Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 August 2013
This study traces the evolution of one version of the New Testament across two early modern kingdoms and three confessional communities. The Oratorian priest Pasquier Quesnel salvaged the text of the Nouveau Testament “de Mons,” which was condemned in 1667 for infidelity to the Vulgate, by attaching “Christian thoughts” to each verse and framing the new product as a moral commentary. The French Jesuit Michel Le Tellier revived the charges against the “Mons” scriptures, but he could not prevent their redistribution in Quesnel's L'Abrégé de la morale de l'Evangile (1672) and Nouveau Testament (1692) for more than three decades until he shifted his attack away from the translation toward the legitimating paratexts. Long before then, Le Tellier plunged the French Jesuits into the competition for marketing vernacular scripture-books. Though they first proposed an alternative model of scripture-reading, they increasingly borrowed from Quesnel's model as they had more success proscribing his book. Meanwhile in England, both Catholics and Protestants attempted to fit Quesnel's scripture-books to the standards of their geo-confessional communities, conforming enough to make transgression possible. The Catholic physician Richard Short represented Quesnel's book as the “Jesuit” Rheims version while the Anglican divine Richard Russel re-packaged it as a deluxe King James Bible. The struggles of all these competitors illuminate the informal processes of authorization that enabled scripture-books to shadow the Authorized Versions and to expand the space for publisher adaptation and reader appropriation between them. By analyzing the permutations of books, scholars might enrich their understanding of confessional differences, often limited to comparisons of textual access, and more precisely discern the varieties of historical relationships that particular Christian communities sought with their sacred scriptures.
1 Richard Russel, The New Testament with moral reflections upon every verse in order to make the Reading of it more profitable and the Meditation more easy. Vol. 1. Part 1. London. Printed by J.R. . . . MDCCXIX (1719). A2r.
2 For a sample listing of hundreds of AV quatercentenary events in 2011, see King James Bible Trust, “Past Events,” http://www.kingjamesbibletrust.org/events/past.
3 Compare Darlow, T. H. and Moule, H. F., eds., Historical Catalogue of the Printed Editions of Holy Scripture in the Library of the British and Foreign Bible Society (London: Bible House, 1903), 1:134Google Scholar, with Norton, David, The King James Bible: A Short History from Tyndale to Today (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 138.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
4 Of the six new English Testaments published in the first-third of the eighteenth century, only one received even a cursory notice in the Oxford and Cambridge monographs that marked the quatercentenary of the AV. That one, Daniel Mace's diglot New Testament (1729), was none of the four derived from Catholic versions. For the classic account of the Geneva Bible's place in England, see Hill, Christopher, The English Bible and the Seventeenth Century Revolution (London: Allen Lane, 1993).Google Scholar
5 The Rheims New Testament (1582) is the only English Catholic version regularly featured in historical surveys of the AV or of the English Bible generally. Even this version, however, is analyzed less as a competitor to the AV than as a hidden source in its translation. See, for example, Daniell, David, The Bible in English (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, whose assessment dryly concludes: “Mercifully, the Rheims New Testament had little effect” (368).
6 When the Council of Trent declared the “old Latin Vulgate edition” authentic in 1546, the Latin “Louvain Bible” emerged as the de facto “Vulgate” until the Clementine (1590) and then the Sixto-Clementine versions (1592) were formally proclaimed the Vulgate almost half a century later.
7 On this Bible's quatercentenary, only one relevant study was published in English, and that was to illuminate the unraveling of the vulgate's authority. See Coogan, Robert, Erasmus, Lee and the Correction of the Vulgate: Shaking the Foundations (Geneva: Droz, 1992).Google Scholar
8 See the conclusions of R. A. Sayce in the Cambridge History of the Bible, ed. Greenslade, S. L., vol. 3, The West from the Reformation to the Present Day (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963), 121–122Google Scholar, extended by Chambers, Bettye, Bibliography of French Bibles (Geneva: Droz, 1983–1993), esp. 1:366–367.Google Scholar Modern scholars have argued that even the Rheims New Testament borrowed substantially from earlier English Protestant translations. See Daniell, Bible in English, 363–364.
9 Shroeder, H. J., ed. and trans., Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent (Rockford, Ill.: Tan, 1978)Google Scholar, 18. Whether or not the Council of Trent actually required all vernacular translations to be made from the Vulgate turns upon this one debatable phrase. Whereas the language of the decree itself might accommodate the use of Hebrew and Greek texts in translation, contemporary Catholic translators and publishers realized that it was safer to market a Bible that was faithful to the Vulgate in an era where many of their ecclesiastical authorities considered all vernacular translations suspect. During the next century in France, however, it became possible to print New Testaments “translated according to the Vulgate, with the differences in Greek” (cf. the Nouveau Testament “de Mons”). The legitimacy of these translations was contested by the Sorbonne and the Roman Index. By the end of the seventeenth century, however, it was those ecclesiastics committed to the exclusive authority of the Vulgate, like Michel Le Tellier, who felt that the burden had been shifted back on them to prove that vernacular translations which deviated from the one “authentic” text violated the Tridentine decree, as will be discussed below.
10 Schroeder, Canons and Decrees, 273–274.
11 This was the starting point taken by the five-volume The Bible as Book series published by The British Library & Oak Knoll Press between 1998 and 2003. This article seeks to move work further into the domain of inter-confessional comparison.
12 Cf. Greenslade, Cambridge History of the Bible.
13 Studies that have interrogated the interrelation of text, form, and technology on cultural uses of the scriptures include Stallybrass, Peter, “Books and Scrolls: Navigating the Bible,” Books and Readers in Early Modern England: Material Studies, eds. Anderson, Jennifer and Sauer, Elizabeth (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 42–79CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Mandelbrote, Scott, “The authority of the Word: Manuscript, Print and the Text of the Bible in Seventeenth-Century England,” in The Uses of Script and Print, 1300–1700, eds. Crick, Julia and Walsham, Alexandra (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 135–153.Google Scholar
14 For a critical discussion of the value of studying readers' manuscript annotation, see Lesser, Zachary, Renaissance Drama and the Politics of Publication: Readings in the English Book Trade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 1–25.Google Scholar For a more positive, albeit circumspect assessment, see Sherman, William, Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), esp. 96–118.CrossRefGoogle Scholar A forthcoming study by the present author, however, will demonstrate the ways in which reader notes can challenge conventional narratives about the function of English Catholic Bibles.
15 Scholarship on the Bibles of early modern France erupted between 1989–1991: La Bible de Tous les Temps, eds. Bedouelle, Guy and Roussel, Bernard, vol. 5, Le Temps des Reformes et la Bible (Paris: Beauchesne, 1989)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Chédozeau, Bernard, La Bible et la Liturgie en Français: L'église tridentine et les traductions bibliques et liturgiques (1600–1789) (Paris: Cerf, 1990)Google Scholar; Bogaert, Pierre-Maurice, ed., Les Bibles en Français: Histoire Illustrée du Moyen Âge à nos Jours (Turnhout: Brepols, 1991)Google Scholar. It was Chédozeau who placed the post-Tridentine Catholic Bible back on the map of French historians and in the foreword to his subsequent magisterial work, Port-Royal et la Bible: Un siècle d'or de la Bible en France (Paris: Nolin, 2007)Google Scholar, he was proclaimed “le Christophe Colomb” of the rediscovery. Anglophone scholarship has yet to advance upon his research. For example, in Lamberigts, M. and Den Hollander, A. A., eds. Lay Bibles in Europe, 1450–1800 (Leuven: Peeters, 2006)Google Scholar, only the post-Tridentine readers of the Dutch Republic and the Netherlands are studied. The essay of Bettye Chambers in François, Wim and Den Hollander, A. A., eds., Infant Milk or Hardy Nourishment? The Bible for Lay People and Theologians in the Early Modern Period (Leuven: Peeters, 2009)Google Scholar does analyze some French Catholic Bibles of the sixteenth century, but focuses on the material distance of Protestant Bible layouts from the principle of sola scriptura. There are two relevant exceptions. The most recent is Ingram's, Elizabeth Morley “Dressed in Borrowed Robes: The Making and Marketing of the Louvain Bible (1578)” in The Church and the Book, ed. Swanson, R. N. (Suffolk, U.K.: Boydell & Brewer, 2004)Google Scholar. The present study seeks to build upon its findings while adopting an alternative conceptual framework. The second exception is Julia's, Dominique essay “Reading and the Counter-Reformation,” in A History of Reading in the West, eds. Cavallo, Guglielmo and Chartier, Roger, trans. Cochrane, Lydia (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999)Google Scholar, which briefly synthesizes Chédozeau's description of the French hierarchy's attitudes toward lay Bible-reading. Between the Jansenists of Port-Royal who promoted independent Bible-reading as a universal obligation and the faculty of the Sorbonne who increasingly sought restrictions on access to vernacular scripture, there was the “position catholique-romaine française.” Those within this mainstream “école” favored regulated access to scripture based upon the capacity of the lay reader and the permission of ecclesiastical supervisors (249). Chédozeau suggested that paratextual explications had “seemed to be required, according to the criteria of the period, by the Council of Trent” (“La Bible française chez les catholiques” in Les Bibles en Français, ed. Bogaert, 147). He later showed how Port-Royalists tried to use Trent-inflected paratextual layouts to protect their more ambitious project of Bible-distribution (Chédozeau, Port-Royal, 60–63, 425). These suggestions will be developed and modified in the present study, which examines how paratexts could both compromise and legitimate vernacular Bibles between the last year of Trent (1563) and the first Port-Royalist biblical commentary (1672).
16 This historiographical tradition was cultivated first in the Memoires of the Duc de Saint-Simon, Le Tellier's contemporary political adversary. The Jesuit scholars that have attempted to rehabilitate Le Tellier against the accusations of Saint-Simon have focused narrowly on Le Tellier's activities as royal confessor. See Pierre Bliard, S.J., Les Mémoires de Saint-Simon et le père Le Tellier, Confesseur de Louis XIV (Paris: Libraire Plon, 1891)Google Scholar and more recently, Domínguez, Joaquín and O'Neill, Charles, eds., Diccionario Histórico de la Compañía de Jesús (Rome: IHSI, 2001), 4:2309–2310Google Scholar. The substantial chapter on Le Tellier in Ceyssens, Lucien and Tans, J. A. G., L'Autour de L'Unigenitus (Leuven: Peeters, 1987), 333–400Google Scholar, lists Le Tellier's publications as a biographical prelude. They suggest to Ceyssens only that Le Tellier's record as a Jesuit apologist and anti-Jansenist mudslinger should suffice to explain his quest to suppress Quesnel as soon as he gained power over the king's conscience. Because Le Tellier's biographers have failed to sift his earlier writings on vernacular scripture, scholars of the French Bible have expressed surprise upon encountering copies of the Nouveau Testament (1697/1703) of Le Tellier and his Jesuit confreres, Dominique Bouhours and Pierre Besnier (Chédozeau, “La Bible française,” 151).
17 Bedouelle, Le Bible de tous les temps, 5:541–544. Ceyssens and Tans, L'Autour, 360, 415. Chédozeau eschews this binary analysis of ecclesiastical attitudes toward vernacular Bible reading, yet he is inclined to leave the Jesuits in the old “restrictive” category because of their alleged “silence” until the end of the seventeenth century. See Chédozeau's La Bible et la Liturgie, 192, and Port-Royal, 438n46. On Catholics not promoting scripture-reading for all until the Jansenists, who were condemned for such a stance in 1713, see Crehan, F. J., “The Bible in the Roman Catholic Church from Trent until the Present Day” in Cambridge History of the Bible, 3:222–23Google Scholar, repeated in Walsham, Alexandra, “Unclasping the Book? Post-Reformation English Catholicism and the Vernacular Bible,” Journal of British Studies 42, no. 2 (April 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 158.
18 Duffy, Eamon, “A Rubb-up for Old Soares: Jesuits, Jansenists, and the English Secular Clergy, 1705–1715,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 28 (1977), 291–317CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Glickman's, Gabriel excellent monograph, The English Catholic Community, 1688–1745 (Woodbridge, U.K.: Boydell, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 177, references Duffy's interpretation but explores no further.
19 Clement XI, Unigenitus dei filius, September 18, 1713, § 3(2).
20 Despite their “de Mons” imprints, the New Testaments of Port-Royal actually were printed from Amsterdam, Brussels, Lyon, and Leiden: see Chambers, Bibliography, 2:ix–x. On why Mons may have been chosen for the false imprint, see de Sailly, Léopold, Étude Bibliographique du Nouveau Testament de Port-Royal (Mons, Belg.: L. Dequesne, 1926), 26–27Google Scholar. On Quesnel's decision to use the Port-Royalists' translation, see Chédozeau, Port-Royal, 437n39. Chédozeau suggests that Quesnel's relationship with this community began in late 1666 when he received a new superior, Colin du Juanet, who was a close associate of the Port-Royalists' principal spokesperson, Antoine Arnauld.
21 See Chambers, Bibliography, 2:409–452, 455–7, 464–73. There were eighteen separate printings in 1667, plus four to ten more in 1668. Clement IX's condemnation of this book is reprinted in L. de Sailly, Étude Bibliographique, 15–16.
22 McNally, Robert, “The Council of Trent and Vernacular Bibles,” Theological Studies 27 (1966), 204–227.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
23 Shroeder, Canons, 19.
24 “La Sainte Bible” is the opening title of the version known as the “Bible of the Theologians of Louvain,” which Christophe Plantin first published in Antwerp in 1578. It was revised and reprinted in dozens of editions without any significant competition from other Catholic versions until the Amelote and “de Mons” New Testaments emerged in the 1660s. La Bibbia Vulgare, the short title of Nicolò Malerbi's standard Catholic translation, was reprinted approximately seventy times in either full or partial form between 1471 and 1567. See Barbieri, Edoardo, “Tradition and Change in the Spiritual Literature of the Cinquecento,” in Church, Censorship, and Culture in Early Modern Italy, ed. Fragnito, Gigliola (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001)Google Scholar, 125.
25 Both are reproduced in Recueil de diverses pièces publiées pour soutenir la traduction du Nouveau Testament imprime à Mons, contre ceux qui en ont voulu interdire la lecture (Cologne: Nicolas Schoute, 1669), 3–17.Google Scholar
26 Recueil (1669), 4–5.
27 Ibid., 13.
28 Ibid., 10.
29 Ibid., 14–15.
30 Finot, Ed, Port-Royal et Magny (Paris: G. Chamerot, 1888), 57Google Scholar; L. de Sailly, Étude Bibliographique, 68; Chambers, Bibliography, 2: 414.
31 During the 4th Session, the delegates expressed frustration over the publication of explicative notes: “And wishing, as is just, to impose a restraint, in this matter, also on printers, who now without restraint [. . .] print, without the license of ecclesiastical superiors, the said books of sacred Scripture, and the notes and comments upon them of all persons indifferently.” See Schroeder, Canons, 18–19.
32 Chédozeau flagged this decree as the origin of paratextual expectations in France (“La Bible Français,” 174). The process by which post-Tridentine Bibles cemented these expectations must be traced now.
33 Schroeder, Canons, 275.
34 Chédozeau, La Bible et la Liturgie, 186–189; Julia, “Reading,” 249.
35 Ronnie Hsia in his magisterial survey, The World of Catholic Renewal, 1540–1770, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005)Google Scholar, 178, recognized that Catholics in Germany, Poland, Switzerland, Bohemia, and Dalmatia gained access to vernacular Bibles after Trent, but he neglected to mention Catholic France.
36 Archivio Congregatio pro Doctrina Fidei (ACDF), Indice, Protocolli B, 324r-v, 331v, 543r-v.
37 When pressed, Benoist justified his borrowing strategy by likening it to the Israelites' despoliation of the riches of Egypt. See Chédozeau, “Les Bibles Français,” 91–93.
38 Chédozeau, “Les Bibles Français,” 96.
39 Chambers, Bibliography, 1:424.
40 Ibid.; Chédozeau, “Les Bibles Français,” 100.
41 For some early sixteenth-century Protestant New Testaments that exemplify the pattern of paratextual down-sizing (Bibles showed no such pattern), see Chambers, Bibliography, 2:3, 9, 15, 16, 33, 59; see also pp. 2, 4, 18, 39, 50 for early sixteenth-century editions that were shorn of paratext entirely.
42 Chambers, Bibliography, 2:124–130.
43 Ibid., 264.
44 Ibid., 281.
45 Ibid., 264.
46 Le Nouveau Testament De Nostre seigneur Jesus-Christ. Traduit Sur L'Ancienne Edition Latine corrigée par le commandement du Pape Sixte V. et publiée par l'autorite du Pape Clement VII. Avec des Notes sur les principales difficultes, la Chronologie, la Controverse, & plusiers Tables pour la commodite du Lecteur. Par le R. Pere D. Amelote Prestre de l'Oratoire, . . . A PARIS, Chez FRANCOIS MUGUET, Imprimeur & Libraire ordinaire du Roy, & de Monseigneur l'Archevesque, . . . . M.DC.LXVI. AVEC APPROBATION, ET PRIVILEGE DU ROY.
47 The Port-Royalists' accusation has been substantiated by later bibliographies and reproduced by modern scholars. See Darlow & Moule, Historical Catalogue, 2.1:405: “According to the Port-Royalists, confirmed by Sainte-Beuve, Amelote's production is merely the Port Royal version, disguised by certain changes”; and Chambers, Bibliography, 2:390: “But according to Petavel, citing Sainte-Beuve, Amelote's translation is in large part plagiarized from the Port-Royal version.” The charge was again repeated in Chédozeau, Port-Royal, 27.
48 Compare the recurrence of this phrase in the royal privilege printed in vol. 3 (1670), 578, and in Péréfixe's episcopal permission printed in a new edition thirty years later, Le Nouveau Testament (Paris: Muguet, 1700)Google Scholar, ē3r. Péréfixe published his approval of Amelote's New Testament almost simultaneously with his second ordinance against the New Testament “de Mons” (April 20 vs. April 22, 1688).
49 Recueil (1669), 3–4.
50 Delaveau, Martine and Hillard, Denise, eds., Bibles Imprimées du XVe au XVIIIe siècle conserves à Paris (Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale de France, 2003)Google Scholar, 341n2123; Chédozeau, “Les Bibles Français,” 147.
51 Quesnel, P., L'Abrégé de la morale de l'Evangile ou pensées Chrétiennes sur le texte des quatre evangelists: pour en rendre la lecture & la meditation plus facile à ceux qui commencent à s'y appliquer (Andre Pralard: Paris, 1672).Google Scholar
52 Chédozeau remarked that Quesnel's “new moral way of reading the sacred texts” (“Les Bibles Français,” 147) was “less strictly faithful perhaps to the Council of Trent” (Port-Royal, 426; also 446–447).
53 This preface was revised in all subsequent editions until it returned in a 1736 edition published in Amsterdam. On the difference between “necessity” and “obligation” in the respective preface of the New Testament “de Mons” and the Abrégé, see Chédozeau, Port-Royal, 368–371, 449–450.
54 Vialart was one of the three delegates appointed by Pope Clement IX to mediate the Jansenist controversy in 1667, which led eventually to the “Paix de l'Eglise” (concordat on January 19, 1669). Vialart issued his approval of the Abrégé after Quesnel achieved an “agreement” with Archbishop Péréfixe, the ordinary of Paris where the volume was printed. On Vialart and the publishing families of Chalons-sur-Marne, see McLeod, Jane, Licensing Loyalty: Printers, Patrons and the State in Early Modern France (University Park: Pennsylvania State Press, 2011), 51–54Google Scholar, 241n40.
55 Quesnel, L'Abrégé, ā2v. At the end of his approval, Bishop Vialart concedes that priests might grant those under their care permission to read this book, but only “as it is useful according to their capacity” (f.ā3v), invoking a safe interpretation of Trent—that is, Chédozeau's “position catholique romaine-français.”
56 Chédozeau suggests that Vialart's imagined audience is not just a rhetorical artifice for sneaking by the censors, but the original expectation of both Quesnel and Vialart, see Port-Royal, 447.
57 Before Andre Pralard published Quesnel's entire Nouveau Testament (1692) two decades later, he had issued five editions of Quesnel's annotated gospels, while pirates were responsible for an additional six.
58 For a revisionist approach to the study of licensing and censorship in France along these lines, see McLeod, Licensing Loyalty (2011). Debora Shuger argued that in seventeenth century England, book producers often did not object “to pre-publication censorship because they desired the legitimacy—the authority—it bestowed by peer review.” See her Censorship and Cultural Sensibility: The Regulation of Language in Tudor-Stuart England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006)Google Scholar, 258.
59 Duclos, P., “Le Tellier, Michel” in Diccionario Histórico de la Compañía de Jesús, 4:2309–2310.Google Scholar Not only does Ceyssens's study of Le Tellier designate him one of the “pincipaux promoteurs” of Unigenitus, it also re-opens the question of whether he played a significant role in the destruction of the monastery of Port-Royal, a charge that prior accounts had dismissed. See Ceyssens and Tans, L'Autour, 350, 363–365.
60 Ceyssens and Tans, L'Autour, 337–338, 346, 357, and again esp. 350: “Si l'on range la grace efficace et la predestination gratuite parmi les opinions erronees, il est facile de multiplier les heresies a combater.”
61 Tellier, Le, Avis Importans (Lyons: P[ierre]. Guillimin, 1675), 78.Google Scholar
62 Ibid., 40–42, 45–46, 62–63, 70–71.
63 Ibid., 77–80.
64 Ibid., 4.
65 Ibid., 18. On “inviting all the faithful” to read, see also p. 7.
66 Le Tellier, Avis, 5, 13 (vs. “a roaming curiosity”); The Mons Preface of Saci and Arnauld advises the reader to adore some of the scriptures' depths “without trying to understand them”: Nouveau Testament (Mons: Gaspard Migeot, 1667, 2nd ed.)Google Scholar, *3v; Quesnel chastised those “qui abandonment leur esprit a une infinite de recherché purement curieuses et inutiles” in L'Abrégé (Paris: Pralard, 1674, 2nd ed.)Google Scholar, ē2r.
67 Le Tellier, Avis, 11–13.
68 Le Tellier, Avis, [unpaginated approbation of “Arroy,” dated November 10, 1675].
69 Chédozeau, La Bible at la Liturgie, 192; Chédozeau, Port-Royal, 438n46.
70 Julia, “Reading,” 249.
71 Pierre Nicole to Quesnel, dated June 12, 1681, excerpted in Tans, J. A. G. and du Moulin, H. Schmitz, eds., La correspondence de Pasquier Quesnel, inventaire et index analytique, vol. 2.1, Index Analytique (Brussels: Nauwelaerts, 1993)Google Scholar, 618. Cited hereafter as Quesnel inventaire.
72 Pralard acquired this 30-year “Privilege du Roy,” dated March 27, 1677, for Quesnel's Abrégé, yet he did not hesitate to reprint it in his first edition of Quesnel's Nouveau Testament (1692). See Chambers, Bibliography, 2:728.
73 The Abrégé printed in 1674 was Pralard's second edition. The 1675 pirated edition was issued with the false imprint of “Mons: Gaspard Migeot.”
74 For the New Testaments “de Mons” published in Lyons in 1674–1675, see Chambers, Bibliography, 2:526–527, 536–538, 543. Le Tellier was a professor in Paris then, publishing his two works that chronologically flanked the Avis in Paris.
75 Chambers, 2:527; Le Tellier, Avis, unpaginated privilege.
76 For the Lyon editions published between 1680–1681, see Chambers, Bibliography, 2:583–584, 590–593.
77 Le Tellier, Observations sur la nouvelle Defense de la version franc ise du Nouveau Testament imprimée à Mons. Pour justifier la conduite des papes, des évesques & du roy, à l'égard de cette version (Rouen, 1684), 8vo, á1r (Italics not in original).
78 Le Tellier, Observations, 107, 15, 193.
79 Nicole to Quesnel, dated May 3, 1685, excerpted in Quesnel inventaire, 2:2:618–619.
80 Quesnel to Cl. Nicaise, dated June 23, 1684, excerpted in Quesnel inventaire, 2.2:618–619. Quesnel claimed that the Archbishop of Paris originally approved the Abregé alongside Archbishop Vialart of Chalons. “All of Paris would witness,” he insisted, that he had worked “under the eyes and with the consent of M. Archbishop François de Harlay” (see Chédozeau, Port-Royal, 439). Vialart, according to Quesnel, would have refused his approbation had he not secured this unwritten “agreement” from Harlay (Quesnel, Explication Apologetique des sentiments du P. Quesnel dans ses Reflexions sur le Nouveau Testament . . . 15 juillet 1710, 22–23). It is notable that Harlay continued to allow Quesnel's book to be circulated in Paris even after he pushed Quesnel himself first out of the city and then out of the realm.
81 In 1685 Pralard published the 4th edition of Quesnel's of L'Abrégé de la morale de l'Evangile; in 1687 he published his first edition of Quesnel's L'Abrégé de la morale des Actes des apostres, des epistres de S. Paul, des epistres canoniques, et de l'apocalypse; ou, Pensees chretiennes sur le texte de ces livres sacres.
82 In his Avis (1675), Le Tellier compared several dozen “mistranslations” of the Mons text with (a) the Sixto-Clementine Vulgate and (b) “the faithful translation” of the Vulgate. This “faithful translation” does not match Amelote's translation, which had been approved by the entire ecclesio-political establishment of France. That bibliographers and the Port-Royalists themselves accused Amelote of poaching from the Mons text itself has been noted above.
83 Arnauld's most celebrated anti-Jesuit polemic was entitled La Morale pratique des jesuites (Paris: Estienne Michallet, [1687])Google Scholar. Ceyssens, in L'Autour (340), catalogued this hiatus between Le Tellier's anti-Mons polemics and the Defense, but he does not offer any explanation for it.
84 Apologie historique de deux censures de Louvain et de Douay sur la matiere de la Grace, a l'occasion du livre intitule: Defense des nouveaux chretiens, Par M. Gery. (Cologne: Nicolas Schouten, 1688)Google Scholar.
85 Quesnel to P. L. Du Vaucel, letter dated January 6, 1690, excerpted in Quesnel inventaire, 2.2:618–620; partially reprinted in Mme. Le Roy, Albert, Un Janséniste en exil. Correspondance de Pasquier Quesnel [ . . . ] sur les affaires politiques et religieuses de son temps (Paris: Perrin et cie, 1900), 1:130Google Scholar.
86 Quesnel to Nicole, letter dated July 10, 1692, reprinted in Le Roy, Janséniste en exil, 1:215–216. Le Tellier's Defense was placed on the Index three times: March 23, 1694; July 7, 1694; December 22, 1700.
87 Quesnel to Du Vaucel (June 18, 1693), reprinted in in Le Roy, Janséniste en exil, 1:269–271.
88 Pierre Besnier, Dominique Bouhours, and Michel Le Tellier, ed. and trans., LE NOUVEAU TESTAMENT/ De NOSTRE SEIGNEUR/ JESUS-CHRIST, TRADUIT EN FRANÇOIS/ Selon la Vulgate./ . . . / A PARIS, Chez LOUIS JOSSE Imprimeur de Mon-/seigneur l'Archevesque, . . . / M.DC.XCVII / Avec Approbation, & Privilege de Roy.
89 See the last paragraph of the preface, reproduced in Le Bachelet, Xavier-Marie, Bellarmin et la Bible Sixto-Clémentine: Étude et Documents Inédits (Paris: Beauchesne, 1911), 148–149.Google Scholar
90 This appendix was a staple of Catholic Bibles since the advent of print. Including it here, however, without the apparatus of printed explications that structured the French New Testaments since the mid-seventeenth century versions of Amelote, Port-Royal, and Quesnel, represented an alternative approach.
91 On Quesnel's explications being “pregnant with Augustinianism,” see Chédozeau, Port-Royal, 478. On their theological anthropology and “moral rigorism,” see Strayer, Brian, Suffering Saints: Jansenists and Convulsionnaires in France, 1640–1799 (Brighton, U.K.: Sussex, 2008), 39–42Google Scholar, 60.
92 Quesnel to Du Vaucel (October 26, 1696), reprinted in Le Roy, Janséniste en exil, 1:419–420.
93 Quesnel to Du Vaucel (September 12, 1699), reprinted in Le Roy, Janséniste en exil, 2:65.
94 Ceyssens claimed that Noailles refused to let the translators print their names on the New Testament on account of rumors that P. Bouhours had been unfaithful, not to the Vulgate, but to his vow of celibacy. Fear of scandal can explain only part of Noailles's resistance, however, because he registered further complaints after all names were removed. See his L'Autour, 350.
95 Quesnel to Du Vaucel (September 12, 1699), in Le Roy Janséniste en exil, 2:65.
96 The anonymous tract was entitled Probleme ecclesiastique propose a M. Boileau de l'Archeveche: A qui l'on doit croire de Msr. Louis-Antoine de Noailles, eveque de Chalons, en 1695, ou de Msr. Louis-Antoine de Noailles, archeveque de Paris, en 1696. Some historians claim that it was written by the pro-Jansenist Benedictine Thierry de Viaixnes, who was hoping to shame Noailles into approving both titles. J. A. G. Tans and L. Ceyssens, however, contend that these historians are “from the Molinist camp”; instead they assign authorship, tentatively, to a cabal of Jesuits. See Tans, Les troubles causés par la Constitution Unigenitus. Correspondance entre P. Quesnel et les principaux évêques appellants, in Lias I (1974), 186n2; Ceyssens and Tans, L'Autour, 346.
97 According to Le Roy, Lallemant was a member of Le Tellier's “Norman cabal”; according to Ceyssens, he was Le Tellier's “right hand.” In 1701 the two Jesuits co-founded the Mémoires of Trévoux through which, from the putative location of Trévoux, they were able to circulate more anti-Jansenist literature without the approval of their ordinary in Paris: Ceyssens and Tans, L'Autour, 334n5, 348–349, 359, 408.
98 Le Tellier and Lallemant's polemics were republished together in 1705 and 1707 with an explicit titular link to the ordinance of the bishop of Apt: Le P. Quesnel seditieux et heretique dans ses Reflexions sur le Nouveau Testament . . . dont la lecture pernicieuse a ete interdite par des eveques d'un grand merite, & particulierement par l'ordonnance de monseigneur l'eveque d'Apt.
99 Quesnel to [Fr. M. de Joncoux] (April 1,1704), extract printed in Le Roy, Janséniste en exil, 2:218.
100 [Tellier, Le], Le P. Quesnel Heretique dans ses Reflexions sur le Nouveau Testament (Brussels: M. Michiels, 1705)Google Scholar, a3v (Avertissement). Note that Le Tellier's title inverts the title of Quesnel's New Testament, foregrounding the paratexts ahead of the scriptural text.
101 In Le P. Quesnel Heretique (139), Le Tellier identifies the Mons text as only the twentieth reason (out of twenty) to condemn Quesnel's book. Lallemant's Le P. Quesnel Seditieux (1704) ignores the Mons text completely.
102 All 101 propositions that Unigenitus (1713) condemned are drawn from Quesnel's “Reflexions,” not his biblical translation. It is not until the penultimate page of the bull that the scriptural text is assimilated with “another french translation done at Mons long since condemned, and disagreeing very much with and differing from the vulgar edition.” The preface even depicts Quesnel's explications as the “false prophet” who is covering himself “with sentences of the divine law as with a kind of sheeps clothing”—that is, that the heresy of Quesnel's paratexts were hiding behind the authority of the scriptures, when all along it had been Quesnel's paratextual form that hid the Mons text.
103 For assessments of the ban on “popish books” inaugurated in 1571 and re-confirmed in 1603–1604, see Williams, J. Anthony, Catholic Recusancy in Wiltshire: 1600–1791 (London: Catholic Record Society, 1968), 9–11Google Scholar; Rivers, Isabel, “Religious Publishing,” eds. Suarez, Michael F. and Turner, Michael L., Cambridge History of the Book in Britain (CHBB), Vol. 5: 1695–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 580–583.Google Scholar During and after the Civil War, however, most English Catholic books were produced quietly in England, with continental publishing declining from eighty-percent of the total twenty-percent. See Clancy, Thomas, English Catholic Books, 1641–1700: A Bibliography (Brookfield, Vt.: Scolar Press, 1996)Google Scholar, ix.
104 For prior sketches of Short's life, see Gillow, Joseph, Bibliographical Dictionary of the English Catholics (London: Burns & Oates, 1902), 5:502–3Google Scholar; Clark, Ruth, Strangers & Sojourners at Port Royal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1932), 164–170Google Scholar, 173; Duffy, “Rubb-up,” 303–309.
105 See Quesnel inventaire, 1:235, 239, 241; 2.2:1081; the third extant letter (November 6, 1706), where Quesnel inquires about Short's translation of his “Reflexions,” is extracted in Le Roy, Janséniste en exil, 2:272–4, see also 281–282.
106 See Quesnel inventaire, 1:242; 2.2:1082.
107 MORAL / REFLECTIONS / UPON THE / GOSPEL / OF / St. Matthew. / To make the Reading of it more Profitable, and the Meditating / on it more Easie. / Translated from the FRENCH. / By T. W. / Printed in the Year 1706. [London], 12mo. For Thomas Whittenhall, see Gillow, Bibliographical Dictionary, 3:621; Clark, Strangers, 167; Blom, Jos, Blom, Frans, Korsten, Frans, and Scott, Geoffrey, eds., English Catholic Books, 1701–1800 (Brookfield, Vt.: Scolar, 1996), 259Google Scholar; Duffy, “Rubb-up,” 304n4, which refers to him as “Henry Whetenhall” in contrast to Clark (285, 360), and Gillow (5:503, 543) and the implication of the initials “T. W.” from the title of his translation.
108 Collinson, Patrick, Hunt, Arnold, and Walsham, Alexandra, “Religious Publishing in England, 1557–1640” in Cambridge History of the Book in Britain (CHBB), Vol. 4: 1557–1695, eds. Barnard, John and McKenzie, D. F. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008)Google Scholar, 46.
109 Moral Reflections (1706), a1r.
110 The first edition was entitled The New Testament of Jesus Christ, translated faithfully into English, out of the Authenticall Latin (Rheims, 1582)Google Scholar.
111 Walsham, “Unclasping the Book?,” 152–55; see also Walsham, “‘Domme Preachers’? Post-Reformation English Catholicism and the Culture of Print,” Past & Present, 168 (2000): 110Google Scholar; Daniell, Bible in English, 358.
112 Fulke, William, The text of the New Testament of Iesus Christ Translated out of the vulgar Latine by the Papists of the traiterous seminarie at Rhemes. . . . Whereunto is added the translation out of the original Greeke commonly vsed in the Church of England: with a confutation . . . 4th ed. (London, 1633)Google Scholar, f. 1v. Edward Bulkley made the same connection in his polemic, Answere to ten frivolous and foolish reasons set downe by the Rhemish Iesuits and papists in their preface before the New Testament . . . (London, 1588)Google Scholar. The year that the Rheims New Testament was first published (1582), Elizabeth's privy council commissioned the presbyterian Thomas Cartwright to “undertake an answer to the Papists' Testament, and other books of the Jesuits,” see State Papers 12/154, f.87 (CSPD, 2:62).
113 Moral Reflections (1706), a3v.
114 [Martin], New Testament (1582), a2r, a3r, a4r.
115 The quotations and details of Jenks's life that are used in this paragraph are dependent on Gillow, Bibliographical Dictionary, 3:616–621.
116 [Jenks], A Short Review of the Book of Jansenius . . . MDCCX. Permissu Superiorum.
117 Of the six extant copies, I reviewed four at the following locations: Ampleforth Abbey, Downside Abbey, Heythrop College, and Ushaw College. The preface is present in each one.
118 MORAL / REFLECTIONS / UPON THE / GOSPEL / OF / St. Mark. / [. . .] / Translated from the FRENCH. / By F.T. (n.p., 1707); MORAL / REFLECTIONS / UPON THE / GOSPEL / OF / St. Luke (n.p., 1707). “F. T.” is Francis Thwaites, a secular priest educated at Douai and the nephew of Whittenhall.
119 Of seven extant copies, all three that I reviewed (at Ampleforth, Bodley, & NYPL) wanted frontmatter.
120 Moral Reflections upon the Gospel of St. Luke (1707), a1r, in copies at Dr. Williams's Library and Oscott College Library. The other copies at Oscott, the Bodley, and the British Library were bound together with other Quesnel volumes and did not possess any frontmatter.
121 Moral Reflections upon . . . Luke (1707), a6r–a8v, also in copies at Dr. Williams's Library and Oscott.
122 Moral Reflections upon . . . Luke, a6r, borrowed from [Le Tellier et al.], Nouveau Testament (1697), ā12r–ē3r.
123 The hiatus between the publication of the Moral Reflections on Luke (1707) and John (1709) led one historian to conclude that Short died in 1708. See Gillow, Bibliographical Dictionary, 5:503. Duffy, however, pushed Short's death back to December 1709 (“Rubb-up,” 309), which is more harmonious with the chronology of the Quesnel-Short correspondence. Quesnel continued to write him until 1712. See Quesnel Inventaire, 1:252, 256–257, 263.
124 Quesnel Inventaire 1:246; 2.2:1082; letter (March 12) extracted in Le Roy, Janséniste en exil, 2:301–302.
125 Du Vaucel to Quesnel, April 4, 1709, recorded in Quesnel Inventaire, 2.2:1086.
126 Duffy, “Rubb-up,” 307. Vicar-Apostolic Giffard could impose discipline on Short effectively because he used to be Short's confessor. Catholic pastors were unable to censor English Catholic books generally and, moreover, were unwilling to alert their Protestant hosts to potential sources of dissidence.
127 Moral Reflections on the Gospel of St. Matthew . . . Printed in the Year 1709. [London.] a1r. Clark mistakenly believed this “Advertisement” was present in the first edition of Short's Moral Reflections (1706), and so interpreted it not as an advertisement but rather a prophylactic, protecting a Catholic book from English government censors. See her Strangers & Sojourners, 167.
128 Collinson, Hunt, and Walsham, “Religious Publishing,” CHBB, 4:44–55, esp. 52.
129 See Towers, S. Mutchow, Control of Religious Printing in Early Stuart England (Woodbridge, U.K.: Boydell, 2003), 224–225Google Scholar; Collinson, Hunt, and Walsham, “Religious Publishing,” 53–54; Rivers, “Religious Publishing,” 579–581; Clancy, English Catholic Books, xiii; Mandelbrote, “authority of the Word,” 140–141; Martin, Henri-Jean, The French Book: Religion, Absolutism, and Readership, 1585–1715, trans. Saenger, Paul and Saenger, Nadine (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 61–66.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
130 Ingram, “Dressed in Borrowed Robes,” 220–221; H. Volz, “Continental versions to c.1600: German” in Greenslade, Cambridge History of the Bible, 3:107–108.
131 See n103 above as well as Shell, Alison, “Anti-Catholic Prejudice in the 17th-Century Book-Trade,” in Censorship & The Control of Print in England and France 1600–1910, eds. Myers, Robin and Harris, Michael (Winchester, U.K.: St. Paul's Bibliographies, 1992)Google Scholar, 35.
132 How the AV became sacrosanct, almost invested with that aura of divine inspiration attributed to the original texts, is traced in Sheehan, Jonathan, The Enlightenment Bible (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005)Google Scholar. Sheehan links the stagnation of English translation efforts until the late eighteenth century with contemporary anxieties that historical-philological scholarship would undermine the theological authority of the Bible. Emphasis on the specter of skepticism and the rigidification of the text, however, can obscure the possibilities for experimenting with scriptural formats that Russel exposes and that had profound political, social, and confessional resonances beyond that of the Deist controversy.
133 In Scotland and Ireland, however, use of the AV had been made compulsory. See Mandelbrote, “The English Bible and its Readers in the Eighteenth Century,” in Books and Their Readers in Eighteenth-Century England: New Essays, ed. Rivers, Isabel (London: Leicester University Press, 2001)Google Scholar, 37.
134 Ascoli, Georges, La Grande-Bretagne devant l'opinion francaise au XVIIe siecle (1930; Geneva: Slatkine, 1971), 2:172, 175–344Google Scholar; Bond, Donald, “Introduction” in Rochedieu, C. A. E., Bibliography of French Translations of English Works, 1700–1800 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), ix–xiGoogle Scholar.
135 Stevelinck, Christiane Berkvens, “L'édition et le commerce du livre française” in Histoire de l'édition française, Tome 2: Le livre triomphant, 1660–1830, eds. Chartier, Roger and Martin, H. J. (Paris: Promodis, 1984), 311–313Google Scholar; Hoftijzer, P. G. and Lankhorst, O. S., “Continental Imports to Britain, 1695–1740,” in Suarez and Turner, CHBB, 5:513, 515, 519Google Scholar.
136 See Betteridge, Maurice S., “The Bitter Notes: The Geneva Bible and its Annotations,” Sixteenth Century Journal, 14, no. 1 (Spring, 1983): 41–62CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Slights, William, Managing Readers: Printed Marginalia in English Renaissance Books (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001), 1–2CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 115–118, 123–127; Campbell, Gordon, Bible: The Story of the King James Version, 1611–2011 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 34–35Google Scholar, 37, 41; Ian Green showed how annotations returned only in the Civil War era with the displacement of an establishment (the Stuart monarchy) that was wary of them: see his Print and Protestantism in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000)Google Scholar, 120. That only solidified the marginal status of annotations when the Stuarts returned.
137 Herbert, A. S., Historical Catalogue of Printed Editions of the English Bible, 1525–1961 (London: British and Foreign Bible Society, 1968), 189–190Google Scholar, 212, 216, 222, 238, 243.
138 Mark Rose, “Copyright, authors and censorship” in Suarez and Turner, CHBB, 5:118–131, esp. 128.
139 Handover, P. M., Printing in London (London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1960), 73–95Google Scholar; Campbell, Bible, 114, 129–130.
140 Norton, King James Bible, 153–155; Green, Print and Protestantism, 118–122.
141 Russel first tried farming to make ends meet, but he quickly determined that it was “a business for which, both by genius and education, he was very unfit.” Russel, New Testament, 1:xviii.
142 Russel makes another pejorative reference to the “generality of persons” in his farewell sermon, The Obligation of Acting According to Conscience, especially as to Oaths (London, 1716)Google Scholar, 21. For conservative discourses against undisciplined Bible-reading in the post-Reformation era, see Katz, David, God's Last Words: Reading the English Bible from the Reformation to Fundamentalism (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2004)Google Scholar, 40; Sherman, Used Books, 115–118; Green, Print and Protestantism, 43–44; Mandelbrote, “English Bible,” 40. The rector William Lowth's Directions for the Profitable Reading of Scripture (1708), republished in 1712, 1726, 1735, and 1769, reveals their currency through Russel's generation. Lowth (1769 ed., 28–33, 38–39) scolds those of “meaner capacities” whose reading practices strengthen the “papists' objections”: they must heed the minister's interpretation and not perplex themselves with abstruse passages, which has lead them to confuse doctrine and disturb the kingdom.
143 Russel reported that he was able to enlist subscribers even among “persons whose political principles are directly counter to mine.” New Testament (1719), 1:x.
144 See Monod, Paul Kleber, Jacobitism and the English People, 1688–1788 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 17–19Google Scholar.
145 On oaths, see Russel, New Testament, 1:49, 185, 492; on the divine right of kings and bishops and on whether the state ought to control ministers, see volume 4:15–17, 67, 85–86, 91, 191, 431, 547, 558.
146 Russel, The Obligation of Acting According to Conscience, especially to Oaths (1716), 10–11Google Scholar.
147 Ibid., 16–17.
148 Ibid., 23.
149 The term is Higman's, Francis in Bibliographie Materielle et Histoire Intellectuelle: Les Debuts de la Reforme Francaise (London: University of London, 1987), 7–10Google Scholar; Ingram adopted it in “Borrowed Robes,” 220–221. On the continuing predominance of religious print see Rivers, “Religious Publishing,” 579.
150 See n130 above.
151 For the concept of the “textual community,” or groups of readers who respond to similar texts in similar ways, see Stock, Brian, The Implications of Literacy: Written Language and Models of Interpretation in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The concept is useful here as long as we recognize how decisively the material organization of scriptural texts affected possibilities for appropriation.
152 The New Testament, with references set under the words at length so that the parallel texts may be seen at one view: to which are added the chronology, marginal readings, and notes chiefly on the difficult and mistaken texts of scripture: with many more references than in any edition . . . . (London, 1722), 2 vols.
153 Herbert, Historical Catalogue, 248–254.
154 Only one of these English versions appears to have been issued again that century, and then only in part: A New Version of the Gospel according to Saint Matthew: with a literal commentary on all the difficult passages . . . written originally in French by Messieurs De Beausobre and Lenfant (Cambridge, 1779). The other two versions are Mace, Daniel, The New Testament in Greek and English (London, 1729)Google Scholar; and Simon, Richard, The New Testament of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ: according to the antient Latin edition. With critical remarks upon the literal meaning in difficult places (London, 1730)Google Scholar.
155 E. Harwood, Liberal Translation of the New Testament (1768), v, cited in Norton, King James, 191.
156 See Norton, King James Bible, 155–157; and Green, Print and Protestantism, 122.
157 In Godly Reading: Print, Manuscript, and Puritanism in England, 1580–1720 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011)Google Scholar, Andrew Cambers illuminates the communitarian settings in which puritans and dissenters read the Bible, challenging the dominant motif of the solitary godly reader and suggesting that the reading practices of English Catholic non-conformists might be studied the same way.
158 [Cornelius Nary], The New Testament of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, newly translated out of the Latin Vulgat. And with the original Greek, and divers translations in vulgar languages diligently compared and revised. Together with annotations . . . . (n.p., 1718); [Robert Witham], Annotations on the New Testament (n.p., 1730).
159 Duffy claimed that Quesnel was “popular among English Catholics,” but did not try to justify the claim (“Rubb-up,” 311). Fewer than ten copies of each of Short's volumes are known to be extant.
160 For Goter's liturgical works, see Crichton, James, Worship in a Hidden Church (Dublin: Columba, 1988), 68–80Google Scholar.
161 Meighan republished the volumes of Goter's Instructions for the whole year. Being practical thoughts on the epistles, gospels, and lessons . . . . in 1717, 1718, 1723, 1726, 1730, 1736, 1744, and 1752, as well as moral reflections on the introit, prayer, epistle and gospel of all the Sundays in the year in 1729.
162 [Challoner, Richard], The Morality of the Bible: extracted from all the canonical books . . . for the use of such pious Christians as desire to nourish their souls to eternal life (London, 1762)Google Scholar, republished in 1765.
163 On liturgical books sustaining English dissenting communities, see Walsham, “Preaching without Speaking: Script, Print, and Religious Dissent,” in Walsham & Crick, Uses of Script and Print, 215–217Google Scholar.
164 The first edition of the gospels only was published in 1697 and republished in 1698. The entire New Testament was published in a variety of forms and layouts in 1703, 1704, 1709 (twice), 1711, and 1734.
165 [Lallemant], Reflexions morales: avec des notes sur le Nouveau Testament, traduit en François, 2nd ed. (Paris: Montalant, 1714–25), 12 mo., 12 vols.Google Scholar The first edition (1713) contained only the four gospels.
166 Decr. S. Congregationis Ind. 13 junii 1757, reprinted in Chédozeau, La Bible et la Liturgie, 44–46. Note also that the brief confirmed an absolute prohibition on certain works of heretics, including “the holy Bible printed by their care, or augmented by their notes, arguments, summaries, scolia, and indices.”