Thomas Fulton's latest monograph provides a rich selection of insights into the interpretation of the early modern Bible. The book joins comparable recent works such as A Material History of the Bible, England 1200–1553 (Oxford University Press, 2020) by Eyal Poleg and The English Bible in the Early Modern World (Brill, 2018), edited by Robert Armstrong and Tadhg Ó hAnnracháin, in recontextualizing how we approach the interpretive practices that shaped the production and reading of early modern bibles. Steeped in historical, theological, and literary contexts, the book has much to offer the newly invigorated field of early modern biblical scholarship.
Beyond the value of Fulton's readings of individual texts and authors, there is much good practical work to advance biblical scholarship in this volume. Fulton takes to task some of the influential inaccuracies of David Daniell and Christopher Hill, as well as other dominant mischaracterizations of individual bibles, to refresh the scholarly landscape. He notably also provides the practical “categories of reading” (12–14) of the Genevan notes, which will hopefully prove a useful tool for taxonomical work on paratexts.
Its first chapters address Erasmus’ literary-historicist approach to interpreting Paul, William Tyndale's literalism across his polemic and biblical paratexts, and the renewed interest in Mosaic law under the reign of Edward VI. The latter half of the book turns to more literary concerns, moving across Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, and John Milton. As for the bibles themselves—the titular “book(s)” —Fulton focuses on the New Testaments of Tyndale and Erasmus, as well as the Edmund Becke, Geneva, and King James bibles. Through these, Fulton “traces the connected problems of interpretation and application through several punctuation moments in the combined history of biblical production and political change” (6). The strength of this approach allows Fulton to engage tightly, and often thrillingly, with the chief texts and figures he has picked out; however, it does result in a highly individualistic history of hermeneutics, constellated by a small selection of major stars and books.
Chapter 5 is a highlight, which addresses the composition and readership of the Faerie Queene via Genevan paratexts on Revelation. The chapter does excellent work in dismantling claims of the supposed objections to the Genevan glosses—almost entirely extrapolated from reports of the Hampton Court conference—and presents a nuanced, literary reading of John Dixon's marked copy of the Faerie Queene, which Fulton convincingly argues is the product of Dixon being “trained” by the Geneva Bible paratext to produce his own similar annotations. First noted by Austen Saunders, Dixon's reproduction of the Genevan paratext in his notes on the Faerie Queene provides a fertile literary ground for Fulton, and he demonstrates adeptly how extensive the Genevan influence can prove and the rewards of such comparative paratextual readings (Saunders 356–357).
There are some gaps in Fulton's history; many major English bibles are subordinated here, with the Bishops’ Bible faring rather badly. One wonders how the reprinting of the Genevan paratexts in later Barker editions of the Bishops’ Bible might affect our understanding of these notes’ exilic contexts. Fulton also repeats the common association between Becke and the “wife beater” comment to 1 Peter 3.7, despite it actually originating with the 1548 New Testament, as Vivienne Westbrook demonstrates (Westbrook 113–118). Similarly, though the book often engages with “paratexts,” this mostly serves as a byword for “glosses” with some (often fruitful) engagements with prefaces and illustrations; a couple of references to arguments and annotations aside, the rest of the substantive paratextual scaffolding remains by the wayside. This narrowness is partly a necessary casualty of Fulton's approach, and his select focus facilitates extremely in-depth readings of the texts on which he does focus, but there are drawbacks to keep in mind about how representative these readings might be of the broader landscape.
By contrast, Fulton resists such issues in his impressive chapter on Measure for Measure (for myopic misreadings of Shakespeare's use of the Geneva Bible have plagued scholarship on the subject). Fulton's clever and lively reading of the play is concerned less with the fashionable word-searching for contextless parallels between Shakespeare and the Genevan paratexts and more with its dramatization of the “rise of literalism and legalism as a problem connected to a strict reading of Paul's words about the magistrate as God's minister in Romans 13” (22). Fulton then concludes the book with two chapters on Milton, including an exceptional reading of Milton's psalm translations; the book is at its finest when providing these close, literary analyses, which showcase Fulton's Miltonic expertise.
Scholarship of the history and interpretation of early modern bibles is enjoying a new renascence, and Fulton's book is a welcome contribution to the field. Its literary readings are excellent and sensitive, while its political and theological interrogations elucidate some of the more overlooked aspects of the reception of scripture and its notes. This will no doubt prove an important work in understanding the impact and uses of early modern bibles, as well as bridging gaps between historical, theological, and literary approaches to its study.
