D De Bruyne’s Sommaires, Divisions et Rubriques de la Bible Latine was originally printed in the summer of 1914 in Namur in southern Belgium, just before the town was destroyed in the German bombardment because it lay directly on the invasion route.
Only a handful of copies survived so for 100 years the text was like gold dust – even the British Library had to rely on a poor-quality photocopy of a photocopy! And, even if you got one of these, despite its French title, the work was in Latin. After the war, money was short and it was impossible to reprint the work due to the complex type-setting needed.
Tom O’Loughlin spent nearly a decade finding perfect copies of the two books, then persuading their owners – the Benedictines of Maredsous – to allow them to be dis-bound and copied. Publisher, Brepols, sent a team of specialists to the monastery to do this and the process was finally complete in early 2015.
Both volumes, Summaries, Divisions and Rubrics of the Latin Bible and Prefaces to the Latin Bible, were reprinted with introductions by O’Loughlin as to their value, and biographical and bibliographical notes on De Bruyne by Pierre-Maurice Bogaert who, like O’Loughlin, has worked extensively on the reception of the Bible in the west.
Posted on Thursday 12th November 2015