Dictionnaire Historique, Critique, Chronologique, Geographique et Litteral de la Bible

Paris, Émery, Saugrain and Pierre Martin, 1730. Four large folio volumes.

Second, revised, corrected and enlarged edition of Dom Augustin Calmet's Dictionnaire historique, critique, chronologique, géographique et littéral de la Bible, and the first to incorporate into a single alphabetical sequence both the text of the 1722 edition and the two supplementary volumes published in 1728. It thus gave this vast exegetical undertaking its definitive form, in four volumes covering A-D, E-M, N-T and V-Z.

The Paris edition of this complete recasting, in large folio, should be distinguished from the counterfeit issued in the same year at Geneva by Marc-Michel Bousquet, in four quarto volumes and with a far more limited illustrative apparatus.

The exceptionally rich illustration comprises a frontispiece and 204 plates, together with a title vignette repeated in each volume and numerous engraved ornaments. The publishers advertised "more than three hundred intaglio figures", many plates containing several individual subjects. A substantial number of the plates are double-page, all mounted on guards. Title pages printed in red and black.

Volume I contains six maps, one plan and forty-seven single, double or triple plates; volume II has fifty-nine plates, most of them double-page; volume III contains eighty-four, approximately half double-page; and volume IV has seven. Views, maps, architectural plans, costumes, ceremonies, battles, punishments, coins and antiquities together form a remarkable visual encyclopaedia of the biblical world.

A very fine copy on good paper, the half-titles, titles and plates printed on substantial rag paper, the text on laid paper, with generous margins.

Contemporary full polished tan calf, spines with six raised bands and compartments richly decorated with small gilt tools, dark green morocco lettering and volume labels, boards framed with a blind fillet and bearing gilt arms at the centre, gilt roll to the board edges, marbled endpapers and pastedowns, red edges.

Upper joint of volume I split for approximately 7 cm at the head, with a small loss at the foot of the lower joint; upper joint of volume II split for approximately 7.5 cm at the foot; abrasions and scuffing to the boards of volume III, with a discreetly repaired defect at the foot; headcap of volume IV damaged, small worm trace at the foot of the upper joint, with some surface wear and darkening at the lower edge of the front board. Corners worn, some restored, with a few small wormholes, principally to the joints.

A few leaves or gatherings slightly yellowed. Tear with minor loss of text to leaf K in volume I; faint marginal tide-mark to several leaves in volume II; in volume III, a wormhole passing through the lower margin to page 272, thereafter reduced to a small trace over a few leaves; small tear in the paper of the final leaf of volume IV. Other very minor signs of use. The set remains internally fresh.

An important copy bearing the arms of Guillaume-Gabriel Pavée, Baron de Vendeuvre: Or, a peacock proper, on a chief Azure a crosslet Or between two mullets of the same, surmounted by a baron's coronet. Born in 1779, Pavée de Vendeuvre represented the Aube as a deputy under the Restoration and July Monarchy and was created a Peer of France in 1837. His library at the Château de Vendeuvre-sur-Barse contained numerous historical and literary works in armorial bindings; an important portion was dispersed at auction in Paris in 2007.

The monumental scale of the books reflects that of Calmet's intellectual project. A Benedictine of the Congregation of Saint-Vanne and Saint-Hydulphe, historian and biblical scholar, Augustin Calmet devoted much of his life to the interpretation of Scripture. His enormous Commentaire littéral sur tous les livres de l'Ancien et du Nouveau Testament, begun in 1707, examined the biblical books in succession. The Dictionnaire formed its encyclopaedic counterpart: persons and places, chronology, geography, history, philology, customs, monuments, coins and antiquities all became means through which the biblical text could be understood.

The first edition of 1722 had appeared in two volumes, A-L and M-Z. The rapid accumulation of further material required two substantial supplementary volumes in 1728, themselves arranged A-L and M-Z. The edition of 1730 completely reintegrated these additions into their corresponding articles. It was therefore far more than a reprint: four volumes originally issued in two separate stages were transformed into a single alphabetical architecture.

The same ambition governs the illustrations. Maps reconstruct the geography of the Holy Land and the routes of biblical history; plans recreate cities, camps, temples and buildings; figurative plates depict battles, sacrifices, ceremonies, dress, instruments and punishments. The images do not simply embellish the text. They seek to make the vanished material world of Scripture visible and intelligible.

The contrast with the Geneva edition of 1730 is particularly revealing. Bousquet reproduced the new organisation of the dictionary in a more compact format, but without the enormous graphic corpus of the Paris edition. Here the 204 plates and their more than three hundred figures transform biblical exegesis into a visual archaeology of Scripture.

At the time this new edition appeared, Calmet had just become Abbot of Senones, an office he retained until his death in 1757. It was there, in the Benedictine abbey in Lorraine, that he continued the historical and scriptural studies that established him as one of the most prolific Benedictine scholars of the eighteenth century.

The publication also bears the imprint of the great Parisian trade in religious and scholarly books. Pierre Émery, who died on 15 June 1730, had already published Calmet's Commentaire littéral. Working closely with him were his two sons-in-law, Claude-Marin Saugrain and Pierre-Alexandre Martin, both active in the bookselling world around the Quai des Augustins and associated with several major scholarly and ecclesiastical publishing ventures. This second edition of the Dictionnaire therefore stands among the great final undertakings of this family publishing network.

The Pavée de Vendeuvre provenance extends into the nineteenth century the history of a book conceived from the outset as both an instrument of learning and an object of prestige. Bound with his arms, the four great folios entered an aristocratic library in which history, religion and major illustrated editions held an important place.

A handsome large-margin copy, complete with its frontispiece and 204 plates, comprising more than three hundred engraved figures, in contemporary bindings bearing the arms of a Peer of France. Through both the scale of its illustration and the complete integration of text and supplements, the Paris edition of 1730 gave Dom Calmet's great biblical dictionary its most monumental form.