The Multiplicity of Scripture

The Antwerp Polyglot Bible (1568-1573) has long been recognized as one of the most ambitious typographical enterprises of the sixteenth century. Upon completion, it was the most elaborate Bible ever printed, a library of biblical erudition with editions of the ancient Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac, Greek, and Latin versions together with new scholarly instruments necessary to study and compare them.

Yet powerful contemporaries also perceived it as a threat to the Church. The very idea of a polyglot bible, especially one that included the Hebrew Bible and Aramaic Targums of Jewish tradition, ran counter to the Council of Trent's decree that the Latin Vulgate was the only authentic version of Christian Scripture. In the middle of the sixteenth century, biblical philology and Catholic orthodoxy turned onto a frightful course of collision, and the pages of the Antwerp Polyglot Bible formed the force field at their crossroads.

The Multiplicity of Scripture is the first book-length study of how the Antwerp Polyglot was made. Combining the history of the book with the history of scholarship and drawing on primary sources from archives and libraries across Europe, it reconstructs the editorial history of Christopher Plantin's masterpiece from within his printing shop. Set in the contexts of fierce biblical controversies in Tridentine Europe and the fraught afterlife of Jewish traditions in post-expulsion Spain, it tells a story of crisis and craftsmanship, of ink-stained proofs in four different alphabets and the extraordinary team of scholars and printers that made this monument of Renaissance printing and scholarly endeavour.

Theodor Dunkelgrun is assistant professor of Jewish History at the University of Antwerp. He was educated at Leiden University and the University of Chicago, where he received his doctorate in 2012 from the Committee on Social Thought. From 2012 to 2023 he held several research fellowships at the University of Cambridge, where he taught for the faculties of History, Divinity, and Classics, and co-founded the Seminar in Early Modern Scholarship and Religion. The co-editor of five volumes, his work has appeared in The International Journal of the Classical Tradition, Journal of the Bible and Its Reception, Jewish Historical Studies, Studia Rosenthaliana, European Journal of Jewish Studies, and De Gulden Passer, as well as in several collections, including most recently The Mishnaic Moment: Jewish Law among Jews and Christians in Early Modern Europe, edited by Piet van Boxel, Kirsten Macfarlane, and Joanna Weinberg (2022). He is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society.