Introduction

Ariel Hessayon and Nicholas Keene

The story of the English Bible has often been told, but the story of the Bible in
England is still incomplete.1 It has been estimated that 465 editions and 101 variant
editions of the Bible in English were published between 1525 and 1700, and that
during the same period 217 editions and 26 variant editions of the New Testament in
English were issued. By 1700 perhaps as many as 1,290,000 copies of the Bible in
English and 545,000 copies of the New Testament in English had been printed. Even
allowing for wear and tear, these figures suggest that many households possessed
either an English Bible or New Testament. The Geneva version of the English
Bible, produced by English exiles in the heartland of Calvinism, with its helpful if
sometimes provocative marginalia, was eventually supplanted by the King James
Bible or so-called Authorized Version of 1611, derived largely from the translation
of William Tyndale (d.1536).2 The continued value of the Bible as a commodity
is evident in the number of testators who were at pains to specify it among the
possessions bequeathed to their heirs.3

It is a commonplace that the Bible was the most read and commented upon book in
this era (in which period of English history has it not been?), and that its influence
suffused all aspects of life from individual salvation to familial relationships to
political government. The vernacular Bible became the symbol of English Protestant
identity and independence in the second half of the sixteenth century, as well as
the ultimate battleground for the contestation of competing ideologies to prescribe

1
D. Daniell, The Bible in English (New Haven, 2003) is thorough. For a classic account,
see F. F. Bruce, History of the Bible in English (New York, 1978).
2
C.J. Sommerville, ‘On the distribution of religious and occult literature in seventeenth-
century England’ The Library, 5th series, 29 (1974), 222–3; B.J. McMullin, ‘The Bible trade’,
in J. Barnard and D. F. Mckenzie (eds), The Cambridge History of the Book in England
Volume IV 1557–1695 (Cambridge, 2002), 455–73.
3
PRO Prob 11/191 fol. 73v; PRO Prob 11/198 fol. 34r; PRO Prob 11/205 fol. 407v; PRO
Prob 11/217 fol. 251r; PRO Prob 11/223 fol. 270r; PRO Prob 11/234 fol. 124r; PRO Prob
11/297 fol. 208r; see also, PRO Prob 11/205 fol. 407v.
2 Scripture and Scholarship in Early Modern England
and regulate the operation of the sacred in the lives of the nation.4 The work of
Christopher Hill has been particularly illuminating in highlighting the centrality of
the (vernacular) Bible to the religious, social, political, economic and cultural lives
of English men and women.5 The story of the Bible in England, however, remains
incomplete. There is a dearth of studies concerning the scholarly criticism of the
Bible between the late sixteenth and early eighteenth centuries. There are a number
of works demonstrating the developing critical attention to the Bible through to
the late Middle Ages in Europe,6 complemented by a substantial body of literature
focused on John Wycliffe and the Lollards.7 The significance of new strategies of
treating the Bible has been explored in the Renaissance,8 many centred on Erasmus,9

4
R.H. Worth Jr, Church, Monarch and Bible in Sixteenth Century England (North Carolina,
2000); I. Green, Print and Protestantism in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2000). The best
study of the King James Bible is D. Daiches, The King James Version of the Bible: An Account
of the Development and Sources of the English Bible of 1611 with special reference to the
Hebrew Tradition (Chicago, 1941). Modern studies include A. McGrath, In the Beginning:
The Story of the King James Bible and how it changed a Nation, a Language and a Culture
(London, 2001), and A. Nicolson, Power and Glory: Jacobean England and the Making of the
King James Bible (London, 2003).
5
C. Hill, The English Bible and the Seventeenth Century Revolution (London, 1993).
6
The principal work is B. Smalley, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages (rev. 3rd
ed., Oxford, 1983). Also invaluable is Henri de Lubac, Exégèse médiévale: Les quatre sens
de l’écriture (4 vols, Paris 1959–64). See also R. Gameson (ed.), The Early Medieval Bible
(Cambridge, 1994); K. Walsh and D. Wood (eds), The Bible in the Medieval World: Essays
in Memory of Beryl Smalley (Oxford, 1985); D.W. Lourdaux and D. Verhelst (eds), The Bible
and Medieval Culture (Louvain, 1979).
7
Particularly useful is K. Ghosh, The Wycliffite Heresy: Authority and the Interpretation
of Texts (Cambridge, 2002). Other key works include A. Kenny (ed.), Wyclif in his times
(Oxford, 1986); D.C. Wood The evangelical doctor, John Wycliffe and the Lollards (Welwyn,
1984); C.V. Bostick, The Antichrist and the Lollards, apocalypticism in late medieval and
Reformation England (Leiden, 1998); A. Hudson, Lollards and their Books (London, 1985)
and idem, The Premature Reformation: Wycliffite Texts and Lollard History (Oxford, 1988);
M. Aston, Lollards and reformers, images and literacy in late medieval religion (London,
1984); M. Deanesly, The Lollard Bible and other medieval biblical versions (Cambridge,
1920).
8
The best account of Renaissance Protestant biblical erudition is François LaPlanche,
L’écriture, le sacré et l’histoire: Erudits et politiques protestants devant la Bible en France
au XVIIe siècle (Amsterdam, 1986). See also Don Cameron Allen, The Legend of Noah:
Renaissance Rationalism in Art, Science, and Letters (Illinois, 1949); idem, Mysteriously
Meant: The Rediscovery of Pagan Symbolism and Allegorical Interpretation in the Renaissance
(Baltimore, 1970). Other useful works include G.R. Evans, The Language and Logic of the
Bible: The Road to Reformation (Cambridge, 1985), J.H. Bentley, Humanists and Holy Writ:
New Testament Scholarship in the Renaissance (Princeton, 1983). See also D.K. Shuger, The
Renaissance Bible: Scholarship, Sacrifice, and Subjectivity (Berkeley, 1994).
9
Of particular value in the historiography on Erasmus is E. Rummel, Erasmus’ Annotations
on the New Testament: From Philologist to Theologian, Erasmus Studies 8 (Toronto, 1986);
J.C. Olin, Six Essays on Erasmus (New York, 1979) and idem, Erasmus, Utopia and the
 Introduction 3
and biblical interpretation during the Reformation has received fulsome discussion.10
There have been a number of useful intellectual biographies on leading late sixteenth
and early seventeenth century European figures prominent in developing critical
approaches to scripture, most notably Anthony Grafton’s study of Joseph Scaliger,11
but corresponding studies of English biblical scholars like Archbishop Ussher and
the polymath John Selden are missing.12 Thereafter historians seem unsure of the
broader significance of scholarly treatments of the Bible and have apparently left
many unwieldy tomes to gather dust on the shelves.

II

Contributors to this volume, whose interests lie in the fields of early modern history,
theology, and literature, have approached the subject of biblical scholarship from
a wide variety of different perspectives, but they share certain assumptions. They
believe that English scriptural erudition can only be understood in a European
context. English biblical scholars in this era belonged to a self-conscious European
intellectual community exchanging ideas and developing strategies for excavating
the sacred text. Anglophone historiography has traditionally failed to sufficiently
appreciate this cosmopolitan intellectual culture and much remains to be done on
the cross-fertilisation of ideas relating to the Bible across geographical, cultural and
linguistic boundaries. The contributors also believe that, contrary to the impression
sometimes conveyed in studies of radical thought, be it in the mid-seventeenth
century or the turn of the eighteenth, biblical criticism was not the exclusive
preserve of ‘free-thinkers’ operating outside the parameters of the ecclesiastical
establishment. It was a shared dialogue, and the various interlocutors drew upon
the same resources of biblical, patristic and historical material to construct their

Jesuits: Essays on the Outreach of Humanism (New York, 1994). See also B. Hall, Humanists
and Protestants (Edinburgh, 1990) and T.J. Wengert, Human freedom, Christian righteousness,
Philip Melanchthon’s exegetical dispute with Erasmus of Rotterdam (Oxford, 1998).
10
See particularly O. O’Sullivan (ed.), The Bible as Book: The Reformation (London,
2000); W.P. Stephens (ed.), The Bible, the Reformation and the Church: Essays in honour
of James Atkinson (Sheffield, 1995); D.C. Steinmetz, The Bible in the Sixteenth Century
(Durham, NC, 1990). A useful collection of essays can be found in R.A. Muller and
J.L. Thompson (eds), Biblical Interpretation in the Era of the Reformation (Michigan, 1996).
See also Muller, Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics. Volume 1:Prolegomena to Theology
(Grand Rapids, 1985) and Post-Reformation Dogmatics. Volume 2: Holy Scripture: The
Cognitive Foundation of Theology (Grand Rapids, 1993).
11
A. Grafton, Joseph Scaliger: A Study in the History of Classical Scholarship (2 vols,
Oxford 1983–93). See also C.S.M. Rademaker, The Life and Work of Gerardus Joannes
Vossius (1577–1649) (Netherlands, 1981), and N. Wickenden, G J. Vossius and the Humanist
Concept of History (Netherlands, 1993).
12
R. Buick Knox, James Ussher Archbishop of Armagh (Cardiff, 1967) contains little
information on Ussher’s biblical scholarship. The wait with regards to Selden may soon be
over with a forthcoming monograph by G.J. Toomer.
4 Scripture and Scholarship in Early Modern England
arguments, however differently they interpreted and deployed that intellectual
resource to contest the status, authority and role of the Bible. An over-reliance
on the binary categorisation of ‘orthodoxy’ and ‘heterodoxy’, always historically
contingent and shifting categories, has perhaps obscured some of the subtleties and
nuances of this shared conversation.13 Nor was discussion of aspects of biblical
scholarship the preserve of university-educated intellectuals locked away in ivory
towers far from the uncomprehending masses. Over the course of the early modern
period, as various essays here demonstrate, the arguments and the information upon
which they were based were communicated to a far broader audience than ever
before, to the delight of some observers and the consternation of others. By the end
of the seventeenth century, the convention that abstruse matters relating to scripture
should be locked away in Latinate discourse was observed as much in its breach as
its observance. As it became increasingly difficult for the religious establishment
to control the dissemination and interpretation of aspects of biblical learning, the
contestation for the authority to interpret scripture became a battleground critical to
the status of the Bible in England. By the mid-eighteenth century no aspect of the
history, construction or transmission of scripture had gone unchallenged, but the
Bible remained the most read and commented upon book.

13
See J.G.A. Pocock, ‘Within the margins: the definitions of orthodoxy’, in R.D. Lund
(ed.), The Margins of Orthodoxy: Heterodox Writing and Cultural Response, 1660–1750
(Cambridge, 1995), 33–53.