This is a paperback reissue of a book first published by the University of California Press in 1994. Though it is now no longer current in respect of ongoing scholarship, it is nevertheless welcome as it makes available again a work that addresses some aspects of the study and use of the Bible in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that have not received as much attention as others. Most of the current scholarship is focused on the Bible in the context of the Reformation era, principally in its Protestant expressions. Debora Shuger turns her attention instead to how Renaissance humanism studied the Bible. The emphasis in this strand of biblical interpretation was on sacred philology and antiquarianism which, by the seventeenth century, effectively set aside a concern with the sacred aspect of the Bible. One can see in the trajectory that Shuger traces a clear anticipation of Enlightenment scholars in how they studied the Scriptures, and it permits one to see from whence the latter emerged as the seventeenth century gave way to the eighteenth. Among the individuals who appear in Shuger's book are Erasmus, John Calvin, Hugo Grotius, Isaac Causubon, Daniel Heinsius and Joseph Scaliger. Space does not permit an overview of the subjects addressed in the five chapters of this book, but suffice it to say that it is suggestive and at times provocative in what it sets forth, and forms a useful complement to work on the Reformation Bible.