If you're a trad, then you probably like your Scripture to be much like your liturgy, the older the better. If not in a dead language, then at least one that's on life support! Well the good news is that if the Sixto-Clementine Vulgate is your idea of a perfect book to curl up with, as you drink your cocoa then you're in luck. The wonderful people over at Baronius Press are going to republish it in 2007. Well they are planning to anyway, and knowing them they'll do their level best. For those of you who are regular readers of the Douai-Reims-Challoner, the Vulgate (if you've got any Latin at all) will be a cinch. That's because the DRC is an almost literal translation of the SCV. Obviously if you just can't wait, then the internet versions will have to do; alternatively you could get one from the German Bible Society or even the Library of Christian Authors. Do be warned though that the Deutsche Bibel Gesellschaft has no punctuation whatsoever. Very scholarly but a pain in the neck to read. And the BAC version is probably somewhat lacking in terms of production values. That may be the best reason for waiting until Baronius work their peculiar brand of magic. After all, the very best of books deserves the very best of paper, printing and binding.
Finally, if you're a technophile trad (as so many of us seem to be) here's one thing you can't do without. A Vulgate search bar for your Firefox browser!
5 comments:
I rather like my Stuttgart Vulgate. It may be a scholarly reconstruction, rather than an historical text, but it supposedly is as close to the original Hieronyman text as anything yet published. And unpunctuated - now that's trad.
Daniel, you're absolutely right in scholarly terms. If I were a biblical or theological-historical scholar I'd agree with you down the line. The only point I'm making is that if you want a good reading copy of the Vulgate, one with punctuation is better. I do actually read my Sixto-Clementine Vulgate for spiritual edification (or so I hope) so I'm content to have one with all that dreadful neo-Modernist clutter like commas and full points :-)
PS You're not connected to the Society of St Pius I by any chance? It's just that if that text were any more trad it'd be in Hebrew!
http://thrownback.blogspot.com/2005/05/for-real-traditionalists-reader.html
Vulgate search for Firefox?!!! This has totally made my day.
I love my BAC Vulgate - not only was it cheap and second-hand, it's printed on paper that's a delicate shade of pink! Slightly paler than the FT. Random but charming. Oh, and it has oodles of Scriptural cross-references - and references to Denzinger!!
The BAC edition indeed sounds "random but charming"; my problem with their books generally is that they fall apart too easily. I nearly bought their Summa Theologica but realised that older colleagues had not so much a book, as two detached covers and a random collection of pages. I rather like the idea of something that will still be going strong long after I'm gone and forgotten.
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