Chapter & Verse: Bibles from the Holdings of Special Collections (2015)

January 12, 2015 – April 3, 2015

“Chapter and Verse” explored the close association of the Bible and related texts with print culture (and, more broadly, book culture). This exhibit, drawing upon the holdings of Special Collections, was meant to complement a touring exhibition, “Illuminating the Word: The Saint John’s Bible,” at the Chazen Museum of Art.

On display in Special Collections were examples from the late medieval period through the 20th century showing the organization of religious texts and their ornamentation. Some of these books were intended for an elite readership; others, for a much larger audience. Small volumes or large, well equipped with erudition or simplified for beginning readers, in a variety of languages, typeset or rendered in manuscript, handsome or otherwise — the array invited re-examination of the familiar and canonical.

Shown here: Detail, showing multiple Bibles, from the frontispiece of Biblia sacra polyglotta: Complectentia textus originales, Hebraicum, cum Pentateucho Samaritano, Chaldaicum, Græcum…, 2 vols. (London, Printed by Thomas Roycroft, 1657). Title page of one of two editions of The Psalms of David in the Peter Pauper Press Collection (gift of James and Nancy Dast). Detail from a manuscript Bible, in very small script on vellum, written in the 13th century. All from the Department of Special Collections.