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Reviewed by:
  • L’Univers biblique catholique au siècle de Louis XIV: ‘La Bible de Port-Royal’, I: Les Préfaces de l’Ancien Testament: une théologie scripturaire (1672–1693); II: Les Préfaces du Nouveau Testament (1696–1708) by Bernard Chédozeau
  • Richard Parish
L’Univers biblique catholique au siècle de Louis XIV: ‘La Bible de Port-Royal’, I: Les Préfaces de l’Ancien Testament: une théologie scripturaire (1672–1693); II: Les Préfaces du Nouveau Testament (1696–1708). Par Bernard Chédozeau. Préface de Jean Lesaulnier. (Sources classiques, 112). 2 vols. Paris: Honoré Champion, 2013. 912 pp.

This substantial edition provides the texts of all the approbations and prefaces to the Port-Royal translation of the Bible, presented in the chronological order of their publication (which, with the exception of St Paul’s Letters, corresponds to the Old Testament in [End Page 102] the first volume and the New Testament in the second). There are opening and closing essays of a synthetic nature, as well as detailed analyses of the liminary texts to the successive books. Some doubt prevails as to which of the earlier pieces can be safely attributed to Le Maistre de Sacy, who died in 1684; and Bernard Chédozeau is the first to admit that much of the later material is of relatively mediocre quality. The volumes are probably best taken, therefore, as a critical édition de référence of the paratexts, and readers who simply consult specific prefaces will be provided both with reliable documents and with a good deal of bibliographical and contextual material while being spared the substantial amount of repetition that is perhaps an inevitable feature of such an enterprise. The recurrent hermeneutic emphasis falls on the desire by Port-Royal scholars to avoid, on the one hand, the growing tendency to engage in philological analysis (which marked the contemporary scholarship of Richard Simon, most enduringly, but was dismissed by Bossuet as ‘minuties grammaticales’), and, on the other, a subjective assimilation of sacred texts to the circumstances of the reader, with the kinds of result that tended to nurture the excesses of Quietism (and which were condemned in turn by Richard Simon as ‘mystiqueries’). In the event, the project itself was destined to be rapidly superseded by more rigorous exegesis, based above all on the practice of commenting on the Hebrew and Greek originals rather than on the Latin of the Vulgate. Overall, the Old Testament pieces afford the most fertile material, with their need to discriminate between a singular sens littéral (for the unconverted) and the plural sens spirituels (for believers), a distinction that is then more broadly applied, excepting only the purely allegorical books of the Song of Songs and the Apocalypse. These prefaces also identify the eventual addressees of the prophetic books as being Christians as well as Jews, and so introduce the widely evoked categories of ‘saints Juifs’, who were able to look beyond the purely Judaic import of the writing, and of (post-Incarnation) ‘chrétiens charnels’, who afford a negative correlative. Most consistently of all, the purpose of biblical study is understood as salvific, and the more democratic access to sacred texts in the vernacular is advocated in parallel with the sacraments as stages on the journey of the laity towards holiness. The opening presentational material usefully and convincingly situates the prefaces in the current of Augustinian thought that was prevalent in the period among moralistes, and affords pertinent analogies with the Querelle des anciens et des modernes; some of the closing remarks, devoted to the links between Port-Royal and Vatican II, seem less obviously suited to this kind of (primarily editorial) project.

Richard Parish
St Catherine’s College, Oxford
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