Thomas Fulton's The Book of Books provides an excellent contribution to our understanding of the Bible's textual history and political use in early modern England. Fulton persuasively argues that English Bible versions (and crucially, their paratexts) were in conversation with the political context in which they were produced—speaking to it, challenging it, and responding to developments. For early modern figures like Tyndale, Erasmus, and Milton, Fulton argues, politics and political commentary belonged to the field of theology, and biblical paratexts were anchored in contemporary concerns. Fulton's book pays rich attention to the interplay between text, paratext, and context at work in early modern English Bibles and literature responding to them.
The book's chapters move roughly chronologically, connecting political upheavals such as Henry VIII's “Great Matter” and the Regicide to the bibles of the period and literary responses to them. Predictably, Romans 13 features often. In chapter 1, Fulton explores Erasmus's reading of Romans 13:1–7 and its implications for the divine right of kings, arguing that the attention paid by Erasmus to historical context allowed him to distinguish between the political demands of Paul's world and his own, thus positioning the text as a literary model. Chapter 2 considers how English protestants like Tyndale responded to such concerns, and how they adapted theories of the literal sense as a result. Fulton argues that Tyndale's literalism was utilitarian and geared toward presentist application, which Fulton terms “applied literalism” (82). The complexity of the protestant literal sense generally has seen provocative re-evaluation in recent years (in particular, by Brian Cummings, Debora Shuger, and, more contentiously, James Simpson). Fulton contributes to such re-evaluation by focusing on where such literalism leads—generally, toward the exigencies of the contexts in which it occurred. This is persuasively set out, and accompanied by rich detail, but it is not clear that Fulton's new terminology of “applied literalism” is strictly required. To propose a new term accepts the definitions of the Protestant literal sense as the bluntly (and unrealistically) nonfigurative mode that Simpson puts forward. It would have been more satisfying had Fulton articulated how the Protestant literal sense is itself more capacious and flexible than this blunt understanding—although his emphasis on how literalism is applied is well observed.
Chapter 3 develops the overlap between literalism and legalism established in previous chapters, arguing for its particular relevance in the reign of Edward VI. Fulton emphasizes Martin Bucer's De Regno Christi as well as revisions to the 1537 Matthew Bible by Edmund Becke. In this, Fulton demonstrates his fundamentally textual focus, for despite his emphasis on Edwardian legalism and the book's overall emphasis on contemporary political contexts, he engages in little sustained discussion of the crucial context of Cranmer's attempted reform of canon law. Chapter 4 engages in a welcome re-evaluation of the annotations of the Geneva Bible, making a persuasive case for their presentist concerns. The margins of the Geneva Bible, Fulton argues, read “like an advice book to magistrates, converting intensely applied historical readings to present political use” (109). In this, Fulton draws attention to what made the Genevan notes suspicious to figures like King James VI and I: annotations ensure that the biblical past speaks to present readers, shaping their responses to their own governance. Given the case Fulton makes for early modern readers’ frequent lack of distinction between biblical texts and biblical annotations, this argument seems especially important for our understanding of the reception of the Geneva Bible.
The book's second half moves into consideration of literary texts, where the connections between text, intertext, paratext, and context are intensified (even as the distinctions between them are loosened). Chapter 5 focuses on Spenser's The Faerie Queen and the Genevan annotations to Revelation. Fulton is right to highlight how much Revelation was applied to present political circumstances, and this chapter impressively traces how the Genevan annotations responded to contemporary political commentary by Bale, Beza, and others. Yet despite this identification of the rich textual field underlying the Genevan notes, Fulton tends to treat the glosses as originating key interpretations, when often they were inscribing traditional or common readings expressed across a range of literary genres. Certainly, the printed annotations in English versions, Geneva in particular, solidified certain ways of interpreting and applying scriptural text. But to say that “Spenser's allegory in The Faerie Queene is deeply structured by the presentation of church destiny in the notes of Protestant Bibles” (143) is to ignore that both are responding to a massive tradition that does not originate in Geneva's notes.
In chapter 6, Fulton returns to Romans 13 and the issues of literalism and legalism, examining how they inflect the political vision of Shakespeare's Measure for Measure. Fulton avoids the keyword-matching approaches that once dominated studies of Shakespeare's use of the Geneva Bible, offering instead a nuanced working through of the relationships between literalism and legalism, strict application, and misapplication, as “problem[s] connected to a strict reading of Paul's words about the magistrate as God's minister in Romans 13” (22). Fulton turns to Milton in the book's final chapters, where his analysis is unsurprisingly excellent, given his established strengths in Milton studies. Chapter 7 engages in a marvelous literary analysis of Milton's 1648 Psalm translations and their imitation of the King James Bible's marginal readings, arguing for Milton's emphasis on the individual choice offered by the KJV's prioritization of marginal alternatives. In his final chapter, Fulton reconnects Milton's approaches to literalism, legalism, and reason established by Erasmus and Tyndale in the book's first chapters.
The Book of Books engages with an extensive range of archival, textual, and paratextual detail, and is backed up by a thorough connection to scholarship. It offers sensitive literary criticism and important contributions to studies of the history of the book, Tyndale, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton. Overall, Fulton offers a welcome redirection of our understanding of the interconnectedness of biblical hermeneutics and early modern political theology—that political legitimacy was consistently positioned as a hermeneutic problem, and hermeneutics were often geared toward present political concerns.
