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LireraTuRE.—S. Berger, ‘La Bible Italienne au moyen age’ in Romania, 1894, p. 358 ff. (with bibliography, and list of MSS appended) ; 8. Minocchi, art. ‘Ttaliennes Versions de la Bible’ in Vigouroux’s Dict. de la Bible; Negroni, La Bibbia volgare ; Carini, Le Versioni della Bibbia in volgare italiano ; le Long, Bibliotheca Sacra.
iii. SPANISH _VERSIONS.—l. The history of the Bible in Spain begins with Priscillian and Lucinius of Beetica, the correspondent of Jerome (£pp. 1xxi. and Ixxv.); and four centuries later the school of sacred paliweography at Seville and afterwards at Toledo, from which came the Codex Toletanus and Codex Cavensis, might well detain us. The im- portance of the Visigothic text of the Vulgate, and the influence of Theodulf and the Latin Bible of Spain beyond the border of that country, are other interesting subjects closely connected with the Spanish Bible.
2. But our immediate object is to trace the his- tory of the Bible in the Spanish language. To this there is no allusion before the 13th cent., when John 1., king of Arragon, passed a royal decree in 1233 at Tarragona, that no one, clergy or laity, was to keep in his house any translation into the vulgar tongue of the OT or NT. This prohibition implies the existence of such a translation. A few years later, however, the reign of Alphonse X., surnamed ‘the Wise’ (1252-1284), marks a period of literary activity, especially in regard to the translation of ancient writings into Spanish. Among other works he is said to have ordered a translation of Jerome’s text of the Bible. One of the most important productions of this reign was the commencement, at any rate, of a Historia General very similar in character to the Bible Historiale (see above, p. 405"), but in its original form probably more general, and containing less of the Bible text than the French work. The Historia was divided into five parts, the first of which corresponded roughly to the Pentateuch ; the second covered from the death of Moses to the death of David; the third the Psalter, Sapiential books, and some of the Prophets ; of the fourth we do not know the contents; the fifth contained some of the Prophets, the Apocryphal books, and a large part of the NT. It is probable that the first two parts alone go back to the time of Alphonse x., and that in Spain, as elsewhere, the earliest form of the composition had comparatively little of the actual text of the Bible, though a good deal of it was paraphrased. Of this work we have many MSS of the 14th and 15th cents., some with, some without, the text of the Bible. It is impos- sible, however, to define precisely the date and origin of the Bible text contained in the work, the later MSS of which in Spain as in France no doubt gradually incorporated more and more of the ipsissima verba of the Bible. Comparatively little, if any, can be assigned to the date of Alphonse xX.
3. One almost unique feature in the history of the Spanish version of the Bible, as compared with those made in other countries, is the large pro- portion of early translations made from the Hebrew text, the work of Jewish Rabbis. The history of these, and of the translations made from the Latin, has to be recovered from an examination of the text of MSS contained in the Escurial and elsewhere, and from such other information as these MSS give in the way of prefaces, notes, ete. Much has been done in this direction by Eguren in the work mentioned at the end of this section, and by Berger in a detailed comparison of the text of the MSS in two articles in Romania for 1899, where a full description of a number of MSS and a bibliography will be found.
Among the important MSS which contain trans- lations from the Hebrew may be mentioned two
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in the Escurial, I. j. 8 and I. j. 6. The first of these is a 15th cent. MS, which contains a large part of the first half of the Bible, including the Psalter. This version of the Psalter is said, in a note prefixed to it, to be the work of Herman, a German, and to be made from the Hebrew. Now a man of this name, known as a translator of Aristotle, is connected with Toledo about the year 1240. There is no reason, then, to doubt that the Psalter was translated about that time by Herman. He probably used the Psalt. Heb. of Jerome, and so we find selah (in Ps 51 [Eng. and Heb. 52]°) ren- dered by ‘always’; but the translation shows an independent knowledge of Hebrew, as at Ps 41° and 417, The second MS mentioned above is assigned to the 14th cent., and contains the second half of the Bible. The Spanish used is that of the early 14th cent., and there are many points of resem- blance, in respect of the text divisions, summaries, etc., between this MS and the Codex Toletanus, the Bible of Theodulf, and the Visigothic text—a resemblance which points to an early date for the translation. There are various other MSS _ con- taining versions from the Hebrew, ¢.g. Escur. Bibl. MS 4, and a bilingual (Lat. and Spanish) MS belonging to the Royal Hist. Library at Madrid, which begins with the Major Prophets and ends with 2 Maccabees. The best known of these translations is the so-called Bible of the Duke of Alba, the MS of which is now in the Liria Palace at Madrid. This is described by Berger as an ‘unrivalled monument of Spanish art and science,’ ‘an enterprise unrivalled in the Middle Ages.’ The work was ordered in 1422 by Louis de Guzman, master of the order of Calatrava, who paid more than £3000 for it. The translation was carried out between 1422 and 1430 by Rabbi Moses Arragel (i.e. ‘the Expert’) of Maqueda, near Toledo. It was not a new translation, but a revision of older texts.