By the late fourth century the Latin gospels circulating in the West disagreed with each other, copy by copy, and Pope Damasus I asked his secretary Jerome to settle them. Jerome began with a revision. He ended up spending more than twenty years on it, most of them in Bethlehem, and producing something nobody had asked for.
The decision that made it was translating the Old Testament from the Hebrew rather than from the Greek Septuagint the Church had always used. Jerome called the principle “hebraica veritas” — the Hebrew truth — and it was contentious: Augustine wrote to him worried that congregations would riot when familiar readings changed under them. Jerome did it anyway. The result is why a Latin Bible, of all things, sits closer to the Hebrew than the Greek Bible the first Christians read.
It became the Bible of Western Europe for a millennium, which is a longer run than any translation before or since. It is what Wycliffe translated into English from, and what the Douay-Rheims translators worked from too — so the Douay-Rheims in this corpus is its direct descendant, and the lineage rungs on that edition point back here. It was also the first substantial book printed with movable type: the Bible Gutenberg set in Mainz around 1455 was this text.