Thomas Fulton. The Book of Books: Biblical Interpretation, Literary Culture, and the Political Imagination from Erasmus to Milton

Abstract

Thomas Fulton’s latest book addresses a familiar topic within studies of the English Bible but, in doing so, shows us just how much we have left to discover. His first chapter focusses on Erasmus’s reading of Romans 13:1–7 and the difficult question of whether the magistrate’s civil authority comes from God. Fulton argues that Erasmus read Romans 13 purely rhetorically, viewing Paul’s letters not as requiring unquestioning submission to magistrates but as literary models, a reading which was crucial to Erasmus’s concept of the Christian Prince. Chapter two argues that although Protestants like Tyndale owed much to Catholic humanists like Erasmus, their interpretative methods were less flexible. In particular, in the aftermath of Henry VIII’s divorce crisis, men like Tyndale reinterpreted Paul’s doctrine of obedience so as to include the Mosaic law. This re-interpretation was entangled with the rise of narrower and more strictly literal modes of biblical interpretation, which...