![]() ![]() Thanks to Luther’s nailing his 95 Theses to the door of the cathedral in Wittenberg in 1517, that city became a center of book publishing and bookbinding. In the Renaissance and Reformation, books were sold unbound, and the buyers of those texts would have them bound by professional bookbinders. But who wrote those handwritten pages? And who bound this book? The books in that shipment were missing a quire, (a section) of the book, and our copy has missing pages, which were replaced with handwritten copies of the missing texts. According to records from that printing house, Jan Moretus shipped 500 unbound copies of this book, Biblia Sacra, to Germany to be sold at the famous Frankfurt Book Fair in the Fall of 1599. Our library catalog record for this book notes that our copy was published in Antwerp, Belgium at the Plantin Moretus Printing House in 1599. ![]() With the endorsement of Pope Clement the Sixth (1592 to 1605) and the Council of Trent (1545 – 1563), the Clementine Vulgate Bible was printed widely throughout Europe. His actions in Wittenberg inspired the leaders of the Counter Reformation to revise their version of the Bible. Hatfield Library has hundreds of rare books ranging from medieval manuscripts to 20 th century first editions, and my study of one of these works, a Latin Bible entitled Biblia Sacra, proves that you really cannot judge a book by its cover. Researching a Rare Book is often like a treasure hunt. ![]()
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