The Power of Scripture: Political Biblicism in the Early Stuart Monarchy between Representation and Subversion, by Andreas Pečar, tr. Jozef van der Voort and Jennifer Walcoff Neuheiser

Abstract

This slender volume, which studies the political deployment of Scripture from the end of Elizabeth’s reign to the outbreak of the English Civil War, both among divine-right royalists and godly Parliamentarians, translates portions of a German monograph published in 2011, too early to have benefited from the recent flowering of scholarship on the early modern political Bible. If the book feels slightly dated, it also reminds one that little more than a decade ago, scholarship on the causes of the English Civil War stressed political as opposed to religious factors (or, less often, religious as opposed to political ones). The political reading, which views the conflict as birthing secular modernity, goes back, Andreas Pečar observes, to the 1690s, when editors of Edmund Ludlow’s defence of the regicide turned the nonconformist MP into a Radical Whig by omitting to print the manuscript’s extensive reflections on divine providence, Antichrist, and the Whore of Babylon (pp. 5–6). Conversely, the religious reading—or at least the revisionist strain that Pečar discusses—sees theological conflicts ripping apart a political consensus.