Abstract
At a time when the academic study of Theology is moving away from its traditional home in departments of Divinity and Theology and into departments of History, Cultural Criticism, and Comparative Religion, there is an increased interest in comprehending the complex intellectual world of the Bible’s translation during the late antique and medieval periods. A concern arising from this ‘secularization’ of biblical studies includes analysis of the paratextual material that accompanied Latin versions of the Bible in the ancient manuscripts, once deemed to be of little importance but now regarded as invaluable sources of evidence for the insight they offer into the consolidation of the Catholic-Latin biblical tradition. The re-publication of Donatein De Bruyne’s Sommaires, Divisions et Rubriques de la Bible Latine presents modern scholars studying the emergence of Latin versions of the Bible with an invaluable aid in terms of ‘how the scriptures were received, read, and interpreted over a period of, roughly, 700 years between the appearance of the Vulgate and the rise of the universities,’ in the words of Thomas O’Loughlin’s introductory chapter to this important publication.
Presented here as a direct re-publication, Summaries, Divisions and Rubrics of the Latin Bible was first published in 1914 in Namur as a preparatory stage in the work of the Commission for the Revision of the Vulgate initiated by Pius X in 1907. From later comments made by De Bruyne, which are presented in the chapter by Pierre-Maurice Bogaert (p. vii), it is apparent that the Benedictine scholar intended his work to be preparatory to the work of the Commission and did not in any sense mean it as a definitive collection: the role of the work as an instrumentum laboris is evident in its anonymous publication by Auguste Godenne. However, as the biography by Bogaert illustrates, De Bruyne had already established a reputation as a formidable scholar of the Latin Bible whose work included pioneering pieces on the attribution of the ancient Latin translation of the Pauline corpus (p. x).
De Bruyne’s work collected in one volume the fore-matter printed in individual editions of the biblical books (p. xxiii). It is divided into three sections: (i) Summaries, (ii) Divisions, and (iii) Rubrics. As O’Loughlin notes (p. xxiii), the Summaries section was intended not so much to recapitulate the contents of individual books, but rather to serve as a guide for readers in locating specific passages. The next section, Divisions, presents in tabular form the capitulation systems utilized in the previous section. The final section, Rubrics, is the most exegetical (p. xxiii) of the three sections: here, texts from the Song of Songs and the Book of Psalms have been annotated to indicate to the reader in typological fashion the speaker of verses utilized in the liturgy of the medieval church.
In making this work available once again after more than 100 years, Bogaert and O’Loughlin have performed a valuable service to scholars of medieval Latin cultural history. The importance of De Bruyne’s work is further substantiated by the inclusion of two chapters, in which readers will find a concise and brilliant biography of De Bruyne alongside a bibliography of his scholarly publications (Bogaert), together with an insightful commentary on the significance of De Bruyne’s work for the 21st century (O’Loughlin).