Professor Dr. Bernhard Lang

Professor Lang has been Professor at Padeborn since 1985, having taught at the Universities of Sorbonne, St Andrews, Aarhus (where he holds an honorary doctorate), Temple University Philadelphia, and the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris. He now lives in Berlin. His Religion und Literatur (below) is a work of 724 pages of the history of religion and literature from Gilgamesh and the OT to modern novels, offering interpretations of 100 works.

Professor Dr. Lang currently is working on a second, enlarged edition of Handbook of the Vulgate Bible and Its Reception: Annotated Bibliography – Latin Glossary – Textual Notes, published by the Vulgate Institute in 2023 (open access: vulgata-dialog.org). This is a comprehensive account of Vulgate research over the last two centuries (ca. 1820–2023) in the form of a thematically arranged annotated bibliography of more than 4000 titles. The work contains explanatory introductions, excerpts of relevant texts from Jerome’s work (generally in translation, but also in Latin), and chronological tables. Of particular note are the annotated alphabetical glossary of linguistic and stylistic terms (pp. 89–126), the glossary of the Latin vocabulary of the Vulgate (pp. 282–472), and the notes on individual biblical texts from Genesis to the book of Revelation and the appendices of the Vulgate (pp. 511–723). The final section is devoted to the cultural impact of the Vulgate in the church, in language, literature, and art, with particular attention to evidence from English, German, French, and Italian literatures and languages. Indexes of names and subjects as well as a detailed table of contents conclude the work.