Scripture and Scholarship in Early Modern England

Nicholas Keene, Ariel Hessayon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9780754638933
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351901543
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The Bible is the single most influential text in Western culture, yet the history of biblical scholarship in early modern England has yet to be written. There have been many publications in the last quarter of a century on heterodoxy, particularly concentrating on the emergence of new sects in the mid-seventeenth century and the perceived onslaught on the clerical establishment by freethinkers and Deists in the late-seventeenth and early-eighteenth century. However, the study of orthodoxy has languished far behind. This volume of complementary essays will be the first to embrace orthodox and heterodox treatments of scripture, and in the process question, challenge and redefine what historians mean when they use these terms. The collection will dispel the myth that a critical engagement with sacred texts was the preserve of radical figures: anti-scripturists, Quakers, Deists and freethinkers. For while the work of these people was significant, it formed only part of a far broader debate incorporating figures from across the theological spectrum engaging in a shared discourse. To explore this discourse, scholars have been drawn together from across the fields of history, theology and literary criticism. Areas of investigation include the inspiration, textual integrity and historicity of scriptural texts, the relative authority of canon and apocrypha, prophecy, the comparative merits of texts in different ancient languages, developing tools of critical scholarship, utopian and moral interpretations of scripture and how scholars read the Bible. Through a study of the interrelated themes of orthodoxy and heterodoxy, print culture and the public sphere, and the theory and practice of textual interpretation, our understanding of the histories of religion, theology, scholarship and reading in seventeenth-century England will be enhanced.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 ‘Og King of Bashan, Enoch and the Books of Enoch: Extra-Canonical Texts and Interpretations of Genesis 6:1–4
• 2 The Genesis Narrative in the Circle of Robert Hooke and Francis Lodwick
• 3 Moral Tales at the Hearth: Jephthah’s Daughter in the Seventeenth Century
• 4 English Scholarship and the Greek Text of the Old Testament, 1620–1720: The Impact of Codex Alexandrinus
• 5 ‘A Two-Edged Sword’: Biblical Criticism and the New Testament Canon in Early Modern England
• 6 ‘To us there is but one God, the Father’: Antitrinitarian Textual Criticism in Seventeenth- and Early Eighteenth-Century England
• 7 Friendly Criticism: Richard Simon, John Locke, Isaac Newton and the Johannine Comma
• 8 Thomas Beverley and the ‘Late Great Revolution’: English Apocalyptic Expectation in the Late Seventeenth Century
• 9 The Ghost in the Marble: Jeremy Taylor’s Liberty of Prophesying (1647) and Its Readers
• 10 Iconisms, Enthusiasm and Origen: Henry More Reads the Bible
• 11 ‘Directions for the Profitable Reading of the Holy Scriptures’: Biblical Criticism, Clerical Learning and Lay Readers, c. 1650–1720
• 12 ‘I resolved to give an account of most of the persons mentioned in the Bible’: Pierre Bayle and the Prophet David in English Biblical Culture
• Afterword: The Word Became Flawed
• Index