Legitimating Other People's Scriptures: Pasquier Quesnel's Nouveau Testament Across Post-Reformation Europe
This study traces the evolution of one version of the New Testament across two early modern kingdoms and three confessional communities. The Oratorian priest Pasquier Quesnel salvaged the text of the Nouveau Testament “de Mons,” which was condemned in 1667 for infidelity to the Vulgate, by attaching...
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| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
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| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
Cambridge Univ. Press
2013
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| In: |
Church history
Year: 2013, Volume: 82, Issue: 3, Pages: 576-616 |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (JSTOR) Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) |
| Parallel Edition: | Electronic
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| Summary: | This study traces the evolution of one version of the New Testament across two early modern kingdoms and three confessional communities. The Oratorian priest Pasquier Quesnel salvaged the text of the Nouveau Testament “de Mons,” which was condemned in 1667 for infidelity to the Vulgate, by attaching “Christian thoughts” to each verse and framing the new product as a moral commentary. The French Jesuit Michel Le Tellier revived the charges against the “Mons” scriptures, but he could not prevent their redistribution in Quesnel's L'Abrégé de la morale de l'Evangile (1672) and Nouveau Testament (1692) for more than three decades until he shifted his attack away from the translation toward the legitimating paratexts. Long before then, Le Tellier plunged the French Jesuits into the competition for marketing vernacular scripture-books. Though they first proposed an alternative model of scripture-reading, they increasingly borrowed from Quesnel's model as they had more success proscribing his book. Meanwhile in England, both Catholics and Protestants attempted to fit Quesnel's scripture-books to the standards of their geo-confessional communities, conforming enough to make transgression possible. The Catholic physician Richard Short represented Quesnel's book as the “Jesuit” Rheims version while the Anglican divine Richard Russel re-packaged it as a deluxe King James Bible. The struggles of all these competitors illuminate the informal processes of authorization that enabled scripture-books to shadow the Authorized Versions and to expand the space for publisher adaptation and reader appropriation between them. By analyzing the permutations of books, scholars might enrich their understanding of confessional differences, often limited to comparisons of textual access, and more precisely discern the varieties of historical relationships that particular Christian communities sought with their sacred scriptures. |
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| ISSN: | 1755-2613 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Church history
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1017/S0009640713000644 |