Multi-Language

MS 74 is one of the library’s oldest manuscripts, dated to the later 10th century, so well over 1000 years old. It contains the writings of Saint John Chrysostom (347–407), Church Father, Archbishop of Constantinople, and one of the most prolific authors of the early Christian Church. In his hometown of Antioch, Syria (now Turkey), Greek civilization encountered the various cultures of the Near East, and its mainly Greek population mingled with Syrians, Phoenicians, Romans, and Jews. During the crusades of the 12th and 13th centuries it was one of the most fiercely fought-over towns in the Levant. Our MS 74 was produced in Constantinople, modern Istanbul, around 950–975 CE, and contains the first 44 of Chrysostom’s 90 homilies on the Gospel of Matthew. 

The illuminated initials and floral bands at the start of each homily are of notably high quality—not two of the 40 exquisitely ornamented bands with floral motifs are the same, and with their intricate detail, their delicate colour gradations, and their rich gold backgrounds they are among the finest examples of their kind.

Both MS 74 and the second Greek manuscript showcased below, MS 44, were among the 38 volumes which came to New College as part of the library of Cardinal Reginald Pole (1500–1558), Archbishop of Canterbury under Queen Mary I. Pole had already donated several books to the College in 1557, but after his death in 1558 his entire library was donated to New College by his friend and executor, Alvus Priuli.
 
MS 74 was probably bought by Pole during one of his stays in Paris in 1526 or 1529, and it is marked with his characteristic ownership note ‘polus’ on one of the front flyleaves.

MS 44 cannot quite rival MS 74 in terms of age (it is dated to c. 1200 CE), but certainly surpasses it in its luxurious decoration. It contains the Old Testament books of the Minor Prophets, translated into Greek, and most likely produced in Cyprus or possibly Constantinople. The manuscript also contains selections from the Book of Maccabees, a history of Jewish leaders which, though first written in Hebrew, now only survives in Greek translations such as this one.

MS 44 is part of a set of four volumes which together make up a complete Old Testament. One of its three companion volumes made a similarly long voyage, and is now held just down the street from New College in the Bodleian Library. The other two stayed closer to home: one of them is in the National Library in Athens, and the other apparently never even left its place of origin, and can today be found in Istanbul, in the Topkapi Palace. Together they form one of only two surviving examples of a multi-volume Old Testament. 

The beauty of this manuscript comes from its detailed miniatures, each showing one of the prophets at the beginning of their book —almost miraculously, all 19 original miniatures have survived. They are illuminated with gold in a style typical of late-Byzantine Christian iconography, and the miniatures we have chosen to show here are those of Jeremiah (left) and of Susannah (right), the only woman included. For both the artist has used warm tones to create vivid, lifelike portraits.

Armenian is one of the rarer languages Margoliouth mastered. While Armenian studies have been pursued at Oxford for a long time, the currently existing professorship of Armenian was established only in 1965, 25 years after Margoliouth’s death. Currently, Oxford is the only university in the UK where Armenian can be studied.

The Armenian script was created for the language by Bishop Mesrop Mashtots (362–440) in the early fifth century. Although it may look similar to Arabic, it is actually closer to Greek, written left to right with one letter for each sound, and with broadly the same alphabetical order.

This psalter, MS 321, is dated to the 16th century. Liturgical Armenian psalter manuscripts like this one divide the 150 Psalms into eight canons, or tones. In our manuscript, the beginning of each of these is decorated lavishly with coloured headpieces—in bold black and red ink in the earlier part of the book (left), and with delicate line-drawings of floral motifs and birds in purple in the latter part of the volume (right).

 
The psalter was donated to New College in 1688 by a student named William Preston, possibly upon the occasion of his graduation. It reflects a wider interest in Armenian at this time, as several Oxford scholars were already researching the language at this early stage—notably Bodley’s Librarian Thomas Hyde (1636–1703), whose book on Armenian place-names never got published, but whose treatise on the Persians is one of the items explored further down in this section. How exactly William Preston, about whom nothing else is known, got his hands on this rarity remains a mystery, but in acquiring and then donating it to the college he certainly responded to the contemporary scholarly interest in Armenian at Oxford. 

The very first multilingual (or polyglot) Bible was published in Spain in 1514. It contained the complete existing texts in Hebrew and Aramaic in addition to the usual Greek and Latin, and it was a landmark in Oriental Studies. Only two years later, in 1516, the first polyglot psalter was published. The Genoa Psalter, also known as the Octaplum or Quadruplex Psalter (BT1.48.1), contains the text of the Psalms in no less than five different languages. The eight columns which are printed on each double page contain, from left to right, the original (Masoretic) Hebrew text; a literal translation of the Hebrew; the text of the Latin Vulgate; the Greek text of the Septuagint; the text in Arabic; the Aramaic Targum translation of the psalms in Hebrew characters; a literal translation of the Targum into Latin; and the learned commentary known as the Scholia.

As Semitic languages, Hebrew, Arabic, and Aramaic are all written from right to left; but Greek and Latin are of course written left to right, and the combination of all these languages on one page must have caused issues for the editors. In the end, despite being outnumbered, the Western languages prevailed, and dictated the direction of reading in this book. 

Excitingly, the psalter contains possibly the first printed reference to the most famous son of its place of origin, the Republic of Genoa: Christopher Columbus and his exploits merit a lengthy footnote to Psalm 19. The statement in the psalm that word of the glory of God has gone in fines orbis terrae, ‘to the ends of the world’, seems to have been the occasion for this, with Columbus’s voyages considered an embodiment of the idea of going to the ends of the known world. Of this psalter only 2,000 copies of it were printed for its editor, the Italian Catholic bishop, linguist, and geographer Agostino Giustiniani (1470–1536). Disappointed by the sales, he never published the polyglot version of the New Testament which he had planned and started to work on. This had to wait another 50 years until the publication of the Antwerp Bible.

Advertised by its printer Christophe Plantin (c. 1520–1589) as ‘the most beautiful work’ ever executed, the eight-volume Antwerp Biblia Polyglotta (BT1.72.4-11) contains a whole library of Renaissance learning. Produced under the patronage of King Philip II of Spain (1527–1598) and the supervision of the Spanish theologian Benito Arias Montano (1527–1598), it represents the combined efforts of eminent scholars from across Europe. 

Flemish printer and publisher Franciscus Raphelengius (1539–1597), primary editor and author of the first European Arabic-Latin dictionary, collaborated among others with the Flemish humanist and Syriacist Andreas Masius (1514–1573), the Italian philologist and biblical scholar Sante Pagnini (1470–1536), the French linguist and Orientalist Guillaume Postel (1510–1581), and his student, the French Bible scholar and Orientalist Guy Lefèvre de la Boderie (1541–1598). It took four years, from 1569 to 1573, and 13 printing presses to complete the eight volumes of this work.

The text of the Old Testament, in Hebrew, Greek, Aramaic, and Latin, fills Volumes 1 to 4; the text of the New Testament in Syriac, Latin, and Greek with a Latin translation and a Hebrew transliteration follows in Volume 5—this is the opening page of the Gospel according to Matthew. 

Volume 6 has grammars and dictionaries for these languages; Volume 7 contains the whole biblical text in Hebrew and Greek with interlinear Latin; and Volume 8 is filled with a wide range of accompanying material from indices and lists of names to commentaries on the psalms and treatises on biblical antiquity from the layout of the Temple in Jerusalem to the topography of the Holy Land, including this map of Canaan, the ancient region in the Levant which encompassed modern-day Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, and parts of Jordan and Syria.

At 18cm and only 84 pages this next item is rather smaller in scope than either of these two large-scale polyglot prints, but possibly makes up for this with in the length of its title: Epicedia Academiæ Oxoniensis in obitum serenissimæ Mariæ principis arausionensis (BT3.61.18(26)). It is a collection of odes and elegies composed, compiled, and presented by members of the University of Oxford on the occasion of the death of Mary, the first Princess Royal and Princess Consort of Orange (1631–1660), mother of King William III of England. It was printed in 1660 apparently quite in haste by the official ‘printer to the University’, Leonard Lichfield II (1637–1686), who on the final pages apologises for the ‘disorder’d, sullied Proofs’.

It contains poems by 63 different students, lecturers, and officials, including one student, one professor, and the warden of New College. 

54 Latin and 11 English poems are joined by a few multi-language verses in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. The page pictured on the left, p. 20, contains the only Arabic poem, by Edward Bernard (1638–1697) of St John’s College (‘Coll. D. Joan. Bapt. Soc.’), who has been called ‘one of the most learned men of a learned age’ and a ‘polyglot student of antiquity’—he knew Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, Syriac, and Coptic, and studied Samaritan, Ethiopic, Persian, and Russian. The Hebrew poem on the next page, p. 21, is by Edward Bernard's close friend Thomas Smith (1638–1710), later lecturer in Hebrew at Magdalen College, Oxford, but at the time still studying for his BA at Queen’s College (‘è Collegio Reginæ’).

The Historia religionis veterum Persarum eorumque magorum, the ‘religious history of the ancient Persians and their magicians’, is the major published work of Thomas Hyde (1636–1703), a gifted orientalist (NB.39.27). Educated at Cambridge, he was Bodley’s Librarian from 1665 until his resignation in 1701, and he was also appointed to teach in the posts of Laudian Professor of Arabic (1691–1703) and Regius Professor of Hebrew (1697–1703). In 1699 he wrote his Historia, the first comprehensive treatment of the ancient Persian Zoroastrians and their religion, based on material he had acquired from members of the East India Company. Published in 1700, it was not well received at publication, and became popular only after Hyde’s death—so much so that it would later form the basis for the entry on Zoroastrianism in Voltaire’s 1764 Dictionnaire Philosophique.

One of its most spectacular pages is the foldout pictured below, which persents samples of a large number of different scripts and languages, mostly reproduced from inscriptions at Persepolis and Palmyra. They include, among others, Armenian, Arabic, Georgian, a ‘magical’ alphabet, and, in one of its first-ever appearances in print, cuneiform. Other pages also include Nabatean Aramaic, Chinese characters, Mongolian, and a Tartar alphabet. The cost for the exotic type and the many engravings for the book was estimated by Thomas Hyde to have been the huge sum of £224.