Humanist Imprints, 1525–1553

Chapter 2 concerns the same Henrician and Edwardian bibles, but focusing now on the humanist scholarship that infiltrates their paratexts and the related debates over whether the Reformation’s philological–historical turn should be read as a harbinger of Enlightenment demystification, whether its attention to the literal sense rendered the Old Testament largely irrelevant, or whether, at bottom, Reformation-era exegesis differs only superficially from medieval and patristic. The paratexts under consideration, whose humanism does owe much to St. Jerome and Nicholas of Lyra, address translation protocols, biblical authorship, canon formation, exegetic ground rules, the appeal to extra-biblical testimony, and the spiritual relevance of the Old Testament’s literal sense. A fair number remark the underlying Greek or Hebrew, cite Classical sources to elucidate the scriptural text, invoke exegetic principles generally credited to nineteenth-century biblical scholars, or attempt to reconstruct unfamiliar cultural practices implicit in an odd locution or narrative detail. Yet these paratexts appear in the most overtly doctrinal Tudor bibles, their historicist commitments inseparable from their confessional ones.