COLBERT'S CALMET
CALMET, Antoine Augustin.
Commentaire litteral sur tous les livres de l’Ancien et du Nouveau Testament. Les deux livres d’Esdras, Tobie, Judith, et Esther.
Paris, Pierre Emery, 1712.
4to, pp. [4], xlii, [2], 83, [1], vii, [1], 85-694, [2]; with 1 plate (‘Caracteres Pheniciens, ou Samaritains, comme il [sic] sont sur les médailles’), woodcut device to title, initials, head- and tailpieces; some browning and foxing, loss to blank fore-edge of pp. 579-80; overall good in contemporary French polished calf, spine richly gilt in compartments with lettering-piece, red edges, marbled endpapers; upper joint split but holding, some wear to corners and edges and marks to covers; gilt armorial stamp of Louis II Colbert, marquis de Linières, to covers, with his gilt monogram and serpent device to spine compartments (Olivier 1302.1 and 3).
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Commentaire litteral sur tous les livres de l’Ancien et du Nouveau Testament. Les deux livres d’Esdras, Tobie, Judith, et Esther.
First edition of the commentary on the Books of Ezra, Nehemiah, Tobit, Judith, and Esther by the French Benedictine Antoine Augustin Calmet (1672–1757), from the library of the last male descendant of the distinguished Colbert family.
This formed the seventh volume of Calmet’s monumental twenty-three tome Commentaire litteral, issued between 1707 and 1716. In addition to the prefaces and chronological tables which accompany each biblical book, there are also three dissertations, on the demon Asmodeus, on the order and succession of the Jewish High Priests, and on the militia of the ancient Hebrews.
Calmet’s scriptural exegesis – which relied primarily on historical and eschewed allegorical or tropological interpretations of scripture – proved exceedingly popular in the following years, and new French editions and Latin translations soon followed. A mild, peaceful, and industrious scholar, Calmet became a respected and widely read source for orthodox theologians, encylopédistes, and even free-thinkers: he was, in the words of B.E. Schwarzbach, vastly important ‘by any standard except originality’ (p. 136). In contrast to the cutting-edge and controversial biblical criticism of such late seventeenth-century figures as Richard Simon (who both read and praised Calmet’s work), Calmet stuck fairly close to traditional conventions and, though he failed to avoid taking any liberties within his biblical criticism (he admits in the present volume that the books of Nehemiah and Judith contain material later than the supposed date of composition), he studiously avoided textual criticism of passages considered theologically sensitive. It was this type of diligent yet cautious industry which gave him both the honour of Voltaire’s attention and the ignominy of Voltaire’s criticism, who quipped that while Calmet did not think, he did give much to think about.
Provenance: with the arms of Louis II Colbert, marquis of Linières (1709–1761). The grandson of the great Jean-Baptiste ‘le Grand’ Colbert, Louis was captain of the gendarmes anglais before becoming field marshal in 1748. He died without issue in 1761.
See B.E. Schwarzbach, ‘Dom Augustin Calmet: man of the Enlightenment despite himself’, Archiv für Religionsgeschichte, vol. 3 (2001), pp. 135-148.
