The Renaissance Bible: Scholarship, Sacrifice, and Subjectivity (review)

Reviews 267 as well as a substantial index of identifiable scholastic and other contemporary sources used in the manuscript. She must also have included images of every illustration found within the Omne Bonum, either in the first volume which contains images discussed in detail within the text, or in the substantial catalogue description that makes up the final volume. Her indexes and appendices are exhaustive. Lucy Freeman Sandler is a scholar w h o is particularly suited to the task of examining this manuscript, already well k n o w n for her codicological studies of the Peterborough Psalter and the Psalter of Robert de Lisle. This particular book evolved out of research done for her substantial contribution to Gothic Manuscripts (1285-1385), for the Survey of Manuscripts Illuminated in the British Isles, also published by Harvey Miller. She has been working on this manuscript for over ten years, and her book reveals the range of skills art historians are increasingly asked to draw on to do justice to the contents as well as to the decoration of illuminated manuscripts. This is a substantial piece of scholarship and will be a work that should become an essential text for those interested in fourteenth-century book production in all its forms. Judith Collard Department of Art History and Theory University of Otago Shuger, Debora Kuller, The Renaissance Bible: Scholarship, Sacrifice, Subjectivity (The N e w Historicism: Studies in Cultural Poetics 29), Berkeley/Los Angeles/London, University of California Press, 1994; paper; pp. xv, 297; 5 b / w illustrations; R.R.P. $17.95. Debora Kuller Shuger's The Renaissance Bible .is an invigorating work of scholarship which compellingly (and delightfully) demonstrates the centrality of the Bible and biblical discourses to the culture of Early Modern England. At first glance such a project m a y seem an attempt to explicate the obvious, but the importance of biblical discourse is, as Kuller Shuger points out, often 'invisible' in modern scholarship which generally tends to segregate religious history from cultural studies. Her book powerfully reveals the poverty engendered of this practice 268 Reviews demonstrating instead the Renaissance bible's 'centripetal pull' on all kinds of Early Modern disciplines and knowledge, its function as a 'synthetic field' for m a n y forms of cultural work, and the ensuing effects of discursive innovation. The texts examined range from pre- and post-Reformation Magdalene narratives through George Buchanan's immensely popular neo-Latin play Jephthah, H u g o Grotius's 1617 orthodox defence of the theology of atonement, De Satisfactione Christi, and Calvinist passion narratives. Kuller Shuger does not chart a broad historical progression in the cultural work of the Renaissance bible but rather conducts 'essays' along discursive paths that possess their o w n genealogy as they interweave and are pulled within its cultural ambit. Themethod is shaped by the phenomena being examined and Kuller Shuger displays a seeming encyclopedic knowledge as she integrates the disciplines of philology, theology, classics, anthropology, biblical hermeneutics and exegesis, feminist criticism and religious history. The series title, T h e N e w Historicism: Studies in Cultural Poetics', accurately situates Kuller Shuger's theoretical perspective and, as w e have come to expect from her, she masterfully employs Geertz's method of 'thick description' as a basis for cultural interpretation. Kuller Shuger begins with a chapter entitled 'After Allegory: N e w Testament Scholarship in the Renaissance' which traces the interconnected lives of a fraternity of scholars, revealing both a tightly knit community but also a group participating in the wider world of politics, law and public affairs. She concludes that biblical discourse was not only central to intellectual life but was also a field in which other knowledges and disciplines circulated with synergistic effect. Kuller Shuger charts a tradition ofbiblical criticism ranging from the philological style of Valla through Protestant dogmatic humanism to, in the latter sixteenth century, an historical approach which viewed the Bible as a text contingent on the practices and rules of an antique culture. This evolution reveals an emerging conflict between two interpretive approaches to the Bible, designated as essentialist and historicist, in which Kuller Shuger posits the most pivotal contention of...