i plan on starting the Vulgate next summer. a few months ago, i saw it on amazon from “American Bible Society; Ed. quartam emendatam edition (June 1990)” for $50, new. today, the thing is out of print. perhaps that was the standard text?
anyway, does anyone know of any in-print editions? note – i’m looking for the entire thing, not just the new testament, or genesis, etc. of course, i don’t really care if a book or two is missing from the whole.
also, are there any stylistic commentaries out there? i already found a great edition of caesar (allen & greenough, 1994 edition) – something like that (although not as exhaustive) would be nice, to say the least.
Are you particularly concerned about which version the Vatican wants you to use? It’s not too hard to find editions of the Clementine Vulgate at used bookstores (online or off). Mine’s a cheap Spanish printing from the 50s. I’ve never looked for the Nova Vulgata, but since that’s the one currently used for liturgy I’d be surprised if a little digging didn’t find it. I’m not sure what sort of cost will be involved, though.
You can get Clementine Vulgates from lulu.com. Most (all?) of them are based on Michael Tweedale’s transcription. You can download the PDF of Tweedale’s edition for free, then buy a hardcopy if you want it. The Clementine is very close to the source used for the Douay-Rheims Bible, which is nice if you want to check your translations.
If you want a modern critical edition, the Stuttgart Vulgate is fairly affordable at scholarly-bibles.com, and somewhat less affordable elsewhere. It generally lacks capitals, punctuation, and paragraph formatting, so it’s not exactly easy reading. But it is the standard pocket critical edition–it was used while translating the NRSV, for instance–and I’m pretty sure it has the largest number of books of any Vulgate currently in print. The American Bible Society is selling a 5th revised edition, but ubs-translations.org and scholarly-bibles.com still list the 4th revised edition.
The complete Nova Vulgata is available from the Vatican’s official publisher at paxbooks.com. It can also be read online at vatican.va. The Nova Vulgata was based on critical study of Jerome’s Vulgate, but edited to accord with modern Greek scholarship (e.g., the Johannine comma is out).
There are free Vulgate modules available for free Bible study programs, too, but most of them are only protocanon+NT. They seem to be taken from the Stuttgart Vulgate, since they lack formatting other than chapter and verse divisions. But most Bible programs will display multiple Bibles in parallel, so you can read the Vulgate in one pane and open the DRC in another to cheat.
I know you said you wanted a complete Bible, but if you know or want to learn Greek, consider the Novum Testamentum Graece et Latine. It has the current Nestle-Aland NT with the NT of the Nova Vulgata on facing pages, critical apparatuses for both, and a wealth of textual information. Also some examples of 20th century academic German Latin, for when you need a break from Jerome.
there is the “Hendrickson Publishers; 4th Corrected Edition edition by roger gryson etc… isbn 3-438-05303-9” at amazon, its the full iuxta vulgatam versionem and the only editio i have ever see in person at a non used book store. This editio is fairly standard now.