Bible, Polyglot | Walton’s polyglot Bible. London, 1655-1657, 8 volumes, the Wardington copy

Bible, Polyglot

Biblia sacra polyglotta [Walton’s polyglot Bible, bound with] Edmund Castell. Lexicon heptaglotton. [and] Brian Walton. The considerator considered [and] introductio ad lectionem linguarum orientalum. London: Thomas Roycroft, 1655-57, 1669

FIRST EDITION, 8 volumes, folio (438 x 272mm.), engraved portrait of Walton by Lombart, extra engraved architectural title page by Wenceslas Hollar, two double-page engraved maps and three double-page engraved plates by Hollar, woodcut illustrations in text, woodcut initials, engraved portrait of Castell by William Fairthorne, purple morocco gilt by John Mackenzie, wide and elaborate gilt border, panelled in blind to a strapwork design, central cartouche outline in gilt, spine gilt compartments, gilt lettering, wide gilt turn-ins, purple watered silk pastedowns and endleaves, gilt edges

A FINE COPY OF THE LONDON, OR WALTON, POLYGLOT BIBLE, A MONUMENT OF ENGLISH SCHOLARSHIP AND TYPOGRAPHY, FROM THE LIBRARY OF LORD WARDINGTON. It was edited by Brian Walton, and contains for the first time texts in Ethiopic and Persian, making this the most complete, as well as the last, of all the great polyglot editions. One of its most notable features is its contribution to biblical textual criticism. The New Testament has variants from the recently rediscovered Codex Alexandrinus, and the sixth volume gives an apparatus criticus from fifteen other sources. Walton received, and rebuffed, significant criticism for this editorial decision.

Walton, whose assistants on the project included Edward Pococke, Laudian Professor of Arabic at Oxford, provided lengthy prefatory essays setting out the aims of the edition and providing an overview of oriental and biblical scholarship at this period. There are two forms of the preface. The earlier of the two acknowledges at some length the help given to the project by Oliver Cromwell. The second preface, written after the Restoration, downplays this assistance. The present copy contains the second form of the preface in an early nineteenth-century reprint.

Although Walton mentions a forthcoming lexicon in his preface to the Bible, Castell's Lexicon heptaglotton, which is here as often found bound uniformly, is essentially a supplement to Walton's work.

John MacKenzie (fl. 1811--c. 1850), who bound the eight volumes, was quite possibly trained by Staggemeier and in turn employed Zaehnsdorf. He described himself as "Bookbinder to their late Majesties King George IV and King William IV".

Also included in this lot is Brian Walton, The Considerator Considered: Or a brief view of certain considerations upon the Biblia Polyglotta, the Prolegomena and Appendix thereof, London, 1659, and Brian Walton, Introductio ad lectionem linguarum orientalum (London, 1655), both small 8vo, and bound to match the set.

REFERENCES: Darlow & Moule 1446; Delaveau & Hillard 54 & 55; Wing B2797 & C1225; Michael Trott, The Life of Richard Waldo Sibthorp: Evangelical, Catholic and Ritual Revivalism in the Nineteenth-Century Church (Sussex Academic Press, 2005)

PROVENANCE: the college d'Oratoriens at Juilly, inscriptions at numerous places in the volumes reading "oratorii Juliaciensis Catalogo ex dono Abbatis D'he'ere"; rebound in 1833 and presented by his congregation at Ryde on the Isle of Wight to Richard Waldo Sibthorp (1792-1879), leading Anglican Evangelist of the 1820s who controversially converted to Catholicism for a brief period in the early 1840s; Christopher Henry Beaumont Pease, 2nd Baron Wardington (1924–2005), bookplate, his sale in these rooms 12 July 2006, lot 246