The Limits of Erudition
The Old Testament in Post-Reformation Europe

A panoramic account of how the Old Testament was considered and contested in the post-Reformation era.

Timothy Twining (Author)

9781009460958, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 12 December 2024

356 pages
23.6 x 16.1 x 2.4 cm, 0.664 kg

'The Limits of Erudition is a superlative book - one of the best and most important I've ever read. It is astonishingly rich in every respect, from its mastery of archival detail to the sweep of its gripping and exciting narrative.' Thomas Roebuck, University of East Anglia

The history of early modern biblical scholarship has often been told as a teleological narrative in which a succession of radical thinkers dethroned the authority of the sacred word. This book tells a very different story. Drawing on a mass of archival sources, Timothy Twining reconstructs the religious, cultural, and institutional contexts in which the text of the Old Testament was considered and contested throughout post-Reformation Europe. In so doing, this book brings to light a vast array of figures from across the confessional spectrum who invested immense energy in studying the Bible. Their efforts, it shows, were not disinterested, but responded to pressing contemporary concerns. The Limits of Erudition employs a novel conceptual framework to resurrect a world where learning mattered to inquisitors and archbishops as much as to antiquaries, and in which the pursuit of erudition was too important to be left to scholars.

Introduction
1. Biblical criticism in Catholic Europe, c. 1590–1630: a tale of Three Polyglot Bibles
2. After Tiberias: Louis Cappel, Jean Morin, and the Limits of Criticism
3. Biblical criticism and mutual censorship in the confessional republic of letters
4. From manuscript to print: the European controversy concerning the critica sacra
5. A Protestant Polyglot Bible: Brian Walton and the confessional politics of Scripture
6. The ends of Biblical scholarship, c. 1657–1670
7. Richard Simon and the limits of Erudition
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: History of ideas [JFCX]