These texts come from the 1582 Rhemes and 1610 Doway printings of the
portions of the Bible. The primary sources provide a glimpse both into
the history of
the Douay-Rheims version and the English language itself. The reader
will quickly notice that the letter ‘j’ does not appear in the texts,
rather ‘i’ functions either as a vowel or a consonant. Likewise ‘u’ is
not a distinct letter; it is employed typographically in the lower-case
in place of ‘v’ where not starting a word. The letters ‘u’ and ‘v’ both
function either as vowels or consonants. The word ‘vniuersity’
demonstrates this rule. The letter ‘w’ is often employed, but in many
cases the earlier form of a double-v (vv) appears instead.
The transcriber has done his best to render the text accurately. Note
the relaxed spelling standards of the time; many variants appear. While
the errata section from the 1610 edition observed: “We haue also found
some other faultes of lesse importance; and feare there be more. But we
trust the reader may easely correct them, as they occurre.” only
obvious errors have been amended. Where the transcriber has doubt
between whether an irregular spelling is either an error and a variant,
the printed text stands. 7-bit ASCII cannot fully represent the
typographical standards of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and
many special characters have been replaced with modern equivalents.
Where verse numbers stand in the margins of the printed texts, they
have been transferred to the body; the verse numbers in the ‘Prayer of
Manasses’ have been supplied from other versions. Reference notes have
been transferred from the margins, and their abbreviations modernized.