The English Bible that came from the Latin rather than around it.
St Jerome translated the Vulgate from the Hebrew and the Greek in the fourth century, and the Church used it for more than a thousand years. The Douay-Rheims is a careful word-for-word English rendering of that Vulgate, made by English Catholic exiles at Douai and Rheims while the King James translators were at work on a different lineage. Bishop Challoner revised it between 1749 and 1752 to ease the reading without loosening the translation. For three hundred years it was the only Catholic English scripture there was.
Because it follows the Latin so closely, and the Latin follows the original languages closely, the sentence structures come through rather than being smoothed into English idiom. That makes some passages read stiffly and others read like nothing else. It is the version to reach for when you want to know what the text says rather than what a committee decided it should sound like.
This edition. Baronius Press set the whole thing again line by line in Century Expanded, the face used in the 1899 Baltimore edition, rather than photographing an old one — so the type is clean instead of blurred. Genuine leather, gilt edges, a ribbon marker, 1512 pages at 6 by 8.25 inches. Thirty-two engravings from the 1941 Douay Bible House edition, remastered, with their captions corrected against the verses. Eleven maps redrawn and coloured by hand, a family register, and the three encyclicals on scripture from Leo XIII, Benedict XV and Pius XII.
It is a book meant to outlast the person who buys it.
