Alison Knight begins her book with an expert summary of current historiography on the place that biblical interpretation occupied in the culture of early modern Europe (and England in particular). She shows how far recent work has challenged the sharp distinction between Enlightenment skepticism and early modern literalism and replaced it with recognition that “where Enlightenment textual critics altered their conceptions of the nature of scriptural revelation, early modern scholars and writers attempted to incorporate the Bible's difficulties within the doctrines of its perfection,” but “the strangeness, awkwardness, and flakiness of the Bible was not (and indeed, never has been) new” (10). Additionally, she reminds us that the abundance of intellectual resources that we now know readers had at their disposal, in English and in Latin, demonstrates that concerns with these interpretative challenges were not confined to a small scholarly elite. Knight acknowledges the significance of confessional disputes for the ways in which Protestant and Catholic writers discussed issues of biblical interpretation: for Protestants, scripture was the sole authority on doctrine; for Catholics, the Church’s Tradition also had authority, as it preserved dominical and apostolic teachings not written in the Bible. She never loses sight of the Jewish scholars on whom both Protestants and Catholics relied. Knight also gives due emphasis to areas where a common inheritance allowed mutual borrowing and influence: St. Augustine’s De Doctrina Christiana established principles for dealing with the thorniest questions of scriptural interpretation (on figurative language, for example) that were fundamental to work on both sides.

The Dark Bible allows space for an exposition of the knottier problems that translators and editors of the Bible wrestled with, and Knight gives the reader clear and nuanced accounts of the ways in which these problems manifested themselves in particular passages and how interpreters reached a rendering of the text that neither “wrested” its meaning or made it incomprehensible. Even those familiar with some of these questions will find this lucid presentation of the issues helpful. Knight uses Bellarmine’s classification of biblical difficulty to guide the reader through the problems scholars faced and the methods they adopted in response. The categories are contradiction (where a statement in one part of the Bible contradicts another); ambiguity (where a statement could have two, possibly contrary, meanings); defects (where grammatical elements are missing in the original); disorders (where events cannot have happened in the order in which they are narrated); idiom (when the literal meaning does not communicate the sense of the passage); and figurative language (where metaphors and enigmas create two possible interpretations, literal and metaphoric). Each chapter offers expert exposition of the ways in which sixteenth- and seventeenth-century scholars described the difficulties and the solutions that they offered. Some involved collation (the comparison of verses with each other so that ambiguities could be explained or narrative problems resolved); some involved expert understanding of the idioms of the original languages. In some cases, problems in the text were registered in print, through typographical indications of words added, or marginal translations of idioms: this may indicate a recognition that the problems were unresolvable, but it also shows, Knight argues, a readiness to acknowledge the difficult and to factor it in, rather than ignore it.

This insight goes to the heart of Knight’s work: her ambition is not merely to offer a convenient history of early modern biblical scholarship but to reveal the “cultures of interpretation” that grew up through the study of the Bible. And she argues convincingly that, at every level, these writers did not attempt to close down the meaning of the text. Instead, they tried to capture and to communicate as much of the richness and complexity of the Bible as possible. Knight puts this willingness to “sit with difficulty” (278)—to recognize when a single interpretation might not be possible, or even when the text resisted interpretation (enigma)—at the heart of her study. She rightly stresses, however, that this willingness to recognize the obscurity of the Bible’s meaning was not because the meaning did not matter: it was precisely because all of the Bible’s meaning mattered. No jot or tittle of the text was superfluous; figures (such as types) could carry more than one referent, and some meanings (as in prophecies) were revealed over time. In each chapter, following an account of Bellarmine’s diagnosis of the problem and an account of scholars’ attempts at solutions, Knight discusses the ways in which these problems and their solutions are reflected in the works of dramatists, poets, and preachers. In each case, it is clear that the caricature of naïve biblical literalism is very far from these early modern “cultures of interpretation,” which attempted to find coherent solutions that did not shut down interpretative possibilities within the text.

It is a mark of a very good book that the reviewer’s main criticism is that it is not longer. The readings of literary texts do sometimes get crowded out by the need to explain the scholarly debate. The chapter on figures has so much material to cover (not least debates over eucharistic presence) that it is perhaps unsurprising that this leaves room only for short discussions of metaphor in Richard III and Herbert’s “Prayer.” The discussion of Donne’s habit of ignoring conjugations of Hebrew words and treating “conjugated meanings as variant definitions of a single word” is fascinating, but much interesting material has been relegated to the footnotes (105). We can hope for much more on these writers from Knight, and we can expect a greater acknowledgement by other scholars of the literary significance of the willingness to “sit with difficulty” that Knight has identified here.