Some Irreligious Uses of the Bible in the Early Modern Period

2019 ◽  
pp. 49-61
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Modern Period

The place of Edward Gresham's Astrostereon (1603) in the discussion on cosmology and the Bible in the early modern period

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-26
Author(s):  
BARBARA BIENIAS
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Philipp Melanchthon ◽  
Hebrew Version ◽  
Theological Debate

Abstract This article situates Edward Gresham's Astrostereon, or A Discourse of the Falling of the Planet (1603), a little-known English astronomical treatise, in the context of the cosmo-theological debate on the reconciliation of heliocentrism with the Bible, triggered by the publication of Nicholas Copernicus's De revolutionibus orbium coelestium in 1543. Covering the period from the appearance of the ‘First Account’ of Copernican views presented in Georg Joachim Rheticus's Narratio Prima (1540) to the composition of Astrostereon in 1603, this paper places Edward Gresham's commentary and exegesis against the background of the views expressed by his countrymen and the thinkers associated with the Wittenberg University – such as Philipp Melanchthon, Caspar Peucer, and Christoph Rothmann. Comparing the ways in which they employed certain biblical passages – either in favour of or against the Earth's mobility – the paper emphasizes Gresham's ingenious reading of the Hebrew version of the problematic excerpts, and his expansion of the accommodation principle.

Rhetorical stylistics

2005 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 215-230 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeanne Fahnestock
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Language Arts ◽  
Language Use ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Rhetorical Tradition ◽  
Figures Of Speech ◽  
Language Choices ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Modern Period

This article explores the nature of the stylistics embodied in the classical and early modern rhetorical tradition and argues that rhetorical stylistics differs in its assumptions and purposes from contemporary literary stylistics. Three areas of difference are discussed. First, rhetoric was a productive not an analytical art, and its criteria for language choices were radically functional and audience-based. Rhetoricians like Quintilian, for example, favored choices for ease of comprehension. Second, rhetorical stylistics, while recognizing genre differences, did not distinguish a separate domain of the literary. The system of rhetorical pedagogy incorporated ‘fictional’ genres and considered texts of every variety as potential ‘donors’ of examples of effective language use. Early modern rhetoricians considered all texts secular by default in comparison to the unique category of language in the Bible. Third, the language arts from antiquity through the early modern period were taught in three overlapping disciplines: grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic. In the last of these arts, the least understood today, stylistic advice played a surprisingly formative role in the construction of arguments. Figures of speech understood in this last context encode specific lines of arguments. A reassessment of the rhetorical tradition on the part of contemporary proponents of stylistics requires an appreciation of these differences.

Translation

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel Willie
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Source Text ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Humanist Education ◽  
Intellectual Networks ◽  
Biblical Translation ◽  
The Relationship

Transnational exchange and intellectual networks in the early modern period relied upon translation—mainly into Latin—as a way to communicate across Europe. Translation was integral to humanist education where creative engagement with the source text was admired. Yet the exegetical and socio-political considerations that underpinned biblical translation meant that the rights and wrongs of translating the Bible into the vernacular in England was hotly debated. Whereas scriptural translation drew attention to the need to translate word for word to prevent heresy and to maintain accuracy in the presentation of the Word, psalm translation and translating from other vernacular languages posed different challenges for the translator; these challenges perhaps become most apparent when translating across confessional divides. This chapter considers the relationship between translation and religion in early modern English literature and the wider European perspectives that informed the ways in which narrative was recreated in English imaginative writing.

The Mappe and the Bible: Nation, Empire and the Collective Memory of Jonah

2008 ◽  
Vol 16 (5) ◽  
pp. 476-500
Author(s):  
Simon Staffell
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Collective Memory ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Biblical Text ◽  
Political Discourses ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Biblical Narratives ◽  
Modern Period

AbstractThis article uses the work of the English cartographer John Speed as a way to explore the role of the collective memory of Jonah in social and political discourses during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The paper engages with debates concerning nationalism during the early modern period. Collective memory theory is also used to consider how Jonah became a reified site of memory. By placing Speed's writing alongside the works of his forebears and examining the function of the Jonah text within three sermons, the evolving collective memory of the biblical text, and its imagined attachment to national identity, is traced. It is suggested that Speed's cartographic selectivity in depicting biblical narratives can be seen in relation to the nascent nationalist and imperialist worldviews and ideologies of sixteenth and seventeenth century England.

Jonathan Edwards’ French Connection

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert E. Brown
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Thomas Hobbes ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Biblical Interpretation ◽  
Jonathan Edwards ◽  
Traditional Belief ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Jewish Scholar

Robert E. Brown focuses on Jonthan Edwards’ engagement with the emerging criticism of the early modern period, when the question of who authored the Pentateuch occupied many a biblical interpreter. Influenced by the more rationalistic approach of the Jewish scholar Abraham ibn Ezra (1089–1164), several writers—including Thomas Hobbes, Isaac La Peyrère, Benedict Spinoza, Richard Simon, and Jean Le Clerc—argued against the traditional belief that Moses wrote the first five books of the Bible. One leading responder to this view was Louis Ellie Du Pin, a French Catholic ecumenist, and Edwards, interestingly enough, drew substantially on Du Pin in his own discussion of the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch. Brown uses this episode to show that Edwards was a creative consumer of European ideas, which illustrates that early modern biblical interpretation was more complex and layered than often recognized.

The Early Modern Yiddish Bible, 1534–1686

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Jewish People ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Lingua Franca ◽  
Bible Translations ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
German Speaking

The Bible has been the central text of Judaism since its earliest history. Translations of the Bible into the vernaculars of the Jewish people in their various diasporas are a venerable tradition. The earliest Jewish translation of the Bible was into Greek, known as the Septuagint, and produced in the centuries preceding the rise of Christianity for the benefit of Greek-speaking Hellenistic Jews. The Bible was then translated during the Talmudic period in Aramaic, the lingua franca of Jews living in the eastern Roman Empire. There were several Aramaic translations, collectively called Targums (translation in Aramaic). The major ones were the Targums of Onkelos, Jonathan, Yerushalmi, and another Targum found in the 20th century known as Targum Neofiti. Unlike the Septuagint, the Targums did not constitute a complete translation, but only covered selected parts of the Bible. The Torah (Five Books of Moses) was the subject of several Targums, while the other parts of the Bible may have had one or more Targums or none at all. After the rise of Islam, the lingua franca of the Jews living under Islamic rule gradually changed from Aramaic to Judeo-Arabic, a version of Arabic with a significant component of Hebrew and Aramaic terminology. The translation of the Bible into Judeo-Arabic by Saadia Gaon (b. 882–d. 942), known as the Taj, became the de facto standard translation and achieved almost canonical status among Jews living in the orbit of Islam. It is believed that Saadiah completed the translation of the whole Bible, but some parts of the translation have been lost. The Jews of the Christian lands in Europe developed a variety of Jewish vernaculars like Judeo-Spanish, Judeo-Italian, and others. The vernacular developed by the Jews living in the German-speaking lands was referred to as “Teutsch,” meaning translation. In the 18th century it began to be called Jüdisch-Deutsch (Jewish-German) and eventually received its modern name, Yiddish. However, unlike the earlier Bible translations, there is no significant tradition in the lands where German/Yiddish was spoken of translating the Torah or other parts of the Bible into the Jewish vernacular prior to the Early Modern period. Hebrew remained the language of the Bible and its study. There is a meager tradition of Yiddish biblical manuscripts, with the majority of the few surviving manuscripts dating from no earlier than the 15th century. Many of the surviving manuscripts are copies of published works from the 16th and even the 17th century. There has been no significant scholarship on this manuscript tradition. For this reason, this study will restrict itself to the printed Yiddish works from the Early Modern period relating to the Bible.

Drama

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adrian Streete
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Religious Ideology ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Opening Up

During the early modern period, doctrinal debate was at the forefront of intellectual and political life. The interrogation of religious ideology on stage often provoked controversy and reaction. Playwrights responded to, but also attempted to shape, these religious debates. I argue that periodic attempts by the authorities to ‘reform’ the stage were only partially successful. Paradoxically, however, the incompletion of these efforts were deeply generative for dramatists, opening up a wide range of aesthetic possibilities that were exploited throughout the period. The second part of this chapter examines some of these possibilities in more detail, and in light of the ‘turn to religion’ in recent scholarship, looks in particular at drama and the Bible, and the exploration of various religious passions on stage.

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