The Book of Books: Biblical Interpretation, Literary Culture, and the Political Imagination from Erasmus to Milton (Published in cooperation with Folger Shakespeare Library)

Just as the Reformation was a movement of intertwined theological and political aims, many individual authors of the time shifted back and forth between biblical interpretation and political writing. Two foundational figures in the history of the Renaissance Bible, Desiderius Erasmus and William Tyndale, are cases in point, one writing in Latin, the other in the vernacular. Erasmus undertook the project of retranslating and annotating the New Testament at the same time that he developed rhetorical approaches for addressing princes in his Education of a Christian Prince (1516); Tyndale was occupied with biblically inflected works such as his Obedience of a Christian Man (1528) while translating and annotating the first printed English Bibles. In The Book of Books , Thomas Fulton charts the process of recovery, interpretation, and reuse of scripture in early modern England, exploring the uses of the Bible as a supremely authoritative text that was continually transformed for political purposes. In a series of case studies linked to biblical translation, polemical tracts, and works of imaginative literature produced during the reigns of successive English rulers, he investigates the commerce between biblical interpretation, readership, and literary culture. Whereas scholars have often drawn exclusively on modern editions of the King James Version, Fulton turns our attention toward the specific Bibles that writers used and the specific manner in which they used them. In doing so, he argues that Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, and others were in conversation not just with the biblical text itself, but with the rich interpretive and paratextual structures that accompanied it, revolving around sites of social controversy as well as the larger, often dynastically oriented conditions under which particular Bibles were created. "This book examines the process of recovery, reinterpretation, and reuse of scripture in the early modern political imagination. It focuses in particular on the literary and cultural transformations of the biblical text for political purposes. It thereby attends to Hobbes' concern in Behemoth that independent scriptural reading led to the dissolution of authority by seeking to understand what role the Bible had in shaping early modern political thought. But most importantly, this study seeks to understand how, precisely, it played this role: what hermeneutic and practical procedures enabled early modern English readers to transform this supremely authoritative text for their use? How did certain imperatives in reading-such as literalism, or whatever we might call their actual method-shape or impede this transformation? To get at the most common, most everyday form of reading, and the most immediate transition from biblical text to cultural discourse, the author is drawn in particular to the apparatus surrounding the text, the interpretive paratext and marginal annotations. Naomi Tadmor's Social Universe of the English Bible has attributed the extraordinary success of the English Bible to the degree to which the translated text Anglicized the ancient Hebrew and Greek, so that more than simply translated, the text was "slightly moulded" to conform to an English framework, and "rendered in terms that made sense to people at that time." Biblical annotations take this process of molding still further, as they had far greater liberty than the translated text to draw a passage closer to a meaning and context germane to its readers. The author's interest here is not only in the content and function of biblical annotations, but also in what occurs in the space that they represent, an interface between the ancient code of biblical meaning and the currency of the early modern world"-- Provided by publisher

Just as the Reformation was a movement of intertwined theological and political aims, many individual authors of the time shifted back and forth between biblical interpretation and political writing. Two foundational figures in the history of the Renaissance Bible, Desiderius Erasmus and William Tyndale, are cases in point, one writing in Latin, the other in the vernacular. Erasmus undertook the project of retranslating and annotating the New Testament at the same time that he developed rhetorical approaches for addressing princes in his Education of a Christian Prince (1516); Tyndale was occupied with biblically inflected works such as his Obedience of a Christian Man (1528) while translating and annotating the first printed English Bibles.

In The Book of Books, Thomas Fulton charts the process of recovery, interpretation, and reuse of scripture in early modern England, exploring the uses of the Bible as a supremely authoritative text that was continually transformed for political purposes. In a series of case studies linked to biblical translation, polemical tracts, and works of imaginative literature produced during the reigns of successive English rulers, he investigates the commerce between biblical interpretation, readership, and literary culture. Whereas scholars have often drawn exclusively on modern editions of the King James Version, Fulton turns our attention toward the specific Bibles that writers used and the specific manner in which they used them. In doing so, he argues that Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, and others were in conversation not just with the biblical text itself, but with the rich interpretive and paratextual structures that accompanied it, revolving around sites of social controversy as well as the larger, often dynastically oriented conditions under which particular Bibles were created.

Just as the Reformation was a movement of intertwinedtheological and political aims, many individual authors of the timeshifted back and forth between biblical interpretation andpolitical writing. Two foundational figures in the history of theRenaissance Bible, Desiderius Erasmus and William Tyndale, arecases in point, one writing in Latin, the other in the vernacular.Erasmus undertook the project of retranslating and annotating theNew Testament at the same time that he developed rhetoricalapproaches for addressing princes in his Education of aChristian Prince (1516); Tyndale was occupied with biblicallyinflected works such as his Obedience of a Christian Man(1528) while translating and annotating the first printed EnglishBibles.

In The Book of Books, Thomas Fulton charts the processof recovery, interpretation, and reuse of scripture in early modernEngland, exploring the uses of the Bible as a supremelyauthoritative text that was continually transformed for politicalpurposes. In a series of case studies linked to biblicaltranslation, polemical tracts, and works of imaginative literatureproduced during the reigns of successive English rulers, heinvestigates the commerce between biblical interpretation,readership, and literary culture. Whereas scholars have often drawnexclusively on modern editions of the King James Version, Fultonturns our attention toward the specific Bibles that writers usedand the specific manner in which they used them. In doing so, heargues that Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, and others were inconversation not just with the biblical text itself, but with therich interpretive and paratextual structures that accompanied it,revolving around sites of social controversy as well as the larger,often dynastically oriented conditions under which particularBibles were created.

In The Book of Books , Thomas Fulton charts the process of recovery, interpretation, and reuse of scripture in early modern English literary culture, exploring the uses of the Bible as a combination of text and paratext that revolved around sites of social controversy and was continually transformed for political purposes. In The Book of Books , Thomas Fulton charts the process of recovery, interpretation, and reuse of scripture in early modern English literary culture, exploring the uses of the Bible as a combination of text and paratext that revolved around sites of social controversy and was continually transformed for political purposes.