Clementine Vulgate 1598

History

This is the Latin version much of this site’s collection depends on. The Vulgate, largely the work of Jerome and taken up gradually across the Latin West, became the principal Latin form of the Bible through the Middle Ages. Many Catholic translations into the modern languages were made from it rather than from the Hebrew and Greek directly — among them the Douay-Rheims in English and Matos Soares in Portuguese.

At its fourth session, on 8 April 1546, the Council of Trent declared that among the many Latin editions then in circulation the vulgate alone was to be held authentic in public readings, disputations, sermons and expositions — and added that it should be printed as accurately as possible. Declaring a text authentic and possessing an accurate copy of it, however, were different problems. Printing had multiplied Latin bibles since Gutenberg, while the manuscripts behind them had been collecting variant readings, copyists’ slips and later corrections over the centuries.

Correcting it went slowly. Louvain produced amended texts — John Henten’s (1499 - 1566), in 1547, and the Antwerp edition of 1583, prepared under the direction of Lucas of Bruges (1548/9–1619) — while in Rome the work passed from commission to commission. Pius IV gave it to cardinals and to men skilled in scripture and in languages, with instructions to collate the oldest manuscripts, consult the Hebrew and Greek sources, and read the commentaries of the Fathers. Pius V continued it. Then the work stopped.

Sixtus V took it up again and had the finished text printed in 1590, ordering it to stand as the standard — and then wanted it redone, and died before he could manage it. The revision was reopened and passed through three short pontificates before it was ready, by then at the beginning of Clement VIII’s pontificate. The edition was published at Rome in 1592, followed by further editions, among them those of 1593 and 1598. Though the edition carried the name of Sixtus V in its title, it is this revision finished under Clement VIII that went down in history as the Clementine, or Sixto-Clementine, Vulgate.

It remained the Catholic Church’s official Latin edition until the Nova Vulgata, promulgated as the typical edition in 1979.

Curiosities

Sixtus V died before he could correct his own edition. According to the 1598 preface, he noticed, once the books had already been printed, that “not a few things had crept into the text through the fault of the press”, and decided that the whole work should go back to the anvil. He had no time. Urban VII was elected on 15 September 1590 and was dead by the 27th. Gregory XIV began the revision again; he and Innocent IX, who succeeded him, died, in the preface’s phrase, “in a very short time”. The preface itself presents the edition finally published under Clement VIII as the carrying out of the project Sixtus had left unfinished.

The Psalms of the Vulgate are not Jerome’s translation from the Hebrew. Jerome produced three versions of the Psalter: a first revision of the old Latin psalter, the Gallican Psalter, based on the Greek, and the Psalter iuxta Hebraeos, translated directly from the Hebrew. It was the Gallican Psalter that ended up being carried into the Vulgate tradition.

Hence the difference in translation — and the traditional numbering as well. Psalm 22 in the Vulgate opens with Dominus regit me, “the Lord rules me”, where the Hebrew says, literally, “YHWH is my shepherd”.

Sources

• The Council of Trent, the Fourth Session — the decrees on the canonical scriptures and on the vulgate edition, in The canons and decrees of the sacred and oecumenical Council of Trent, trans. J. Waterworth (London: Dolman, 1848), 17-21
• Praefatio ad lectorem — the preface to the three Clementine editions, reproduced as an appendix to the Nova Vulgata
• Scripturarum thesaurus (1979) — the constitution promulgating the Nova Vulgata in its place
• The History of the Latin Vulgate — John E. Steinmueller, Homiletic & Pastoral Review (December 1938), on the Louvain amended texts, the Roman commissions and the Clementine editions published under the name of Sixtus V
• Jerome’s Psalters — Scott Goins, The Oxford Handbook of the Psalms, ed. William P. Brown (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), on Jerome’s three psalters and on the Gallican being the one that stayed in the Vulgate tradition