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The period between the late Renaissance and the early Enlightenment has long been regarded as the zenith of the 'republic of letters', a pan-European community of like-minded scholars and intellectuals who fostered critical approaches to the study of the Bible and other ancient texts, while renouncing the brutal religio-political disputes that were tearing their continent apart at the same time. Criticism and Confession offers an unprecedentedly comprehensive challenge to this account. Throughout this period, all forms of biblical scholarship were intended to contribute to theological debates, rather than defusing or transcending them, and meaningful collaboration between scholars of different confessions was an exception, rather than the norm. 'Neutrality' was a fiction that obscured the ways in which scholarship served the interests of ecclesiastical and political institutions. Scholarly practices varied from one confessional context to another, and the progress of 'criticism' was never straightforward.
The study demonstrates this by placing scholarly works in dialogue with works of dogmatic theology, and comparing examples from multiple confessional and national contexts. It offers major revisionist treatments of canonical figures in the history of scholarship, such as Joseph Scaliger, Isaac Casaubon, John Selden, Hugo Grotius, and Louis Cappel, based on unstudied archival as well as printed sources; and it places those figures alongside their more marginal, overlooked counterparts. It also contextualizes scholarly correspondence and other forms of intellectual exchange by considering them alongside the records of political and ecclesiastical bodies. Throughout, the study combines the methods of the history of scholarship with techniques drawn from other fields, including literary, political, and religious history. As well as presenting a new history of seventeenth-century biblical criticism, it also critiques modern scholarly assumptions about the relationships between erudition, humanistic culture, political activism, and religious identity.
List of contents
- Introduction
- Prelude: The discourse of critica in the late Renaissance
- PART I: Debating sacred history in England and the continent
- The 'Theological Vortex'? Isaac Casaubon in England, 1610-1614
- Philology divided: the controversy over John Selden's Historie of Tithes (1618)
- PART II: Commenting on the New Testament
- New Testament scholarship after Scaliger
- Hugo Grotius: 'historical criticism' in its generic and controversial contexts
- Conclusion: the myth of 'critical exegesis'
- PART III: Criticizing the Old Testament
- Anti-Protestant controversy and the 'ecclesiastical' versions of the Old Testament: the case of Jean Morin
- Protestants and the Septuagint: the failed edition of Patrick Young
- Critical judgement and theological exegesis: the case of Louis Cappel
- Cappel's Critica sacra in the confessional republic of letters
- The London Polyglot Bible: synthesis, retrospective, or another controversial intervention?
- Conclusion: from humanistic exegesis to sacred criticism
- Coda. From Critica sacra to Enlightened critique?
- Critica criticorum: the case of Richard Simon
- Making the ars critica 'more philosophical': the case of Jean Le Clerc
- Conclusion: the generalization of criticism?
- Bibliography
About the author
Nicholas Hardy is currently Munby Research Fellow in Bibliography at the University Library and Darwin College, Cambridge. His research interests cover early modern humanism, intellectual history, classical reception studies, and the history of the book. He took a BA (2008) in Classics and English at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and then an MSt (2009) and DPhil (2012) in English, also at Oxford, before joining Trinity College, Cambridge to take up a four-year Research Fellowship in 2012. He has also held visiting fellowships at the Scaliger Institute, Leiden University Library, and the Folger Institute in Washington, DC.
Summary
A study of the ways in which the text and meaning of the Bible were debated by scholars and theologians, Catholic and Protestant, in seventeenth-century Europe, considering the technical problems faced by scholars studying and editing the text in its original languages, and the religious and political pressures affecting the ways they worked.
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resurrects the unity of a whole intellectual culture, which was characterized by a dynamic engagement with ancient texts ... very well-researched ... excellent command of sources in Latin and Greek
Report
Criticism and Confession exemplifies the very best kind of scholarly book: one that challenges a long-standing narrative and, by interweaving penetrating insight with multivectored erudition, manages to make an important field exciting again. Debora Shuger, University of California, Los Angeles, Renaissance Quarterly
