The Book of Books: Biblical interpretation, literary culture, and the political imagination from Erasmus to Milton
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...
| Summary: | 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. Cover -- THE BOOK OF BOOKS -- Title -- Copyright -- Dedication -- CONTENTS -- A Note on Texts -- Introduction -- Chapter 1. Erasmus's New Testament and the Politics of Historicism -- Chapter 2. Tyndale's Literalism and the Laws of Moses -- Chapter 3. A New Josiah and Bucer's Theocratic Utopia -- Chapter 4. The Word in Exile: The Geneva Bible and Its Readers -- Chapter 5. Battling Bibles and Spenser's Dragon -- Chapter 6. Measure for Measure and the New King -- Chapter 7. Milton's Bible and Revolutionary Psalm Culture -- Chapter 8. Milton Contra Tyndale -- Coda. Legitimating Power -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Biblical Index -- General Index -- Acknowledgments. "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"-- |
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| Item Description: | Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources |
| ISBN: | 0812297660 |