Antoine Augustin Calmet was born in 1672 at Ménil-la-Horgne in Lorraine and entered the Benedictines of the reformed Congregation of Saints Vanne and Hydulphe, the Lorraine counterpart of the Maurists. He spent his life among its abbeys as a teacher of philosophy and theology, and was abbot of Senones from 1728 until his death there in 1757.
His fame rests on his work on Scripture. The Literal Commentary on all the books of the Old and New Testaments, in twenty-three volumes (Paris, 1707–1716), was followed by the Historical, Critical, Chronological, Geographical and Literal Dictionary of the Bible (1722), enlarged by two supplementary volumes in 1728. Its learning on the history, geography, customs and antiquities of the Bible made it a standard work across Europe, Protestant as well as Catholic, for more than a century. He wrote besides a history of Lorraine and a celebrated treatise on apparitions and the vampires of central Europe (1746).
The library offers his Dictionary in the English of 1732, made from his last and fullest edition by two Anglican clergymen, Samuel D’Oyly and John Colson, and here transcribed in full: every entry of the alphabet, with Calmet’s notes and the translators’ scholarly ones. The sixty-one notes in which the translators argued against Catholic doctrine are left out.