L'Hébreu dans le livre lyonnais au XVIe siècle: inventaire chronologique (review)

In 2004, Lyse Schwarzfuchs published Le Livre hébreu à Paris au XVI^e siècle (see the review in The Library, vii, 6 (2005), 341–43). In this new publication she has analysed sixteenth-century works containing Hebrew printing types printed at Lyons. It is interesting to compare the production of such books in Paris and in Lyons, the only other town in France in the sixteenth century where Hebrew types were used (except for four books at La Rochelle at the end of the century). But one has to keep in mind that there was no Jewish population in France from 1394. (At Lyons, not belonging to the Kingdom of France, the Jews were expelled around 1420). So these books were not intended for a Jewish market. It was the Christian humanistic interest in the Hebraica veritas, in the original language of the Old Testament, so typical of the Renaissance and the Reformation. Latin, Greek, and Hebrew were taught not only at the 'Collegium trilingue' at Louvain, but also at the 'Collège royal' at Paris.

In Lyons, the Italian Dominican Sante [Antonio] Pagnini (1486–1536) together with the printers Antoine Du Ry and Sébastien Gryphe made an important contribution in providing tools for the study of Christian Hebraists. The most important work is Pagnini's Thesaurus linguae sanctae, printed in folio by Gryphe in 1529 (no. 21). It is a Hebrew-Latin dictionary of over 700 leaves, printed from right to left and based on David Kimchi's famous Sefer hashorashim (Book of Roots), the first Hebrew book ever printed (Rome: Obadiah, Manasseh, and Benjamin, 1469–73; see BMC, xiii, pp. xlv and 4–5). At Lyons, the work was reprinted twice (nos 136 and 139).

Before Pagnini's death in 1536, Gryphe published the popular Latin-Italian dictionary of Ambrogio Calepino (1440–1510), who knew no Hebrew, with anonymous additional Hebrew terminology, probably by the hand of Pagnini (no. 29). From 1570 ten new editions of this dictionary appeared at Lyons with very learned additional Hebrew material, also anonymous but probably from the hand of Corneille Bonaventure Bertram (1531–94). Twenty-nine editions of works by Desiderius Erasmus with small Hebrew citations were published at Lyons. There are twenty editions of the Familiarum colloquiorum opus, published between 1527 and 1562, in which some Hebrew extracts from Habakkuk 2. 4 and Psalm 24. 12 are found; six editions of the Adagia, between 1528 and 1559, with extracts from Proverbs 27. 17, I Kings 10. 11–12, 19. 24, and 24. 13; two of the Moriae encomium of 1529 and 1540 with one single Hebrew word; and finally one of the Epistola ad Augustinum Eugubinum and the Responsio Eugubini, 1530, with some Hebrew through out. One third of the books in which some Hebrew types have been used are Latin or French Bibles, or parts thereof.

The structure of Schwarzfuchs's new book is modelled on her book on Paris. Since she refers to this frequently, the two are best consulted side by side. In the book on Paris, 439 separate items have been described, while in the Lyons book there are exactly 200. A few editions are considered doubtful; of three editions (nos 3, 105, and 165) no single copy could be traced.

In the regular literature on Hebrew printing, Lyons has hardly ever played any role. What Schwarzfuchs has brought together with much diligence, are mainly Latin and French books with here and there a few lines, or even a few words, or letters, in Hebrew type. Nevertheless, the first Hebrew printed types in France, albeit in woodcut, appeared in 1488 at Lyons (in Bernhard von Breydenbach's Des sainctes peregrinations de Iherusalem, copied from the Munich edition of 1486). At Paris, they first appeared in 1508. And the first serious Hebrew grammar (in Latin...