Scripture and Scholarship in Early Modern England (review)

One of the most gripping opening sentences in modern scholarship is Mario Praz's from Studies in Seventeenth Century Imagery: "There lies asleep in old European libraries, chiefly in those of ecclesiastical origin, a vast literature of illustrated books which are very seldom and only cursorily consulted nowadays" (1939, 1:9). Praz's observation on emblem books applies just as well today to volumes of biblical scholarship: both were essential reading in the early modern period and culturally vital, but are now largely neglected, even by scholars. To remedy this, University of London historians Ariel Hessayon and Nicholas Keene have collected twelve essays on topics ranging from the history of construing biblical giants and angelic miscegenation (in an impressively erudite piece by Hessayon) to the philosophe Pierre Bayle's influence on English views of King David (in Alex Barber's rather underdeveloped contribution). In addition to complaining about historians' neglect of "scholarly treatments of the Bible," which has left "many unwieldy tomes to gather dust on the shelves" (3), the editors also argue that what scholarship there is has been misguided in its binarism, placing artificial barriers between English and Continental works, works in different disciplines, and writers and readers who are often categorized oversimply as orthodox or heretical, elite or popular.

The essays gathered by Hessayon and Keene by and large support the editors' introductory claims. First, many demonstrate the interdependence of a genuinely pan-European scholarly community. The primary focus of the collection is on English authors, but William Poole, for example, shows Royal Society members Robert Hooke and Francis Lodwick reading David Pareus, Pico della Mirandola, Spinoza, and Richard Simon. And while Scott Mandelbrote argues that the quest to establish the "true Septuagint" by means of the Royal Library's Codex Alexandrinus had a specifically English importance —it was thought it might "help to confute Catholic claims about the uncertainty of the witness of Scripture" (87–88) —the exciting scholarly adventure he describes is truly international, following manuscript hunters like Sir Thomas Roe (James I's ambassador to the Ottomans) to Greece, Turkey, Egypt, and most of Europe before returning to England. Several additional essays by Nicholas Keene, Stephen D. Snobelen, and Rob Illiffe describe the indispensable reading of continental (especially French) scholarship for John Locke, Isaac Newton, and others who were trying to sort out biblical chronology and the canon of the New Testament.

The attempt to break down the supposed barrier between orthodoxy and heterodoxy, secondly, is aided by Nicholas McDowell's excellent essay on the reading of Jeremy Taylor's Liberty of Prophesying (1647). The royalist Taylor's efforts to stabilize the established Church by "defining Christian belief in terms of ethics rather than theology and by establishing the validity of toleration on the basis of the uncertainty of religious knowledge" proved immensely popular with radicals like William Walwyn, Samuel Fisher, and Clement Writer (179). Challenging the influential arguments of Christopher Hill, McDowell shows that heresy and literacy were sometimes interdependent.

Yet sometimes the binaries prove more resistant. For instance, though McDowell works to challenge the false separation of the orthodox and heterodox, many of the other essays tend to maintain it. Indeed, the focus of the collection is largely on heresy, whether that of Locke, Newton, and anti-Trinitarians (here the inclusion of essays by three members of the Newton Project may have been a factor), the Cambridge Platonist and theological Origenist Henry More, or populist radicals like the millenarian Thomas Beverly. Perhaps heresy is simply more interesting than orthodoxy, but this is not a hypothesis adequately tested by this collection. Similarly, the division between disciplines also tends to be upheld by the editorial selections. Nicholas Cranfield's essay on artistic representations of the chilling story of Jephthah and his daughter from Judges is the only study from a nonliterary disciplinary perspective (for which a single color plate is included, the only image...