[BIBLE.] Biblij Czeská.

A monumental, beautifully illustrated bible in Czech, in a peculiar and eerie Czech Jesuit binding – a deluxe book, all eds scarce and very rarely found complete. This is the fourth edition by the Melantrich press, in the Utraquist version based on the Latin Vulgate, with the addition of the third book of the Maccabees. This ed. includes new woodcut illustrations by the German Florian Abel and the Italian Francesco Terzio. ‘Thanks to Melantrich, the Czech Bible reached wide circles of people, and it was read in families during many generations’ (Pecirkova, p.1177). Educated at Wittenberg and a humanist scholar, Melantrich (1511-80) represents ‘the apex of C16 printing in the Czech Lands. […] when the Kingdom of Bohemia lost sovereignty in 1620, Melantrich’s eds became a treasury of the Czech language and culture for centuries to come’ (Ryznar, p.15).

 The superb design of the woodcuts – including the six days of creation – was inspired by the woodcuts of the Benátská Bible, the first Czech bible printed abroad, in Venice in 1506. Like the Benátská and the Severinova bibles that followed, all inspired by the C15 Venetian Malermi Bible, Melantrich’s bible beautified the text with full-page and smaller woodcuts (‘Česká kniha’, 161-64). The style and hatching of the latter, traditionally influenced by the work of Dürer and Schön, show here the influence of Terzio’s Italian training. ‘The translation or modification of older versions was partially prepared by Sixt of Ottersdorf, a Reformation humanist and a well-known historian who prepared the translation of the Third Book of Maccabees […] and also took part in modification of the New Testament. The Melantrich Bibles represent the official and most widespread Czech translation of the second half of the C16’ (Dittmann).

 The text of the Melantrich bible was produced across the years of the Council of Trent, and the printer did not have the means to revise the whole text according to the new regulations. This became a problem when Jesuit presence became stronger in Bohemia from the 1550s; the Czech Jesuit Vaclav Sturm called it the ‘zmelantrichovani’ (‘entangled’), instead of ‘Melantrichova’, bible (Kyas, p.172). This copy was sometime in a Czech or Slovak Jesuit college, church or school within the Kingdom of Hungary, as suggested by the Patriarchal cross (the Hungarian device) tooled to the lower cover of the C19 binding. Whilst Utraquist practices were deemed very close to Catholicism, except for the liturgical use of the vernacular, after 1620, when the Counter-Reformation was fully enforced in Bohemia after defeat by the Habsburgs, ‘absolute conformity to the norms of the post-Tridentine liturgical books was soon demanded’ (Wainwright, p.314). The highlighting in this copy may illustrate this shift, including the study of specific passages and the crossing-out of the Protestant-leaning doxology, absent in the Vulgate, at the end of the Lord’s Prayer (fol.508v). A Czech ms note records what appear to be deaths of a dozen people likely caused by the plague; there was indeed a flare-up in 1639-40, brought about by soldiers crossing the Czech Lands during the Thirty Years’ War. The annotator records that ‘Darkness began. In the summer of 1639 the first died’, then Gyryk Kautecky, Matau Pwrabecz, Michl Pachcke and a few others.

 Only Columbia and UW copies recorded in the US.