Geneva Bible Research Articles

The Battle of Two Bibles: When and How Did the King James Bible Gain Its Popularity over the Geneva Bible?

This article addresses two questions: “When did the King James Bible gain a foothold of popularity among the English people?” and “How did the Geneva Bible lose its popularity to the King James Bible?” By reviewing the post-1611 printing of these two versions of the Bible and examining the texts of the Paul’s Cross sermons and the parliamentary sermons between 1612 and 1643, I find that the King James Bible was already more popular than the Geneva Bible by 1620, and that the rising trend of the popularity of the King James Bible had become irreversible by 1630. By 1640, the battle of the two Bibles was long over. I also refute the assumption that the political authorities’ suppression of the Geneva Bible caused its defeat. Rather, I argue that the decrease in consumer demand for exegetical notes led to the demise of the Geneva Bible.

“Instruction” and “Justification” in the Masoretic text, Septuagint, Elisabethian Bible and the Book of Psalms by archbishop Ambrose (Zertis-Kamensky): The translation of the lexeme חקָֻּה

The article is about the analysis of the variants of the translation of the Masoretic text’s lexeme חקָֻּה in the Septuagint, Elisabethian Bible and the Book of Psalms by archbishop Ambrose (Zertis-Kamensky), the translation from Hebrew made in the 2nd half of the 18th century. The causes of the distinctions in Greek, Church Slavic texts and in this Psalter are analyzed in this article. Archbishop Ambrose wished to clear the verses, which are the cases of the usage of this lexeme, by showing obviously, that the instructions should be understood there. The possible influence of the Church Fathers’ and medieval theologians’ exegesis on the translation of archb. Ambrose is philologically and theologically analyzed. Also the correlation between it and the academical exegetes, both Russian and West, is researched. The works of st. Athanasius the Great, st. Theodoret of Cyrus, st. Augustinus, st. Jerome of Stridon, st. Hilarius of Pictavium, Euthimius Zigaben and Cassiodorus are chosen from the first ones. The commentaries of the Lopukhin’s Explanatory Bible, of P. A. Iungerov, the Americans E. S. Gerstenberger, S. L. Terrien, the Germans F.-L. Hossfeld, E. Zenger, H.-J. Kraus and New Geneva Bible are from the second ones. The parallel between the analyzed Psalter and the Church Fathers is mostly in the works, where the “justification” is differed from the commandments. As for the academicals, only Lopukhin’s Explanatory Bible and Iungerov’s commentaries have it. Therefore, these works are also near to the analyzed Psalter.

The Geneva Bible: How Reformed Refugees Shaped Renaissance Reading of Scripture

“Geneva Bible” is an umbrella-term for two New Testaments and two Bibles: an inaugural New Testament (1557), followed by a study Bible (1560), provided vernacular Scripture in English for believers under duress in Britain; then each was later refined, in 1576 and 1599 respectively.1 The first translators and publishers were English-speaking Reformed refugees from persecution under Mary Tudor, who brought their expertise and industry to a flowering of international biblical scholarship in 1550s Geneva, alongside fellow refugees from other repressive European contexts. This article explores how they and their successors progressively resourced readers to engage with Scripture via sophisticated peritextual aids. KEYWORDS: Genesis 1, Geneva, Junius, Matthew 1, peritextual material, readers and reading, refuge(e), Revelation, Tomson, Whittingham

The Paper of London, British Library, Royal Manuscript 18 B II

British Library, Royal Manuscript 18 B II is the earliest and most complete surviving witness to the Middle English prose Melusine.1 It is a single-text codex about which very little is known prior to the 17th century. The text is presented in single columns with wide margins and written in an elegant secretary hand on chancery paper folded in folio. The main text and the capitula seem to be the work of a single scribe, likely professional. There are spaces left for initials two or three lines in height and half-page miniatures, though these were never filled. While the most commonly cited date of production for the Middle English prose Melusine is circa 1500, no concrete evidence justifying this estimation is currently available. Robert Nolan argues in his doctoral thesis that the work was translated from the first edition of Jean d’Arras’s Mélusine, which was printed by Adam Steinschaber in Geneva in August 1478.2 This hypothesis is based on the number and placement of the capitula in Royal MS 18 B II, which correspond to those found in the Geneva edition.3 There are also numerous passages in the English translation which diverge from the majority of manuscript versions of the French Mélusine, but which correspond almost exactly to the text produced by Steinschaber. More recently, Lydia Zeldenrust has concurred that Steinschaber’s edition, or another incunable very close to it, was the source for the Middle English Melusine.4

Emergence of the Tyndale–King James Version tradition in English Bible translation

In this essay, it is demonstrated that the inception of the English Bible tradition began with the oral–aural Bible in Old English translated from Latin incipient texts and emerged through a continuous tradition of revision and retranslation in interaction with contemporary social reality. Each subsequent translation achieved a more complex state by adapting to the emergence of incipient text knowledge (rediscovery of Hebrew and Greek texts), emergence of the (meaning-making) knowledge of the incipient languages (Latin, Hebrew and Greek), language change (Old, Middle and Modern English), mode of communication (hearing-dominant and text-dominant), style (literal or word-for-word) and products (oral-aural Bible, handwritten manuscript Bible and printed Bible). Historical sources indicate that there were translations of portions of the English Bible since 700 CE as handwritten manuscript Bibles in Old and Middle English and in print in Modern English – even before the retranslation associated with Tyndale (1526) and despite ecclesiastical opposition since 1408. This version and its revisions (1530–1531, 1534) are followed by subsequent revisions (Coverdale Bible, Matthew’s Bible, Great Bible, Geneva Bible and Bishop’s Bible). The next revision was the King James Version (1611), which replaced all its predecessors, and which was never replaced for the next four centuries – not even by its revisions.Contribution: Contrary to the fragmentation caused by ordering individual English Bibles either by period (e.g. 20th century) or according to their features (e.g. literal), it is demonstrated that the history of English Bible translation emerged rather as a translation complex, and its history must be understood in this way.

Conceptual Frameworks on the Relationship Between Physics–Mathematics in the Newton Principia Geneva Edition (1822)

Conceptual Frameworks on the Relationship Between Physics–Mathematics in the Newton Principia Geneva Edition (1822)

‘the most beautifully bound book in the University Library’: The Seventeenth-Century Embroidered Wardlaw Bible in the Special Collections of the University of St Andrews

In 2001 Wardlaw family descendants gifted to the University of St Andrews a pair of embroidered seventeenth-century gauntlet gloves and an embroidered seventeenth-century Geneva Bible bound with The CL. Psalmes of David in Meeter. Family tradition purports that the bible and gloves were given by Charles I to Sir Henry and Lady Wardlaw. Although it is feasible that the gloves were gifted to the first Sir Henry by Charles I, the bible was published after 1640—its 1599 date of imprint is false—and it, therefore, cannot have been given to Sir Henry, who died in 1637. It is also questionable if Charles I would have gifted a Geneva Bible, rather than the King James Version. Following a detailed description of the binding and the conservation it has undergone, the Wardlaw family legend is re-examined through comparing the embroidered binding to others of the seventeenth century, examining the provenance within the bible, and discussing the Geneva version of the bible.

Competing Prose Psalters and Their Elizabethan Readers

Layouts and paratexts of Elizabethan prose psalters advocate two competing reading methods: reading sequentially according to the church calendar or selecting psalms by occasion. Marked psalters and bibles, however, show that Elizabethan readers often disregarded printed prescription, practicing either method, or both, as they chose. To capitalize on reader independence, printers eventually produced texts that encouraged comparative reading across multiple translations, culminating in the two-text psalter of the 1578 Geneva Bible. This episode in the history of devotional reading demonstrates the tendency of Elizabethans to slip the confessional categories into which their own texts, and later historiography, would place them.

Shall i Compare Thee? Sonnet 18 and Robert Greene’s Menaphon

To what should we compare the first verse of what Helen Vendler justly calls ‘the most familiar’ of Shakespeare’s sonnets?1 Stephen Booth’s claim that ‘Shall I compare thee to a Summers day?’ ‘plays on the proverbial comparative formula “as good as one shall see in a summer’s day”’ is uncontroversial.2 But is the wording of Sonnet 18’s rhetorical question, introduced by a phrase that, in slightly varying forms, was presumably heard in everyday conversation, also rooted in a particular Elizabethan or Jacobean text? Two passages from the Geneva Bible seem likely candidates. Lamentations 2:13—‘What thi[n]g shal I co[m]pare to thee, o daughter Ierusalém … ?’—is quickly followed by a second question concerning the devastated city that might plausibly be linked to the sonnet’s anxiety about time’s threat to the fair young man: ‘Is this the citie that men call, The perfection of beautie, and the ioye of the whole earth?’ (2:15)3 It could be said of Jerusalem what A. Kent Hieatt, in his study of the commerce between Spenser’s Ruines of Rome and Shakespeare’s Sonnets, says of the former’s representation of Rome: ‘Shakespeare discerningly assimilated the central image … the ancient exemplary city … and integrally transmuted it into an image of the exemplary physically and morally vulnerable beloved’.4 Another possibility is Luke 13:18: ‘What is the kingdome of God like? or whereto shal I compare it?’ Could Jesus’s reply to his own question—‘It is like a graine of mustarde seed, which a man toke and sowed in his garden, and it grewe, and waxed a great tre, and the foules of the heaven made nestes in the branches thereof’ (13:19)—have had any bearing on Shakespeare’s reply to his, which also enlists a horticultural figure, the ‘eternall lines’ in which ‘to time thou grow’st’, in the service of a vision of immortality?5

Caliban Yisrael: Constructing Caliban as the Jewish Other in Shakespeare’s The Tempest

This paper seeks to introduce new data into the discussion of William Shakespeare’s portrayal of Jewish people through intertextual and close reading of Shakespeare’s The Tempest and The Merchant of Venice, sections from the Geneva Bible, and primary documents discussing Anglo-Jewish life in the Elizabethan era. Shakespeare’s relationship to and purported views of Jewish people have been scrutinized for centuries. However, almost all conclusions put forth by scholars about Shakespeare’s ties to Elizabethan Jewish communities and anti-Semitism have been drawn from one work, The Merchant of Venice. Merchant contains Shakespeare’s only explicitly Jewish characters, Shylock and his daughter, Jessica, although she happily converts to Christianity. In this paper, I propose that Shakespeare has an implicitly Jewish character lurking in The Tempest: Caliban, the play’s main antagonist, a native to the island on which the play is set, and Prospero and Miranda’s slave. I will support the interpretation of Caliban as a Jewish-coded figure through cross-reading The Tempest with The Merchant of Venice, sections of the Geneva Bible, and non-fiction testimonials from English residents during and before the Elizabethan era. Using both these plays alongside other scholarly and historical texts, I will bring cultural and historical context to these portrayals in order to explore a deeper understanding of the complicated and nuanced depictions of Jewish people in Shakespeare’s work.

For the Sake of the Arguments: Reading the Headnotes to The Faerie Queene

Abstract This essay proposes taking a serious poetic and literary-historical interest in the ballad-stanza ‘Arguments’ which precede and summarize every Canto in Spenser’s Faerie Queene. Short, simple, and economical, the four-line Arguments seem at first a very different poetical space from the Spenserian stanza—but on closer reading, they demand an investment in the dimensions of printed language and the spaces and syntax of its storytelling which fits persuasively with the wider poetics of The Faerie Queene and with its narrative structures. The first section establishes the Arguments in a context of analogous early modern paratexts—in the Geneva Bible, Thomas Speght’s 1598 collected Chaucer, printed plays, and the Sternhold-Hopkins psalter. The second reads them closely as a ‘didactic technology’ which might, as well as helping us to read The Faerie Queene, help teach us how to.

A Father’s Lament Doubly Received: Robert Alter, Nigel Butterley, and David’s Lament for Absalom

Abstract David’s lament in 2 Sam 18:33, on hearing of Absalom’s death, has been an extremely popular text for composers to set to music. The traditional English language settings utilise a text that begins ‘When David Heard’, though these words are absent from the 1611 King James Bible, and the 1560 Geneva bible, and no other extant text supports this rendering. However, a cluster of some thirteen settings of the text in the seventeenth century which appropriated this translation established somewhat of a ‘tradition.’ Settings through to the twenty-first century have continued to utilise this text, with one prominent composer assuming that the textual tradition came from the King James Bible. However, Australian composer Nigel Butterley has produced a setting which makes use of Robert Alter’s translation of the David story. Rather than focus on the single verse, Butterley redacts four chapters of Alter’s translation into a comprehensible narrative, punctuated by the refrain ‘Beni Avshalom. Beni, veni Avshalom’ which appears three times, and the full lament which occurs on the last two occasions. This paper examines Butterley’s appropriation of Alter’s translation, and the musical vocabulary which is employed in conveying this deeply moving text. Interested as it is in issues of interpretation, it reveals Butterley as a both sensitive and powerful reader of scripture.

Émilie Du Châtelet's interpretation of the laws of motion in the light of 18th century mechanics

Émilie Du Châtelet is well known for her French translation of Newton's Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica. It is the first and only French translation of Newton's magnum opus. The complete work appeared in 1759 under the title Principes mathématiques de la philosophie naturelle, par feue Madame la Marquise Du Chastellet. Before translating Newton's Principia, Du Châtelet worked on her Institutions de physique. In this book she defended the Leibnizian concept of living forces – vis viva. This paper argues that both of these works were part of a critical transformation and consolidation of post-Newtonian mechanics in the early 18th century, beyond Newton and Leibniz. This will be shown by comparing Du Châtelet's translation of Newton's axioms with her own formulations of the laws of motion in light of Thomas Le Seur's and François Jacquier's Geneva edition which holds a special place among the several editions of the Principia that appeared in the early 18th century.

“Better, as in the Geneva”: The Role of the Geneva Bible in Drafting the King James Version

The part played by the Geneva Bible in the composition of the King James Version (1611) has been a vexed issue from the very commissioning of the King James translation in 1604. This essay sheds new light on the issue by focusing in detail on two extant drafts of the King James translation, one that has only recently come to light. Both drafts not only reflect the translators' frequent recourse to the Geneva Bible but also show them taking care explicitly to signal this recourse in a distinctive, even surprising fashion. Detailed consideration of this crucial feature of the drafts illuminates the vital role played by the Geneva Bible in the King James Version's composition process, providing a better understanding of that process as a whole and of its fragmentary remains that survive today.

Toward a New Cultural History of the Geneva Bible

The most widely circulated bible in the English Renaissance was produced by exiled English Protestants living in Geneva during the reign of Queen Mary I. With over 140 editions and half a million copies in circulation, the Geneva Bible and its complex marginal devices played a major role in shaping the English reader. Two of its innovative paratextual features are of particular importance: the breaking down of chapters into enumerated verses, facilitating the easy extraction of individual passages, and the expanded use of annotations, animating and enabling the application of biblical passages in contemporary social and political contexts. This essay rethinks the interpretive procedures and the cultural contexts of the notes, which, though influential in Elizabethan England, reflect the condition and polemical discourses of their exiled Marian community. Consequently, the Geneva Bible's notes construct a vision of the English “nation” as persecuted, captivated, and threatened by idolaters.

Xenophon and Plato in Elizabethan Culture: The Tyrant's Fear Before Macbeth

Xenophon and Plato in Elizabethan Culture:The Tyrant's Fear Before Macbeth Francesco Dall'Olio (bio) When in the Wasps (422 BCE) Aristophanes satirized the Athenians' obsession with tyranny,1 the state of uncertainty and anxiety provoked by the Peloponnesian War had caused the Athenians to fear that one man or a group of conspirators could take advantage of the situation to overthrow the democracy. As a result, the definition of tyranny, the personality of the tyrant, and democracy in relation to other forms of government became issues of great interest, sparking off a lively debate. Twenty centuries later, Renaissance England experienced a similar theoretical urge: the political, religious, and cultural turmoil triggered by Henry VIII's Act of Supremacy (1534) initiated a heated debate on the difference between a king and a tyrant, the legitimacy of tyrannical rule, and the obedience of the people to monarchical sway.2 The kings and queens of England in this period were repeatedly charged with accusations of tyranny from different quarters and for different reasons. Henry VIII's personalistic and despotic rule solicited the infamous parallel with the Roman tyrant Nero from Catholics and Protestants alike, who accused him of using the Reformation for his private purposes.3 Anthony Gilby, a Marian exile in Geneva and a translator of the Geneva Bible, wrote in his Admonition of England and Scotland (1558) that "thus was there no reformation, but a deformation, in the tyme of that tyrant and lecherous monster." 4 Mary's rule led Protestant writers to compare her to such traditional tyrannical figures as Herod, Nero, or Caligula, as the politician John Hales refers to in an oration to Elizabeth (1559) printed by John Foxe, the author of the martyrological The Acts and Monuments of the English Church (1563).5 In the course of her reign, Queen Elizabeth had [End Page 476] to face both Catholic and Protestant threats: the former accused her of being an unlawful sovereign (Pius V, on deposing and excommunicating her, defined her "pretensia Angla regina," and Sixtus V accused her of "exercysinge an absolute Tyrannie"),6 while radical Protestants manifested their disappointment with her politics in religious matters (the clash became particularly virulent in 1584, with her royal veto on Anthony Cope's Puritan revision of the Book for Common Prayer).7 The official ideology of the Elizabethan age replied to this constant state of threat and uncertainty by endorsing a new political theory about tyranny and kingship based on the concept of obedience. Elizabeth and her advisors encouraged the composition of homilies and treatises to instruct the people that rebellion against an anointed king was always a sin, no matter how bad the sovereign was. An Homily Against Disobedience and Willful Rebellion, the clearest and most direct expression of this new doctrine, was very explicit on this point: "a rebel is worse then the worst prince, and rebellion worse then the worst government of the worst prince that hitherto hath ben."8 During Elizabeth's reign, this view influenced the way political theory came to associate tyranny with the usurpation of the throne, replacing medieval conceptions focused on the ruler's personality9 and identifying in illegitimate kingship the only case when revolt could be tolerated.10 As Maynard Mack has noticed, "England, in contrast [to the Continent], assigned to the king what had been developed by the Church lawyers for clerics, compressing into the doctrine of two bodies united in one being the faceless permanence of an institution and the character of a man," while the royalists moved "toward the theory of divine right."11 All this, however, did not occur smoothly. The idea of the tyrant as a bad ruler had been the foundation of medieval interpretations of tyranny, and in the works of such theorists as John of Salisbury (Policraticus 8.7) and Thomas Aquinas (Sententiae 2. quaest.44. art.2), it served to legitimize the people's right (and sometimes duty) to depose and even kill the tyrant, conceived of as a monstrous beast and Satan's envoy.12 This theory, still current in Italian humanism,13 in the Elizabethan age furnished theoretical ground for such "heretical" authors as John Ponet, a...

A Newtonian tale details on notes and proofs in Geneva edition of Newton's Principia

Based on our research regarding the relationship between physics and mathematics in HPS, and recently on Geneva Edition of Newton's Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1739–42) by Thomas Le Seur (1703–70) and François Jacquier (1711–88), in this paper we present some aspects of such Edition: a combination of editorial features and scientific aims. The proof of Proposition XLIII is presented and commented as a case study.

Towards a Marginal History of Reading the Geneva Bible

Historian and divine Thomas Fuller’s comparison of the Geneva Bible’s marginal annotations to "spectacles" has proved captivating for critics. However, despite fitting neatly within a hermeneutic understanding of scriptural study in which readers search for "inner truths" inside a postlapsarian structure of signs and symbols, this figuration fails to encompass either the ambivalence of Fuller’s full appraisal or the various, complex ways through which readers came to encounter and comprehend their Bibles. This article proposes a new artefactual study of the Geneva Bible’s printed marginalia and their position within early modern reading practices. It demonstrates how the Geneva Bible's (para-)textual apparatuses existed in multiple unstable forms across the life of the translation, charting how different notational formulae impacted upon mise-en-page and, ultimately, upon exegetical praxis.

The “ornament of the law”: vestments and the translation of Judaism in the Geneva Bible

While the 1560 Geneva Bible has long been recognized as a landmark in the development of English Puritan culture, little has been said about its relation to the English vestiarian controversy. The Geneva translators were among a faction of radical Protestants who regarded the liturgical vestments as a form of idolatry that should be completely expunged from Christian worship. This paper argues that the translators’ hostility toward the physical garments of Roman Catholicism prompted their effort within the Geneva translation to appropriate a spiritualized version of the Judaic priestly dress described in Exodus. A consideration of this process will demonstrate that the Geneva translators did not simply repudiate Judaism as a form of fleshly idolatry, but, rather, aimed to appropriate its ritual forms to bring spiritual authority to the new biblical text.

The liturgy and order of the mid-sixteenth century English Church in Geneva

The mid-sixteenth century English church in Geneva is one of the few refugee churches at this period to have been free of dispute and discord. While its origins in Frankfurt, the absence of Lutheran hostility and the protection provided by Calvin and the local Reformed church may all be counted as reasons for its peaceable nature, it is suggested here that this also has much to do with the Order and Liturgy of the church which emphasised practicality, participation and community. The church was also one where many of its members had work to do: both as artisans and merchants as well as work of a literary nature, the greatest achievement of which was the production of the Geneva bible. Activity was undoubtedly also a factor in protecting the church from internal disputation.