Introduction

The Polyglot Bibles published in Europe between 1500 and 1700 offer some of the best expressions of the objectives of late Renaissance humanism. Exquisitely printed, in an increasing number of ancient and Eastern languages, edited by the greatest biblical scholars of the day, they combined the ideals of the bibliophile with those of the philologist.

The production of parts of the Bible in various languages was by no means new. Bilingual texts appear throughout the Middle Ages. They served various purposes. They could assist students of the languages or simply provide the translation into a known language of a liturgy in one no longer spoken. The Coptic monasteries of Egypt held versions of the Bible in their libraries which were in more than two languages and intended for visitors from the different parts of the vast Monophysite world. By the twelfth century, when Coptic was being replaced by Arabic, we find fragments of the New Testament in Coptic, Ethiopic, Syriac, Arabic and Armenian. The tradition continued well into the fourteenth century, as we see from the polyglot fragments of the New Testament from the Baramus monastery in the Wadi Natrun north-west of Cairo, and the Psalter at the Macarius monastery in the same area, purchased (but never received) in the early seventeenth century by the French antiquarian Nicolas Fabri de Peiresc, involved in the preparation of the Paris Polyglot Bible.

Yet another contemporary polyglot manuscript, however, also from the Monophysite world, a psalter now in the Cambridge University Library, in Hebrew, Greek, Syriac and Arabic, was intended for a more scholarly end. The compiler clearly wished to correct the Syriac version on the basis of the Hebrew. He thus seems to have been following a different tradition – one which was known in the West – and which dates back to the early third century when Origen prepared his Hexapla, an edition of the Old Testament in six different versions presented in parallel columns: the Hebrew text, the Hebrew text transcribed in Greek characters, and the four Greek versions of Aquila, Symmachus, Theodotion and the Septuagint.