Biblical Scholarship in an Age of Controversy: The Polemical World of Hugh Broughton (1549-1612)

by Kirsten Macfarlane

Overview

This book provides a new account of a distinctive, important, but forgotten moment in early modern religious and intellectual history. In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Christian scholars were investing heavily in techniques for studying the Bible that would now be recognised as the foundations of modern biblical criticism. According to previous studies, this process of transformation was caused by academic elites whose work, whether religious or secular in its motivations, paved the way for the Bible to be seen as a human document rather than a divine message.

At the time, however, such methods were not simply an academic concern, and they pointed in many directions other than that of secular modernity. Biblical Scholarship in an Age of Controversy establishes previously unknown religious and cultural contexts for the practice of biblical criticism in the early modern period, and reveals the diversity of its effects. The central figure in this story is the itinerant and bitterly divisive English scholar Hugh Broughton (1549-1612), whose prolific writings in Hebrew, Greek, Latin, and English offer a new and surprising image of Protestant intellectual culture. In this image, scholarly advances were not impeded but inspired by strict scripturalism; criticism was driven by missionary ideals, even as actual proselytization was sidelined; and learned neo-Latin texts were repackaged to appeal to ordinary believers. Seen through the eyes of Broughton and his neglected colleagues and followers, the complex and unexpected contributions of reformed Protestant intellectuals and laypeople to longer-term religious and cultural change finally become visible.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780192898821
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	02/11/2022
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	9.00(w) x 6.00(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Kirsten Macfarlane, Associate Professor of Early Modern Christianities, University of Oxford, and Tutorial Fellow, Keble College

Kirsten Macfarlane is Associate Professor of Early Modern Christianities at the University of Oxford and an Official Fellow and Tutor at Keble College. Before this, she was a Title A Research Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge University, and completed her BA (2012), MSt (2014) and DPhil (2017) at Lincoln College, University of Oxford. She has held visiting fellowships at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Houghton Library, Harvard, and the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Hugh Broughton, Now and ThenPART I. CHRONOLOGY AND ITS CONSEQUENCES1. From Chronology to Theology2. From Chronology to Translation3. From Chronology to GenealogyPART II. CONTROVERSY AND ITS CONSEQUENCES4. Jewish Conversion in Europe and Constantinople5. Theological Controversy in England and Geneva6. Unrealized Ambitions: The New TestamentConclusionBibliography

Editorial Reviews

"This is a remarkably erudite study which engages Greek, Hebrew, Latin, English, Dutch, French, and German primary and secondary sources, whilst nevertheless succeeding in remaining highly accessible. It is essential reading to students of early modern biblical studies, but will also prove to be of interest to modern biblical interpreters and pastors." — Matthew N. Payne, Global Anglican

"This monograph is both the first substantial study of Hugh Broughton, a major English biblical scholar and controversialist at the turn of the seventeenth century, and a distinctive contribution to the history of early modern erudition." — Rezensiert für , H Soz Kult von

"In reconstructing Broughton's career, Macfarlane has synthesized a vast array of not only thorny, technical, often quadrilingual works, but polemical ones as well.... She presents a rich perspective on the enmeshment of religious doctrine and technical scholarship, a spider's web of associations in which a single move could cause distant vibrations. By showing that Broughton could both hold to an extreme position on scripture's textual inspiration and practice sophisticated historical and philological criticism, she succeeds in widening the parameters of the best recent work in her field." — Tomás Antonio Valle, University of Notre Dame

"Biblical Scholarship in an Age of Controversy: The Polemical World of Hugh Broughton (1549-1612) is a work of deep erudition, graceful narration, and trenchant argumentation. Macfarlane's book is far more than a biography of the English Hebraist Hugh Broughton, though it certainly is that. Rather, it is an exploration of English, and to a lesser extent European, learned culture in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century." — Andrew Berns, USC

"Every so often a book emerges that sheds light not only on a figure whose complexity of allegiances and commitments have eluded cogent analysis previously, but also advances the fields upon which the author seeks to offer scholarly interventions which, in this case, include early modern religious history — with particular attention to England and Puritan studies — and intellectual history — with special focus on the history of scholarship: two discursive presences in our interpretation of the pre-modern past that have not always overlapped in terms of resources and analytical trajectories. Macfarlane's book accomplishes that rare feat." — Paul Lim, Vanderbilt

From the Publisher