These two volumes, published by Brill in the attractive Studies in the History of Christian Traditions, explore the neglected circumstances of the 1555 publication of the editio princeps of the Syriac New Testament and the continuing influence of Christian Kabbalism on the assimilation of Syriac into western European scholarship in the sixteenth century. In a self-deprecating introduction to the first book, Wilkinson offers an astute opening observation that ‘historians often allow themselves the imprecision of speaking of “the Bible”’ without appreciating the extent to which this term is a theological abstraction, before going on to make the equally valid point that few early modern historians have the interest or competence in oriental languages to address oriental philology in the early modern period (pp. 1–3). As an early modern historian, with the interest but not the competence, I approached Wilkinson's two volumes with great interest, and found much to admire in his meticulous scholarship.

Wilkinson goes on to argue that Christian Kabbalah constitutes a ‘most significant component of the world-view of the Catholic scholars who produced the printed editions of the Syriac New Testament’ (p. 7). Through a discussion of Maronite-Roman relations, and the beginnings of comparative Oriental and liturgical studies in Rome in the early sixteenth century, and the important role played by Teseo Ambrogio, whose manuscript Syriac Psalter was lost in the 1537 sack of Pavia by the army of Francis i only to turn up seven years later in a sausage-maker's shop in Ferrara before disappearing from view once more, Wilkinson builds his case. In 1529 Teseo passed on the baton when he gave a Syriac Gospel to the young Johann Albrecht Widmanstetter in a meeting Wilkinson describes as ‘heavy with consequences for Syriac studies and the history of New Testament printed editions in Syriac’ (p. 19).

Another key figure in the early development of Syriac studies is the cardinal scholar, humanist and sometime general of the Augustinian order and bishop of Viterbo, Egidio da Viterbo, the ‘defender of Reuchlin and the protector of Elias Levita’, the man who declared at the opening of the fifth Lateran Council that ‘Men should be changed by Religion, not Religion by men’ (p. 29) and who viewed the production of Syriac New Testaments within the eschatological framework of the union of mankind at the end time. His partnership with Levita was, as Wilkinson puts it, ‘of enormous significance for European Christian Hebrew Studies’ (pp. 48–9). Syriac studies ‘from their very beginning had their place within a prophetic schema and a mystical hermeneutic that would remain the context within which they would be pursued by the Western Catholic Syriac scholars responsible for the printed editions of the sixteenth century’ (p. 62).

In the third, fourth and fifth chapters, Wilkinson explores the work of the Syriac scribe Moses of Mardin, sent to Rome by the Jacobite patriarch of Antioch to procure printed Syriac Bibles, Andreas Masius, the enigmatic linguist Guillaume Postel, who sought ‘to carry Christianity to the East not with armies but with editions of the New Testament in Syriac and Arabic’ (p. 122), and Widmanstetter, in the context of the 1555 editio princeps of the Syriac New Testament published in Vienna which Wilkinson addresses in the final chapter. He asks the question whether it can be considered a kabbalist's Bible, stressing Widmanstetter's commitment to this tradition and the inclusion of a plate of the crucifix and the Sephirotic Tree that appears in John's Gospel designed, Wilkinson suggests, by Postel. In the years after 1555 Wilkinson observes in conclusion, increasing contacts between Rome and the eastern Churches led to the development of a profound oriental scholarship ‘quite removed from the kabbalistic fantasies of the High Renaissance’ (p. 189) that has perhaps obscured its significance in the first half of the century.

In the second volume Wilkinson turns to the Antwerp Polyglot Bible (1569–72), quite rightly calling it a neglected monument of sixteenth-century European scholarship and typography. It was the second of the four great European Polyglot Bibles, ending with the most critically advanced, the London Polyglot of the 1650s, and has been somewhat overlooked. Wilkinson again returns to the role of the Christian Kabbalists who had driven forward early Syriac New Testament studies. The model for the Antwerp Polyglot was the Complutensian Polyglot masterminded by Cardinal Cisneros, the inspiration for which was Origen's Hexapla. It was, as Wilkinson puts it, ‘a truly outstanding book’ (p. 6), intellectually ambitious despite Cisneros's traditional attitude to the Scriptures, and typographically trailblazing, but Cisneros's death, the delays in its publication and the loss of many copies at sea, impaired its impact and limited its distribution, creating the scholarly and commercial opportunity for a successor taken on by the legendary printer and Familist Christophe Plantin. Its editor-in-chief, Benito Arias Montano, whom Wilkinson disassociates from the Family of Love with good grounds, had to defend the Polyglot in Rome against those who suspected Hebraic studies in general and Kabbalists in particular. Montano was actually a relative late-comer to the project, and Wilkinson highlights the work of the northern scholars including Postel's pupil Guy Lefèvre de la Boderie, and the more kabbalistic orientated material found primarily in volume six of the Polyglot with the edition of the Syriac New Testament. Wilkinson concludes with a discussion of the 1584 Paris Syriac New Testament.

There is much to admire in Wilkinson's two volumes. I am not convinced that the chapter structure, which tends to concentrate on individuals and is therefore sometimes overly biographical, is ideal. Nor, given that the two volumes contain 192 and 122 pages of text respectively, am I persuaded of the need for two books, especially given the degree of overlap and the frequency with which Wilkinson ends up footnoting his own work. However, these concerns do not detract from an appreciation of Wilkinson's careful and sophisticated scholarship and of his skill in exploring a neglected aspect of early modern European scholarship.