Good News from Stuttgart:

Abstract

The Bibelsammlung in the Wiirttembergische Landesbibliothek has been renowned for its riches since its foundation in the eighteenth century. The British Museum Library under Anthony Panizzi looked enviously at Stuttgart's holdings and set out to build a Bible collection worthy of the national library. However, it was not until 1994 that the British Library set the jewel in its collections of early English Bibles with the acquisition of the Bristol Baptist College copy of the first complete printing ofTyndale's translation of the New Testament. The growth of the Bibelsammlung has continued, albeit at a more modest pace, during this period. Most recently it has been engaged in a project to re-catalogue and computerize records for its collection of early English Bibles and in the process has discovered a jewel that has lain without recognition for some two hundred years: a perfect copy of the 1526 Tyndale New Testament. The history of the British Library copy is well documented back to its identification in the 1740s; before that nothing is known of its provenance. The copy found in Stuttgart has a longer, more complex history, which goes far to explain why it had not previously been reported. Its first recorded (and probably first) owner was the Elector Ottheinrich (Otto Heinrich, 15°2-1559) of the Palatinate. A humanist who converted to Protestantism, Ottheinrich helped found the library at Heidelberg, which would grow to become the Bibliotheca Palatina. As spoils from the Thirty Years' War, the Palatina was seized in 1623,