In 1568 a body of English Catholics, many of them Oxford men who could no longer hold their posts, set up a college at Douai in Flanders under William Allen. Part of what it existed to do was to put an English Bible into Catholic hands, because the only English Bibles then in circulation were Protestant ones and were being used in argument. Gregory Martin began translating in October 1578 at something like two chapters a day, and the New Testament was published in 1582 at Rheims, where the college had temporarily moved. Martin died on the 28th of October that year, weeks after his New Testament appeared. The Old Testament was ready at the same time and then sat unprinted, for the plain reason that the college could not afford to print it; it came out at last in two volumes in 1609 and 1610, by which point the King James Version was two years away.
What separates it from every other English Bible in this corpus is what it was made from. Not the Hebrew and the Greek: the Latin Vulgate. The Council of Trent had declared the Vulgate the authentic text of the Church, and the Douai translators argued in addition that Jerome had worked from manuscripts older than any Greek copy available to them — which, for the Old Testament, was not an unreasonable thing to think in 1600. The prose that resulted is heavily Latinate, sometimes to the point of not being English at all: the Lord's Prayer asks for “supersubstantial bread”, because the translators would not naturalise a word the theology was resting on. That was policy, not incapacity.
By the middle of the eighteenth century almost nobody could read it, and Bishop Richard Challoner revised it between 1749 and 1752 — heavily, and largely in the direction of the King James Version, which by then was simply what English scripture sounded like. Every Bible sold today as a Douay-Rheims is Challoner's text rather than Martin's. This one is the 1899 American printing, from the John Murphy Company of Baltimore, carrying the imprimatur of James Cardinal Gibbons; because that printing is long out of copyright it is the one that has been scanned, keyed and reproduced ever since, and it is what nearly every digital Douay-Rheims actually is.
In this reader it does something almost no other edition here can. Its recorded parent is present in the corpus: open a lineage rung beneath a Douay-Rheims verse and the rung below is the Latin Vulgate itself, the actual text it was translated from, rather than the ≈ original-language floor that most editions fall through to. That is the case the rung mechanism was built for. The influence also ran the other way — the Rheims New Testament was on the King James translators' desks, and a fair amount of its Latinate vocabulary passed into their work — but the lineage list keeps only formal revision lines, so that debt is not recorded there. One inversion to note: its rung chip shows the year 1899 while the catalogue card shows no year at all. The rung years are a hand-curated list and the card reads the catalogue's own metadata, and where an edition sits in one and not the other, the two disagree in public.
A caution about the canon. The text held here has 72 books, not the 73 of a printed Catholic Bible. The six deuterocanonical books it does carry — Tobit, Judith, 1 and 2 Maccabees, Wisdom and Sirach — sit after Revelation instead of in their Catholic positions, and Baruch is absent altogether. That is a property of the digital text as it was ingested, not of the 1899 book, and it means this column will read correctly verse by verse but should not be used to check what the Catholic canon contains.