ABSTRACT
Tremellius’ edition of the Old Testament has been described as ‘one of the classical works of the Reformation’.1 In the historical writing of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, there is an overwhelming consensus not only that this work was Tremellius’ most important contribution to his age, but also that his was the foremost Protestant Latin translation of the period. This is certainly the impression that emerges from the standard reference works. For instance E. I. Carlyle, in the original Dictionary ofNational Biography, remarked that, while it was far from faultless, Tremellius’ translation ‘evinced very thorough scholarship, and for long, both in England and on the continent, was adopted by the reformers as the most accurate rendering’.2 Much more recently, Brian Armstrong, writing in The New International Dictionary of the Christian Church, noted that: ‘Tremellius is best known for his Latin translation of the Hebrew Scriptures … long used as the most accurate Latin Bible’.3 Such opinions are endorsed by more specialist literature. For example, in her monograph on the Renaissance Bible, Deborah Shuger went even further when she described Tremellius as the ‘translator of the major Protestant Latin Bible’, and, shortly after, refers to the translation as ‘the great Protestant Latin Bible’.4 Despite this general appreciation of the significance of Tremellius’ Old Testament, surprisingly scant attention has been paid to it. His nineteenth-century biographers could hardly pass over it without comment, but their treatments are inevitably short and superficial.5 It is also clear that even in the field of biblical scholarship, Tremellius’ work has not received anywhere near the attention that it deserves.6 For this reason
it is the intention of this chapter to subject this work to a more thorough analysis, again seeking, as in the last chapter, to offer a characterisation of the particular qualities of that work.
