The Book

The Bible is the most successful book ever written. For well over 1,000 years it has been the most widely circulated of all written works, and it has affected the culture, language and art of more people than any other book has done. In turn, every age has adapted and used the Bible for its own purposes, influencing its shape, appearance and language. This is a narrative of the Bible as an artefact - an account of how it has changed, evolved and survived during its extraordinary journey through history.

The story begins in the age of illuminated manuscripts. It starts with Saint Jerome, whose Latin translation - the Vulgate - first gave the Bible the definitive form it has retained ever since. Chapter 2 follows the separate history of the Bible in its original languages of Hebrew and Greek. Then the narrative returns to document the gradual triumph of the Latin Vulgate through the Dark Ages of Western Europe, and continues with the magnificent giant Bibles of the early Middle Ages, the Bible with its monastic commentaries (which tell us how it was used), and the crucial turning point of the thirteenth century when the Bible assumed its modern form. The account of the Middle Ages ends with magnificent picture Bibles, some of them the most beautiful books ever made, and the famous and dangerous English Wycliffite Bibles, whose owners could be burnt at the stake.

The invention of printing changed the history of books. A whole chapter is devoted to Gutenberg and the first printed book - the celebrated 42-line Bible. The story then leads on to the Reformation, Martin Luther's German Bible, the Protestant-led wave of translations of the Bible into other European languages, the development of a Bible publishing industry, and the extraordinary efforts of missionary societies to translate the Bible into every known language in the World. The last chapter is set in modern times. It chronicles the discoveries - including the Dead Sea Scrolls and papyrus fragments found in the Egyptian desert - that take the story right back to the beginning and bring us close to the origins of both Old and New Testaments.

Christopher de Hamel writes with the storytelling gift of the good historian. He is also a scrupulous scholar. Without being either evangelical or polemical, his precise, lucid and highly informative narrative is solidly based on documentary evidence. Original and authoritative, The Book. A History of the Bible presents a clear-sighted, thought-provoking and utterly gripping account of the world's most remarkable book.