Date/Time
Date(s) - 11 Feb 2013
5:15 PM - 6:30 PM
Location
Martin and Margy Meyerson Conference Room, 2nd floor Van Pelt Library
Category(ies) No Categories
Please join us this Monday, February 11, for the next back-to-normal meeting of the weekly Workshop in the History of Material Texts. We will convene, as usual, at 5:15pm in the Martin and Margy Meyerson Conference Room, which is located on the second floor of Van Pelt Library, diagonally across from the elevators.
This week, we welcome frequent seminar attendee *Daniel Cheely* (Penn History), whose talk is entitled “Catholic Bible Reading?: Penn’s Tridentine Vulgate (1605) and the Marginalia of Thomas Marwood.” Dan writes:
“The “authentic” Latin Vulgate of the Council of Trent was not promulgated and published until 1592. Only four years later, the Roman Index prohibited vernacular translations of it. Because this ban on vernacular reading was not lifted until 1757, scholars have turned to inquisitorial records to understand how early modern Catholics interacted with the Bible. Some of these sources are extraordinarily revealing (e.g., the processo of Menocchio, Carlo Ginzburg’s Friulian miller), but the conflict-rich setting in which they were produced tends to determine the types of conclusions that are drawn from them, privileging unidirectional resistance models of reading and occluding the multiple possibilities that were available to a variety of Catholic readers. In this session, we will be considering other sources – namely, used books.
“The earliest edition of the official Tridentine Vulgate that the Penn library holds is a 1605 quarto volume published in Antwerp. It was issued without printed marginal annotation of any kind – that is, it was something akin to a naked text, to the extent that the rhetorical concept was materially possible, because that was the only format that the presiding popes were willing to authorize. The preface conceded, however, that “it would not damn” those who added useful supplements like the prologues of Jerome, marginal variants, and concordances as long as they were added “minimally.”
“The first marking reader who acquired the book – Thomas Marwood, a late seventeenth-century Catholic tutor for a Norfolk gentry family – annotated instead almost everything. He was meticulous, systematically linking verses to the commentary of the patristic, medieval, and contemporary theologians that he transcribed. His defiantly scholastic mode of annotation represents an alternative form of resistance, yet one constitutive of a particular kind of fervent Catholic identity.
“Comparing Marwood’s marginalia together with the marks and blank spaces left in the vernacular scripture-books of his compatriots, we will explore a broad sample of biblical reading traces. Among the problems that we will engage are how confessional reading patterns shape and are shaped by community boundaries, and how practices can precede books while also being determined by them. We hope to begin answering, ultimately, whether there were distinctive modes of Catholic Bible-reading and why that would matter.”
Daniel Cheely is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Penn History Department. His talk is derived from his dissertation, “The Book of Marwood: English Catholics and their Bibles in Early Modern Europe,” which was inspired by the book upstairs and many Monday evening seminars. Grants from the Huntington, Folger, and the Social Science Research Council have allowed him to compile a database of early modern Catholic Bibles in order to contextualize the book’s story and weigh its implications. A final chapter of that story is forthcoming in Church History.