The Enlightenment Bible: Translation, Scholarship, Culture by Jonathan Sheehan (review)

107 than in how it is said. Swift’s self-styled ‘‘modern’’ speaker embodies the undisciplined use of reason the tale lambasts. By satirizing such individualism, Swift endorsed religious conformity. Though his unyielding faith in the National Church’s authority may appear odd to us, it was a common attitude within Anglican religious debate and certainly among its clergy. As J. R. Pocock has observed, ‘‘it is incredibly hard for us, raised as we are on the liberal presupposition that religion should have nothing to do with authority, to recapture the mentality of our predecessors to whom religion was an affair of authority and could not be otherwise.’’ But doing so is necessary. The purpose of Swift’s satire, as Christian Thorne has noted, seems less to enter a public debate than to ‘‘shout discourse down.’’ To conclude, as Ms. Ellenzweig does, that the Tale ‘‘uphold[s] the teachings of the Anglican Church while making clear that the spirit is a fiction’’ mistakes both Swift’s deep distrust of religious fanaticism and self-confident individualism for freethinking . Pope’s antisectarianism, which defined his religious thought and was itself the consequence of being raised and remaining Catholic in an anti-Catholic world, led him to strive continually for religious common ground. As a consequence , it has always attracted suspicions of heterodoxy. Like early critics of his Essay on Criticism, Ms. Ellenzweig detects heterodoxy in Pope’s observation that ‘‘Wit, like Faith, by each Man is apply’d / To one small Sect, and All are Damn’d beside.’’ But these lines attack sectarianism, not faith. Similarly, Pope’s claim in a letter to Bishop Atterbury that reading Church controversies left him ‘‘a Papist and a Protestant by turns, according to the last book I read’’ signals not his deism, but his ongoing interest in identifying common ground between Catholicism and Protestantism . Pope exemplifies both his era’s exhaustion with theological disputes and his own exasperation as an internal exile. The sophisticated, learned, and self-consciously literary world of eighteenth-century religious controversy certainly included an intense engagement with the past and a familiarity with heterodox beliefs. By addressing these issues, Ms. Ellenzweig opens a valuable conversation. But entering fully into that religious controversy requires greater awareness of these writers’ contexts and a sharper sense of the variety of eighteenth-century habits of religious thought than this study provides. Anna Battigelli SUNY Plattsburgh JONATHAN SHEEHAN. The Enlightenment Bible: Translation, Scholarship, Culture. Princeton; Princeton, 2005. Pp. xvi ⫹ 273. $58. Although I am still in doubt as to what ‘‘Enlightenment’’ means after Mr. Sheehan’s explanation, which includes an index of almost all we know about the eighteenth century, The Enlightenment Bible is valuable, learned, and important . Mr. Sheehan explores a series of hermeneutical questions that arose (and perhaps only could have arisen) after the Renaissance and before the high Victorian age, between Luther’s German Bible of 1522 and the Essays and Reviews of 1860. Mr. Sheehan’s general adversaries are those who think that philosophy engulfed religion at this time as interest in the Bible waned. Mr. Sheehan focuses on biblical studies that flourished mostly in Germany and England. Almost three-quarters of 108 his analysis concerns Germany; only one of his two major chapters (out of nine), ‘‘Scholarship, the New Testament , and the English Defense of the Bible,’’ directly deals with the time of the Scriblerians, who are rarely mentioned . The following topics are covered: the beginnings of the vernacular Bible; the birth of the ‘‘Enlightenment’’ Bible, and English responses up to and including Richard Bentley, whom Sheehan makes seminal; German pietism’s incorporation of critical methodology; responses to philological research; approaches stressing moral pedagogy and the bible as poetry; the bible as stimulus for archival research; universalist and cultural readings; and the vagaries of higher criticism through 1850 in England and Germany . The thread that unites large and small essays on the English bible is translation . Mr. Sheehan regards those periods that created research without making the bible available to the public (as in translation ) as epicene and deficient; such periods fail to use the Bible as it should be used. He repeatedly inquires why English translation, after the Authorized Version...