The Book of Books: Biblical Interpretation, Literary Culture, and the Political Imagination from Erasmus to Milton

By Thomas Fulton

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Release date: Feb 5, 2021
• ISBN: 9780812297669

Book preview

THE BOOK OF BOOKS

THE

BOOK OF BOOKS

Biblical Interpretation, Literary Culture, and the Political Imagination from Erasmus to Milton

Thomas Fulton

Published in Cooperation with Folger Shakespeare Library

Copyright © 2021 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

www.upenn.edu/pennpress

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN 978-0-8122-5266-8

For my parents

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

A NOTE ON TEXTS

I have struggled with whether to modernize texts or leave them in the original. Except for the titles of early books cited in the notes and bibliography and passages quoted in the notes, I have chosen to modernize spelling and (very occasionally) punctuation throughout the text. I have generally preserved the original irregularities of capitalization. When humanistic study seems under siege, there remain few compelling reasons to exclude nonspecialists or international readers, especially with the difficulties of early Tudor orthography. It also seems inconsistent to surround modernized texts such as Shakespeare’s with the erratic spelling of his contemporaries. The one exception is Edmund Spenser, because modern editions of Spenser are left in original spelling, and because it seemed too big a task in a monograph with a broad scope to question that well-defended scholarly tradition. In some cases, where the original spelling of the word represents a somewhat diffferent or particularly expressive word—as when Henry VIII articulates his scruples over scripture as a scripulositie—I have included the original with the transcription.

Introduction

After the Bible was Translated into English, every Man, nay every Boy and Wench that could read English, thought they spoke with God Almighty and understood what he said, when by a certain number of Chapters a day they had read the Scriptures once or twice over, the Reverence and Obedience due to the Reformed Church here, and to the Bishops and Pastors therein, was cast off, and every Man became the Judge of Religion, and the Interpreter of Scriptures to himself.

—Thomas Hobbes, Behemoth: The History of the Causes of the Civil Wars of England (written ca. 1668)

Many years ago, in an effort to recover the experience of early modern readers, I began the seemingly simple task of reading their Bibles. What started as exploratory and haphazard became more and more systematic as I sought to understand the Geneva version, an annotated Bible created by Protestant exiles during the reign of Queen Mary. This was the Bible used by major figures and theologians of Elizabethan and Jacobean England, as well as a huge swath of its reading population—it was the Bible of Queen Elizabeth, Aemilia Lanyer, William Shakespeare, Edmund Spenser, Richard Hooker, John Whitgift, and the Earl of Oxford, Edward de Vere, among many others.¹ Because the Geneva Bible grew to be immensely popular, with something like half a million copies in well over 100 editions in sixty years, and because it had such extensive notes, I realized that if I were to follow the course of study Hobbes observed in his contemporaries—reading a certain number of chapters a day, as every boy and girl did—I would gain a far more tangible sense of how readers accessed this text, and how it shaped their access to others. Studying the popular Geneva text and its notes closely—and reading it comparatively with other Renaissance Bibles—seemed a first step (however belated) in understanding the interpretive habits and reading practices of early modern Britain.

The exercise also offered a way to reassess how Hobbes and others imagined the Bible as the premier text in the intellectual origins of the English Civil War. In the opening of The Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution (1965), for example, Christopher Hill asked whether there were Montesquieus, Voltaires, and Diderots of the English Revolution, answering, the Bible, especially the Geneva Bible with its highly political marginal notes, came near to being a revolutionists’ handbook.² Given that royalists were also great readers of scripture, these causal assertions from Hobbes and Hill seemed slightly mythologizing, but it remained clear that there was far more to be understood about the social and political dimensions of the English Bible.³ If the question of whether the text could be blamed (or celebrated) for the dissolution of political authority seemed unanswerable, the question of precisely how the ancient text worked its way into the social fabric—and how it became so readily applicable to contemporary politics—remained quite vital.

Considering this, I pursued a course of systematic reading that centered on a comparative study of England’s two dominant vernacular Bibles: the Geneva text of 1560 with its extensive notes, and the 1611 Authorized Version, whose much sparser marginal notes serve only as cross-references, short philological glosses, and alternate readings. The stark paratextual differences between these key Renaissance Bibles originate in a remarkable moment in political and bibliographic history when James I, at a conference at Hampton Court in 1604, pronounced the notes of the Geneva text to be very partial, untrue, seditious, and savoring too much, of dangerous, and traitorous conceits.⁴ This fiery indictment, often seen as pervasively representative of courtly opinion, has profoundly colored the reception history of the Geneva text and, in turn, other vernacular Bibles. Yet relatively little work has been done to verify the reputed dangerousness of the notes or the actual social use—be it subversive, royalist, or puritan—of particular Bibles.⁵ In undertaking a comparative reading of biblical versions and notes, I paused over central texts and their political use to trace the histories of interpretation and translation in older versions of the Bible. The biblical translations and annotations of Desiderius Erasmus and William Tyndale in particular provide a major point of origin for Tudor biblical translations and annotations, and also, like the later paratexts, they offer a remarkable site of commerce between translation and cultural reuse. Here, too, one could ask whether the early modern Bible and its paratext operated as a kind of polemic or political advice manual, and, contrariwise, whether and how much the political context shaped biblical interpretation. Not only offering correctives to long-held suppositions about the contents of the annotations, my systematic reading also vastly challenged assumptions I had held about the interpretive habits the notes represent and prepared me for the present investigation into their cultural and political role. The annotations in the Geneva Bible opened a world of readings and interpretive methods quite out of step with what I had understood to be the literal approach of the Protestants, as described by reformers such as Calvin or Tyndale. The annotators of these Bibles were motivated far less than they claimed by the humanistic recovery of the historical text or meaning. In fact, their reading habits proved much more medieval, more figuratively typological, and above all more anachronistically presentist than they had been described to be.

The book that has resulted 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, I am 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.⁶ 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. My 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.

Like Hobbes, though with more enthusiasm than anxiety, scholars have long felt that an intense interest in scripture profoundly shaped Renaissance culture, especially after the advent of the printed vernacular Bible and the reading imperatives that accompanied it. After the extensive dissemination of vernacular Bibles during Edward VI’s reign, scripture quickly became the central object of study by every literate sector of society; the Bible and biblical primers were among the first things read, often systematically, by boys and girls.⁷ The poet Katherine Philips, to cite one famous example, is reputed to have read the Bible thorough before she was full four years old.⁸ John Milton, possibly given the new King James Bible when he was five years old (his marked 1612 copy is preserved in the British Library), learned the vernacular Bible at a young age, but he also became acquainted with the text in its original languages: his earliest extant poems, purportedly composed at the age of fifteen, are Psalm translations; his earliest letter thanks his tutor, Thomas Young, for his gift of a Hebrew Bible.⁹ Like other early modern students and scholars, Milton took a systematic approach to his reading—culling particular passages in a theological commonplace book for later reuse. As he writes retrospectively in the introduction to De Doctrina Christiana, a work of extensive biblical citation, I began in my youth … to study assiduously the books of the Bible, both Testaments, in their original tongues; then go carefully through some of the shorter Systems of theologians, and, following their practice, to distinguish appropriate topic-headings, under each of which I would classify whatever passages of the Bible presented themselves for extracting, so that I could recover and use them when I needed to.¹⁰ This method largely describes Milton’s reading procedures in his extant commonplace book, as it follows deep-seated conventions of reading in early modernity: biblical passages are culled, set under topics, and stored for use and extraction in the event of a thematic, theological, or polemical need.¹¹

Given an early modern culture of readers familiar with the Bible and preoccupied with problems of biblical interpretation, this project seeks to recover the shape and impact of this preoccupation on cultural discourse. On a certain level, the book’s premise builds on foundational work such as Northrop Frye’s Great Code: The Bible and Literature and Frank Kermode’s Genesis of Secrecy among other studies that allow us now to take for granted the deep influence of the biblical text on the literary imagination. My specific interest, though, is the combination of the biblical text and the paratextual packaging of that text, which revolves around particular sites of social controversy as well as the larger, often dynastically oriented, conditions under which particular Bibles were created. Much of the literature of the English Renaissance grew out of a culture of interpretation bent on making the biblical text applicable to political use. Texts laden with biblical references, such as Erasmus’s Education of a Christian Prince, the first book of Spenser’s Faerie Queene (also called the Legend of Holiness), Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, Milton’s 1648 Psalms or Paradise Lost, were in conversation not just with the biblical text itself, but with the rich interpretive structures around that text. The relationship between socially oriented biblical interpretation and literary production is much more complex than simply one of source and influence, in which the dominant biblical text impresses its shape on literary production. I have sought to understand how writers endeavor to mimic and participate in the interpretive enterprise—even to argue against it and reshape it.

To further complicate the traditional top-down vision of the Bible’s influence on literary texts, the collaboration between biblical interpretation and early modern political writing often took place within the work of a single figure. Interpreters and even translators of scripture were also writers and polemicists. Arguably true of Milton, at the end of the period, this is certainly true of earlier writers like Martin Bucer, who turned from an unfinished Latin Bible to help create The Book of Common Prayer (1549) and write his treatise of political advice De Regno Christi (1550), or William Whittingham and Anthony Gilby, who worked on the annotated Geneva Bible while authoring polemics on resistance.¹² The dual, even triple, roles of biblical translator, interpreter, and political writer were fully inhabited by the two towering figures in the history of the English Renaissance Bible, Erasmus and Tyndale. On the larger European map, a significant dichotomy is usually drawn between Erasmus and Luther, and one might expect Tyndale to represent the local English version of Luther as well as the local purveyor of Lutheran ideas. Yet unlike Luther, Tyndale never openly pitted himself against Erasmus in a sustained fashion. Instead, Tyndale started his translating career as a translator of Erasmus’s Enchiridion (1522; manuscript discovered in 2015), and then translated Erasmus’s annotated New Testament, both its Greek and sometimes Erasmus’s Latin; Tyndale’s English New Testament was subsequently published in diglot editions with Erasmus’s Latin.¹³ Tyndale’s possibly apocryphal words, recorded by John Foxe, that If God spare my life, ere many years I will cause a boy that driveth the plough shall know more of the scripture than thou dost,¹⁴ derive from Erasmus’s Paraclesis, where Erasmus declares in a series of wistful subjunctives, I would desire that all women should read the gospel and Paul’s epistles, and I would to God they were translated in to the tongues of all men, so that they might not only be read, and known, of the Scots and Irishmen, but also of the Turks and Saracens. … I would to God the plowman would sing a text of the scripture at his plowbeam.¹⁵ Stephen Greenblatt rightly points to the vast difference between Erasmus’s ‘Would that’ and Tyndale’s ‘I will cause,’¹⁶ yet this difference is in many ways bridged by Foxe’s myth-making report, which reframes Erasmian aspiration as Tyndalean volition. Indeed, the 1529 translation of Erasmus’s Paraclesis (quoted here) was used to preface Tyndale’s New Testament in 1536. Here and elsewhere, Erasmus is paradoxically cast as a progenitor and even a figure of the English Reformation.

With one writing exclusively in Latin and the other in the vernacular, Erasmus and Tyndale set the stage early in the northern Renaissance as model scholars involved in translating and commenting on scripture as they wrote political advice books and works theorizing the application of scripture to the problems of the state. Erasmus undertook the project of annotating and retranslating the Novum Instrumentum (1516) at the same time that he developed rhetorical approaches for addressing princes in the Education of a Christian Prince (1516) among many other works. Tyndale was similarly occupied in such biblically inflected works as his Obedience of a Christian Man and How Christian Rulers Ought to Govern (1528), The Practice of Prelates: Whether the King’s Grace May be Separated from his Queen (1530), and the polemical Exposition of Matthew (1533) while translating the New Testament and parts of the Hebrew Bible. Henry VIII had been outraged at what he called the pestilent glosses in the margents¹⁷ of Tyndale’s first New Testament—seemingly more scandalizing than the text itself—but he eventually found use for vernacular scripture as well as Tyndale’s theory of obedience.

This book begins its history with Erasmus and Tyndale, and traces the connected problems of interpretation and application through several punctuated moments in the combined history of biblical production and political change: the crisis of religion at the moment of Henry’s divorce, the biblical installment of Edward VI, the period of exile for Protestants during Mary’s reign, tensions under Elizabeth, uncertainties surrounding the arrival of James from Scotland, and the dissolution of the monarchy in the 1640s. These moments occasioned Bibles and biblical texts that sought to cultivate particular views, including Tyndale’s Pentateuch (1530), the Edwardian Bibles of Edmund Becke (1549, 1551), the Geneva Bibles created in exile (1557, 1560), the Bishops’ Bible (1568), the Douay-Rheims Catholic Bible (1582, 1609) with its intense biblical confutations published as superannotated Bibles, and the King James Version (1611), radically shorn of explanatory notes.

Dynastic shifts often motivated biblical production, and these moments of revision are tied to problems in interpretation. In the case of what are often called official Bibles, such as the Bishops’ Bible, monarchs and their bishops worked together to produce a new version; and, in the case of the unofficial Geneva Bible, exiled annotators inscribed the conditions of the nation under Catholic rule into the margins and then, on the death of Mary, prefaced the new Bible with a dedication to Elizabeth.¹⁸ As I discuss further in Chapter 2, a complex scheme of Protestant royal iconography reinforced this connection between the monarch and the Bible in the Tudor era, often drawing on Hans Holbein’s influential woodcut in the first complete printed English Bible of 1535. The same image of a Tudor monarch appears with the boy king Edward in Thomas Cranmer’s Catechism, and then with Elizabeth in the place of her father in editions of the Bishops’ Bible, though with significant changes in iconography.¹⁹ (These images are discussed in chapters 2, 3, and 6.) Images participate in the interpretive paratextual structure surrounding the biblical text; working in coordination with the verbal components, they play a major role in sustaining a particular reading of the text. In 1539, Henry VIII issued an official Great Bible—great simply for its enormous pulpit size—and here the title page image depicts Henry with Bibles in each hand, inscribed with VERBUM DEI, passing them to Thomas Cranmer and Thomas Cromwell.²⁰ In Edward’s reign, though the project never came to being, Archbishop Cranmer invited German reformers to create a new Latin Bible—improving on Erasmus’s work—that would originate in England. And in Elizabeth’s reign, Matthew Parker and other bishops created the Bishops’ Bible, which drew both notes and translation ideas (though revised) from the Geneva Bible.

The association between Bibles and monarchs was so strong that the Interregnum church historian Thomas Fuller, in his major work The Church-History of Britain (1655), enumerates the first four translations of the Bible, which he calls according to their royal sponsors—the last and best being the King James Version (Figure 1). The chart Fuller provides to illustrate ihese four translations is telling for its unconscious inaccuracies as well as its deliberate omissions, especially the omission of the Geneva Bible. Many of the inaccuracies are not in the least surprising, given how hard it would be to reconstruct such a complex bibliography—even a century later—without a Short-Title Catalogue, the specialized Historical Catalogue of Printed Editions of the English Bible, and the still-growing body of scholarship on the English Bible.²¹ Yet the omissions in the list are more striking, especially because Fuller knew the Geneva well (it receives more explanation in his text than any of the others).²²

Figure 1. The Book of Books from Fuller’s Church-History of Britain (1655). The first, second, third, and the last and best Translation of the Bible—the King James Version—each set forth in the reigns of Protestant monarchs.

The Geneva Bible is notably omitted from the chart. Thomas Fuller, Church-History of Britain (London: Printed for John Williams, 1655), 387; Call number: 151–385f. Used by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

Also not given a place in the chart, Tyndale’s translations nonetheless appear in the preliminaries as a [pretended false] Translation, which had to be recalled and replaced with the Great Bible, supposedly rather commended than commanded to people. The supposed first translation is, as Fuller describes the Great Bible, the authoritative correction to Tyndale, Extant in Sir Thomas Cotton’s library, which he incorrectly dates 1541. The first Great Bible was printed in 1539, but there were official and semiofficial Bibles before this, the earliest complete printed edition, the Coverdale Bible, having first appeared in 1535 or early 1536. Cranmer had urged Cromwell to obtain the king’s most Gracious License for the 1537 Matthew Bible, so named after Thomas Matthew, a pseudonym designed to cloak the extensive presence of Tyndale, killed the year before its appearance. The same license is given to the 1537 printing of the Coverdale Bible, which had (with Holbein’s help) flatteringly portrayed the king.²³ As Fuller relates, the Great Bibles were chained in Saint Paul’s Church in London, though many Country-Parishes could not afford them.²⁴ By Edward’s reign, congregations systematically read the Great Bible throughout the year, and, according to the nutshell account in Fuller’s Book of Books chart, Elizabeth’s official Bishops’ Bible (his so-called third Translation) is left free and open to all Her well affected Subjects.

Fuller describes each English Bible as originating from a Protestant monarch in association with the bishops and handed, in one way or another, down to the people. There is some truth to this, though Edward’s reign saw only the repackaging of old translations in spite of the court’s aspirations to create the great Protestant Latin translation and the similarly abortive efforts of John Cheke to create a vernacular New Testament.²⁵ Fuller’s invented second Translation under Edward seems to originate from the profound branding power of visual and textual paratexts, especially the images of Tudor monarchs in Bibles issued in their reigns. For him, it is natural to assume that with each new Protestant monarch came a new translation, and that there are only four translations worthy of mention, one for each monarch, with the last and best belonging to James. In the case of the Edwardian Bible, Fuller probably here refers to Edmund Becke’s editions published by John Day in 1549 and 1551. Although not a new translation, it is a newly edited edition of the Matthew Bible. Edmund Becke supervised these editions and wrote an important dedication to Edward VI that would have given Fuller the impression of another official translation. There were, in fact, many more than four English translations, and more of them originated from exiles (both Protestant and Catholic) and private scholars than from the commands of kings or the labor of bishops. By far the most read and disseminated among these translations—unacknowledged in Fuller’s chart—was originally the product of exiles writing during the reign of a Catholic Queen.

The occlusions and inaccuracies in Fuller’s bibliographic presentation point to a reality that may have been even stronger in perception: Bibles were highly effective products for those in power. Engendering assent in large portions of society, Bibles served as powerful expressions of national sovereignty. From a cultural standpoint, therefore, translation, commentary, and paratext were often the province of the powerful even when created by the marginalized or exiled. Miles Coverdale, hiding on the continent to create what would essentially become a royalist biblical production—issued just before Tyndale’s execution—serves as a case in point. Similarly, the Genevan exiles filled their translation with subversive notes long before they had any idea that Queen Mary would die in time for them to repackage the Bible of early 1560 into an influential statement of Elizabethan nationalism, proclaiming—and arguably helping to shape—the new Queen as the our Zerubbabel, the descendant of David who would build the second Temple after the nation had been captured by idolaters.²⁶ The powerfully nationalist Epistle to Elizabeth, one of the changes made to turn the Marian text into an Elizabethan one, introduced Genevan and London editions for the next twenty-two years.

Rethinking the Literal Sense

The Letter to Can Grande attributed to Dante connects literary criticism with biblical hermeneutics and usefully encapsulates the layered forms of medieval allegory that were common prior to the Reformation. The text is valuable not only as a potential example of a writer considering biblical hermeneutics as a reflection of his own modes of representation, but also as an illustration of the differences between medieval and Renaissance forms of reading. Medieval forms of reading had developed into several interpretive modes. Called the Quadriga after the Roman chariot drawn by four horses, these were the literal, the allegorical (often synonymous with typological), tropological (or moral), and the anagogic (spiritual). In Dante’s famous explanation of these layers of meaning, he takes a passage from Psalm 114: When Israel went out of Egypt, the house of Jacob from a barbarous people, Judea was made his sanctuary, Israel his dominion. As the text explains, the passage carries four senses: the literal, that the Israelites left Egypt in the time of Moses; the allegorical, that this represents redemption through Christ; the tropological, that this signifies the conversion of the soul from misery to the state of grace; and finally, the anagogical, that this relates the departure of the sanctified soul from bondage to the corruption of this world into the freedom of eternal glory.²⁷ Protestant reformers sought an interpretative method less layered and less polysemous, insisting that scripture should have only one sense. They divide the scripture into four senses, wrote Tyndale, the literal, tropological, allegorical, anagogical. The literal sense is becoming nothing at all. For the Pope hath taken it clean away and hath made it his possession. He then makes what is perhaps his most famous statement, intoned in terms that resonate with the imperatives of the Ten Commandments: Thou shalt understand therefore that the scripture hath but one sense which is the literal sense. Further, Tyndale denounces allegorical reading altogether: The greatest cause of which captivity and the decay of the faith and this blindness wherein we now are, sprang first of allegories. To be sure, scripture offers allegories among other figures, but these must be subordinated to a literal reading: that which the proverb, similitude, riddle or allegory signifieth is ever the literal sense which thou must seek out diligently. Thus, Tyndale in 1528 cautions against securing too much meaning in biblical books like Revelation, which rely heavily on allegory without a literal backing: The Apocalypse or Revelations of John are allegories whose literal sense is hard to find in many places.²⁸

In spite of such credos of simple literalism, close attention to the interpretative practices of Tyndale and other English Protestants reveals that they still read scripture on multiple levels. The contradiction raises two related concerns: first, that the interpretive habits of readers do not necessarily conform to the way they define these habits; and second, that the words they used to define their methods, such as literal, have changed or narrowed since the early modern period, complicating our adoption of these terms. The persistence of medieval modes of reading—themselves far more nuanced than the critical parodies of the Protestants suggest—also stems simply from the weight of habit and tradition.²⁹ Centuries of habituated interpretation cannot change in a matter of a single year or decade even if a coherent plan for hermeneutic change were instituted. But many voices planned the Reformation—or Reformations, as Christopher Haigh has shown of England, and certainly such multiplicity existed outside of the island as well—and significant changes of mind occurred within individual careers and within the movements.³⁰

Rather than relying on the reformers’ self-defined methods of interpretation, therefore, this project endeavors to reconstruct methods of interpretation from the practices of interpreters, annotators, and readers, with particular attention to the margins of the biblical text—both the printed margins and para-texts, and, where possible, the valuable marks of readers. As I have discussed elsewhere with Kristen Poole, hermeneutics, a field of study we often relegate to the lofty world of theologians, was in fact so often the subject of sermons and commentaries that we can confidently speak of popular hermeneutics: common readers were versed not only in the biblical texts themselves but in modes of interpreting them.³¹ These interpretive cultures are shaped as much by habit, of course, as by self-conscious expressions of method. The explanatory notes in the Geneva Bible conform to several different categories of reading, many of which are, in fact, holdovers from medieval traditions in the Quadriga. Following the Quadriga, and drawing from it, these modes of reading exist in something like four categories:

1.  Historicist reading, which falls into two related subcategories:

a.  Contextualist historicism, which seeks to explain a passage according to the conditions of the ancient past contemporary to the text. Historicist glosses sometimes include cross-references, or references to Josephus.

b.  Philological historicism, which seeks to recover the sense of words from their ancient lexical context. Although Erasmus simply intermixed these subcategories in his annotations, contextualism and philology began to be disaggregated in the Geneva annotations, so that sometimes philology appears in the explanatory notes, but more often in separate italicized notes set off by straight quotation marks rather than numbers. The explanatory note for the word masons in 1 Kings 5:18, for example, a passage describing the workers gathered by Solomon to build the Temple, is philological: The Hebrew word is, Giblim, which some say, were excellent masons. A similar philological note appears in the margins of the King James Version (which ostensibly had no explanatory notes), since translators were clearly intrigued by this Hebrew word: Or, Giblites, as Ezek. 27:9, which enforces this group as the proper name of a people from Gebal. More often in the Geneva text philological notes appear separately, as in the one on camel in Jesus’s statement, It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, then for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God (Matt. 19:24). The gloss, "Or, cable rope" derives from new research into the early Syriac translation, which helped determine ambiguities around Aramaic and Hebrew words for rope and camel. The reading offered in the margin functions more as an alternate reading than an embellishment, and the fact that it remained in the margins rather than the text should not imply a lesser status. In this case, the domesticated service animal associated with this passage since Wycliffe and Tyndale (and before in the Vulgate’s camelum) had maintained enough cultural strength to retain the English word in the text even while a different signifier had emerged.³² These alternate readings, often introduced by or, became the dominant marginal paratext in the King James Version, as is discussed in chapter 7. The King James text often adopts the alternate reading of the Geneva, as if the passage of time had enabled a promotion of the marginal translation into the text. Here the KJV stayed with the traditional camel and did not offer an alternative.

2.  Anachronistic reading, which falls into two subcategories:

a.  Typology, a medieval tradition readily adapted by Protestants, which reads a specific event or person in the Old Testament as a figure or type for an event or person in the New Testament, sometimes with cross-references.

b.  Presentist reading, which applies any event, symbol, or biblical personage to the early modern historical present. The most telling indication of this sort of reading is in the anachronistic vocabulary of the notes: words like papist or tyrant evoke the early modern present in the biblical past.

3.  Universalist moralizing (a form of tropological interpretation): proverbial commonplaces on theology and human nature, such as a note on Lamentations 3:37: He showeth that nothing is done without Gods providence. (Gods providence has a particularly Calvinistic resonance here, but otherwise it is simply a note geared toward reinforcing the moral lesson of the passage.)

4.  Allegorical interpretation. In spite of Tyndale’s explicit rejection of this mode of reading (especially when not subordinated to literalism), allegory persists. As I discuss in chapter 5, allegory powerfully reenters the Protestant hermeneutic arena after the polemical power of the Book of Revelation becomes apparent, mostly after 1530. Signaling the ostensible Protestant aversion to the term, allegory itself is exceedingly rare in the Geneva notes—I have found just two instances, and significantly not in Revelation, where it most belongs. It is used to explain the genre of the Song of Songs, which begins with this description in the Argument: In this Song, Solomon by most sweet and comfortable allegories and parables describeth the perfect love of Jesus Christ. Allegory is an established mode of reading the Song of Songs that many used, including Milton.³³ The rare term similarly appears in Galatians 4:22 and following, where the headnote to the chapter explains that Paul confirmeth his argument with a strong example or allegory. This is one of a few examples Tyndale provides to support his view that allegorical reading must be supported by literal: And (Galatians 4), The spirit cometh by preaching of the faith etc. Thus doth the literal sense prove the allegory and bear it, as the foundation beareth the house.³⁴

Outside of the Book of Revelation, which becomes increasingly important as a separate entity, the most dominant modes of interpretation in the Geneva Bible’s notes are historicism and presentism (that is, 1a and 2b), with forms of typology also playing an important role in readings of the Old Testament and informing the allegorical approach to Revelation. Of course, these four modes of reading frequently overlap.

The interrelatedness of different genres of annotation occurs in a gloss on Lamentations 4:20 in the Geneva Bible, which I discuss in chapter 4, at a moment of lament by the vanquished Jews notable for its obscurity: The breath of our nostrils, the Anointed of the Lord was taken in their nets, of whom we said, Under his shadow we shall be preserved alive among the heathen. The note attached to breath of our nostrils reads the phrase as a royal epithet, referring implicitly to their King Zedekiah, the last of the kings before the fall of Judah. But the English note explicitly attaches the epithet to an actual king that has a specific English resonance: Our King Josiah, in whom stood our hope of Gods favor, and on whom depended our state & life, was slain whom he calleth anointed, because he was a figure of Christ. The repetition of our in our king, our hope, our state inferentially includes the reader, and draws on the recent loss of Our King Josiah—that is, King Edward VI, the young king, like Josiah, tragically lost and replaced by the persecuting Queen who is so much the subject of these glosses. This is a case of historical typology—where a biblical king stands in for an actual English king—a phenomenon closely studied by Kevin Killeen.³⁵ The Geneva margin is reluctant to go so far as to make the explicit connection, but it provides sufficient framework for the reader to do so. This suggestive historicist reading, perhaps too suggestive to withstand scrutiny, ultimately gives way to biblical typology: the anointed king is a figure of Christ. The paratext performs what many notes strive to do in converting a relatively obscure passage to useful applicability. It suggests that in spite of the frequent insistence on the simple sense of scripture, Protestant reading can be far more complex than it describes itself to be: more polysemous, often historical, more frequently allegorical, typological in a couple of ways, but always intent on transforming the ancient text for use in the early modern present.

Ostensibly, at least, Tyndale broke interpretive practices down into a simple binary, the literal versus the allegorical or figurative. The binary between literal and figurative was long imagined in terms of Paul’s aphoristic statement in 2 Corinthians 3:6, the letter killeth, but the Spirit giveth life, a passage that seemed for many medieval Catholics to celebrate allegorical reading and mandate against the literal sense. Tyndale’s prose, which offers more exhortation than explanation, describes how the passage was mistakenly thought to condemn literalism: Yea they are come unto such blindness that they not only say the literal sense profiteth not, but also that it is hurtful and noisome and killeth the soul. Which damnable doctrine they prove by a text of Paul (2 Corinthians 3) where he saith the letter killeth but the spirit giveth life. Lo say they the literal sense killeth and the spiritual sense giveth life.³⁶ Tyndale’s emphatic endorsement of the literal sense may not be without its own paradoxical complexity, or precisely identical to the views of other reformers on the subject, but it is broadly representative of the teaching, if not always the practice, of Protestant reformers.

In an influential reading of the Pauline passage in De Doctrina Christiana, Augustine eschewed blind adherence to the letter: For he who follows the letter takes figurative words as if they were proper, and does not carry out what is indicated by a proper word into its secondary signification.³⁷ In a later work, De Spiritu et Litera, Augustine offers a revised interpretation, that Paul’s words are not primarily about the literal and the figurative, but about the way that the letter or law may prescribe against sin, yet is unable in itself to provide a way to salvation.³⁸ Simple adherence to the outward formality of the law is, consequently, spirit killing. It is this interpretation that Luther and Calvin, among other reformers, embraced, denying the validity of the first.³⁹ As Calvin complains, during several centuries, nothing was more commonly said, or more generally received, than this—that Paul here furnishes us with a key for expounding Scripture by allegories, while nothing is farther from his intention.⁴⁰

From the knotty aftermath of the Protestant assault on medieval reading, an acute tension emerged between literal and nonliteral forms of interpretation. English literalism, as inaugurated by Tyndale, often took an extreme form that James Simpson, in a polemical and influential reassessment, has identified as fundamentalism.⁴¹ I do not use this anachronistic term here, though the early moderns had no term for the strict interpretive tendency that emerged among Protestants, especially those of a puritanical slant. Following the tenets of sola scriptura, strict literalists embraced a way of reading bent on adhering to the prescriptive power of scripture, and to shorter, commandment-like statements, such as touch not mine anointed (1 Chron. 16:22; Ps. 105:15), or honor thy father and thy mother (Exod. 20:12) that could serve in a wider application than the biblical context might allow. The same interpretive tendency also sought to make scripture the only rule to frame all our Actions by, as a polemical interpreter of the Psalms wrote, and the "only Law whereby to determine all our Civil Controversies.⁴² The repeated words only and all are suggestive of the kind of intensive interpretive mode of this sort of literalism, as are the ways that scripture here becomes synonymous with Law, even when law is only a generic subcategory of scripture. The passage is also suggestive of the way such readings emerge in political application. Literalism and its extreme form manifest themselves in the political realm largely in terms of reading biblical law, and accordingly they are closely allied with legalism. In Simpson’s view, the resistance to fundamentalism that emerges in the early Tudor period comes from Catholics such as Thomas More. I argue that this oppositional model in fact describes a tension that exists within English Protestantism itself, which is deeply divided about how to read the biblical text and, in turn, how to apply textual interpretation to the ethics of daily life. The various reformations and counter-reformations in English religion do not create monolithic forms of reading, but rather reveal a profound tension within English interpretive culture between a strict literal approach and a nonliteral approach that is formed largely in response. It was against English Presbyterians in the mid-1640s, for example, that Milton turned to decry the strictness of literal interpreting" that had distorted their thinking and caused illiberal marriage legislation as well as an irrational adherence to divine right.⁴³ The interpretive methods he proposed in turn—in his divorce tracts and in arguments about political sovereignty—allowed for far less stringent reliance on a singular, isolated biblical text. Even in the most seemingly Protestant of contexts, such as the work of Milton, English polemical and literary texts were constantly responding to, readjusting, and eroding Tyndale’s foundational concept of the literal text.

The polarized paradigm of literalism versus anti-literalism provides a useful working framework, but it is also seriously complicated by the very fact that literalism remains incomplete as a hermeneutic label even for a figure like Tyndale. As my chapter on Tyndale argues, his core argument for political obedience, following Luther, relies on an embellished reading of the Mosaic law regarding the obedience of parents—a reading that is not, in fact, readily recognizable as literal, though it does follow an increasingly predominant hermeneutic pattern in social and political applications. The interest of this project, then, is to reconstruct a hermeneutic method that derives not from the self-proclaimed literalist method of Tyndale and other writers, but from the realities of their practice. A broad reading of the notes of Renaissance Bibles, and of manuscript annotations and other traces of readerly activity, enable both an expanded history of early modern reading and a revised history of interpretation, one that sees more connection between practice and theory. Combining hermeneutic histories with the history of reading, I build on scholarly research that has reconstructed the way that early modern readers processed and reused textual material.⁴⁴ This research has uncovered the degree to which early readers conceived of the activity of reading in highly utilitarian terms, describing themselves less as readers, which suggests passive reception of material, but as users, reading for action.⁴⁵ This research in the history of reading, largely devoted to the use of secular and classical texts, deserves to be widened to consider religious texts, particularly the most read of texts, the Bible. Not surprisingly, the cultural propensity to transform classical reading material for current application also deeply characterizes the reading and interpretive procedures of early modern Bible users. Scriptural commentators constantly turned, even twisted (Erasmus used detorquere, to twist) biblical verses to make them applicable to present circumstances. Thus, the habits of biblical readers and their interactions with biblical paratexts, their methods of interpreting and reusing the authoritative text, can be used to reconstruct a more accurate, if multifaceted, understanding of Renaissance biblical interpretation. I have ventured here to consider a predominant mode of socially and politically oriented reading as applied literalism, not because it truly conforms to what we or Tyndale might consider to be literalism, but because it represents a practice closely associated with and sometimes falsely protected by the solid assurance of literal meaning.

This project shares interests with recent work on political theology such as that of Julia Lupton and Graham Hammill that approaches the combination of politics and theology from another theoretical position.⁴⁶ Much of their scholarship on these questions has focused respectively on the figures of Paul and Moses, who both play a major role in this study, since readings of Romans and the law in Exodus and Deuteronomy dominate Tudor political writing. This branch of criticism on biblical politics draws, however, from different paradigms, particularly in its use of the term political theology. The term has been used in some of the most prominent work on politics and religion in early modern studies, though Carl Schmitt originally used it (in Politische Theologie, 1922) as a way of metaphorically understanding the nature of political authority emerging, as Victoria Kahn writes, either as a symptom of or resistance to the new secular political order.⁴⁷ Drawing on Schmitt, Lupton and Hammill similarly theorize political theology as a phenomenon attached to the transition to early modernity: We take it to name a form of questioning that arises precisely when religion is no longer a dominant explanatory or life mode.⁴⁸ Although this critical paradigm has been useful for the latter part of the early modern period, religion remains a dominant form of explanation for most of the period and for the authors covered in this book, where the conjunction of politics and theology are far different from what Schmitt imagined; indeed, since Schmitt did not concern himself directly with sixteenth-century politics and theology, it is not entirely fair or useful to gauge the truth value of his theory in this early context. Yet the seemingly unavoidable term has also pervaded very different critical perspectives.