The Book of Books: Biblical Interpretation, Literary Culture, and the Political Imagination from Erasmus to Milton . Thomas Fulton. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021. Pp. x+371.
2022; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 120; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1086/721694
ISSN1545-6951
Autores Tópico(s)Reformation and Early Modern Christianity
ResumoPrevious articleNext article FreeBook ReviewThe Book of Books: Biblical Interpretation, Literary Culture, and the Political Imagination from Erasmus to Milton. Thomas Fulton. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021. Pp. x+371.Jeffrey Alan MillerJeffrey Alan MillerMontclair State University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmailPrint SectionsMoreIn the seventh “book” or part of his monumental Church-History of Britain of 1655, the English clergyman Thomas Fuller embarks on a grand “List of such principall Books” published “in the Reign of this King [Edward VI] and His Father [Henry VIII]” that had been “Preparatory to, and Introductive of Reformation” in Britain, with Fuller directing attention especially to what he calls “State-books” or books that had in some sense been official productions of the English state and church. Fuller outlines, for example, the successive versions of the English “Liturgie or Common-Prayer” issued in those years and in the decades immediately following. “The Book of Books” released in that period, however, had been and “remains,” writes Fuller, “the Bible it selfe.” He goes on to chart the sequence of bibles translated into English that had been “authorized by” royal “Proclamation” and “set forth” in print from “the Reigne of K. Henry the eighth” to that “of King James,” when what Fuller extols as “the last and best Translation of the Bible,” the King James Bible (KJV), appeared in 1611.1Thomas Fulton’s rich and important study The Book of Books: Biblical Interpretation, Literary Culture, and the Political Imagination from Erasmus to Milton uses as a jumping-off point this suggestive moment in Fuller’s work and the link it makes between English biblical production, monarchical succession, and the entwined political and theological imperatives “of Reformation.” Moving from the turbulent decades of the early sixteenth century on the brink of Henry VIII’s seismic “break from Rome” through “the execution of Charles [I]” and its own tectonic aftermath in the mid-seventeenth century, Fulton focuses on a sequence of “punctuated moments in the combined history of biblical production and political change” in early modern England, examining “chiefly moments of transition or instability that often occur at the accession of a new monarch” (6, 71, 249–50). “These moments,” Fulton observes, invariably “occasioned Bibles and biblical texts that sought to cultivate particular views” and that were often “tied to problems in interpretation” of the Bible writ large (6–7). “Dynastic shifts” as these in the English monarchy, moreover, also were predictably “accompanied by outpourings of theologically oriented political literature” beyond but regularly in germinal dialogue with the new biblical texts of the day (7, 250). While mostly eschewing any “grand narrative” but also never wholly collapsing into a mere chain of lightly connected case studies in the manner of too many scholarly books at present, Fulton tells a cohesive story of the “points of contact” that emerged in early modern England “between scripture, the political imagination, and literary discourse,” weaving throughout the account reflection on the evolving scriptural “interpretive procedures” and translation practices “that enabled” and transformed those imbricated “discursive fields” (18–19, 251).Most chapters in Fulton’s book proceed by drawing together the rise of a new English monarch, the concomitant production of a new English Bible or bibles, and an especially notable literary work crafted around the same time. One chapter, for instance, considers the impact of “Edward VI’s accession to the throne” in 1547 in relation to both Martin Bucer’s De regno Christi of 1550—a work that Fulton shows Bucer himself regarded, at least in certain respects, as “literary” (literarius), mining some of the more celebrated “literary qualities” of key precursor works such as “More’s Utopia and even Erasmus’s Education of a Christian Prince,” despite Bucer being animated by rather different theological and political commitments—and a contemporaneous new edition of the Bible in English that came to be known as “Becke’s Bible,” first published in 1549 (83, 90, 97, 256).2 A further chapter explores the first book of Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene in connection with the whiplash succession of the Catholic Mary I by the Protestant Elizabeth I and key Catholic and Protestant versions of the Bible in English that went on to appear during Elizabeth’s reign.One of the great strengths of Fulton’s study is the way it never treats the roiling “history of biblical production and political change” that he charts as sheer “context” for elucidating the more canonically “literary” works that he examines, which include, in addition to those already mentioned, a number of Milton’s writings and Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, whose “first recorded performance” took place at the palace of Whitehall the very year the newly ascended James I had famously denounced one prominent English Bible, the so-called Geneva Bible, and commissioned another, which became the KJV (6, 176).3 Fulton may insist that novel editions of the Geneva Bible “flooding the market” in the last decades of the sixteenth century and the rival “publication of the English Catholic New Testament, by Gregory Martin and English exiles in Rheims, in 1582” crucially “provide context and illumination for Spenser’s allegories” in The Faerie Queene (160, 168).4 Yet Fulton also runs the analysis in the other direction, revealing how such literary works shed light on “vital aspects of” the “theo-political culture” of a given regnal era itself and on the ways that a new reign’s new constellation of “biblical texts were read” by many of those same literary works’ own writers, readers, and auditors (90, 249).Each chapter of Fulton’s book thus tends to advance three arguments, at a minimum, concurrently: one regarding particular developments in “English political theology” and “English political discourse” more generally under a certain monarch or monarchs; another concerning one or more of the “extraordinary Bibles” published contemporaneously that both “shaped” and were shaped by the unfolding “political context” and the wider “cultural imagination” of the moment; and another probing specific “literary texts” and illuminating how the swirling currents “of biblical production and political change” were not just “drawn into” towering literary achievements of the period but could be also “drawn out again by readers” (3, 6, 103, 172, 186, 190, 250, 256). This makes it somewhat difficult to furnish quick, potted summaries of the study’s eight chapters, at least for the purposes of attempting to offer a review of the work not as long as the work as a whole. Even were it feasible, though, distilling the book down to each chapter’s barest chain of arguments would miss too much of what makes Fulton’s study wonderful. It may not be the main argumentative point of his chapter on Measure for Measure, “Jacobean political theology,” and the enduring yet controversial place of the Geneva Bible in the early days of the monarch who would commission the biblical translation that ultimately supplanted the Geneva as “the most influential” Bible “in English” (174, 187); however, Fulton’s almost tangential discussion of Measure for Measure’s reference in the First Folio edition of the play to “the Manacles / Of the all-building-Law,” which many subsequent editions of the drama have long revised to read “all-binding law,” brilliantly recovers the possible textual legitimacy and import of what might otherwise appear to be a presumptively unauthorial “mixed metaphor” erroneously inserted into the Folio edition by some non-Shakespearean hand (196).5Indeed, while Fulton does not mention it (likely because the discovery occurred too late in the composition of his study to be fully incorporated, though Fulton does glancingly refer to the event), the recent identification of Milton’s own annotated edition of Shakespeare’s First Folio suggests that at least one redoubted early modern reader with an eye for correcting possible errancies in the Shakespearean text would have agreed with Fulton that “all-building-Law” should not be accounted among them.6 In Milton’s copy of the text, Milton emends, in what is manifestly his own hand, two different lines from the same scene of Measure of Measure on the very same page and in the very same column as the reference to “all-building-Law” in the First Folio appears. He changes the conjunction “and” to “or” in altering the question “Which had you rather, that the most iust Law / Now tooke your brothers life, and to redeeme him / Giue vp your body to such sweet vncleannesse[?]” to read “Which had you rather, that the most iust Law / Now tooke your brothers life, or to redeeme him / Giue vp your body to such sweet vncleannesse[?]” Then, further down the column, Milton also proposes that “en-shield beauty” should be “enshrin’d beauty.” He leaves “all-building-Law,” however, to stand.7Yet if Fulton rather understandably misses that one opportunity to buttress his study with consideration of a work annotated by Milton, he more than makes up for it with the scrutiny he brings in a separate chapter to Milton’s “marked and extensively used” copy of a 1612 edition of the KJV (199).8 This archival marvel, now held in the British Library, has been strangely neglected by scholars, often positioned more as a kind of heirloom “family Bible” of Milton’s than as a volume that might actually have received heavy use by Milton specifically in his own relentless labors as a reader and writer (213). It is here, on a flyleaf, that Milton records dates of births and deaths for various family members, beginning with his own beginning. “John Milton was born the 9th of December 1608 die Veneris [sc. Friday],” Milton writes in his hand at the top of the page, “half an howr after 6 in the morning.”9 As Fulton expansively documents, though, such notes of family genealogy added by Milton and later amanuenses to that single page of the Bible scarcely constitute the only redolent signs of Milton’s protracted use of this exact copy of the King James translation. Charting insights the volume affords into Milton’s “material practices of reading” and how the KJV in particular “played a significant role” not only “in Milton’s experience as a reader” but also “in what he sought to recreate for his readers” as a poet, using “Milton’s 1648 Psalm translations” into English as a vivid case in point, Fulton provides easily the best rumination on Milton’s extant, annotated copy of the KJV that I have ever encountered (201–2).Speaking of biblical annotations, it should not go unremarked that another of the considerable strengths of Fulton’s book is the attention he devotes across every chapter of the study to the printed annotations and other forms of paratextual material with which early modern bibles usually came replete. Despite the “great deal of light” that Fulton rightfully acknowledges recent generations of scholarship “have shed” on early modern “paratexts” and the way they “shaped readers’ constructions of meaning and their subsequent reuse of reading material,” accounts of early modern English bibles have still tended to focus more often than not on cherry-picked examples of printed marginalia that can be made to seem especially noteworthy, or salacious, or both (114). As an early forerunner of the trend, James I himself was indelibly reported to have decried the Geneva Bible as “the worst of all” versions of the Bible “translated in English” on the grounds of its containing a number of “marginall notes” that were supposedly “very partiall, vntrue, seditious, and sauouring too much, of daungerous, and trayterous conceites,” yet with James only citing in illustration of the charge a mere two notes (adjoining Exod. 1:19 and 2 Chron. 15:16, respectively) from a body of annotations that by the time of James’s tirade had swollen to “around 300,000 words in some versions” of the Geneva Bible, “nearly half the word count of the biblical text” in its own right (175).10 Similarly, the paratextual apparatus in the aforementioned Becke’s Bible tends to be reduced in modern studies to a single, contemptible line in one of “The notes” suffixed to the end of 1 Peter 3, where a note advises that a husband ought to “dwelleth wyth his wyfe” and “taketh her as a necessarye healper, and not as a bonde seruaunte or a bonde slaue,” but that “yf she be not obedient and healpfull vnto hym,” he should “endeuoureth to beate the feare of God into her heade, that therby she maye be compelled to learne her duitie and do it,” for which odious comment this edition has sometimes been gifted the boorish “moniker ‘wife-beater’s Bible’” (90).11Fulton never seeks to excuse or contextualize away such infamous elements of the English bibles he canvasses; if anything, his habit is more the opposite, to position even the most notorious of notes as symptomatic of malignancies spread across a given version of the biblical text at large, as when he links the “misogynistic severity” of the gloss on 1 Peter 3 in Becke’s Bible to “the legalist vehemence and militant sectarianism” found throughout the paratext of that edition, where “the tone remains similar, and domestic and political spheres overlap considerably” (90–91). Nonetheless, Fulton departs from almost all of his predecessors by undertaking an uncommonly “systematic” and “comprehensive study” of the published annotations in their entirety from the bibles he examines, with the most glittering example being Fulton’s sweeping assessment of the notes contained in “the first two English Bibles created in Geneva: the 1557 New Testament, the only English Bible to be printed during Mary’s reign; and the 1560 complete Bible, issued about a year and a half after Elizbeth succeeded to the throne” (2, 113).12 Doing so allows Fulton to recover to a fresh and invigorating degree the “ubiquity” of the Geneva and other bibles’ paratextual material in early modern English culture, along with “the ways that this scaffolding around the biblical text enabled a mode of exchange between the ancient text and the early modern world” (113). It also empowers Fulton to reassess the extent to which not just certain early modern English translations but the paratexts that accompanied them influenced the works of English literary giants like Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton, and how the initial audiences for those literary works had been so concurrently “trained by” English bibles of the era “to interpret” biblical material “in a particular way” that the “text and paratext” in the case of specific bibles and the poems and plays drawing on them could become so conflated as to be “essentially interchangeable” (141–42, 169, 171).As with any book of this scope and attainment, there are aspects of Fulton’s study to which one could object. Fulton has a habit, for instance, of describing the hermeneutic practices of the early modern Protestants in terms that veer rather far from the way those Protestants themselves understood their approach to the Bible. When cataloging what he frames as the various “modes of reading” that early modern Protestants employed in their biblical translations and wider works, as a case in point, Fulton positions “Typology”—whereby “a specific event or person in the Old Testament” was regarded as a prefigurative “‘figure’ or ‘type’ for an event or person” to come later, usually “in the New Testament”—under the umbrella of “Anachronistic reading,” wholly distinct from “Historicist reading,” the latter which Fulton delineates as seeking “to recover the sense of words” and “to explain” the import of a text in its original “ancient lexical” and more broadly historical “context” (12–13). Now, I agree that modern scholars should not always feel obliged to stick uncritically to describing the operations and manifest beliefs of early modern exegetes in the same precise way and in the same precise terms that were “used to define their methods” at the time (11). As Fulton wisely countenances, it is also the case that the actual “practices of interpreters, annotators, and readers” in the early modern period did “not necessarily conform to” those same individuals’ programmatic or theoretical statements about their hermeneutic methods (11–12). Still, in positioning “typology” and “historicist reading” as effectively mutually exclusive or inherently oppositional, such that it can be said with respect to various early modern Protestants and their bibles that “historicist reading” in the end “gives way to biblical typology” rather than the one having been seen as part and parcel of the other, Fulton diverges so strongly from almost all early modern Protestants’ own understanding of typological significance in relation to history and the Bible’s “historical” meaning that it leads to some distortions in Fulton’s assessment of those Protestants’ works as his study progresses (15).Though this may have been done as much at the press’s behest as at Fulton’s own—for, now as in the early modern period, words add up, in terms of increased costs and otherwise—it is also lamentable that a book so marvelously sensitive to the transformative vagaries of translation with regard to early modern English versions of the Bible would yet frequently decline to include in their original languages passages from the many works the study surveys written in Latin or other non-English tongues, despite Fulton’s almost invariably appearing to have consulted these underlying, non-English versions of the works himself. Fulton, that is, draws on an admirably wide array of writing not originally in English, but he often gives only English translations, his own or those of others, for the passages he quotes, absenting the original languages of the quoted passages even from the book’s endnotes. This throws up an unfortunate barrier to subsequent scholars being readily able to engage in precisely the kind of comparative scrutiny of texts and their translations that Fulton and the early modern figures he studies consistently pursue so much to their advantage.Moreover, the lack can sometimes occlude that a text may not quite say what is being purported by its translation. Early on in the study, for example, Fulton quotes from the authoritative modern English edition of The Collected Works of Erasmus a famed letter from Desiderius Erasmus in 1515 to the Dutch theologian Maarten van Dorp, in the course of which Erasmus is presented as having “praised” the great forerunning humanist Lorenzo Valla for being “‘a man more concerned with literature than with theology’ in the enterprise of biblical scholarship” (27–29).13 Neither Fulton’s study nor the edition of the letter in the modern Collected Works include Erasmus’s actual Latin version of the passage, but when one consults it one finds, at least to my eyes, that Erasmus appears to have said something rather different. “Vallam plurima laude dignum arbitror, hominem rhetoricum magis quàm theologum,” Erasmus wrote in Latin, which I would translate as, “I am of the opinion Valla is deserving of much praise more as a rhetorician than as a theologian.” This comment by Erasmus, in fact, sets up a sequence in his letter where he proceeds to compliment Valla’s “diligence” in having “compared the Greek with the Latin” in studying “the sacred writings” of the Bible but then again goes on to carve out separation between Valla and himself by noting his abiding “dissent” on “a number of points” from Valla, “especially with regard to those that pertain to theological matters [res theologica].”14 Erasmus, in other words, does not really extol Valla in the passage in question “as a man more concerned with literature than with theology.” He takes a kind of swipe at Valla for being more laudable “as a rhetorician [hominus rhetoricus] than as a theologian,” which alleged shortcoming of Valla on “theological matters” Erasmus underscores to distinguish his and his own work’s superior merits.Nevertheless, any such quibbles I might have with elements of Fulton’s book are dwarfed by the study’s myriad triumphs. Fulton’s The Book of Books is a remarkable piece of scholarship, made all the more so by how much today increasingly conspires against the undertaking of scholarly works like it. Fewer and fewer scholars at present would ever be countenanced, much less supported, to pursue the glacial depth of research that undergirds this book, and that sadly applies most to doctoral students and other up-and-coming junior scholars for whom, with the possible exception of the chapter devoted to Shakespeare, a work of this sort, with this focus, would tend not to be the stuff that jobs are made on, even in the increasingly rare cases where a job exists to be had in the wider field of early modern studies whatsoever.Of course, one ought to be wary of drawing melodramatic analogies between modern scholarly woes and those that beset many of the early modern scholars whom Fulton’s study excavates. Fulton’s chapters brim, however, with the presence of figures whose works met with considerable opposition from the countries and academic institutions that in different, saner times might have helped to shelter them. He surveys, for example, the “major,” international scholarly giants such as “Immanuel Tremellius, Peter Martyr Vermigli, Paul Fagius, and Martin Bucer” who found a refuge in England for their work in the early sixteenth century, and he dwells acutely on “the exiled community” of English Protestants in Geneva later in the same century to whom the world owes the Geneva Bible, among other immortal achievements (21, 83). It was hard for me to read those parts of Fulton’s book and not think of many of the most promising young early modern scholars I know today who have either been driven from academia outright or have been obliged to take up residence far away from their own native countries and, often thereby, from their families and friends. One might churlishly question just how large a number of contemporary scholars this might truly encompass, though it helps to recall, as Fulton informs his readers, that “under Mary I’s reign” in the sixteenth century it was only in practice “a relatively small group” of English Protestants who “fled the country and settled throughout Germany and Switzerland,” around “a thousand exiles” in total, and modern scholars still rightly treat that development as both a permanent disgrace to Mary’s rule and a phenomenon of seismic cultural importance (115). It might also be objected that being pressured to take refuge overseas for one’s work need not be positioned as a dire hardship. Geneva is a nice place, after all, so what was all the apocalyptic bellyaching from the English “Genevan exiles” really about (126)?Yet if Fulton’s book offers an optimistic reminder of the wide range of deathless, landmark works produced in the early modern period even under straitened, “exilic” circumstances, the study also throws into relief how the “conditions of these exiles” could “inflect” their works in ways not always salutary (107, 131). As Fulton’s study details, not every would-be masterpiece went on to be published, regardless of the constraints it faced; not every work was made better by suffering. Nor did every auspicious scholar make it out of the situation alive, and not just because some were executed. (Early modern academics were perhaps less credulously unaware than we that one could still be thought to have killed a scholar without recourse to the stake or block.) I am immensely grateful to Thomas Fulton for writing this study, and to Modern Philology for allowing me to review it at some length. I have done so in confidence that Fulton’s book should stand for generations as a work of deep, lasting value for scholars across a multitude of disciplines in early modern studies, wherever those scholars may turn out to be. I just hope that they will indeed continue to be, and we owe it not only to them but to ourselves to do a better job of ensuring that the very scholarship we most celebrate in hindsight can find a more welcome home among us now and in the future.Notes1. Thomas Fuller, The Church-History of Britain: From the Birth of Jesus Christ, Untill the Year M. DC. XLVIII (London, 1655), 7:375, 385–87 (sigs. 3b4r, 3c1r–3c2r). For the first edition of the KJV, see The Holy Bible, Conteyning the Old Testament and the New (London, 1611).2. Though written in 1550, Bucer’s De regno Christi “was not published until 1557, six years after Bucer’s death”; see Scott Amos, “Martin Bucer’s Kingdom of Christ,” in The Oxford Handbook of Reformed Theology, ed. Michael Allen and Scott R. Swain (Oxford, 2020), 191–92, 200–201 (quotation on 200). For the passage by Bucer to which Fulton refers, wherein Bucer appears to characterize De regno Christi as the sort of “literary” work “required from me” in thanks for Edward VI’s financial support of him, see Martin Bucer, De regno Christi Iesu servartoris nostri (Basel, 1557), 2:2: “Literarium enim, & de loco aliquo religionis nostrae admonens munusculum requiri à me, facilè intelligo.” For Becke’s Bible, see Edmund Becke, ed., The Byble, That is to Say All the Holy Scripture: In Whych are Contayned the Olde and New Testamente, Truly & Purely Translated into English, & Nowe Lately with Greate Industry & Diligence Recognised (London, 1549), hereafter cited as “Becke’s Bible.” As Fulton notes, Becke’s Bible in fact represented a revision of the so-called Matthew Bible of 1537, itself a “compilation” but also revision of the forerunning English translations of William Tyndale and Miles Coverdale (89).3. For the first complete edition of the Geneva Bible, see The Bible and Holy Scriptures Conteyned in the Olde and Newe Testament (Geneva, 1560).4. For the Roman Catholic Rheims New Testament, see The New Testament of Iesus Christ, Translated Faithfully into English, Out of the Authentical Latin, According to the Best Corrected Copies of the Same, Diligently Conferred with the Greeke and Other Editions in Divers Languages (Rheims, 1582).5. For the lines from Measure for Measure as they appear in the First Folio, see William Shakespeare, Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies (London, 1623), sig. F5r. See also, e.g., what is therein identified as act 2.4.92–93, in Measure for Measure, ed. A. R. Braunmuller and Robert N. Watson (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2020), where the First Folio’s “all-building-Law” is corrected to “all-binding law” on the grounds that it “makes more immediate sense with manacles” in the preceding line than does the Folio’s “‘all-building’, which has received so many different interpretations as to affirm its opacity.”6. Milton’s annotated First Folio survives in the Free Library of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, RBD EL SH15M 1623; hereafter cited as “Milton’s FF.” Full digital images of the volume are available at https://libwww.freelibrary.org/digital/feature/first-folio. Jason Scott-Warren first identified annotations in the Free Library’s copy as being in Milton’s hand in “Milton’s Shakespeare?,” Centre for Material Texts: A New Forum for the Study of the Word in the World (blog), September 9, 2019, https://www.english.cam.ac.uk/cmt/?p=5751. On the annotations’ ascription to Milton and their significance, see more fully Claire M. L. Bourne and Jason Scott-Warren, “‘Thy Unvalued Booke’: John Milton’s Copy of the Shakespeare First Folio,” Milton Quarterly, forthcoming. For an incisive study of the volume before its Miltonic provenance was recognized, one made more not less valuable by the essay’s sifting of the evidence in the copy without its specifically Miltonic import already in view, see also Claire M. L. Bourne, “Vide Supplementum: Early Modern Collation as Play-Reading in the First Folio,” in Early Modern English Marginalia, ed. Katherine Acheson (New York: Routledge, 2018), 195–233. Fulton refers to the recent “discovery of Milton’s possible markings in a Shakespeare Folio in 2019” in one of his study’s two later chapters centering on Milton (209).7. Milton’s FF, sig. F5r.8. For Milton’s annotated copy of the KJV, see British Library, London, MS Add. 32310. Milton’s copy was one of the 1612 quarto editions “Imprinted at London by Robert Barker Printer to the Kings most Excellent Maiestie” and entitled The Holy Bible, Conteyning the Old Testament and the New (London, 1612), quoting the title page.9. A digital image of the page can be viewed at https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/john-miltons-family-bible.10. William Barlow, The Summe and Substance of the Conference, which, It Pleased His Excellent Maiestie to Have with the Lords, Bishops and Other of His Clergie, (at which the Most of the Lordes of the Councell were Present) in His Maiesties Privy-Chamber, at Hampton Court. Ianuary 14. 1603 (London, 1604), 46–47.11. Becke’s Bible, 5.101r.12. For the first edition of the Geneva Bible’s New Testament, see The Newe Testament of Our Lord Iesus Christ. Conferred Diligently with the Greke, and Best Approved Translations, trans. William Whittingham (Geneva, 1557).13. See also Desiderius Erasmus to Maarten van Dorp, [May] 1515 (Epistle 331), in The Collected Works of Erasmus, ed. R. A. B. Mynors, D. F. S. Thomson, Wallace K. Ferguson, et al., 86 vols. (Toronto, 1974–), 3:137.14. Desiderius Erasmus, Omnia opera, 9 vols. (Basel, 1538–40), 9:14: “Porrò quod admones, sciebam Laurentium Vallam ante nos hoc laboris occupasse, quippe cuius annotationes primus curarim euulgandas… . Equidem Vallam plurima laude dignum arbitror, hominem rhetoricum magis quàm theologum, qui hac diligentia sit usus in sacris literis, ut Graeca cum Latinis contulerit, cum non pauci sint theologi, qui nunquam uniuersam testamentum ordine perlegerint: quanquam ab hoc aliquot locis dissentio praesertim in his quae ad rem theologicam pertinent.” See also P. S. Allen, H. M. Allen, and H. W. Garrod, eds., Opus epistolarum Des. Erasmi Roterodami, 12 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1906–58), 2:112. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 120, Number 2November 2022 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/721694 Views: 544Total views on this site HistoryPublished online August 18, 2022 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.
Referência(s)