In this book Timothy Twining, currently a senior postdoctoral fellow of the Research Foundation-Flanders at the Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies, KU Leuven, sets out to establish how, when and in what circumstances early modern Old Testament scholarship was written, disseminated and criticised. The publication dates of landmark works of early modern biblical scholarship – Johann Buxdorf’s Tiberias (1620), Jean Morin’s Exercitationes biblicae (1633), Louis Cappel’s Critica sacra (completed about 1634, published 1650), the London Polyglot Bible (1653–7) and Richard Simon’s Histoire critique du Vieux Testament (1678) – provide the structure for the book. Instead, however, of offering successive interpretations of these texts, its narrative dives deeply into lesser-known printed texts, correspondence, annotations in books, censors’ reports and institutional records. Twining has read extraordinarily widely in the printed works of the period and has consulted archives across Europe. His narrative moves assuredly across the distinct confessional contexts of the Dutch Republic, Rome, Paris, Spain, England and Switzerland while deftly navigating among the multiple versions of the text of the Old Testament – Masoretic, Septuagint, Samaritan Pentateuch, Sixtine Septuagint, Clementine Vulgate – with which early modern scholars grappled.

The titular ‘limits of erudition’ are four general categories that serve as the methodological framework for this project in the history of knowledge. These ‘limits’ are the ‘informational’ (the range of resources an individual scholar had at his disposal); ‘institutional’ (how institutional roles could shape the practice and purpose of a scholar’s work); ‘censorial’ (the impact of religious or other authorities on whether and in what circumstances given texts could be published); and ‘confessional’ (how given versions of the biblical text were preferred by distinct religious groups and how scholars legitimised, justified, or engaged with this reality). In regard to this final ‘limit’, Twining makes the important point that many of the key works of early modern Old Testament scholarship were written as much to alter the views of members of an author’s own confession as to contest those of confessional opponents. Twining’s central contention is that by framing early modern Old Testament scholarship in terms of these limits of erudition it is ‘possible to render visible the otherwise invisible contours of early modern scholarly life as lived’.

In this ambition he succeeds admirably. The combination of Twining’s innovative methodology and his own seemingly limitless erudition illuminate in new and unexpected ways the conditions and constraints within which the intellectual life of post-Reformation Europe was carried out. The limits of erudition is an enormously valuable contribution to the study of early modern biblical scholarship and to the history of knowledge more broadly.

A further aspect of The limits of erudition that warrants notice is its intervention in a contemporary historiographical debate. The book, which distantly originated as a doctoral dissertation at Cambridge, builds on and extends the revisionist work of Noel Malcolm, Nicholas Hardy and, above all, Kirsten Macfarlane that targets a metanarrative whose proponents locate the origins of modern biblical criticism in the writings of radical outsiders (notably, Isaac La Peyrère, Thomas Hobbes and Spinoza), while asserting that early modern confessional biblical scholars unwittingly contributed to the development of secular modernity by inadvertently undermining scriptural authority. The revisionists maintain that the secularisation narrative linking early modern and present-day biblical criticism is doubly ahistorical because it both reflects the secular philosophical commitments of most academic scholars today and represents a teleological use of a single point of reference to make transhistorical judgements about past scholars. Twining presents his study as responding to Macfarlane’s call for historians to show how ‘multiple trajectories make complex, overlapping, and often diffuse and unclear patterns from multiple points in the early modern period to multiple points today’.

The historical, methodological and revisionist aspects of Twining’s work converge in his discussion of Richard Simon’s Histoire critique du Vieux Testament. Its final chapter argues that Simon’s decoupling of historical investigation of the Bible from its traditional function of providing the authoritative grounds of belief and practice constituted an epochal achievement that, by opening up the possibility of pursuing scholarship of the Bible with a degree of independence from its theological import, marked the end of an era of Old Testament scholarship.

If the Histoire critique marked the end of an era of scholarship, does it also thereby terminate the methodological usefulness of the four limits of erudition that have provided the framework for this study? In fact, while Twining is clear that none of the limits of erudition were static or unchanging, nor were the interrelationships among them constant, he thinks that the Histoire critique represented only the potential for transition and change and not yet a definitive rupture so that, in most respects, the four limits and the set of interrelationships among them retain their descriptive and explanatory value for late seventeenth-century Old Testament scholarship, including Simon’s. Nevertheless, he observes that their relative usefulness in illuminating the practice and purpose of biblical scholarship may decline for the period of or following Simon’s work, although he frames this observation as a hypothesis to be tested in further research rather than as a firm conclusion.

Twining, finally, asserts that Simon’s Histoire critique du Vieux Testament, by showing scholars (and not just Catholic ones) how it might be possible to combine an orthodox confessional attitude toward the biblical text while still subjecting it to learned inquiry, softened the potential for conflict between religion and history. No longer an unwitting contributor to the development of secular modernity, Simon is here recast as a founding figure in a counter historiographical narrative that recognises the contributions to philological and historical scholarship of the Bible from Simon’s day to our own by scholars with definite theological and confessional commitments. Twining particularly notes the prominence of Evangelical scholars in contemporary New Testament criticism.

The depiction of religion in what was known as the secularisation or modernisation thesis as an instance of the survival within modernity of pre-modern modes of thought and practice has come under broad and sustained criticism in recent years and has largely yielded to the idea of ‘multiple modernities’ and the accompanying recognition that religion is to varying degrees incorporated within many versions of modernity. The complexity of the place of religion in the modern world is a prime example of multiple trajectories from multiple points in the early modern period to multiple points today. In The limits of erudition Twining has brilliantly traced one such trajectory, although the desirability of softening the potential for conflict between religion and history is a metahistorical value that may not find universal support among scholars today.

Two final questions occur to the reader. Is it really teleological to see early modern biblical scholarship as contributing to some degree to the diminishment of the authority of the Bible in the West? Multiple modernities notwithstanding, it is a legitimate task of historians to explain how the shift from a society in which belief in God is unchallenged to one in which it is understood to be one option among many (in Charles Taylor’s – hardly a secular-minded scholar – formulation in A secular age) came about. Recognising the irony of history in this instance is not to dismiss early modern confessional biblical scholars as foolish or deluded. How appropriate, finally, is Twining’s methodological framework when applied to heterodox thinkers? Is Spinoza, discussed briefly in chapter vi, in particular, adequately captured by Twining’s four ‘limits of erudition’? This is another question for further research raised by this learned and challenging study.