The Douay–Rheims Bible, also known as the Douay–Rheims Version, Rheims–Douai Bible or Douai Bible, and abbreviated as D–R, DRB, and DRV, is a translation of the Bible from the Latin Vulgate into English made by members of the English College, Douai, in the service of the Catholic Church. The New Testament portion was published in Reims, France, in 1582, in one volume with extensive commentary and notes. The Old Testament portion was published in two volumes twenty-seven years later in 1609 and 1610 by the University of Douai. The first volume, covering Genesis to Job, was published in 1609; the second, covering the Book of Psalms to 2 Maccabees plus the three apocryphal books of the Vulgate appendix following the Old Testament, was published in 1610. Marginal notes took up the bulk of the volumes and offered insights on issues of translation, and on the Hebrew and Greek source texts of the Vulgate.
Title page of the Old Testament, Tome 1 (1609)
Colleges at University of Douai
Title page of the Rheims New Testament alongside the first page of the Gospel According to Matthew from the Bishops' Bible, 1589, edited by William Fulke, who believed the Bishops' Bible New Testament was superior to the Rheims New Testament
Challoner's 1749 revision of the Rheims New Testament borrowed heavily from the King James Version.
The Vulgate, sometimes referred to as the Latin Vulgate, is a late-4th-century Latin translation of the Bible.
Saint Jerome in His Study, by Domenico Ghirlandaio
First page of the first volume of the Gutenberg Bible: the epistle of Jerome to Paulinus from the University of Texas copy. The page has 40 lines.
A page from the Codex Amiatinus containing the beginning of the Gospel of Mark
Frontispiece of the original 1592 Sixto-Clementine Vulgate
