The 1501 bible has considerable historical value beyond the considerable antiquity of the imprint itself, for it also counts among the earliest known donations of a rare book to the George Peabody Library within a just a few years of its founding. It was given in January 1863, in the thick of the American Civil War, when occupying Union troops were bivouacked just blocks away and the fledgling Peabody Library was effectively frozen in place. Its donor was a Colonel Anthony Kimmel of Linganore, Maryland, whose donation may have been prompted by the appearance in 1861 of the library’s first published list of desiderata, which of course included early editions of the bible.

The 1501 Kimmel bible bears several proud marks of the colonel’s generous benefaction, including his own autograph written in indelible ink across the front cover (see image below) and an inscription on the spine that reads: “Biblia Sacra 1501. Presented to the Peabody Institute Baltimore by A. Kimmel, Linganore, Frederick County MD, 1863.” A more extensive manuscript note is pasted into the front cover, which reads as follows:

“To the Rev[eren]d Dr. Morris, Librarian to the Peabody Institute, Baltimo[re,] Sir I have the honor to present to the Institute this “Biblia Sacra” a relic of the past, printed at Ven[ice] in year 1501, it is a rare book. I bought it in Corso, Rom[a] and is 361 years old & brought to this Land, the home of the brave, accept it as an earnest [sic] of my highest esteem, in which I most fondly hold the liberal & generous, my friend George Peabody, the Marylander in London, respectfully, my dear Sir, Anthony Kimmel. January 1, 1863, Linganore, Frederick County Maryland.”

Seventy-two years later, in 1935, the Peabody received the gift of another early bible from Kimmel’s private collection, which bears a similar manuscript note written in his hand referencing its purchase in Lyon in 1852. This incunable issued from another Venetian press in 1481, is known in at least 40 copies worldwide]—a robust survival rate for a time when standard print runs seem rarely to have exceeded 300 copies. This may well be one of the finest copies to survive, for it is preserved in an attractive 18th-century binding with fine edges, marbled papers, gold tooling on the board edges, and a bound-in silk bookmark. An ownership inscription names Claudius Boisot in 1767, who may have commissioned the present binding. What is more, the text block is endowed with distinctive evidence of the hybridity of manuscript and print, and the dynamism of books as living objects, well after the invention of printing by moveable type. While the entire Latin Vulgate is printed, the initial letters of each paragraph were added by a limner in red ink, filling initial blank spaces provided for this purpose by the printing-house compositor. More interesting still are interpretive manuscript marginalia added by several readers of this bible, perhaps stretching across several centuries.

Most distinctive of all about the 1481 Kimmel bible (and perhaps the reason its penultimate Maryland owner elected to donate his less grand post-incunabular bible to the Peabody) is what has been bound alongside the imprint: several neatly written-out pages of a decree issued by the Council of Trent. That ecumenical council of the Roman Catholic Church met from 1545 to 1563 to outline, in part, the Church’s stance on essential points of orthodoxy that had come under fire during the Protestant Reformation. The particular decree bound in Kimmel’s 1481 bible speaks plainly to the object itself: namely, “the edition and use of sacred books,” passed by the Council of Trent in 1546, investing ecclesiastical authorities with greater control over the printing of bibles and liturgical works.

When Martin Luther undertook the translation of the Bible into German two decades  before the passage of this Tridentine decree it caused an immediate sensation. The Luther Bible quickly became the most heavily reprinted book of the sixteenth century, igniting immense controversy over the canonical legality and spiritual value of translating Scripture into the vernacular. This 1546 Tridentine decree aimed to impose stricter regulations on printers to prevent the proliferation of further translations and prohibited the printing of Scripture “without the permission of ecclesiastical superiors.” From then on, printers were required to obtain prior written approval from Church officials—their so-called nihil obstat (nothing hinders [it from being printed])—to publish any sacred texts.

—Kelsey Champagne, Earle Havens