by tradition, as well as a high degree of presentational uniformity.  The tendency towards stability can be seen as part of a dialectical process; indeed, given that in the medieval West the Bible never ceased to play a lively and integral role in the cultural fabric of society, its omnipresence meant that from time to time it had to be adapted to prevailing material, graphic and decorative canons and, above all, to the functional requirements of different historical periods. Thus the way in which the Bible manifested itself more generally represents a faithful reflection of the evolution of the book structure, writing and ornamental elements. Additionally, the Bible constitutes a sort of 'geometric place', around which one can observe a continual intertwining of the various expressions emanating from the development of Christianity and the Church. Marked by doctrinal disputes, issues relating to spiritual renewal and, not least, the struggle for power, the history of the Bible is replete with profound and conspicuous changeschanges which, although sometimes very apparent, are not always easy to interpret. The physical object acts as a vehicle, and even, on occasion, as an ||

One of the large Erfurt Bibles, “Erfurt 2”, produced in the late thirteenth century is extensively decorated with micrographic masoretic notes. In this article, I concentrate on two scenes and relate them to the writings of Ḥaside Ashkenaz and Rabbi Neḥemiah ben Shlomo Troestlin, the Prophet from Erfurt, active in the first third of the thirteenth century: the first from the opening of the Book of Ezekiel, and the second from the Book of Proverbs.

Archiv für Papyrusforschung und verwandte Gebiete, 2016

Chester Beatty Biblical Papyrus III (also known as P47) is, with its ten relatively well-preserved folios, our earliest extensive manuscript of the Apocalypse of John. It has, however, received very little scholarly attention, apart from brief studies of its textual affinities and, more recently, scribal habits. This gap in our knowledge is hoped to be filled by the author’s doctoral thesis, where physical and non-textual features of the manuscript are analysed in connection with its scribal habits and textual characteristics. Such an approach is reflective of the recent trend to study manuscripts not only as the tradents of texts, but also physical artefacts in their own right. Thus, besides reporting on the shape and scope of the research project more generally, the present article aims to draw attention to three aspects of P.Beatty III where the integrative method of study has proven particularly fruitful.

Liturgische Bibelrezeption: Dimensionen und Perspektiven interdisziplinärer Forschung . Liturgical Reception of the Bible: Dimensions and Perspectives of Interdisciplinary Research, 2022

Tyndale Bulletin, 2016

As a rule, no two Tiberian Bibles are alike when it comes to their masoretic notes. Indeed, the masora magna notes can be thought of as part of the unique fingerprint of each individual manuscript. Notwithstanding, this study presents the first evidence of two Pentateuch codices containing identical masora magna, and explores how these codices relate to one another. Both these codices were the work of Samuel b. Jacob, the scribe who wrote the Leningrad Codex. Thus this study contributes to our understanding of the scribal habits of this important figure.

The third volume in the New History of the Bible series published by CUP, assembles 34 papers and essays surveying the complex evolution and influence of the most disseminated hypertext in the printing era. Whereas the editors of the initial series had compressed the post-Reformation period into a single volume, in the revised series the past 500 years are covered by two separate volumes, each addressing a wider variety of topics than would have been possible to include in a single 650-page volume.

2020

The issue that is the main focus of this paper has not been of great interest to bibliology scholars. Even though one version of the Brest Bible, marked as B, was described quite thoroughly by Feliks Bentkowski already two hundred years ago, the catalogue descriptions have until today been based upon the scheme formulated by Karol Estreicher (senior). He identified three versions of the Brest Bible, which differ only in the title page. The fact is that there are only two versions, A and B, in existence, which differ in the first gathering (*) or (very rarely) in the first two gatherings (*, **). The gatherings of version B were established to have been printed in the 1580s or 1590s in Jan Karcan’s press in Vilnius. Apparently, a certain number of the Old Testament gatherings A–Y were typeset and printed in Brest in 1563. There is only one extant complete copy of it with the newly printed gatherings, whereas in the remaining dozen or so copies that have survived it is only one, or ra...