The forty essays in this splendid volume originated in the Festival of Ideas at the University of York in 2011, organized by Jane Moody. The book is attractively produced with a number of illustrations which add important dimensions to the text.
The topic is of great and wide-ranging interest. The Bible was England's most important book in the early modern period. Its influence permeated culture from theology to language and literature, politics, and natural philosophy. Even more, the Bible was vital to daily life. Men, women, and children interacted with the Scriptures. Many forms pointed to biblical texts: pictures, songs, proverbs, and quotations. The scriptures were available in elaborate and cheap editions. The Bible “mattered in early modern England as the pivot of thought and learning, to which knowledge of all sorts might be directed, and which contained inexhaustible conceptual and intellectual, as well as spiritual riches” (1).
This handbook gives us the most far-reaching and detailed picture of the Bible in this place and period ever available. It unpacks the many and diverse contexts in which the Bible functioned, opening us to wide vistas where the Bible served as an intellectual as well as a deeply personal resource. In short, “it is the sheer diversity of the scriptures and their ability to impinge on all areas of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century life that constituted them as such important texts and concepts” (2). The book surveys problems of biblical translation and scholarship as well as the array of ways the Bible was experienced, in seeing, hearing, and being read.
The six parts of the volume display this breadth of dimensions as the essays dig deep into their particular topics. Part I: Translations, provides coverage of “the Englishing of the Bible” through translations beginning with the works of Tyndale and Coverdale in the 1530's, through the Geneva Bible (1560), the Rheims New Testament (1582) and King James Bible (1611), and retranslating the Bible in the English Revolution, among other pieces. A significant ingredient here is the contentiousness of Bible translations, evoking political and social ramifications. While “translating the word of God might attempt to create common understanding through allowing individuals to read scripture in their own language” we also find that “debates regarding the appropriateness of biblical translation continued throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries” (21).
Scholarship relating to the Bible and its interpretation (Part II) focused then on classical languages, especially Latin, and the languages of biblical texts. Scholarly study of the Vulgate, Septuagint, and Hebrew Bibles were concerned with the integrity of biblical texts in a period when “biblical criticism” was beginning to develop. The primacy of the “literal sense” of the Bible, a key ingredient of protestant hermeneutics in opposition to the traditional fourfold senses of Scriptures, turned out to be a complicated enterprise as several essays show. Sacred geography and chronology also claimed attention as aids to understanding scripture more clearly.
In Part III: Spreading the Word, essays focus on ways scripture was spread, beginning with “The Church of England and the English Bible, 1559–1640” by Lori Anne Ferrell. Ian Green's fine “‘Hearing’ and ‘Reading’: Disseminating Bible Knowledge and Fostering Bible Understanding in Early Modern England” details myriad ways by which the clerical and “godly” ideal that every literate adult should be about “reading the Bible voraciously and studying it critically in search of spiritual enlightenment and comfort” was pursued (284). Rachel Willie studies Dissonance and Psalmody, showing main ways that Psalmody came to permeate Christian consciousness, boosted by the Sternhold and Hopkins psalter that “would become the dominant psalter in domestic and church settings for the next one hundred and fifty years” (293). Mary Morrissey considers early modern English preaching in an era when the preacher's words were compared by Ralph Barlowe with nails in the biblical text (cf. Ecclesiastes 12:11). Preachers had to “mine” biblical texts for applications to life while also trying to say more about Christian doctrine from the same texts (312). Studies of Scotland and Ireland enhance this section as well as Helen Smith's fascinating piece on the Bible and conversion.
The essays in Part IV: The Political Bible amply exemplify the editors' comment: “The Bible was political in every sense” (367). The political nature of the Bible evolved from the sixteenth-century when it was read as a source of authority for establishing the rights of the ruler and ruled as well as the relationship between secular and ecclesiastical government, to the seventeenth-century where scriptural interpretation was turned to as a way of working out questions of state. From James VI and I's exegetical labors and a political use of the Bible (Jane Rickard) to “The Bible, Britannia, and the Glorious Revolution” (Emma Major), we find the Bible appealed to as a political resource—including the interpretations of Diggers, Levellers, and Ranters as Civil War sects.
Part V: The Bible and Literature presents essays that are just the tip of the iceberg in showing how the Bible was “a fruitful source for authors” (451) and how “the Bible and biblical poetics was central to early modern literary culture” (453). Here are studies of the King James Bible, scripture and tragedy, George Herbert, and John Bunyan among others.
Part VI: Reception Histories considers the appropriation and reworking of the Bible. Three case studies chapters are on John Donne, John Saltmarsh, and “Domestic Decoration and the Bible in the Early Modern Home.” The final three chapters confront issues of interiority, atheism, and critique. In the end, it is scripture itself which has “provided the interpretative resources which structured and inspired its changing uses” (562).
A chronology and bibliography conclude this masterful collection of scholarly pieces on England's early modern biblical culture. This is a treasure chest resource that more than repays careful and reflective study.
