In their introduction, the editors assert, “All of the essays are concerned, in a variety of ways, with ongoing historical changes in the interpretive reception of biblical texts” (4). This is accurate, so far as it goes: the variety indicated, however, is nearly commensurate with the breadth of interest of the honoree, and therefore daunting. The festschrift includes thirteen essays, grouped under two capacious headings: “European Biblical Cultures: Interventions in Traditions” and “Dissemination of Biblical Traditions: West and East.”
Among the seven chapters in the first grouping, Phillip J. Donnelly's and John V. Fleming's stand out as contributions to the field of intellectual history. Donnelly argues that the transition in Latin pedagogy in England from the immersion-based scholastic approach to the translation-dominated method of the “Royal Grammar” in 1542 constitutes an ethical, not just an educational watershed, and that this work “is one of the enabling conditions of the Renaissance English biblical epic” (35). Fleming retails both English and French rebuttals of the flawed historiographies of David Hume and Charles-François Dupuis, respectively—via the satirical counter-inquiry, “Did Napoleon Exist?” launched independently by Richard Whately and Jean-Baptiste Perès—in service of the thesis that Enlightenment rationalism will ultimately prove inadequate even on its own terms to destroy the rational buttresses of Christian faith.
In the second grouping the elegant contribution of the philosopher Eleonore Stump, through her close, compelling reading of the Samson cycle in Judges, while just plausibly fitting the bill here as an American thinker, lends potent support to the conviction that the Bible need, indeed must, not become the property of academic biblicists.
The editors claim “cross-disciplinarity” for their project. My one significant gripe with an otherwise provocative volume is that when several contributors venture properly theological claims, they often do so poorly. This is frankly embarrassing in at least one offhanded comment whose author might have avoided it, pardonable but conspicuously amateurish in another, and in one significant case, arguably irresponsible (a questionable reduction of one famous philosopher-theologian's life-work to the position he articulates in a single, narrowly constrained civic manifesto).
In concluding his own excellent entry, Gregory Maillet quotes from Jeffrey's recent Christianity and Literature: Philosophical Foundations and Critical Practice (2011), in words that aptly summarize a fundamental intuition consistently if sometimes subtly borne out by this volume: “[T]o an almost overwhelming degree, English literature has acquired both its historic identity and its cultural authority from the mystery of divine transcendence” (Christianity and Literature, 323).
The book also includes a sixteen-page bibliography of Jeffrey's published works, spanning forty-four years, as well as a fairly detailed (twenty-page) index.
