The Bible was, by any measure, the most important book in early modern England. It preoccupied the scholarship of the era, and suffused the idioms of literature and speech. Political ideas rode on its interpretation and deployed its terms. It was intricately related to the project of natural philosophy. And it was central to daily life at all levels of society from parliamentarian to preacher, from the 'boy that driveth the plough', famously invoked by Tyndale, to women across the social scale. It circulated in texts ranging from elaborate folios to cheap catechisms; it was mediated in numerous forms, as pictures, songs, and embroideries, and as proverbs, commonplaces, and quotations.
Bringing together leading scholars from a range of fields, The Oxford Handbook of the Bible in Early Modern England, 1530-1700 explores how the scriptures served as a generative motor for ideas, and a resource for creative and political thought, as well as for domestic and devotional life.
Sections tackle the knotty issues of translation, the rich range of early modern biblical scholarship, Bible dissemination and circulation, the changing political uses of the Bible, literary appropriations and responses, and the reception of the text across a range of contexts and media. Where existing scholarship focuses, typically, on Tyndale and the King James Bible of 1611, The Oxford Handbook of the Bible in England, 1530-1700 goes further, tracing the vibrant and shifting landscape of biblical culture in the two centuries following the Reformation.
Author(s): Kevin Killeen, Helen Smith, Rachel Judith Willie
Series: Oxford Handbooks
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Year: 2015
Language: English
Pages: 805
City: Oxford
Cover
The Oxford Handbook of
the Bible in Early Modern England, c.1530–1700
Copyright
Contents
List of Illustrations
List of Contributors
Note to the Reader
Introduction. ‘All other bookes … are but Notes upon this’: The Early Modern Bible
part 1 Translations
Introduction to Part I
1 ‘A day after doomsday’: Cranmer and the Bible Translations of the 1530s
2 Genevan Legacies: The Making of the English Geneva Bible
3 ‘A comely gate to so rich and glorious a citie’: The Paratextual Architecture of the Rheims New Testament and the King James Bible
4 The King James Bible and Biblical Images of Desolation
5 The Roman Inkhorn: Religious Resistance to Latinism in Early Modern England
6 Retranslating the Bible in the English Revolution
Part II Scholarship
Introduction to Part II
7 The Septuagint and the Transformation of Biblical Scholarship in England, from the King James Bible (1611) to the London Polyglot (1657)
8 The Apocrypha in Early Modern England
9 Isaiah 63 and the Literal Senses of Scripture
10 The ‘sundrie waies of Wisdom’: Richard Hooker on the Authority of Scripture and Reason
11 ‘The doors shall fly open’: Chronology and Biblical Interpretation in England, c.1630–c.1730
12 Early Modern geographia sacra in the Context of Early Modern Scholarship
13 Milton’s Corrupt Bible
14 The Commodification of Scripture, 1640–1660: Politics, Ecclesiology, and the Cultures of Print
15 Self-Defeating Scholarship? Antiscripturism and Anglican Apologetics from Hooker to the Latitudinarians
Part III Spreading the Word
Introduction to Part III
16 The Church of England and the English Bible, 1559–1640
17 ‘Hearing’ and ‘Reading’: Disseminating Bible Knowledge and Fostering Bible Understanding in Early Modern England
18 ‘All Scripture is given by inspiration of God’: Dissonance and Psalmody
19 Ornament and Repetition: Biblical Interpretation in Early Modern English Preaching
20 Preaching, Reading, and Publishing the Word in Protestant Scotland
21 The Bible in Early Modern Gaelic Ireland: Tradition, Collaboration, and Alienation
22 ‘Wilt thou not read me, Atheist?’ The Bible and Conversion
Part IV The Political Bible
Introduction to Part IV
23 Mover and Author: King James VI and I and the Political Use of the Bible
24 ‘A king like other nations’: Political Theory and the Hebrew Republic in the Early Modern Age
25 Digging, Levelling, and Ranting: The Bible and the Civil War Sects
26 A Year in the Life of King Saul: 1643
27 ‘That glory may dwell in our land’: The Bible, Britannia, and the Glorious Revolution
Part V The Bible and Literature
Introduction to Part V
28 The King James Bible in its Cultural Moment
29 The Noblest Composition in the Universe or Fit for the Flames? The Literary Style of the King James Bible
30 Epic, Meditation, or Sacred History? Women and Biblical Verse Paraphrase in Seventeenth-Century England
31 Scripture and Tragedy in the Reformation
32 ‘This verse marks that’: George Herbert’s The Temple and Scripture in Context
33 ‘Blessed Joseph! I would thou hadst more fellows’: John Bunyan’s Joseph
34 Paradise Lost, the Bible, and Biblical Epic
Part VI Reception Histories
Introduction to Part VI
35 Donne’s Biblical Encounters
36 Domestic Decoration and the Bible in the Early Modern Home
37 ‘My exquisite copies for action’: John Saltmarsh and the Machiavellian Bible
38 Unbelief and the Bible
39 Inwardness and English Bible Translations
40 Early Modern Davids: From Sin to Critique
Chronology
Bibliography
Index
