I. Historiography and Structure: Two Authorized Versions and the Space Between

By the time Richard Russel issued his New Testament, Anglophone Protestants for more than a century had been reading what we now call the King James Bible or, more emphatically, the Authorized Version (AV). First published in 1611, the AV just celebrated its quatercentenary. The occasion was commemorated by an explosion of conferences, exhibitions, and monographs on both sides of the Atlantic, expanding an already sprawling body of literature on this one title.Footnote ² Whereas scholarship surrounding the tercentenary could claim that the book triumphed from “sheer merit,” recent accounts emphasize the coordinated effort of king's printers and archbishops to drive the popular Geneva Bibles out of the kingdom.Footnote ³ Post-Genevan competitors have received much less attention.Footnote ⁴ Catholic editions barely have been recognized as competitors, except by the contemporary Protestant governments that prohibited them.Footnote ⁵ An exploration of these other Bibles would reveal contests for legitimacy continuing long after the last Geneva Bible was printed in England. After that year, 1644, the “Authorization” of the AV had not become a solid barrier to biblical diversity, but rather a set of symbols that publishers had to represent in order to enter the market. These symbols were not wholly abstract. Royal monopolies endowed them with concrete legal value. Yet clever competitors, including the one who refurbished a Bible from the Catholic world, still figured out how to manipulate them.

Within early modern Catholicism, there was only one unequivocally authorized version: the Sixto-Clementine Vulgate (1592).Footnote ⁶ This one “vulgar” Bible of the Latin Church just eclipsed its 420th anniversary, experiencing as much fanfare as it received for previous milestones—little.Footnote ⁷ Scholars have labored over its putative offspring, however, scrutinizing in particular the textual DNA of French Catholic Bibles in order to resolve their paternity. Their examinations frequently yield a diversity of parents, even though canonical injunctions seemed to make these multiple lines of descent prescriptively impossible.Footnote ⁸ The Council of Trent in 1546 recognized only the Latin Vulgate as “authentic, and that no one dare to presume under any pretext whatsoever to reject it.”Footnote ⁹ The Roman Index of 1564 declared vernacular translations legitimate “only as elucidations of the Vulgate edition” and irredeemably illegitimate when “made by authors of the first class,” that is “heresiarchs.”Footnote ¹⁰ Now that it has been shown that some Catholic New Testaments borrowed text from Protestant versions anyway, what ought to be investigated is how that borrowing was done, and under what circumstances it could avoid censure. This study of Quesnel's Bibles will explore the mechanics by which authors and publishers could perform fidelity to the text of the Vulgate and the traditions of Trent while circulating books that were less faithful, establishing new precedents for the form of Catholic scripture-books in so doing. By following the transmission of Quesnel's book from France to England we will be able to detect relationships among various traditions of authenticating Bibles that have been obscured by a division of historiographical labor along national and confessional boundaries.

Conventional questions about how much scriptural access was determined by one's location on either side of the Reformation divide will yield more satisfying answers only upon a more thorough methodological appreciation of the scriptures as physical products—that is, as books rather than texts.Footnote ¹¹ A preoccupation with the biblical text—about whether or not it was disseminated, how much of it was withheld, or which canonical texts were included in whose Bibles—has yielded crucial basic knowledge for tracking confessional variations.Footnote ¹² The Bible, however, could never be encountered as an immaterial collection of words either more or less complete, not in the early modern world nor ever. As sermon, icon, or book, the scriptures always were materially encoded, their meaning and capacity for appropriation conditioned by their physical shape.Footnote ¹³ An emphasis on books over texts implicates the discrete, interlocking communities of readers at work in constructing each Bible in peculiar ways for particular ends. To balance the study of textual access with the history of reception then, it is not necessary to begin with an examination of what readers wrote in their books after they got them. Scrutinizing manuscript annotation can be extraordinarily revealing, but it is ordinarily painstaking, and logically secondary to the study of the processes by which each scriptural artifact came to be.Footnote ¹⁴ These processes pivoted on the choices of producers who had to reckon with readers' expectations—where readers included both licensing authorities and potential customers, and where expectations were set between the ideal function of the book and its expected use. This scriptural microhistory, therefore, seeks to discern confessional patterns more precisely by tracking regional and chronological differences, but even more to uncover similarities in the intra-confessional contests for establishing the authenticity and marketability of Bibles. It aims, ultimately, to reopen the concept of scriptural access.

This article proceeds in four stages. First, it examines how Quesnel secured a place for his New Testament in France. Building upon scholarship on French Bibles accumulated over the last twenty-five years, this case study aims to refine judgments about how French editions of the Vulgate were legitimated, weighing the relative force of texts and paratexts, of conciliar decrees and regional expectations, of institutional validation and popular acclaim.Footnote ¹⁵

Second, it traces the relentless campaign of one French Jesuit, Michel Le Tellier, to de-legitimize Quesnel's scriptural texts. Only when Le Tellier becomes royal confessor to Louis XIV do historians begin earnestly tracking his career and charting his tactics for achieving Unigenitus (1713), that comprehensive papal indictment of Quesnel's New Testament. Missed are his prior and subsequent efforts to undermine Quesnel's Bibles by producing his own.Footnote ¹⁶ By focusing instead on Quesnel's competition from within his own Oratorian community, historians fold Le Tellier's later political maneuvers into a more tidy narrative of the French Catholic Bible, whereby a semi-Jansenist cohort of Oratorians and Port-Royalists promote access to the scriptures while the Jesuits and other ultramontane traditionalists favor restrictions.Footnote ¹⁷ Returning Le Tellier to an earlier part of the story will enhance our understanding of Quesnel's success: his book altered the conditions for circulating the scriptures in large part because it induced hostile players to enter the field. Though Le Tellier and other opponents sought to stem the demand for Quesnel's books through competition, they eventually imitated the innovative style that they believed consumers desired, solidifying the changes that Quesnel introduced.

Third, it evaluates how another set of Catholic publishers, this time in England, sought to re-package Quesnel's Gospels for their own community, navigating between the suspicion of the Roman Index and Jesuit missionaries on the one hand, and on the other the authority of an alternative vernacular Bible, the Rheims New Testament. This English scene of the drama of Quesnel's book has been reviewed before only briefly as evidence that the larger Jesuit-Jansenist conflict had crossed the Channel.Footnote ¹⁸ Revisiting it will allow us to compare the contexts that structured how Catholics read scripture in lands where their institutional hierarchy still possessed coercive power and in lands where that hierarchy had long been deprived.

Fourth and finally, it shows how the evicted minister Richard Russel traded on the papal condemnation and paratext of Quesnel's New Testament to render it saleable in an English Protestant kingdom where a different Bible and biblical layout had been authorized and a new dynasty, which Russel deemed illegitimate, still demanded authorization. Tracing the genealogy of Russel's hitherto unstudied book back to Quesnel will allow us to consider some fundamental questions: what counted as sacred scripture for various communities of early modern Christians? How were its physical components determined, exhibited, policed, and subverted? What was the role of confessional difference in fixing opportunities for scriptural appropriation, and how was that variable affected by different political and ecclesiastical contexts? Overall, this study should shed light on the historically contingent nature of the scriptures as material and symbolic objects whose meaning could be shaped and reshaped by the disparate communities that depended on them as a single, stable, and authoritative sacred text.

II. Making Quesnel's Scriptures French & Catholic

In 1713, the papal bull Unigenitus passed judgment on Quesnel's “Reflexions Morales.” One hundred and one propositions discovered within it were declared:

Before trying to parse this exhaustive condemnation, we first ought to investigate how for several decades Quesnel's book had succeeded. Given its starting point as an attempt to salvage another condemned New Testament, it is surprising that the book ever had a chance. Quesnel had attached his reflexions morales to the text of the Nouveau Testament “de Mons,” a wildly popular version translated by the embattled community of Port-Royal.Footnote ²⁰ It already surpassed twenty print runs between its debut in 1667 and its prohibition the following year.Footnote ²¹

On this disciplinary action, the ecclesiastical powers of Rome and Paris united—a notable achievement. Agreement on the permissibility of particular French translations of the Vulgate was hardly automatic after the Council of Trent (1545–1563). The issue of vernacular scripture was so divisive that it had threatened to dissolve the council itself.Footnote ²² The delegates ultimately reached no accord beyond a policy of local ecclesiastical oversight: the “ordinary” would examine and approve Bibles before they were issued in his diocese, ensuring that the text of “the Holy Scriptures, especially of the old Vulgate Edition, would be printed in the most correct manner possible” and that the title identified the author and press, so that all responsible parties could be held accountable.Footnote ²³ This conciliar principle of subsidiarity enabled the publication of La Sainte Bible in Paris, Lyon, and Rouen, where the bishops of those dioceses permitted it; the production of the Catholic Bibbia Vulgare, on the other hand, ceased in Italy.Footnote ²⁴

The opposition of Hardoüin de Péréfixe, the archbishop of Paris, to the New Testament adopted by Quesnel demands an explanation then, even if the antipathy of the Roman Inquisition might not. Péréfixe issued two ordinances in quick succession against the “Nouveau Testament imprimeé a Mons.”Footnote ²⁵ Each one submits a different complaint, both of which reflect the expectations set up by the Council. Péréfixe first proscribed the book on 18 November 1667 for the simple fact that he, as the ordinary of the diocese, never approved it before its publishers dared to print it.Footnote ²⁶ Five months later he explained why he would continue to refuse his approval: according to the faculty of the Sorbonne, the translation was not faithful to the Vulgate, nor even to the Greek, “in an infinity of places.”Footnote ²⁷ Péréfixe admitted that he was disposed to reject the Mons New Testament even before encountering these two acts of non-compliance with Trent. He was aware that “this Translation was put into light by suspect persons,” the primary translator, Louis Isaac Le Maistre de Saci, having been imprisoned in the Bastille for his alleged Jansenism.Footnote ²⁸ He reported that the Sorbonne's exacting review vindicated his suspicion. Not only did the translators “alter the text according to their own fantasy,” but in many important places they “followed the ministers of Geneva” and “favored the errors of Jansenism.”Footnote ²⁹ Borrowing Calvinist Bible translations damned the supposedly Catholic version of René Benoist one century earlier, he affirmed, and the same offense would damn this one, too. What Péréfixe failed to acknowledge was the resurrection of the Benoist text in a modified form, and its ascension as the quasi-official French Catholic Bible by the end of the sixteenth century.

The damnation of the Mons New Testament, similarly, did not last forever. It barely lasted a year. Bibliographers have recycled the claim that “after the Paix de l'Eglise (1669),” in which Pope Clement IX, King Louis XIV, and four French prelates brokered a temporary resolution of the Jansenist conflict in order to avoid a national schism, “this version was permitted in France on the condition that the text would be accompanied with explicative notes for the understanding of obscure and difficult passages.”Footnote ³⁰ No official authorization is cited to support this claim. It is sensible that the “Paix” would have outmoded accusations of Jansenism. That does not explain, however, why exegetical paratext alone should cure both a book that defied the canons of Trent and a text decreed heretically corrupt. Pasquier Quesnel knew that it would, though; the publication of the Mons New Testament that he modified depended on it.

The legitimating force of paratext emanated from the same session of the Council of Trent discussed above, even though it seemed to offer only criticism of contemporary biblical annotation.Footnote ³¹ The seed from which the new tradition of glossing later sprouted was planted in the statement against private interpretation: “No one . . . shall presume to interpret sacred scripture contrary to the sense held by holy mother church or even contrary to the unanimous consent of the Fathers.”Footnote ³² This decree introduced no further restrictions upon the circulation of approved Bibles: anyone with sufficient means could buy one; vocal heretics would be punished. It was only when a papal delegation altered these conditions the year after the council ended that Bible producers employed this decree as an agent in their negotiations for ecclesiastical approval.

This first post-conciliar index, promulgated in 1564, erected an intermediate layer of requirements that made the reception of even properly vetted Catholic editions dependent upon the possession of a special reading license. Bishops or inquisitors would dispense these licenses to individuals who, according to the judgment of their local pastor or confessor, would derive from such reading “no harm but rather an increase of faith and piety.”Footnote ³³ Had this licensing system been implemented throughout the early modern Catholic world it would have constrained access to the Bible well beyond the terms sketched out by the council. Leading French churchmen generally embraced the object of reader restraint, that lay readers should engage the scriptures only in proportion to their intellectual capacity and orthodox formation;Footnote ³⁴ but many bishops outside the Italian and Iberian peninsula, whose dioceses were populated by substantial Protestant communities, experimented with access as a means of restraint.Footnote ³⁵ They recognized that Catholic readers in their care might be exposed only to heretical texts and interpretations if they did not permit the broad circulation of orthodox ones. The Roman Congregation of the Index itself was sympathetic to this dilemma, as the eminent consultores William Allen and Roberto Bellarmino deliberated about the manner in which Catholic Bibles could be circulated safely in “areas where heresies flourish” so that vulgar readers were not left to “suck venom.”Footnote ³⁶ It was under these circumstances that the apologist René Benoist found the conciliar decree against private interpretation useful, because he sought approval for a new Bible accompanied with annotations that would bind the text to the sense pronounced by the Catholic church.

Benoist's marketing strategy was successful: in 1566 his Bible was granted a royal privilege. In 1567, however, the Sorbonne condemned it. The faculty objected, not surprisingly, to Benoist's dependence upon the text and paratext of the Geneva (Calvinist) Bible.Footnote ³⁷ As a result, the whole paratextual layout became tainted by association with Geneva for the next two decades. When in 1573 Christophe Plantin risked re-publishing in Antwerp the Benoist text, now partially revised by the Dominican Jean Henten and approved by three of his colleagues from the theology faculty of Louvain, he first made sure to (1) delete the name of Benoist from the title of his New Testament “translated from latin” and (2) erase all marginal annotation.Footnote ³⁸ Five years later in Lyon, Barthelemy Honorat republished the whole “Louvain” Bible, again without Benoist's name and, as he promised anxious readers and censors, “sans gloses, additions ny distractions qui la puissant render suspecte.”Footnote ³⁹ The legitimating force of marginal notes, therefore, did not flow directly from Trent nor continually from the medieval tradition of scholastic glossators, whose methods Catholic humanists and Protestant reformers ridiculed together. In fact, to the extent that they mirrored the form and content of the notes in the Calvinist Geneva Bibles, glosses initially compromised post-Tridentine Bibles.

Glosses finally returned in 1586, as four Parisian booksellers attempted to circumvent a competitor's royal privilege for this denuded version of the Bible. But they also needed to circumvent the incriminating perception of notes, so they introduced their innovation through the language of that decree against private interpretation. Their title marketed a Louvain edition augmented “avec les annotations des anciens Peres et Docteurs de l'Eglise, aux marges, pour l'intelligence asseurée de plusieurs passages et lieux de l'Escriture saincte.”Footnote ⁴⁰ While most French Catholic Bibles continued to circulate without marginal paratext, this edition established a discursive precedent for the legitimate inclusion of annotations.

Annotations shifted from legitimate to legitimating by the middle of the seventeenth century as ecclesiastical authorities discerned a blurring distinction between Catholic and Protestant Bibles in French. Since the Louvain version borrowed the Geneva text, which Benoist and Henten had used the Vulgate to “correct” rather than to translate anew, identifying textual differences always required careful scrutiny. For the less fastidious reader, the task of discrimination became even more perplexing when an increasing number of Geneva editions appeared bare, shorn of their distinctive marginal paratexts.Footnote ⁴¹ Intervening in 1621, the Parisian publishers Jean Richer and Pierre Chevalier printed a “Louvain Bible” with an appendix entitled “Moyens pour discerner les Bibles Françoises Catholiques d'avec les Huguenotes.”Footnote ⁴² It designated the textual places “corrupted” in the Geneva version, but newly emended in this book by a doctor of the Sorbonne according to the Sixto-Clementine Vulgate, which in 1592 had been declared the “authentic” text recognized by the Council of Trent. To remove further ambiguity, the title also marketed a new paratextual apparatus, featuring chapter summaries extracted from the apologetical church history of Cardinal Baronius as well as “L'Explication des passages de L'Escriture selon le sens des Peres quoi ont vescu avant & durant les quatre premiers Conciles Oecumeniques.” Nevertheless, François Veron, the king's “reader of controversies,” chastised this translation for not doing enough to rectify the “falsifications of the Bibles of Geneva.”Footnote ⁴³ But after sprinkling the revised text of his New Testaments, published in 1646 and 1647, with more patently Catholic terms, especially “la messe” (Acts 13:2), he followed the example of the Louvain edition he otherwise opposed in advertising exegetical commentary “a la marge de chaque Livre & chapitre.”Footnote ⁴⁴ The royal privilege conferred for his “N. Testament avec ses Notes” affirmed that paratext had become an essential component of this Bible's authorization.Footnote ⁴⁵

Even as the demand for a polemical translation began to wane, the necessity of annotation endured. In 1666, less than a year before the Nouveau Testament “de Mons” first appeared, the Oratorian Denis Amelote published his first New Testament volume with the copious footnotes, marginal glosses, and chapter summaries that progressively enveloped and overwhelmed the pages of his second and third volumes.Footnote ⁴⁶ His text, however, differed little from the Port-Royalists' “Mons” translation, which the archbishop of Paris and the faculty of the Sorbonne uniformly condemned for perpetuating the errors of Geneva and Jansenius. In fact, the Port-Royalists accused Amelote of plagiarizing their translation!Footnote ⁴⁷ The General Assembly of the Clergy of France, however, commissioned Amelote's version. All of its royal privileges, theological approbations, and episcopal permissions (including that of Archbishop Péréfixe) together authorized not a scriptural text, but an annotated book: “Le Nouveau Testament avec les Notes Francoises & Latines.” Footnote ⁴⁸ Saci's “Mons” New Testament, on the other hand, appeared as an unglossed text proliferating through a defiant printing campaign that targeted all social levels of the French reading public. Péréfixe feared that these “badly explicated” scriptures “were falling into the hands of all sorts of persons indifferently” causing them “to die by the letter that kills when they should have been given life by the spirit of the [letter's] true sense.”Footnote ⁴⁹ It hardly mattered that other Mons New Testaments were printed with paratext and that some Amelote editions were printed without it. The entire political, ecclesiastical, and theological hierarchy of France already committed itself to a title that marketed notes. If a competitor sought toleration, especially one that had to overcome suspicious origins, a more vocal and unwavering allegiance to the now authoritative tradition of printing explications was required.

Both Pasquier Quesnel and Saci himself soon perceived that the Mons New Testament had been proscribed as much for what it did not print as for what it did. In 1672, three years after the “Paix de l'Eglise” officially dulled anti-Jansenist sensitivities, ecclesiastical authorities in Paris allowed Saci to publish the first of twenty-one volumes of a Latin-French diglot version of the Old Testament, all the verses of which were bound to “une explication tirée des Saints Pères et des auteurs ecclésiastiques.”Footnote ⁵⁰ That same year, Quesnel re-issued the Mons Gospels similarly shielded by a new paratextual layout and episcopal approbation.Footnote ⁵¹ Reuniting the vernacular scriptures with interpretive notes, Quesnel made the Port-Royal edition conform to precedent—but only formally. For his glosses emptied the post-Tridentine tradition of its Counter-Reformation substance.Footnote ⁵² Instead of framing his commentaries as bulwarks against solipsistic, heretical interpretation, as both François Véron and Denis Amelote had done, he pitched them as more benign “Christian thoughts.” Quesnel's preface then sharpened the evangelical rhetoric of the Mons New Testament, proclaiming not just a “right” of all men and women to read the Bible, but now an “obligation.”Footnote ⁵³ Both textual innovations provoked conflict (and competition) later, but their peculiarities were masked for the time being by their format, as well as by the mandate Quesnel secured from Felix Vialart, the bishop of Châlons-sur-Marne.Footnote ⁵⁴ Addressing his letter to pastors, Vialart reclaimed the New Testament as “the book of priests.”Footnote ⁵⁵ His prominently displayed approbation dimmed the book's appeal to the general populace, projecting instead a primarily clerical readership.Footnote ⁵⁶ Despite or, more likely, because of this projection, the book was able to be distributed among a much broader audience in a portable duodecimo volume.Footnote ⁵⁷

For Quesnel then, as much as for Saci, Amelote, and the “Louvain” Bible publishers before him, performing the rejection of private interpretation according to the paratextual scripts developed since Trent provided enough cover to get away with stealing lines from the illicit translation of another. These producers all auditioned their books before a review committee, which we tend to analyze through the intensely focused conceptual lens of censorship. Indeed, the board did repress deviant texts here; but, it also conferred authority on them when they assumed the characters of books that gestured toward some of the community theater's norms of propriety—which in turn were modified by the style of these approved Bibles.Footnote ⁵⁸

III. De-Catholicizing Quesnel: The Opposition and Competition of Michel Le Tellier, S.J.

The Jesuit Michel Le Tellier, the last confessor of Louis XIV, would become known by his detractors as the architect of Port-Royal's demolition; some even claimed that Unigenitus, the papal bull that condemned Quesnel's Nouveau Testament in 1713, “was written in the shadows by the servants of Le Tellier.”Footnote ⁵⁹ While it is undeniable that Le Tellier participated in the construction of the bull, it is not enough to understand his opposition to Quesnel as a visceral reaction against all things Jansenistic.Footnote ⁶⁰ Thirty-four years before he was appointed royal confessor, before he composed any other polemic, he had expressed concern about the resurgence of the Mons New Testaments. In 1675, while Professor of Holy Scripture at the Jesuit college of Louis-le-Grand in Paris, he published a tract euphemistically entitled Avis Importans et necessaires aux personnes qui lisent les traductions françoises des Saints Ecritures, et particulierement celle du Nouveau Testament imprimé a Mons. Le Tellier's advice for reading the Mons New Testament proved remarkably simple: Don't. His reasoning hewed to the two salient arguments that Archbishop Péréfixe had levied against this version in 1667/8: (1) the text deviated from the Vulgate; and (2) the publishers flouted the authority of the episcopal ordinary to license Bible editions or, in this case, to proscribe them. Péréfixe's second ordinance also alluded to the Sorbonne's “discovery” of numerous textual corruptions, and Le Tellier proceeded to enumerate a few dozen significant ones.

Unlike Péréfixe, however, Le Tellier had to mollify his language. The archbishop had died and the new one, François Harlay, though no friend of Jansenists, was responsible for maintaining the tenuous “Paix de l'Eglise” negotiated in 1669. Palpably aware of the delicate circumstances, Le Tellier advanced his searing criticism of the Mons text while struggling to preserve a polite, collegial tone towards its translators. He warned Catholic readers how this scriptural translation would lead them to “very pernicious errors,” but he hesitated to categorize these errors in loaded terms.Footnote ⁶¹ He made not one single accusation of “Jansenism.” When he pointed out doctrinally meaningful places where the Mons and Geneva texts coincided, he suggested that the translators “without trying to insult them” committed the mistake unwittingly, “perhaps without having thought about it.”Footnote ⁶² After all these courtesies, however, he still felt compelled (1) to conclude by defending himself preemptively from the charge of disturbing the peace and (2) to remove his name from the book entirely.Footnote ⁶³

Just as notable as the manner and content of Le Tellier's first assault on the new Mons versions is what Le Tellier left unopposed. He did not contest the social trajectory of the Port-Royalists' printing campaign. The sacred text, he explained, originally was composed in a style “that appears sometimes very simple, that it might accommodate the feeble minds of the most middling sort.”Footnote ⁶⁴ He affirmed “the great number of Christians of either sex who have no knowledge of the Latin language, but who nevertheless desire the consolation of reading the scriptures and of nourishing their souls on the word of God, which is their most salutary food, as our Lord has declared”—provided that they “have the assurance that what they read is truly the word of God.”Footnote ⁶⁵ His stipulation then was intended to rule out the text Quesnel employed, but not the approach to reading that Quesnel designed. Like Quesnel, Le Tellier here did not advocate reading for apologetical training or for consolidating Catholic identity. He disparaged curiosity, but so did the prefaces of both the Port Royalists' New Testament and Quesnel's Abrégé.Footnote ⁶⁶ While he invoked the Tridentine decree against private interpretation, he did not mention any paratextual conditions that corresponded to it. As long as readers cultivated a “humble and docile spirit” and “a disposition to listen to the Church,” they could “draw forth some instruction and light for making themselves capable of serving and glorifying God.”Footnote ⁶⁷ Le Tellier's standards of exegetical submission were so nebulous that the self-described “Doyen” of the Faculty of Paris approved his book only on the condition that he add some remarks about how readers of vernacular scripture should repair to their confessors “for explication of the difficult parts.”Footnote ⁶⁸ Le Tellier's Avis, therefore, counters the judgment that French Jesuits did not follow the Oratorians and Port-Royalists in recommending the reading of vernacular New Testaments until the very end of the century.Footnote ⁶⁹ Competition between the Mons and Amelote versions had generated ecclesiastical conflict and a flurry of censures in the late 1660s, but the ensuing “Paix” enabled familiar biblical formats to shelter radical proposals for lay Bible-reading. This Jesuit's own daring proposal was a response to them, rather than to the conventional watershed moment, the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685), which would not happen for another decade.Footnote ⁷⁰

The question remains whether Le Tellier's Avis achieved its end of re-suppressing the Mons New Testament. The answer: certainly not Quesnel's version of it. Pierre Nicole, one of the original contributors to the Mons New Testament, wrote Quesnel in 1681 still urging him to read Le Tellier's tract so that he somehow might “profit from its nonsense.”Footnote ⁷¹ Instead of bothering with it over the last six years, Quesnel simply continued issuing his annotated gospels while his publisher in Paris, Andre Pralard, renewed his royal privilege to print them in 1677—for the next thirty years!Footnote ⁷² Quesnel, however, was not yet the target of Le Tellier. Two new editions of Quesnel's vernacular scripture-books immediately preceded the publication of Le Tellier's Avis and openly circulated in the city where Le Tellier taught.Footnote ⁷³ Yet neither one was a New Testament, nor even an obvious reproduction of the Gospel text. Both were L'Abrégé de la morale de l'Evangile. These were titles that might lead would-be censors to mistake the scripture-books they headlined for another genre entirely—a devotional genre, not subject to the Tridentine review developed in France. Perhaps Le Tellier's anti-Mons polemic never named Quesnel's book because he believed that its paratextual apparatus fortified it against direct assault. What cannot be denied is that Le Tellier elected to have his Avis published in Lyon—the only city in France for which there is unequivocal evidence that the Port-Royalists' New Testament was reprinted, without Quesnel's annotations, between the “Paix de l'Eglise” (1669) and the end of the seventeenth century.Footnote ⁷⁴ Le Tellier even secured the same permissions of the Royal Procurators “Vaginay” and “De Seve” to publish his opposition to the New Testaments that the Lyonnais printers had just received the previous year to issue them.Footnote ⁷⁵ When these printers attempted to republish their New Testament during the following decade, with the support of Antoine Arnauld's Nouvelle Défense de la Traduction du Nouveau Testament imprimée a Mons (1680), Le Tellier resolved that his next polemic would not be as deferential as his first.Footnote ⁷⁶

In his Observations sur la Nouvelle Défense (1684), Le Tellier signaled his new strategy by opening with a dictum of Tertullian: “wherever the adulteration both of the scriptures and of their exposition has been recognized, that is where diversity of doctrine may be found.”Footnote ⁷⁷ As Le Tellier continued to unveil textual “falsifications,” which spread from a few dozen places across the New Testament to 240 in the Epistles alone, he now began to dissect the paratext as well: headings, summaries, and even a few annotations. He was no longer coy about equating “alterations” with precise heresies. In various places the Port-Royalists “borrowed maxims from the school of the Semi-Pelagians,” “insinuated the condemned dogmas of Jansenius,” and imitated “the principle of Calvin which destroys the foundation of religion.”Footnote ⁷⁸ The “Paix” was clearly over for Le Tellier. Sensing danger again, Pierre Nicole advised Quesnel to remove from his Abrégé the Mons passages criticized by Le Tellier and to replace them with the approved texts of Amelote.Footnote ⁷⁹ Quesnel already had determined, however, that Le Tellier's Observations “was not even worth losing his time to address.”Footnote ⁸⁰ Manifestly confident in his existing defenses of genre, paratext, approbation, permission, privilege, and consumer demand, Quesnel had his annotated gospels published in Paris in 1685 as well, followed two years later by an edition of his commentaries on the rest of the Nouveau Testament.Footnote ⁸¹

Quesnel demonstrated the stability of his Mons scripture-books at the same time as Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes and commissioned 150,000 copies of Amelote's New Testament to be distributed among those Huguenots who chose to become Catholics rather than exiles. If Le Tellier despised the translation of the Port-Royalists, he was never satisfied with the one revised by Amelote either.Footnote ⁸² With the wide circulation of both now assured, Le Tellier decided to retreat, or at least shifted to defense. In 1687 he published the Défense des nouveaux Chrestiens et des missionnaires de la Chine, du Japon, et des Indes, a rejoinder to the Port-Royalist Antoine Arnauld's scathing parody of the culturally accommodationist policies of Jesuit missionaries.Footnote ⁸³ If Le Tellier was abandoning his campaign against the Mons texts, Quesnel did not hesitate to press his advantage, launching a counter-offensive so that his opponent might never be able to mobilize again. In 1688 he published a pseudonymous denunciation of Le Tellier's Defense, accusing it of reintroducing a theology of grace that the faculties of Douai and Louvain had censured one hundred years earlier.Footnote ⁸⁴ If Quesnel could incite them to censure Le Tellier now, then perhaps Rome and Paris might find him guilty, too. He was right; and he rejoiced in 1690 that Douai was readying its indictment.Footnote ⁸⁵ In 1692, the first year that his entire Nouveau Testament en François avec des Reflexions Morales was published, Quesnel announced to Pierre Nicole that the Roman Index had conceded Le Tellier only five months to correct his Defense before it would become a forbidden book.Footnote ⁸⁶ Facing censorship himself, Le Tellier realized that his decades-long case for re-censoring the Mons New Testaments or any other Jansenizing work would be compromised in the court of ecclesiastical opinion. He thus turned to a different judge, the market, and decided to compete.

Quesnel discovered within a year that Le Tellier had begun collaborating with two other Jesuit priests to produce their own Nouveau Testament.Footnote ⁸⁷ In 1697 Louis Josse, the archiepiscopal printer of Paris, pressed out the first edition of their Gospels reinforced by the approbation of the Sorbonne, the permission of their ordinary, and the privilege of their king.Footnote ⁸⁸ The “Pères de la Compagnie de Jésus” (the approvals only identified them corporately) let their preface explain why yet another version of the vernacular scriptures was necessary: “among all those that have appeared until now, and that Catholics have in their hands, there is none that has followed exactly the latin version commonly called the Vulgate” (A4r). They present this alleged lacuna as more of an opportunity than a problem at first (A4v). They conclude, however, by appealing to Trent, “which has declared authentic, not the Greek text of which it said nothing, but the Vulgate only. . . . and the same Council expressly prohibits that [the Vulgate] should be rejected under any pretext, which no doubt pertains to translators as much as or even more so than to anyone else” (A4v-5r). To demonstrate that their reading of Trent was the authoritative one, they recalled the Sorbonne's condemnation of Benoist's text, which they agreed was not faithful to the Vulgate (A5r). Like Archbishop Péréfixe, they neglected to observe that Benoist's translation had become the foundation of the “Louvain” versions that French bishops did approve. As a result, the preface's implied argument that no French translation yet met the minimal standards of Trent only underscored the opposing practices of the bishops, confirming that textual fidelity was negotiable, and that legitimacy could be achieved by other means.

The Jesuits proved the legitimacy of their own version by modeling its fidelity to the original Sixto-Clementine Vulgate (1592) in text and paratext. They lifted their chapter summaries directly from this Roman Catholic authorized version, and reproduced its empty, unannotated margins. The first preface to this vulgate, however, explicitly permitted the addition of printed commentary, especially from patristic sources.Footnote ⁸⁹ The legitimation of French Catholic Bibles had come to depend upon the representation of this type of glossing, even more than upon the reality of faithfulness to the Vulgate. That is exactly why Le Tellier had tired of notes. Not only had their appearance distracted censors from spying and arresting inaccurate or even condemned translations, but they increasingly served as convoys for smuggling in heretical doctrine, as he had protested in his Observations. By stripping away the printed explications though, the Jesuit editors did not intend to abandon readers to a naked text and to their own interpretations. They did allow one appendix to remain—and its presence was significant. The Table of Gospels and Epistles that are read in Church during Mass for the whole year re-conceives the New Testament as a liturgical instrument.Footnote ⁹⁰ Its passages became synched with those read and expounded by the ordained pastor during the sacred rituals of common worship. Oral instruction had long been the preferred mode of catechesis in the church, and Le Tellier sought to re-integrate it with the rapid development of lay scripture-reading in Catholic France, especially after recognizing how rival factions could impose contentious theologies of sin, grace, and salvation upon the reading community by controlling the margins of Bibles.Footnote ⁹¹ The first edition of the Jesuits' New Testament then prescribed the re-oralization and liturgization of scriptural experience, even as it diffused the printed text in almost pocket-form to the reading public.

Despite its most self-conscious imitation of the Council of Trent's official Vulgate, Le Tellier's New Testament encountered resistance from the ordinary, whose permission the same council required. Cardinal Louis-Antoine de Noailles, the current Archbishop of Paris, mandated the correction of over one hundred sheets before he would allow the first tome to be published in his diocese, according to Quesnel, whose correspondence monitored the affair.Footnote ⁹² Quesnel reported that Noailles refused to permit the second tome in 1699, already disgusted with himself for having permitted the first one.Footnote ⁹³ Why Noailles opposed the book is not entirely clear.Footnote ⁹⁴ Quesnel flatly stated that it was “badly translated,” but conformity to the Vulgate could not have been Noailles's principal grievance.Footnote ⁹⁵ A more likely irritant was the book's rejection of the paratextual tradition, or rather its object of displacing the new Mons scripture-books protected by that tradition, especially the editions of Quesnel that Noailles had just re-approved.

It was, paradoxically, Noailles's approval of Quesnel's Nouveau Testament that ultimately proved its undoing. The content of the “moral reflections” that Quesnel attached to the Mons scriptures only attracted critical attention after Noailles certified that the augmented work had changed genre, from an “abridgment of scripture's moral teaching” to a proper “New Testament,” the explications of which were deemed a crucial part of the legitimation process. In 1698, an anonymous pamphlet accused Noailles of inconsistency: the “Moral Reflections” that he approved in 1695 allegedly harbored the same errors of Jansenius that he detected and condemned in a theological treatise of 1696.Footnote ⁹⁶ With pressure mounting on Noailles to rescind his permission from Quesnel's book, the Archbishop of Malines arrested Quesnel in 1703 and commenced a thorough review of his publications. Though Quesnel escaped to Amsterdam shortly thereafter, Le Tellier seized the opportunity to renew his campaign against the Mons New Testaments, this time by a frontal assault on Quesnel. He collaborated with Jacques-Philippe Lallemant, his colleague at the Jesuit College Louis-le-Grand, to circulate two consecutive polemics: Quesnel Seditieux in 1704 and Quesnel Heretique 1705.Footnote ⁹⁷ Just before each one appeared, the bishops of Apt and Gap posted ordinances against Quesnel's book.Footnote ⁹⁸ Quesnel immediately pleaded with Cardinal Noailles to censure the libels of Lallemant and Le Tellier in order to undermine the censures against him.Footnote ⁹⁹ Noailles did continue to resist Le Tellier, but ultimately even the cardinal's power was not enough. Le Tellier's efforts to subvert Quesnel by polemic and counter-Bible were reinforced decisively by his own spectacular ascent through the ecclesiastical ranks beginning the following year. In rapid succession he was made the rector of Louis-le-Grand, secretary of his company's general assembly in Rome, provincial of the Society of Jesus in France, and finally, in 1709, royal confessor to Louis XIV. Condemnations of Quesnel's Nouveau Testament seemed to follow in lockstep.

But when Le Tellier did direct his new powers of influence against Quesnel's book, it was neither because he was flailing wildly against all the Jansenist threats that his Company imagined, nor because he rejected the vulgarization of scripture. He had decided to promote Bible-reading for all the faithful over thirty years beforehand. But since that same time he had resolved to eradicate “false translations,” especially those that deviated from the Vulgate toward the Geneva text of the French Protestants. He continued to believe that the Mons text was infected with “damnable errors,” following the solemn diagnoses of the archbishop of Paris and the pope himself in 1667/8. He could convince his church and state to condemn it again only when he maligned its legitimating paratexts. He finally defeated Quesnel's version not by stripping away the paratexts that hid a corrupt text, but by laying bare the paratexts themselves as a “Manual of the Jansenists.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ The incriminating identity of the Mons text was detected at last too, but only as a minor accomplice, overshadowed in the line-up by the nefarious “Reflections.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ In fact, the scriptural text remained almost as concealed as it had been when Quesnel first covered it more than three decades earlier.Footnote ¹⁰² The Council of Trent had declared a text authentic, but in France authenticity came to depend on paratext.

IV. Making Quesnel's Nouveau Testament Catholic Again, and English

Proponents of Quesnel in England followed Le Tellier's progress carefully. Since the sixteenth century, when the Elizabethan government legally re-established the Reformation and banned “popish books,” English Catholics had been imbibing religious literature flowing through underground continental pipelines, especially those rigged into France and the Low Countries.Footnote ¹⁰³ Richard Short, a London medic also trained in philosophy at Douai, believed that Quesnel's writings would be salutary for the urban Catholic mission that he was aiding covertly with his physical and spiritual therapy.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Since 1706 he had been corresponding with Quesnel in Holland and importing his works, including “the Reflections.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Quesnel warned Short, however, not to “draw to himself the eyes of the world if he wanted to defend the truth.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Short understood: in order to have the scripture-books of this French priest translated and published through the Catholic secret press, he had to avoid triggering not only the sedition laws of the English Protestant state, but also the sensors of the Jesuit missionaries whose confreres, he believed, were pushing the condemnation of Quesnel's Reflections in Rome. In 1706 Richard Short published Moral Reflections upon the Gospel of St. Matthew without any attribution except “T. W.,” the initials of the elderly country squire Thomas Whitenhall who had completed the translation.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ All references to the authorship of Quesnel were expunged. Publishing Catholic scriptures anonymously was still a direct violation of Tridentine protocol, but had long been accepted as a practical necessity for the presses hidden in this non-Catholic kingdom.Footnote ¹⁰⁸

Catholic censures could be averted by other means. Short reversed the order of the title, foregrounding the “reflections” ahead of the “gospels,” just as Quesnel had done for the two decades that his Abrégé flew under inquisitorial radar. But the need to forestall an authoritative Catholic review of the text qua scripture was not as urgent for him as it was for Quesnel, because Short jettisoned the Mons New Testament. His opening Advertisement promised that “the Text was translated from the Vulgat[e] according to the version of Rhemes 1633.”Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Using this pre-approved translation to meet the demands of Trent was a tactic calculated to reassure English Catholic readers as well as their Jesuit supervisors.

Not a single Jesuit, however, had been involved in the production of the Rheims New Testament. The project was commissioned by Cardinal William Allen—the same cardinal who (1) founded the English College of Douai, which was the first of the continental seminaries that trained English Catholics to return home as missionary-priests; and who (2) had lobbied the Roman Congregation of the Index, along with Cardinal Bellarmino, to encourage the publication of paratextually barbed vernacular Bibles for those Catholics who were hemmed in by Protestant neighbors. Under Allen's direction, the Oxford exiles Gregory Martin, Thomas Worthington, and Richard Bristow furnished a scrupulously Latinate translation with aggressively contra-Protestant notes in 1582.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Their book was duly approved by the archiepiscopal vicar and theologians of Rheims, where the College of Douai had temporarily relocated. Two years before it began pouring forth from the city's presses, the Society of Jesus initiated its own mission to England. Historians have not interpreted the close timing of these two seminal events, the advent of the English Jesuit Mission and the Rheims New Testament, as coincidental; and indeed, there is evidence that the Jesuits appropriated the book in their missionary effort.Footnote ¹¹¹ But this Counter-Reformation Bible became even more firmly identified with the Jesuit Mission by the English governments that forbade it. “The version of Rhemes 1633,” which Short employed, was the 5th edition of this English Catholic New Testament; it was opposed the same year by the 4th edition of a Cambridge divine's state-commissioned refutation, which blasted the “invasion of a Troupe of Romish and Rhemish Iesuites, who endeavoured by this [book], as the most subtill and plausible way that ever yet they enterprised, to build up the walls of Rome in England.”Footnote ¹¹² Production of full-scale Rheims New Testaments and Douai-Rheims Bibles ceased during the English Civil War and did not resume for an entire century. Before Short printed his Moral Reflections on the Gospel of St. Matthew, none of his co-religionists had hazarded to publish a new translation. By recovering the “Jesuits'” Rheims text, then, he actually was reinforcing its position as the sole authoritative translation of the Vulgate for the English Catholic community.

If Short's scriptural text would not compromise his Moral Reflections, his paratext might. The Advertisement was followed by the Author's Preface, in which an astute reader would detect both the dates that signaled Quesnel's authorship and the expressions that betrayed his non-conformity. This preface was the less radical one from Quesnel's Nouveau Testament (1692): where the Abrégé (1672) had proclaimed a universal “obligation” to read scripture, this one only pronounced a “right.”Footnote ¹¹³ Even a “right,” however, was more than the Rheims New Testament's preface had allowed. Hearing the gospel preached was the necessity there, but private scripture-reading was a privilege dependent upon the ordinary's assessment of regional circumstances and personal capacities—just as so many French bishops had interpreted the prescriptions of Trent.Footnote ¹¹⁴

Sylvester Jenks, a secular priest in London whom Short had coaxed into proofreading his first manuscript, opposed the inclusion of Quesnel's preface.Footnote ¹¹⁵ In fact, he claimed that he had burned it. A self-consciously “quiet” missionary who later would be elevated as the vicar-apostolic of England's northern district, Jenks was anxious to keep his record clean of Jansenism. He published a disclaimer in 1710, confessing that he agreed to review Short's first volume only reluctantly, as a personal favor to the physician who had saved his life.Footnote ¹¹⁶ He alleged that he had warned Short that there was still enough left in the annotations to merit the pope's censure. Realizing that his doctor's devotion to Quesnel was incurable, Jenks quit the project. Short salvaged the preface somehow, because it appears in extant copies of his first Quesnel gospel.Footnote ¹¹⁷

Promptly regretting his decision, he fulfilled the penance that his priest had prescribed. In both volumes published the next year, Short abandoned the preface.Footnote ¹¹⁸ He tore all the front matter out of the Moral Reflections on the Gospel of St. Mark (1707).Footnote ¹¹⁹ With Luke (1707), however, he sought not just to avoid the appearance of a forbidden book, but to embrace the likeness of an authorized one. After the title page, he inserted the two episcopal permissions that Vialart and Noailles had granted to Quesnel's scripture-books, of course without attaching Quesnel's name to them. He informed readers that these “orders” show how his Moral Reflections were published “not only by the Permission and Approbation but even by the Command of the Church.”Footnote ¹²⁰ Then he replaced the Author's Preface with an entirely new one entitled, “Useful Reflections of the R.R.F.F. of the Society [of Jesus].”Footnote ¹²¹ Here, astonishingly, Short reproduced the exposition of Le Tellier, Bouhours, and Besnier on literal translations of the Vulgate, acknowledging its origin in the preface to the Jesuits' Nouveau Testament (1698, 2nd ed.).Footnote ¹²² In sum, Short intuited that his English Catholic readers and their supervisors might be satisfied if he remodeled his Quesnel Bible on the very Jesuit Bible that had been designed to sabotage it.

Not even these daft redactions, however, could preserve Quesnel's Reflections for Catholics. When Pope Clement XI issued his first general condemnation of Quesnel's Reflexions Morales in 1708, Short's press stopped.Footnote ¹²³ The following year Short began to reconsider. Why should a Latin edict from Rome about a French book concern English Catholic prelates who were struggling to maintain a hidden church on a Protestant island? Perhaps these worlds were so disconnected that London's vicar apostolic, Bonaventure Giffard, was not yet even aware of the papal brief. Quesnel reasoned that his French adversaries would have to make their own effort to get the brief publicized in England; and Quesnel confided to Short in March 1709 that he did not think Le Tellier had enough credit to do that.Footnote ¹²⁴ Short's press was in motion again when, three weeks later, Quesnel expressed shock and utter bewilderment upon learning that Le Tellier had just been named royal confessor while, simultaneously, the Roman Index issued its official condemnation of Le Tellier's Defense of the Chinese Rites.Footnote ¹²⁵ One month later Giffard assured his Jesuit interlocutors that he suppressed Short's publication of the Moral Reflections upon the Gospel of St. John (1709) as soon as the year-old bull was made known to him.Footnote ¹²⁶ Short ultimately failed in England because Le Tellier won in France—even though he lost in Rome.

Short had tried to legitimize Quesnel's Gospels by performing adherence to Tridentine regulations, just as they had been developed among English Catholics. He substituted the approved, English translation of the Vulgate for the version of Mons; he showcased the requisite approbations; his copious “Reflections” appeared to mirror the dense annotations of the authorized Douai-Rheims Bible. Short's scripture-books may have appealed to an English Catholic readership, but they could not persuade English Jesuits that they were safe for them too, even with their jesuitizing accommodations. So, in his final Quesnel volume, Short renounced all of them. Published the same year that Giffard foreclosed his English Catholic market, Short's second edition of the Moral Reflections upon the Gospel of St. Matthew (1709) beckoned for an alternative consumer base. Short reinstated Quesnel's “Author's Preface” that he had cautiously omitted three years earlier. That it could incite his ecclesiastical superiors to accuse him of heterodoxy no longer worried him, because he no longer was engaging with them. His new “Advertisement” confirmed his new audience: “as care is taken to make the English answer faithfully the French Original, so no Alterations are made in any of the Expressions which do not suit with the Opinions commonly receiv'd in England.”Footnote ¹²⁷ “The Opinions commonly receiv'd in England” were certainly not the same as those defended by Pope Clement XI against the alleged assault of Quesnel. This “Advertisment,” therefore, asked English Protestant readers not to be scandalized by any Catholic-tinged expressions in an otherwise good book, and not to hold the anonymous English producers responsible for them. The translator, it suggested, merely followed sound philological principle in faithfully rendering the original rather than expurgating it for sensitive eyes. The publisher withdrew his previous “advertisement” of the Rheims text, of course, because his current patron community did not consider that version legitimate. For that community, there was only one Authorized Version, and Richard Russel, as we shall see, knew to market that version explicitly when he first attempted to sell Quesnel's Reflections in 1719. By that time, however, it already had been a decade since the English editions of Quesnel's scripture-books had been converted from Catholicism.

V. Making Quesnel's New Testament Protestant

The papal bull Unigenitus did as much to keep Quesnel's Bible open in England as it did to close it in France. That Catholic books circulated across Europe to an extent formerly ascribed to the Calvinist international publishing network has been recognized already.Footnote ¹²⁸ Recent scholarship, moreover, has multiplied examples of Protestants appropriating Catholic devotional literature, sometimes expurgated and licensed and sometimes not, especially in England.Footnote ¹²⁹ The Bible, however, was different. Historians have highlighted the transformation of Luther's German New Testament and French Geneva Bibles into licit Catholic editions, but not migration in the other direction.Footnote ¹³⁰ Protestant Tudor and Stuart regimes had forbidden English Catholic Bibles since they were first published in 1582.Footnote ¹³¹ But Richard Russel believed that he could use Unigenitus to persuade his English audience that this Catholic Bible was Protestant. He explained in his preface that he attached “the act whereby the Pope condemns the Book, [that] it may serve as a recommendation of it to us” (xiii). Still, Russel realized that this exotic “recommendation” might not be enough to assure his pious patrons that the whole work was doctrinally safe and sound. Unlike Quesnel, Le Tellier, and Short, Russel lacked the assistance of an institutionalized system for validating the orthodoxy of religious publications within his own confessional tradition. The responsibility of the Stationers' Company to police the content of registered books had dissolved when the Licensing Act lapsed in 1695. In the absence of another analog to the Sorbonne and Roman Congregation of the Index, Russel promised his readers that he had performed the role of the censor himself. He dutifully expurgated Quesnel's commentaries, showcasing his corrections in “crotchets” and then shaming the “popish errors” by parading them back out in a final appendix (x).

Making the book anti-Roman was only the first step to making it properly English. Unlike Le Tellier, Russel did not question whether Quesnel's New Testament was rendered from “the vulgar Latin” (ix). Russel assumed it was, and consequently refused to translate it. He pledged instead that he “printed the Text according to our own english translation” (ix). The reign of this translation, which we now know as the AV, had become entrenched in England with the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660—that is, just a few years before Quesnel began to show how porous the Vulgate's dominion was over the Catholic world.Footnote ¹³² Though Russel was under no legal obligation to use the AV text, he considered it necessary for procuring the economic allegiance of English Protestant readers.Footnote ¹³³

Russel did not translate Quesnel's commentary afresh either. He confessed to borrowing the English Catholics' translation, but only after purifying that too, sweeping out the “Gallicisms and other odd words” that “daily corrupt our language” (xi–xii). Russel insinuated that Catholics were to blame for sullying the national idiom, but he could not have been unaware that they were no longer the ones primarily responsible for the invasion of French books. Bibliographers have designated the end of the seventeenth century as the origin of “Anglomania” in France, where French readers began devouring English-language books of political philosophy, experimental science, and enlightenment literature.Footnote ¹³⁴ Yet, in the same period, French books were pouring into England at an unprecedented rate. The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 swept into London a substantial refugee community of French Huguenots, many of whom were intent to vend religious texts in their native tongue. Furthermore, the Copyright Act of 1710 removed traditional restrictions on the importation of non-English books, and the close of the War of Spanish Succession in 1713 marked the end of Anglo-French conflict and the trade embargo that accompanied it. It was not much of a coincidence then that the year that Russel published the first volume of Quesnel's New Testament was the same one that the influx of French books to England was reaching its zenith.Footnote ¹³⁵ This proliferation must have acquainted Russel with new opportunities for translation as well as with the need to distinguish his own text by its distance from inferior transliterations, which in this case he did not hesitate to label Catholic.

By demonstrating that his authorized text was bound to orthodox annotation, Russel would seem to have satisfied the same conditions for validating a Bible that Quesnel did in France. That was precisely Russel's problem. If exegetical paratexts validated a Bible in France, they could brand it as foreign in England. For when Le Tellier decoupled text and commentary from an approved New Testament, he was striving to re-establish a precedent in his Catholic realm that had been settled in Protestant Britain almost a century earlier—and for similar reasons. Ever since James VI/I reacted to the “bitter notes” of the Geneva Bibles and the Rheims New Testament by vacuuming out the margins of the AV in 1611, glossing had been reconstructed as a sectarian act, if not a seditious one.Footnote ¹³⁶ Protestant non-conformists reinforced these suspicions when they strapped the Geneva notes back onto the pages of AVs, and then printed them from their refuge in Amsterdam both during and after the English Revolution.Footnote ¹³⁷ Reversing this troubling legacy of annotation would be especially challenging for Russel, given his own borderline political identity. He was a non-juror: a minister deprived of office for refusing to abjure the Stuart court (sheltered in France) and to swear allegiance to the Hanoverian King George I. Though Russel's theology and politics were inextricably intertwined, the latter was more potentially compromising—without the licensing act, only the laws against sedition remained to discipline the press.Footnote ¹³⁸

If returning glosses to the scriptural text was a subversive enterprise for Russel, it was at the same time his only hope for publishing a legitimate Bible in England. Seeking a royal privilege, as Quesnel and Le Tellier had done in France, would have been a vain pursuit. The King's Printer and the two universities already held an exclusive privilege to produce Bibles, which they guarded jealously and litigiously.Footnote ¹³⁹ A few crafty entrepreneurs, however, had exploited a loophole: publish “paraphrases” or “expositions” instead of “Bibles,” and then package the complete text of the AV neatly within them.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ A similar genre game, indeed, had provided cover to Quesnel's Abrégé. The difference was that Quesnel's Reflexions concealed a condemned text, whereas Russel's Reflections had to shroud the authorized one.

Since Russel's dissent had cost him his parish in Sussex, he needed his new book to be not just acceptable, but lucrative.Footnote ¹⁴¹ To solicit a wider clientele than the Jacobite hard-core, he tried to suggest that his glossed New Testament ought to be welcomed by all socially and theologically respectable readers. Unlike the English Catholic version, which was printed “with a small and indifferent character, and on very ordinary paper” (Russel, ix), his edition conformed to national standards of excellence in both religion and workmanship. On the other hand, his Reflections would help correct less worthy domestic traditions of Bible usage. The preface of Quesnel that Russel reproduced berated those who “take upon themselves to interpret the holy scriptures of their own heads.” Quesnel's Reflexions would help readers cultivate “respect, docility, caution, humility, submission, and simplicity of faith, far from bringing along the presumption, pride, boldness, and that spirit of self-sufficiency and independency, which heresy insensibly conveys into all those whom she has seduced” (xxxviii). Russel promoted his adaptation similarly as a remedy for the undisciplined scripture-reading of “the generality of persons who receive so little advantage from the free use of scriptures” (vii), appropriating an establishment critique of vulgar reading practices that was calculated to make his transgressive reintroduction of scriptural annotation appear, by contrast, more conservative.Footnote ¹⁴²

Russel's purposes were not simply commercial. They were devotional, but they were more than that, too. What should not be overlooked is Russel's urge to disseminate these “Reflections” on account of the marginalized political and ecclesiastical principles embedded within them, however much his marketing strategy suggested the contrary.Footnote ¹⁴³ Quesnel's Reflexions were flavored with the Gallican and acutely Augustinian sensibilities of a Jansenizing Catholic priest, most of which the non-jurors wanted the English public to taste.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ The divine right of bishops and kings, the abuse of oaths, and the illegitimacy of secular control of ecclesiastical office—all generously mixed into Quesnel's scriptural exegesis—were the necessary ingredients of Russel's refusal to swear allegiance to George I.Footnote ¹⁴⁵

Since Russel attached his name to the publication, he did not openly avow sentiments liable to be held seditious. On the other hand, he did not want his points buried completely, so he supplied readers a map for unearthing some. Immediately after assuring them in his preface that he had purged the text of “erroneous tenets,” he admitted rather curiously that he did not expurgate everything. He requested forbearance in these places, singling out two “which, tho' designed by the Author in a popish [sense], are notwithstanding true in an orthodox sence” (x). Upon flipping to the second place (John 20:2–8), the reader finds an affirmation of pastoral authority to interpret scripture for the faithful and, by extension, a vindication of the structure of Russel's glossed New Testament. Russel had voiced his hermeneutical agenda more clearly (and stridently) in the farewell sermon that he had published anonymously three years earlier. There he vilified “Dissenters” for de-contextualized reading practices which caused them “to pervert and abuse scripture,” the effect of which is “that unreasonable schism, which has so long infested this Nation, and involved us in so much Blood and Confusion.”Footnote ¹⁴⁶ He, of course, had made sure to distance himself from an alleged Judeo-Catholic tradition of commentary that privileged paratext over the text itself.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ Concluding that sermon with a plea for a middle way between “Papists on one Hand, and Fanatics on the other,” Russel took it upon himself to assemble a composite scriptural book that both suggested and would be itself the solution.Footnote ¹⁴⁸

The first unexpurgated passage that Russel identified for his readers was more overtly political. The scriptural citation (John 13:24–25) led to a critical analysis of the subject's relationship to the sovereign. The Reflections conceded that “piety must with simplicity obey power,” yet it maintains that “we must be curious to know who are bad, upon no Account but to the Advantage of the Church, and to secure ourselves against them.” The application of Quesnel's counsel to the present state of England certainly would not have felt conservative to the incumbent Hanoverian regime. But Russel's meticulous efforts to package his whole edition as such enabled him to enlist subscribers quite successfully, not only in the relief of his financial straits, but in his subtle rebuke of the government that caused them.

VII. Afterward

The history of Quesnel's book does not just reflect, in a passive sense, the types of vernacular scripture-books that could be legitimated in multiple kingdoms and confessional communities; the reconstructions themselves helped reconstitute the boundaries of legitimacy. Richard Russel showed it was possible to privilege text over paratext in the title of a New Testament commentary and yet still avoid a conflict with the existing Bible monopolies. Three years after Russel's first volume appeared, another set of London printers re-tested the experiment publishing The New Testament, with . . . notes chiefly on the difficult and mistaken texts of scripture, by the vicar Francis Fox.Footnote ¹⁵² By 1726, the year after Russel's last volume appeared (safely, once again), a pattern had been established: London printers adopted the same nomenclature for their Bible commentaries every year for the rest of the decade. At the same time, these printers were emboldened to change the independent variable of English Bibles, namely the authorized text. The first attempt at a new English translation was derived from a French text composed by the Protestant chaplains of the king of Prussia; the second was from the “Original [Greek] Text”; and the third, in 1730, “according to the Ancient Latin Edition.”Footnote ¹⁵³ Yet two levels of legitimacy ought to be distinguished here: what was possible to print is not identical to what was welcome. None of these new translations was reprinted anytime soon.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ Popular attachment to the AV, however, was attested most eloquently by competitors, one of whom in 1768 lamented “that the bald and barbarous language of the old vulgar version hath acquired a venerable sacredness from length of time and custom.”Footnote ¹⁵⁵ As Richard Russel perceived in 1719, this “vulgar version” was still England's Vulgate.

National commitments to a naked scriptural text were, on the other hand, more negotiable. Russel recognized this opportunity just as clearly as he had discerned the value of presenting a stable, venerable text. Buttressing the AV with Quesnel's reflections, Russel fashioned an annotated scripture book that enhanced a quickly developing genre of “Family Bibles.”Footnote ¹⁵⁶ These heavy, deluxe Bibles, laden with devotional commentary, and marketed as “very useful for families,” were printed often by subscription just as Russel's New Testament was. But the domestication of biblical reading experience and interpretation was not necessarily as conservative or quiescent as it was meant to appear. Most frequently issued by evicted ministers, these glossed books relocated the primary place of exegesis from the established church and its pulpits to the privacy of the household. Russel had not only seethed against the “fanatical” impulse to extricate scripture from the senses communicated by authority and tradition, but he designed his whole project of biblical annotation in opposition to it. Despite Russel's inclinations, what his project made possible was an expansion of nonconformist reading opportunities for those on the high-church end of the political and ecclesiastical spectrum. These readers could use Quesnel's commentary to appropriate the scriptural text separately, without the direction of the new establishment that had disenfranchised them, according to the pattern set out by contemporary low-church dissenters as well as by English Catholics long before them.Footnote ¹⁵⁷

Since 1582 these English Catholics had possessed their own New Testament replete with the apologetical and liturgical paratexts that could support a dissenting community of belief and worship. Even though the book had not been republished since 1633, it retained in both form and substance a quasi-canonical status. Richard Short's Moral Reflections on the four gospels were not the only unsuccessful attempts to replace it. Both Cornelius Nary and Robert Witham understood that annotations were necessary, marketing the same on their title-pages.Footnote ¹⁵⁸ But with new translations accompanying their new glosses, these versions were less similar to the original template than Short's. Nary's New Testament was placed on the Roman Index in 1722, but Witham's did not require a condemnation to fail. Neither one survived beyond a second printing. Only Richard Challoner's New Testament was able to secure a stable place in the market, progressing through nine editions from 1738 until the end of the century; but Challoner, who would later become the vicar apostolic of London, explicitly co-opted and revised the Rheims text, debuting his book as The Rheims New Testament, 5th edition. The Rheims version, though never solemnly decreed the “only authentic” one, continued to demand a more exclusive allegiance from English Catholics than the Vulgate ever did for the French.

Though Quesnel's scripture books had been banished from the English Catholic community, a comparable style of devotional commentary found a way to return. It is difficult to determine how widely read Short's Quesnel-adaptations were before they were suppressed.Footnote ¹⁵⁹ But when Thomas Meighan succeeded Thomas Metcalfe as the principal Catholic publisher of London in 1715, he began to publish works that approximated their function. John Goter, the missionary who received Richard Challoner into the Catholic Church, had been issuing “practical thoughts” and “moral reflections” on the gospels and epistles that were read during the liturgy of the mass until his death in 1704.Footnote ¹⁶⁰ Meighan revived these in 1717, frequently republishing them through mid-century.Footnote ¹⁶¹ At that point Richard Challoner, the architect of the reconstructed Rheims New Testament, capitalized on the genre by publishing and then republishing his own Morality of the Bible. Footnote ¹⁶² Ultimately then, the biblical entrees of “Christian thoughts” and “moral reflections” that Quesnel had prepared were consumed by English Catholics on a different plate, but in a familiar setting—that is, a liturgical one. While their Rheims New Testament remained fundamentally intact, complementary books were produced alongside it to facilitate the evolution of their sacred reading habits, with the scripts for common worship and interior development now meeting and interacting within one scriptural volume.Footnote ¹⁶³

In like manner, Unigenitus signaled the victory of Le Tellier over Quesnel's Nouveau Testament, but not the defeat of the genre it developed. The church hierarchy was not alone in deciding the legitimacy of Catholic New Testaments. The reading public judged, too. Le Tellier must have determined that he could not satisfy the persistent demands of that latter court with only his denuded liturgical New Testament, though it did proceed through several editions.Footnote ¹⁶⁴ In 1713, the same year that Pope Clement XI promulgated his bull, Jacques-Philippe Lallemant re-released the gospels of Le Tellier and his Jesuit companions, this time with their own Réflexions Morales, adopting the same title and paratextual style that Quesnel had concocted to legitimize his New Testament for both judges decades earlier.Footnote ¹⁶⁵ The initial public response must have gratified Lallemant's Parisian publisher, who issued a second edition of these Quesnelized Jesuit gospels the next year, followed by another eight volumes to complete the New Testament over the course of the decade. A third edition was published in 1757, the watershed year in which Pope Benedict XIV waived the general ban on vernacular scripture-reading that the Roman Index had imposed in 1596. While finally pulling canonical legislation into line with broader Catholic practice, the papal brief still left a few constraints in place. Prominent among these were (1) the requirement for explicative notes and (2) the re-prohibition of works defending Quesnel's Nouveau Testament.Footnote ¹⁶⁶ Both, paradoxically, represented victories for Quesnel: the first, that the court of ecclesiastical opinion had decided against the bare, unannotated scriptural layout of his nemesis Le Tellier; the second, that efforts to promote and appropriate Quesnel's books had continued despite the previous decisions of that same court. Quesnel's New Testament had become French, Catholic, English, and Protestant, and Le Tellier's protégé showed how it might become both Jesuit and Roman, too.