Beyond the Douai-Reims Bible: The Changing Publishing Strategies of the Kellam Family in Seventeenth-Century Douai

The Library ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 344-375
Author(s):  
Alexander Soetaert ◽  
Heleen Wyffels

Abstract The career of the Catholic Englishman Laurence Kellam is often reduced to his most impressive edition, the Old Testament of the Douay-Rheims Bible (1609–1610), an English Catholic Bible translation edited by the English College of Douai. Yet, there has been scarce attention for the remaining 190 editions, printed in English, as well as in Latin, French and Dutch, that bear a Kellam imprint. The discovery of another fifty editions that should be ascribed to the Kellam press demands a reappraisal of its activities and significance. By analysing both printed and archival sources, this article intends to fit the Bible edition of 1609–1610, and English Catholic printing on the continent more generally, into the wider perspective of three generations of publishing activities and family history, highlighting the increasingly tight connections between several generations of the Kellam family and the authors, institutions, and fellow-publishers of their host society.

Author(s):  
Scott Mandelbrote

Scepticism and loyalty represent the poles of van Dale’s career. Two contexts have been mentioned as relevant here: the seventeenth-century attack on magic and superstition, and the circles of friendship that created a contemporary Republic of Letters. This chapter evaluates both contexts, as well as others that may throw light on his relatively neglected attitude to the text of the Bible. It brings into focus two important intellectual episodes: his treatment of the account of the Witch of Endor (1 Samuel 28:3–25), and his engagement with Hellenistic sources relating to the text of the Old Testament, especially to the miraculous composition of the Septuagint. These issues brought van Dale to ask questions about God’s Word. The chapter explores the limits of his scepticism, the extent of his scholarship, and the role of friendship and isolation in his development. Finally, it draws attention to his place in contemporary Mennonite debates.


2013 ◽  
Vol 56 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-29 ◽  
Author(s):  
JOHN ROBERTSON

ABSTRACTFrom the mid-seventeenth century, the problem of human sociability, long a staple of natural jurisprudence, became even more central to political thought. Faced with Hobbes's insistence on man's natural unsociability, Protestant thinkers continued to treat the question from within natural law. For reasons we do not yet understand, however, Catholic thinkers did not. Instead, it is argued here, they turned to sacred history, and in particular to the Old Testament, as the earliest record of the formation of human societies, Hebrew and gentile. The materials for this enquiry were provided by new critical scholarship on the Bible and the peoples of the ancient Near East. Despite the hostility of the authorities in Rome to its findings, this scholarship was widely available in the Catholic world, notably so in contemporary Naples. Two of the most remarkable applications of sacred history to the problem of sociability were by the Neapolitans Pietro Giannone, in his ‘Triregno’ (1731–3), and Giambattista Vico, in the Scienza nuova (1725–44). These works explored the ways in which family relations, religious practices, and war enabled the ancient Hebrews and their gentile neighbours to form and maintain societies, notwithstanding the unsocial tendency of human passions.


2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (4) ◽  
pp. 212-225
Author(s):  
Victor Porkhomovsky ◽  
Irina Ryabova

The present paper continues typological studies of the Bible translation strategies in different languages. These studies deal with passages and lexemes in the canonical text of the Biblia Hebraica, that refl ect ancient cultural and religious paradigms, but do not correspond to later monotheist principles of Judaism and Christianity. The canonical Hebrew text does not allow of any changes. Thus, two translation strategies are possible: (1) to preserve these passages in the text of the translation (a philological strategy), (2) to edit them according to the monotheist principles (ideological strategy). The focus in the present paper is made on the problem of rendering the name of the ancient Semitic goddess ’ashera, attested as the companion of the supreme gods in certain traditions and pantheons (’El /’Il/, Ba‘al, YHWH). Two strategies of rendering the name of ’ashera are attested in different Bible translations: (1) to preserve the name of the goddess (philological strategy), (2) to eliminate this name or to replace it with the names of her fetishes and sacred objects (ideological strategy). The Zulu case of rendering the name ’ashera is particularly looked at in this paper.


2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 40-55
Author(s):  
Victor Ya. Porkhomovsky ◽  
◽  
Olga I. Romanova ◽  

The present publication expands the analysis of the Old Testament translations into different languages. This line of studies was initiated by the works of the late French scholar Philippe Cassuto and one of the authors of this publication. The purpose of the article is to look at the strategies applied in translating the Old Testament names of the Supreme Being into Latin (the Vulgate version) and modern Italian. This purpose is two-fold: by doing so, we also expand the data base of the Old Testament terms‘ renditions in different languages. The article provides the full nomenclature of the names of the Supreme God in the Old-Hebrew (Masoretic) text of the Old Testament, concentrates on their semantics and grammatical structure, and explains the contexts of their use. A canonical Russian-language translation is used as a reference base to illustrate the fate of the original names of the God in translation. The widely-accepted English-language translations of the Old Testament are included to provide a broader perspective on translation strategies applied to this particular aspect of the Old Testament texts. The analyzed Latin and six modern Italian-language translations demonstrate a considerable degree of uniformity in translating the names of God. The Latin and the Italian translations apply the philological strategy to translating the Holy Bible (as opposed to another option presented by the typology of the Bible translation – the ideological strategy). Notwithstanding the relative lexical uniformity of the translations, they demonstrate the differences between Catholic and Protestant versions. The analysis of the Italian translations of the Old Testament contributes to the typology of the Bible translation and ultimately makes an input to the general theory of translation.


Author(s):  
Dawn Coleman

This chapter assesses the Bible in American preaching from the seventeenth century to the present by analyzing dominant uses of scripture in two types of Protestant sermons: the cultic, or those addressed to the faith community, and the civic, or those directed to a public beyond the church. Primary strands of cultic preaching have been the salvation of the soul, associated with John 3:3 and evangelicalism from the Great Awakening forward, and spiritual improvement and well-being, which draws on a wide range of mainly New Testament passages, notably the Sermon on the Mount, and historically has been more pronounced in liberal churches and among Methodists. In recent decades, American civic preaching has been linked to the jeremiad, a form derived from Old Testament prophetic rhetoric, yet it should also be recognized as featuring prominent motifs of freedom and of love, for which the central texts include, respectively, Exodus and the injunction to love thy neighbor as thyself.


2000 ◽  
Vol 21 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 123-130
Author(s):  
Kristiina Ross

The full version of the Bible was first published in Estonian in 1739. In comparison with the neighbouring Protestant countries this is a very late date. However, serious attempts to translate the Bible into Estonian were made already in the 17th century. There are two manuscripts from the 17th century which contain translations of the Old Testament. The older manuscript dating from the middle of the century has been – unlike e.g. the Finnish Bible which had been translated from Luther’s German version – translated directly from Hebrew, by Johannes Gutslaff. Also the 1739 Estonian version was translated directly from the Hebrew version. As is widely known, Luther was of the opinion that a translator should not follow the structure of the source language&&instead, he must use the fluent and pure target language. The Estonian translations followed strictly the Hebrew version, which resulted in the fact that still today, Estonian phraseology has Hebrew influence.


2020 ◽  
Vol 138 (4) ◽  
pp. 649-672
Author(s):  
Cosima Clara Gillhammer

AbstractThe late-fifteenth-century Middle English manuscript Oxford, Trinity College, 29 contains a universal history of the world, compiled from diverse religious and secular source texts and written by a single compiler-scribe. A great part of the text is focused on Old Testament history and uses the Vulgate as a key source, thus offering an opportunity to examine in detail the compiler’s strategies of translating the text of the Bible into the vernacular. The Bible translations in this manuscript are unconnected to the Wycliffite translations, and are non-reformist in their interpretative framework, implications, and use. This evidence is of particular interest as an example of the range of approaches to biblical translation and scholarship in the vernacular found in late medieval English texts, despite the restrictive legislation concerning Bible translation in fifteenth-century England. The strategies of translating the biblical text found in this manuscript include close word-by-word translation (seemingly unencumbered by anxieties about censorship), as well as other modes of interaction, such as summary, and exegesis. This article situates these modes of engagement with the Bible within a wider European textual tradition of including biblical material in universal history writing.


2015 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 85-89
Author(s):  
Robert Alter

For author Robert Alter, moving from the Northeast to California meant moving from academic institutions with firmly established hierarchies to a place characterized by openness and flexibility. Comparative Literature at Berkeley made it possible for the author to explore a wide range of literary interests, and this eventually led him to teach and write on the Bible and then to begin to translate it. His impulse to break decisively with prevailing modern models of Bible translation was encouraged by California's atmosphere of innovation.


Aethiopica ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 16 ◽  
pp. 102-129
Author(s):  
Senai W. Andemariam

The labour and sacrifices of the members of the Swedish Evangelical Mission and their predecessors in the production of scriptural works in Eritrea, and partly in Ethiopia, are praiseworthy. More acclaim is owed to these workers for their educating and/or involving native workers in the arduous task that often spanned two or three generations. When it comes to taking credit for these works, however, the native workers were rarely mentioned or, if they are mentioned, their contributions were not given the deserved recognition. This article attempts to highlight the remarkable contributions of native workers in the translation, or completion of the translation, of the Bible into four languages in Eritrea in contradistinction with the often exaggerated contributions of foreign missionaries in that successful mission.


1998 ◽  
Vol 49 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-80
Author(s):  
Christian Thodberg

Grundtvig and the Old Testament - the Danish Bible or the SeptuagintBy Christian ThodbergThe article begins with an account of Grundtvig’s attitude to the Old Testament (OT). Gmndtvig does not have to presuppose the New Testament when dealing with OT, but can read it freely: it is the same God that acts in both books of the Bible, though in different ways, according to how he leads and maintains his people. The same freedom finds expression in Gmndtvig’s sermons where he moves about effortlessly in the whole of the Biblical universe.Some of these sermons are dominated by a solemn, Old Testament tone, especially those that follow a triadic stmcture: first the Old Testament prophecy is mentioned, in the middle its fulfilment in and with the coming of Christ is described, and finally follows the most important part, the fulfilment of the prophecy in the present, Grundtvig not failing to place his activity in the centre - but as a stage, naturally, in the course of the history of salvation.In Grundtvig’s hymns, too, this structure recurs, as in Blomstre som en Rosengaard, in which the triadic structure is connected with the so-called Vstructure, the right side of the »V« of the hymn describing the fulfilment of the prophecy. By means of the V-structure Thodberg shows how baptism is the focus of the hymn, and also that in his interpretation of Isaiah 35 as a prediction of baptism Grundtvig leans on the Septuagint rather than the contemporary Danish Bible translation. In the Danish Hymn Book, Blomstre som en Rosengaard is only a torso - baptism is not the essential thing here.The article mentions a number of other examples of influence from the Septuagint on Grundtvig’s hymns and sermons. Among these the hymn Hyggelig, rolig stands out since it contains a large number of phrases that refer to the Septuagint. This applies to stanza 4 in which Grundtvig shows how even the person most troubled by doubts and most deeply bereaved will have a foretaste of the Kingdom of God when approaching Heaven in his or her heart on the tone ladder of songs of praise. This is a rendering of Psalm 84 in the Septuagint. The article concludes that from the 1830s Grundtvig makes extensive use of the Septuagint when quoting from OT. The background is that Grundtvig regarded the Septuagint as more poetical than the Danish translation from 1736, and - more importantly - that in preferring the Septuagint Grundtvig follows Irenaeus by relying on the Bible of the New Testament and the Old Church.


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