College Record 2014

(Biblia Sacra Vulgatae Editionis, Paris 1662) recently donated to the College by Dr
John Penney. It formerly belonged to the anthropologist Godfrey Lienhardt (GBF
1967–88), a friend and colleague of Evans-Pritchard, who mainly studied the Dinka
of southern Sudan.
This Bible was the work of Antoine Vitré (?1590-1674), a French printer who
adopted the device of Hercules standing triumphant next to a dead monster, with
the caption Virtus non territa monstris (‘Courage not scared of monsters’). He was
the first Paris printer to use Syriac type in his Syriac and Latin Psautier (1625), and
he became the King’s official printer for oriental languages in 1630. He was best
known for his Bible Polyglotte (1645), which required a large financial outlay – for
which he was never reimbursed, as he had expected to be – to buy the necessary
typefaces, since it was to be ‘imprimée en arabe, en chaldéen, en grec, en hébreu, en
latin, en samaritain et en syriaque’. This enormous – ultimately ten-volume – work
of scholarship, which involved extensive expert collaboration, started in 1628 and
was completed in 1645. Apparently the paper and the layout were attractive, but the
inconvenience of the format, as well as the number of errors the work contained,
sadly reduced its value. Nevertheless, Vitré’s folio Bibles are thought by some to be
amongst the best printed books of the seventeenth century.
Wolfson’s copy is distinguished by the biblical text being complemented by 364 fullpage
copper plate engravings, which have been bound up with it into one volume.
These illustrations, which are interspersed throughout, originate from quite a
different publication, the first volume of Scheuchzer’s great work, the Physica Sacra.
This was published in the 1730s in various Latin, German and French editions,
and was, as Professor Kennedy informed us, intended to be an explanation with
commentary of the Bible on natural-scientific grounds. Scheuchzer himself oversaw
the illustrations, which were largely based on items either in his own natural history
cabinet or in other famous European cabinets of rare specimens. The plates were
created in Augsburg by Johann Andreas Pfeffel (1674–1748), who employed many
artists and engravers to produce a magnificent four-volume, lavishly illustrated
folio work, in which it has been said that the Baroque attains, philosophically and
artistically, its high point and conclusion.
112