Pub Date : 2023-01-01DOI: 10.1215/10829636-10189057
Thomas Roebuck
The vocalized edition of the Mishnah (the ancient compilation of Jewish oral teachings) published in Amsterdam in 1646 has long been an object of fascination to scholars. The story of its creation at the confluence of Jewish publishing and Christian millenarian enthusiasm is well-known. However, it was long believed that seventeenth-century Christian readers ignored the book, a view that has only recently begun to be challenged. This article joins that challenge and introduces a vital new source: a copy in the Bodleian Library that has been heavily annotated by a Christian reader, who the article demonstrates was Edward Bernard (1638 – 1697), Savilian Professor of Astronomy at Oxford University and a passionate student of languages. Discussion of the astonishingly rich annotations reveals that this copy—and therefore this edition more broadly—was a crucial linchpin in the history of Christian study of the Mishnah in the seventeenth century.
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Pub Date : 2023-01-01DOI: 10.1215/10829636-10189043
S. Mills
Edward Pococke is best known to historians today as one of seventeenth-century Europe's preeminent discoverers of Islam. This article explores three less familiar aspects of his work as a scholar of Arabic: his comparative approach to the “Oriental” languages; his interest in the Arabic translations of the Bible; and his study of Judaeo-Arabic biblical criticism. It argues that foregrounding these concerns—developed throughout the course of his long career as Laudian Professor of Arabic and Regius Professor of Hebrew at Oxford—enables Pococke's work to be situated in its more specific theological contexts. In this way, it seeks to look beyond attempts to position Pococke at the origins of a disciplinary history of modern “Arabic studies,” and to understand instead how his scholarship was intertwined with early modern theological disputes—most of all, the debate about the status of the Masoretic text of the Hebrew Bible.
{"title":"Edward Pococke (1604–1691), Comparative Arabic-Hebrew Philology, and the Bible","authors":"S. Mills","doi":"10.1215/10829636-10189043","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/10829636-10189043","url":null,"abstract":"Edward Pococke is best known to historians today as one of seventeenth-century Europe's preeminent discoverers of Islam. This article explores three less familiar aspects of his work as a scholar of Arabic: his comparative approach to the “Oriental” languages; his interest in the Arabic translations of the Bible; and his study of Judaeo-Arabic biblical criticism. It argues that foregrounding these concerns—developed throughout the course of his long career as Laudian Professor of Arabic and Regius Professor of Hebrew at Oxford—enables Pococke's work to be situated in its more specific theological contexts. In this way, it seeks to look beyond attempts to position Pococke at the origins of a disciplinary history of modern “Arabic studies,” and to understand instead how his scholarship was intertwined with early modern theological disputes—most of all, the debate about the status of the Masoretic text of the Hebrew Bible.","PeriodicalId":51901,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN STUDIES","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41940833","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-01-01DOI: 10.1215/10829636-10188987
Polly Ha
This special issue seeks to expand the intellectual landscape of English Protestantism over the course of its long Reformation from the early sixteenth through the late seventeenth centuries. England's protracted conflict over its Protestant identity encouraged the diversification of its orientations to sacred texts and religious traditions, stretching it beyond western Europe to the eastern Mediterranean world. The essays examine English Protestant engagement with Hellenic, Hebraic, and Arabic sources and traditions within a wider context than typically explored in existing narratives. They illustrate how English Protestant scholarship reinforced stereotypes, while also prompting self-reflection and inspiring the reconstruction of England's own traditions and cultural assumptions. Expanding English ecclesiastical, theological, exegetical, philological, and cultural interests, the volume calls for a more fluid and “connected history” to understand the full scope of English Reformation thought and its engagement with non-Western churches and traditions.
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Pub Date : 2023-01-01DOI: 10.1215/10829636-10189029
Kirsten Macfarlane
The English Hebraist John Lightfoot has a Janus-faced legacy. On the one hand, he is known among historians of the British Reformation for his participation in the Westminster Assembly (1643 – 52), for which his journal remains a crucial source of evidence. On the other hand, among historians of scholarship, he is famous primarily for his Horae Hebraicae et Talmudicae (1658 – 78), an unprecedentedly thorough application of Hebrew scholarship to New Testament exegesis, now recognized as a milestone of biblical criticism. This article brings these facets of Lightfoot's legacy together by arguing that there are extensive connections between Lightfoot's contributions in the Westminster Assembly and his conclusions in the Horae. In doing so, it argues not only for the vitality and centrality of Jewish texts and learning to the history of the long Reformation, but also for the importance of theology and controversy to the history of scholarship.
英国希伯来人约翰·莱特富特（John Lightfoot）有一个面向Janus的遗产。一方面，他因参与威斯敏斯特会议（1643年）而在英国宗教改革历史学家中广为人知 – 52），他的日记仍然是重要的证据来源。另一方面，在学术历史学家中，他主要以其著作《荷拉·赫布里卡埃与塔木迪卡埃》（Horae Hebaicae et Talmudicae，1658）而闻名 – 78），这是希伯来文学术在新约注释中前所未有的彻底应用，现在被认为是圣经批评的里程碑。这篇文章将莱特富特遗产的这些方面结合在一起，认为莱特富特在威斯敏斯特议会的贡献与他在《贺兰》中的结论之间有着广泛的联系。在这样做的过程中，它不仅论证了犹太文本和学术对长期宗教改革历史的活力和中心地位，还论证了神学和争议对学术史的重要性。
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Pub Date : 2023-01-01DOI: 10.1215/10829636-10189001
Anastasia Stylianou
Early modern Anglo-Hellenic relations have received little scholarly attention; however, Greek Christianity had a significant influence on the English Reformations. This article analyzes sixteenth-century English textual contacts with, and constructions of, Greek Christianity. It highlights the importance of Greek Christian history (from the patristic era to the fall of Constantinople) to reformers across the confessional spectrum, and investigates the various uses of this history in justifying or criticizing England's break with Rome, focusing upon the government's propaganda tracts of the 1530s, Reginald Pole's De Unitate, and John Foxe's Acts and Monuments. It also examines the Venetian-Greek Nicander Nucius's depiction of the Henrician Reformation in his autobiography, exploring how this unique account was shaped by Nicander's religious beliefs. Eastern Christianity must be incorporated into historical narratives of the English Reformations in order to understand fully the confessional debates, encounters, and identities of the period.
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Pub Date : 2023-01-01DOI: 10.1215/10829636-10189015
Polly Ha
Puritan and conformist divines both sought to “own the Hebrew doctors” just as they had appealed to patristic sources in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The puritan Walter Travers drew upon the rabbinic commentary of Abraham Ibn Ezra to argue for the refashioning of the church in the 1570s. Elizabethan ecclesiastical controversy in turn helped “invent” central features of avant-garde conformity by prompting Richard Hooker's use of Jewish precedent to stabilize the church from the 1580s onward. Mutual claims to the Hebrew doctors exposed disagreement over how to proportion the New Testament church in relation to layered Jewish tradition. Yet, by the early seventeenth century, the separatist Henry Ainsworth began to make more extensive, even promiscuous, use of Maimonides. This signaled movement away from simply attempting to “own the Hebrew doctors” to conscripting Jewish authorities as more active, and less mediated, participants in early modern debate.
清教徒和墨守陈规的神学家都试图“拥有希伯来医生”，就像他们在16世纪末和17世纪初求助于教父的来源一样。清教徒沃尔特·特拉弗斯(Walter Travers)引用了亚伯拉罕·伊本·以斯拉(Abraham Ibn Ezra)的拉比评论，主张在1570年代对教堂进行改造。伊丽莎白时代的教会争议反过来又帮助“发明”了先锋派一致性的核心特征，促使理查德·胡克从1580年代开始使用犹太人的先例来稳定教会。对希伯来医生的相互要求暴露了在如何将新约教会与分层的犹太传统相关联的问题上的分歧。然而，到了17世纪早期，分离主义者亨利·安斯沃思开始更广泛地，甚至混杂地，使用迈蒙尼德的观点。这标志着从简单地试图“拥有希伯来医生”到征召犹太当局在早期现代辩论中更积极，更少调解的参与者的运动。
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Pub Date : 2022-09-01DOI: 10.1215/10829636-9966107
Jason B. Crawford
Early modern English literary culture was thick with tales of divine judgment. Texts ranging from true-crime pamphlets to Thomas Beard's vast collection The Theatre of God's Judgements (1597) promised to disclose God's work in history, and they found signs of that work in stories of horrific come-uppance: usurers eaten by rats, adulterers mutilated, Sabbath-breakers struck dead. Because they were concerned with the consequences of human transgression, these tales drew heavily on the conventions of tragedy. And because they were concerned with vice and come-uppance, they also drew heavily on the conventions of comedy. They are therefore fraught with difficult questions. When is retribution hilarious, and when is it lamentable? On what imaginative and moral conditions do tragedy and comedy depend? These questions likewise haunted dramatists such as Shakespeare, who drew heavily on the literature of divine retribution for his own experiments in tragic and comic representation. His Othello, especially, is built from tales of vice and retribution, and in it Shakespeare tests the boundaries that separate justice from atrocity, comic satisfaction from tragic violence. By reading Othello alongside the literature of divine judgment, this essay makes several claims: that the hilarious come-uppances of comedy depend on certain cultural conditions; that those conditions have changed in the context of the Reformation, in ways that tales of retribution make graphically visible; and that Shakespeare responds to exactly these changes when, in his own comedy of judgment, he finds the mechanisms of comic justice collapsing.
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Pub Date : 2022-09-01DOI: 10.1215/10829636-9966079
David Aers
This essay argues that Calvinist versions of God and human redemption cannot be adequately grasped without studying the medieval traditions from which they emerged. Beginning with a close reading of Calvin's extremely violent understanding of the atonement, the essay moves through examinations of medieval versions of human redemption (literary, theological, and devotional) before turning to the political and ethical consequences of Calvin's reformation of these versions of God as played out in the Cromwellian regime of the mid-seventeenth century. Finally, the essay explores the reemergence of a version of God and charity recognizable to medieval readers in the writings of the “Ranter” Abiezer Coppe. Throughout, the essay demonstrates how models of redemption with their attendant versions of God have clear consequences for ethics and politics.
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Pub Date : 2022-09-01DOI: 10.1215/10829636-9966121
Lindsey Larre
The many disguises of Edgar in King Lear have led critics to dub the chameleonic figure a choreographer of human compassion in a play that holds compassion as a vital dramaturgical principle. This essay argues that Edgar's performances of suffering and his choreographies of deception reveal how costly are the demands of performing true compassion, and thus how rare is the response he will come to recognize as “good pity.” Examining closely the responses elicited by Edgar's performance of affliction alongside Edgar's response to witnessing the suffering of others, the article explores how the elusive Edgar serves as an embodied exploration of problems of poverty and almsgiving, of the moral status of playacting, and, most profoundly, of the complex nature of Christian charity and compassion. In the space Edgar opens between coerced care and complicit compassion, between the obligations of caritas and the possibilities of drama, Shakespeare questions what it entails to meaningfully respond to the suffering of another, and what tools — if any — theater might offer this project.
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Pub Date : 2022-09-01DOI: 10.1215/10829636-9966093
Nancy Warren
This essay explores Thomas More's understanding of the role of the recipient's virtue in activating the full power of Christ's body in the Eucharist in his A Treatise on the Passion of Christe and A Treatise to receive the blessed body of our lorde, sacramentally and virtually bothe. Though passionately committed to the doctrine of the Real Presence, More writes that the body of Christ, while fully present, is not in and of itself entirely sufficient to complete the work of the sacrament if the recipient is not virtuous and receives the sacrament unworthily. An unvirtuous recipient receives only bodily, which is to say not completely — not, in More's terms, virtually. An unvirtuous recipient is not the only means by which the full power of the Eucharist may be compromised. Because the Incarnation and transubstantiation involve transformations of word and bodies into each other, it is not surprising that More's concerns with the sacrament, virtue, and the virtual also involve language. In the Dialogue Concerning Heresy, More strenuously criticizes Tyndale's translation of scripture. This essay also examines the ways in which More's objections to Tyndale's translation understand its destructive power as rooted in linguistic choices that disrupt the crucial nexus of virtue, the virtual, and the corporeal. In More's view, Tyndale's Bible thus deserves immolation along with the heretics themselves.
{"title":"Virtual Reality: Virtue, the Eucharist, and Translation in the Writings of Thomas More","authors":"Nancy Warren","doi":"10.1215/10829636-9966093","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/10829636-9966093","url":null,"abstract":"This essay explores Thomas More's understanding of the role of the recipient's virtue in activating the full power of Christ's body in the Eucharist in his A Treatise on the Passion of Christe and A Treatise to receive the blessed body of our lorde, sacramentally and virtually bothe. Though passionately committed to the doctrine of the Real Presence, More writes that the body of Christ, while fully present, is not in and of itself entirely sufficient to complete the work of the sacrament if the recipient is not virtuous and receives the sacrament unworthily. An unvirtuous recipient receives only bodily, which is to say not completely — not, in More's terms, virtually. An unvirtuous recipient is not the only means by which the full power of the Eucharist may be compromised. Because the Incarnation and transubstantiation involve transformations of word and bodies into each other, it is not surprising that More's concerns with the sacrament, virtue, and the virtual also involve language. In the Dialogue Concerning Heresy, More strenuously criticizes Tyndale's translation of scripture. This essay also examines the ways in which More's objections to Tyndale's translation understand its destructive power as rooted in linguistic choices that disrupt the crucial nexus of virtue, the virtual, and the corporeal. In More's view, Tyndale's Bible thus deserves immolation along with the heretics themselves.","PeriodicalId":51901,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN STUDIES","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44970862","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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