Paratexts of the English Bible, 1525-1611

Paratexts of the English Bible, 1525-1611
Author: Debora Shuger
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 521
Release: 2022-03-24
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0192655604

English bibles, from Tyndale's 1525 New Testament to the 1611 King James, feature calendars, woodcuts, maps, chronologies, prayers, philological glosses, inset historical essays, elaborate multi-page diagrams, single-leaf summaries of scripture, prefaces by eminent churchmen, doctrinal notes by leading theologians, a dialogue on predestination, a twelfth-century genealogy of Christ, a ninth-century Jewish chronicle--most widely available, given the hundreds of editions printed between those dates. This book explores this archive, but it also tracks its changes, because while biblical translations remain relatively stable over time, the paratexts cocooning a bible's first printing sometimes mutate or vanish in succeeding editions--and indeed sometimes they migrate to a competing bible. These paratexts, together with their revelatory print histories, disclose a picture of the English Reformation that differs in striking ways from the authorized version.

Paratexts of the English Bible, 1525-1611

Paratexts of the English Bible, 1525-1611
Author: Debora K. Shuger
Publisher:
Total Pages: 347
Release: 2022
Genre: Bible
ISBN: 9780191926235

This title studies paratexts found in sixteenth-century English Bibles, from prefaces, dedications, and annotations to prayers, diagrams, and woodcuts to shed light on the materiality of surviving Bibles and on their publication histories, but also on Reformation theology and the history of the English church.

The Bible

The Bible
Author: Bruce Gordon
Publisher: Basic Books
Total Pages: 322
Release: 2024-09-17
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1541619722

A “wonderful…highly comprehensive” (John Barton, author of A History of the Bible) global history of the world’s best-known and most influential book For Christians, the Bible is a book inspired by God. Its eternal words are transmitted across the world by fallible human hands. Following Jesus’s departing instruction to go out into the world, the Bible has been a book in motion from its very beginnings, and every community it has encountered has read, heard, and seen the Bible through its own language and culture. In The Bible, Bruce Gordon tells the astounding story of the Bible’s journey around the globe and across more than two thousand years, showing how it has shaped and been shaped by changing beliefs and believers’ radically different needs. The Bible has been a tool for violence and oppression, and it has expressed hopes for liberation. God speaks with one voice, but the people who receive it are scattered and divided—found in desert monasteries and Chinese house churches, in Byzantine cathedrals and Guatemalan villages. Breathtakingly global in scope, The Bible tells the story of this sacred book through the stories of its many and diverse human encounters, revealing not a static text but a living, dynamic cultural force.

Words Are Not Enough

Words Are Not Enough
Author: Garrick V. Allen
Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing
Total Pages: 236
Release: 2024-09-17
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1467466875

An innovative study of the manuscript history of the New Testament, encompassing its paratexts—titles, cross-references, prefaces, marginalia, and more. How did the Christian scriptures come to be? In Words Are Not Enough, Garrick V. Allen argues that our exploration of the New Testament's origins must take account of more than just the text on the page. Where did the titles, verses, and chapters come from? Why do these extras, the paratexts, matter? Allen traces the manuscript history of scripture from our earliest extant texts through the Middle Ages to illuminate the origins of the printed Bibles we have today. Allen’s research encompasses formatting, titles, prefaces, subscriptions, cross-references, marginalia, and illustrations. Along the way, he explains how anonymous scribes and scholars contributed to our framing—and thereby our understanding—of the New Testament. But Allen does not narrate this history to try to unearth a pristine authorial text. Instead, he argues that this process of change is itself sacred. On the handwritten page, scripture and tradition meet. Students, scholars, and any curious reader will learn how the messy, human transmission of the sacred text can enrich our biblical interpretation.

The Oxford History of Poetry in English

The Oxford History of Poetry in English
Author:
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 717
Release: 2024-08-08
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0198930240

The Oxford History of Poetry in English (OHOPE) is designed to offer a fresh, multi-voiced, and comprehensive analysis of 'poetry': from Anglo-Saxon culture through contemporary British, Irish, American, and Global culture, including English, Scottish, and Welsh poetry, Anglo-American colonial and post-colonial poetry, and poetry in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the Caribbean, India, Africa, Asia, and other international locales. OHOPE both synthesizes existing scholarship and presents cutting-edge research, employing a global team of expert contributors for each of the fourteen volumes. By taking as its purview the full seventeenth century, 1603-1700, this volume re-draws the existing literary historical map and expands upon recent rethinking of the canon. Placing the revolutionary years at the centre of a century of poetic transformation, and putting the Restoration back into the seventeenth century, the volume registers the transformative effects on poetic forms of a century of social, political, and religious upheaval. It considers the achievements of a number of women poets, not yet fully integrated into traditional literary histories. It assimilates the vibrant literature of the English Revolution to what came before and after, registering its long-term impact. It traces the development of print culture and of the literary marketplace, alongside the continued circulation of poetry in manuscript. It places John Milton, Andrew Marvell, Margaret Cavendish, and Katherine Philips and other mid-century poets into the full century of specifically literary development. It traces continuity and change, imitation and innovation in the full-century trajectory of such poetic genres as sonnet, elegy, satire, georgic, epigram, ode, devotional lyric, and epic. The volume's attention to poetic form builds on the current upswing in historicist formalism, allowing a close focus on poetry as an intensely aesthetic and social literary mode. Designed for maximum classroom utility, the organization is both thematic and (in the authors section) chronological. After a comprehensive Introduction, organizational sections focus on Transitions; Materiality, Production, and Circulation; Poetics and Form; Genres; and Poets.

Political and religious practice in the early modern British world

Political and religious practice in the early modern British world
Author: William J. Bulman
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Total Pages: 261
Release: 2022-06-07
Genre: History
ISBN: 1526151340

This volume brings together cutting-edge research by some of the most innovative scholars of early modern Britain. Inspired in part by recent studies of the early modern ‘public sphere’, the twelve chapters collected here reveal an array of political and religious practices that can serve as a foundation for new narratives of the period. The practices considered range from deliberation and inscription to publication and profanity. The narratives under construction range from secularisation to the rise of majority rule. Many of the authors also examine ways British developments were affected by and in turn influenced the world outside of Britain. These chapter will be essential reading for students of early modern Britain, early modern Europe and the Atlantic World. They will also appeal to those interested in the religious and political history of other regions and periods.

Roger Ascham’s Themata Theologica

Roger Ascham’s Themata Theologica
Author: Lucy R. Nicholas
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 265
Release: 2023-09-21
Genre: Foreign Language Study
ISBN: 1350267953

Roger Ascham is often classified as 'a great mid-Tudor humanist' and he is perhaps best known for his role as tutor to Elizabeth I. His most famous works, The Scholemaster and Toxophilus, have been extensively quarried and anthologised in studies on prose style and English humanism. By contrast, his Neo-Latin works that engaged with theology and key Reformation concerns have languished in the shadows of modern scholarship. Ascham's Themata Theologica ('Theological Topics') is one of these, and its content has the potential to open up many an investigative avenue into the intellectual and religious culture of the sixteenth century. This is the first volume to offer a corresponding English translation. The Themata can be dated to the early to mid- 1540s, and was composed by Ascham while still at Cambridge University and serving as a senior fellow at St John's College. The work mainly comprises a compendium of relatively short commentaries on Scriptural verses (both Old and New Testament), many of which developed into expositions on difficult philosophical concepts, such as the notion of felix culpa (literally, 'happy fault') and some of the most intractable theological questions of the day, including the nature of sin, adiaphora ('matters of indifference'), justification and free will. This little-known text offers a rare opportunity to trace the course of Ascham's own religious maturation, but also offers fresh insights into the confessional climate at Cambridge University during one of the most turbulent periods of the Reformation in England.

David, Donne, and Thirsty Deer

David, Donne, and Thirsty Deer
Author: Anne Lake Prescott
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Total Pages: 250
Release: 2024-05-28
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1526179377

For nearly half a century Anne Lake Prescott has been a force and an inspiration in Renaissance studies. A force, because of her unique blend of learning and wit and an inspiration through her tireless encouragement of younger scholars and students. Her passion has always been the invisible bridge across the Channel: the complex of relations, literary and political, between Britain and France. The essays in this long-awaited collection range from Edmund Spenser to John Donne, from Clément Marot to Pierre de Ronsard. Prescott has a particular fondness for King David, who appears several times; and the reader will encounter chessmen, bishops, male lesbian voices and Roman whores. Always Prescott’s immense erudition is accompanied by a sly and gentle wit that invites readers to share her amusement. Reading her is a joyful education.

The Oxford History of Poetry in English

The Oxford History of Poetry in English
Author: Laura L. Knoppers
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 577
Release: 2024-08-08
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0198852800

Beginning with the last years of the reign of Elizabeth I and ending late in the seventeenth century, this volume traces the growth of the literary marketplace, the development of poetic genres, and the participation of different writers in a century of poetic continuity, change, and transformation.

The Book of Books

The Book of Books
Author: Thomas Fulton
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 384
Release: 2021-02-05
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0812252667

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.