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Illustrations after Hans Sebald Beham
When Jan Moerentorf published his magnificent Dutch language Bible in 1599, it was already 33 years since his father-in-law Christophe Plantin brought out the last Catholic Bible in Antwerp (1566). Admittedly there had been some separate editions of the New Testament but even that series had been concluded by his father-in-law in 1577. These were not good times for Catholic readers of the Bible: the iconoclastic movement and the arrival of the Duke of Alba, the setting up of Calvinistic republics in Antwerp and elsewhere and the reconquest by the Duke of Parma had led to confessional polarization and economic decline. Not that Catholics were prohibited from reading the Bible, but the so-called fourth rule of the Index of the Council of Trent (1564) also introduced in the Netherlands, made the reading of it dependent on the prior authorization of the Bishop.
Caution was now required because freedom in reading – and interpretation – of the Bible had been partially responsible for the birth of Protestantism. That is the main reason why the Bible was no longer at the top of Catholics’ reading lists. Moerentorf made a clear allusion to this long hiatus in Bible production in the prologue to his Dutch language Bible, which was marketed in two editions: one in his own name and the other in collaboration with Jan van Keerberghen (the image here shows a copy of the latter). In essence this Bible aims to offer a Dutch translation of the Sixto-Clementine Vulgate, which had been published in Rome in 1592 and which Moerentorf had been allowed to print in 1599 thanks to an exceptional privilege from the Vatican, an edition which is little-known. The theologians from the University of Louvain whom he consulted supported the translation project and supplied the publisher with the revision of the ‘Louvain Bible’ (1548), the official text of the Catholic Bible as edited by the Augustinian canon regular Nicolaus van Winghe from the monastery of Sint-Maartensdal in Louvain, which had now been adapted to the latest Roman Vulgate version.
As was required for Catholic Bibles, para-textual material was sober and kept to the minimal chapter summaries and cross-references to other Bible passages in the margins. This edition did contain some beautiful illustrations: those of the Old Testament were based on the Histories and Prophecies of Hans Sebald Beham and those of the New Testament were after the work of Bernard Salomon. Moerentorf’s Bible was to become the standard Bible for Catholics for the coming decades (and even centuries).
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