The Political Bible in Early Modern England

This book explores the Bible as a political document in seventeenth-century England, revealing how it provided a key language of political debate.

Kevin Killeen (Author)

9781107518421, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 26 March 2020

322 pages
23 x 15.3 x 1.5 cm, 0.4 kg

'An important supplement, and corrective, to recent scholarship on the Classical-republican foundations of early modern political thought. Killeen's magisterial study of how seventeenth-century Englishmen read their Old Testament, with its often murderous and often murdered kings, both illuminates and defamiliarizes the era's discourses of liberty and oppression, property and prerogative, divine right and prophetic defiance.' Debora Shuger, University of California, Los Angeles

This illuminating new study considers the Bible as a political document in seventeenth-century England, revealing how the religious text provided a key language of political debate and played a critical role in shaping early modern political thinking. Kevin Killeen demonstrates how biblical kings were as important in the era's political thought as any classical model. The book mines the rich and neglected resources of early modern quasi-scriptural writings - treatise, sermon, commentary, annotation, poetry and political tract - to show how deeply embedded this political vocabulary remained, across the century, from top to bottom and across all religious positions. It shows how constitutional thought, in this most tumultuous era of civil war, regicide and republic, was forged on the Bible, and how writers ranging from King James, Joseph Hall or John Milton to Robert Filmer and Thomas Hobbes can be better understood in the context of such vigorous biblical discourse.

1. Introduction: the political bible
2. Early modern hermeneutics and the Old Testament
3. The sermon, the listener and enemy theory in the Thirty Years War
4. Hezekiah, the politics of municipal plague and the London poor
5. Constitution and resistance: the language of Civil War political thought
6. Dividing the kingdom: Rehoboam and Jeroboam
7. Hanging up kings: regicide and political memory
8. Preaching on the ramparts: Hezekiah at war
9. How Jezebel became sexy: Ahab, Naboth's land and Jezebelian hermeneutics
10. Conclusion
Appendix. Chronology of Biblical kings
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: History of ideas [JFCX], Church history [HRCC2], History of religion [HRAX], Early history: c 500 to c 1450/1500 [HBLC], British & Irish history [HBJD1], Literature: history & criticism [DS]