Geneva Bible Research Articles

Reading the Geneva Bible: Notes Toward An English Revolution?

Since its first publication in 1560, the Geneva Bible has been considered by many as a revolutionary or seditious text, especially because of the numerous explanatory notes that the translators added in the margins of the text. Focusing on the 1560 Old Testament, this article takes a fresh look at the text, marginal notes and editorial apparatus of the Geneva Bible in order to ask whether they can be read as recommending English readers to overthrow Mary Tudor as an idolatrous tyrant and whether they could be read as giving support to the revolution against Charles I almost a century later. A close reading of the Geneva Old Testament leads to the conclusion that its politics are undecidable because the notes and prefaces faithfully reflect the internal political undecidability of the Bible itself. While some of the Geneva notes and prefaces encourage a revolutionary response to tyrants, there are many others that recommend obedience or passive resistance. As a consequence, the Geneva Bible's marginal notes could only be used to legitimize revolution through radically reductive reading strategies.

A New Set of Spectacles: The <i>Assembly’s Annotations</i>, 1645-1657

With the collapse of press censorship that followed the impeachment of William Laud in the Fall of 1640, a group of London printers took advantage of their new-found freedom and encouraged the House of Commons to convene an assembly of divines whose sole task was to revise the notes located within the margins of the Geneva Bible. The new annotations, it was agreed, were to be affixed to the margins of the Authorized Version, which would subsequently be sold as an annotated Bible. London’s newly liberated presses, however, produced a flood of Bibles, and the price of Bibles naturally fell. Such market conditions meant that an annotated Bible, more costly to produce, would be rendered unmarketable. Fortuitously, the men assembled to compose the new annotations came up with a set far too lengthy to be confined to the margins of the Authorized Version. The resulting commentary, which was published in 1645 as a separate volume, proved to be a marketable alternative.

‘It Droppeth as the Gentle Rain’: Isaiah 45:8 and The Merchant of Venice IV.1.181

PORTIA'S ‘It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven’ in The Merchant of Venice IV.i.1811 is usually glossed with reference to Ecclesiasticus 35:20 (‘Oh, how faire a thing is mercie in the time of anguish and trouble. It is like a cloude of raine’) and, more rarely, with Deuteronomy 32:2 (‘My doctrine shal drop as the raine, and my speache shal stil as doeth the dewe’).2 A third Old Testament source should also be considered here, namely Isaiah 45:8, translated in the Geneva Bible as ‘Ye heavens, send the dewe from aboue, & let ye cloudes drop downe righteousnes’ and in the Bishops’ Bible as ‘Ye heauens from aboue drop downe, and let the cloudes rayne righteousnesse’.3 The question of which bible translation Shakespeare used has generated a good deal of discussion. The Geneva Bible was more portable and more popular, and for the most part it seems that it was the bible to which Shakespeare had recourse. On the other hand there are times when the Bishops’ Bible seems nearer Shakespeare's phrasing, and of course, there is no reason why he could not have employed both.4 If Shakespeare remembered the Bishops’ Bible for the Isaiah passage it has as good a prima facie claim as the other two Old Testament verses as a possible source. In addition, Isaiah 45:8 (in whichever translation) may have had the advantage of being better known. In its plainchant form as Rorate caeli it had been regularly used during Advent in an antiphon whose opening was taken directly from the Vulgate (after which it diverges from the biblical text).5 Furthermore, the antiphon did not disappear with the Reformation (so, for example, Byrd composed a setting for it).6

Lucy Robartes's ‘A meditation uppon the Lords day’: A Puritan Palimpsest and English Sabbatarianism

Lucy Robertsher boocke which was giuenmee by my most deare and Louinghusbande and was his good Mothers1631 the 6 daye of mayeLRobertsLucy Roberts1John Robartes gave his young wife Lucy a 1562 Geneva Bible on 6 May 1631. It had belonged to his mother, the puritan matriarch Frances Hender. They had married a year earlier in April 1630 when Lucy was fifteen, and had possibly just arrived at the Robartes's seat of Lanhydrock in Cornwall.2 Their union sealed a strong puritan alliance. John (1606-1685), later the first earl of Radnor, was the eldest son and heir of Richard Robartes, first Baron of Truro, and his wife, Frances Hender, and Lucy (c.1615-c.1645/6) was the second daughter of Robert Rich, second earl of Warwick, and his wife Frances Hatton. Factional divisions on chiefly religious grounds amongst the Cornish gentry had emerged by this time, and it is in relation to the debate of Sabbatarianism that Lucy Robartes made a rare literary incursion. Her brief discourse, which she entitled 'A meditation uppon the Lords day', is scripted on one of several blank pages at the back of this Geneva Bible, composed sometime after 1633, in three instalments, and it is this which enables us to examine her use of an individual Bible as a tool to express her own theological and political opinions.3Though it is admittedly only a short text, when studied in the light of the Geneva Bible's annotations and the 1618 edition of James I's 'Book of Sports' held in the Lanhydrock library, Lucy Robartes's 'Meditation' sheds fascinating light on the way in which an early modern woman writer was able to interact with a key contemporary controversy of political and theological importance. Moreover, she presents it as having significant spiritual implications for both herself and the generations to follow. Acknowledgement of the heritage and future of an intergenerational text such as this family Bible demonstrates that she was aware of a wide potential readership for her writing. The hand that wrote and signed the introductory inscription at the front of the Bible, 'Lucy Roberts her boocke. . .' and signed 'LRoberts, Lucy Roberts', is the same hand that wrote the meditation at the back of the Bible. Three different pens are used, and the paleographical style is uniform, though it appears to mature. Contextual evidence suggests that it was probably begun around 1633 or 1634, since it is situated between two other meditations, both signed 'LRoberts' and dated 1632 and 1634 respectively. It was presumably added to in two additional phases during her use of the Bible, and represents an accumulative reading programme on the Sabbatarian debate. It cannot be said for certain that she did not complete it even as late as the early 1640s.This study endeavours to demonstrate how the particular books within a remarkable private library can be better appreciated for what they offer literary history. Such libraries are often undervalued in the histories of country houses, as the National Trust's Libraries Curator, Mark Purcell, noted in Library History: 'Generally speaking, people who have taken a serious interest in the history of books - as opposed to those who have had a serious interest in collecting them - have not paid a great deal of attention to libraries in country houses. And historians of country houses have returned the compliment by taking very little account of books.'4 Even in the fact of their acquisition, each of these books can tell a fascinating story beyond the mere contents of its pages. For too long, such books have served as aesthetically pleasing wallpaper, and even the National Trust admits to only having adopted a properly 'curatorial approach' for their 'unsung treasures' as late as the 1990s.5 The 1562 Geneva Bible that was the property of the Robartes family at Lanhydrock (now belonging to the National Trust) is one example of how the examination of just one book can illuminate both family and county history for the benefit of literary and historical scholarship. …

The Battle for the Bible in England, 1557-1582 (review)

Reviewed by Donald Dean Smeeton Eastern Mennonite University The Battle for the Bible in England, 1557-1582. By Cameron A. MacKenzie. (New York: Peter Lang Publishing Group. 2002. Pp. xi, 338. $69.95.) "The Bible says so." That should end the argument, but truth and certainty are not that simple today nor, as Cameron A. MacKenzie shows, were they that simple during the English Reformation. His stated purpose is to examine early English Bibles to see "what we can learn about the religious and theological commitments of the communities that produced them" (p. 1). He argues that the Geneva Bible was essentially adopted and domesticated by the Anglican Church in order to temper the separatistic impulses of English Puritanism. Then he describes how the Rheims text was a Catholic attempt to turn the Protestant arguments against their creators without sacrificing what it meant to be Catholic in the sixteenth century. By limiting his scope to the period between the publication of the Geneva Bible and production of the Rheims New Testament, he fills in details omitted by the broad outlines drawn by other authorities. There have been several significant works that have provided the big picture. David Daniell's The Bible in English: Its History and Influence (2005) and Alister McGrath's In the Beginning: The Story of the King James Bible (2001) are but two recent, readable examples. By narrowing his inquiry, MacKenzie fills in the significant steps between William Tyndale's New Testament (1526) and the King James Bible (1611). MacKenzie has focused on the cultural, political, theological, and social forces that influenced the three major Bible translations (the Geneva Bible, the Bishops Bible, and the Rheims New Testament) of this twenty-five-year period. The Geneva Bible was, of course, the voice of opposition not only to the Catholic politics of Mary Tudor but also against the "settlement" of her half-sister Elizabeth. He correctly shows the weakness of speaking of "the" Geneva Bible because it appeared in many editions in both Europe and in England. Each edition of the Geneva Bible had a distinctive preface, different introductions to the various sections, explanatory notes, marginal readings, liturgical calendars, and noted textual variants. Each set of editors was guided by religious, not to mention political, values that informed their presentations. Their understanding of the Bible's message and its perspicuity influenced not only their choice of words in translation, but also their choice of what was needed to make the message evident. MacKenzie points out that what first had been produced as a work of opposition to the English throne was, in the end, printed by the British establishment to consolidate Anglicanism and provide a united front against the threat—which was both real and exaggerated—of Catholics destabilizing the fragile Elizabethan settlement. By employing arguments from philology, the church fathers, and textual criticism, the Rheims translators of the New Testament reversed the Catholic opposition to an English text. Their translation relied fundamentally upon the authority of the Catholic Church expressed, in this instance, by the decrees of the Council of Trent and showed that an English Bible could support orthodoxy as [End Page 966] well as heresy. Like its Protestant counterparts, the Rheims New Testament was partisan and polemical in its notes, chapter summaries, tables, and explanations. It was Latinate, even obscure; English was a deliberate choice rather than simply taking issue with Protestants regarding the clarity of the text. MacKenzie's work is thorough with extensive explanatory endnotes, a solid bibliography, and a useful index. Just as his work is strongest when dealing with the religious and political issues of the Anglican Church, it is weakest in describing the ecclesiastical and theological changes in Roman Catholicism that allowed the Rheims project to become a reality.

Rhetoric, Fiction and Theology: James Ussher and the death of Jesus Christ

Preaching in Oxford in 1640, James Ussher, Archbishop of Armagh, drew the attention of his listeners to the dangers of rhetorical language in any discussion of the death of Jesus Christ:Consider the invaluable price that was paid for thee, and how great he was who paid it... It was the second person in the sacred Trinity, he, and no other, that was thus humbled for thee: he was weary for thee, and reviled for thee, sweated and fainted for thee, hungered for thee, and was buffeted for thee. It was he, the second person of the blessed Trinity, in proper speech, without either trope or figure, shed his blood for thee, died for thee1In the hermeneutical morass of the mid-seventeenth century, Ussher's words issued a timely warning. Developing Aristotle's Rhetoric, Renaissance humanists had instructed their readers on the responsible en-coding of persuasive powers in literary texts. After the reformation, handbooks of rhetoric foregrounded the religious possibilities of de-coding the sacred text. The title page of Henry Peacham's The Garden of Eloquence (1577) claimed the usefulness of its contents for 'the better understanding of the holy Scriptures'; the title page of Dudley Fenner's Artes of Logick and Rhetoricke (1584) referred to its contents' Opening of certaine parts of Scripture, according to the same'. But the Opening' of popular Bible reading tended to go further than the early theologians had preferred. Within Ussher's puritan tradition, the annotations of the Geneva Bible established a basic distinction between the sign and the signified in an effort to erect an interpretive apparatus that would limit and control the open-ness of the text. The Geneva annotations referred to such figures of speech as parenthesis, antithesis, synecdoche, 'metonymia', hyperbola, enallage, and hypallage - all explained for the benefit of the imagined 'simple reader'.2But 'simple readers' went beyond the Geneva Bible's caution. Ussher's sermon, two generations later, was challenging the exegesis of those theologians who had come to interpret biblical statements indicating the universality of the death of Christ - for the world, for 'all', 'for thee' - to mean something other than they initially appeared to mean. What did St Paul mean, in apparently transcending the issue of election, when he stated that 'God is the Saviour of all men' (1 Timothy 4:10)? The first page of Fenner's Artes ofLogick and Rhetoricke explained that the text showed 'salvation to be the thing caused by God', without making any claims for the number of the redeemed.' What did St John mean when he wrote that Jesus Christ 'is the propitiation for our sins: and not for ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world' (1 John 2:2)? Protestant theologians could answer that question in quite different ways. Some 'soul-torturing' puritan scholastics with high Calvinist tendencies explained the text by identifying 'the world' as a sign and referring it to the CIeCt/At the opposite end of the theological spectrum, others, increasingly described as Arminians, refused to identify the expression as a metaphorical sign and argued instead that Christ's death had placated God's wrath against every individual: 'the world' really meant 'the world'. Between these poles, and often still within the puritan camp, 'hypothetical universalists' followed Calvin on election and predestination, but, like the Arminians, insisted that the atonement provided by the death of Christ was universal in its scope. Their retention of the universality of the death of Christ - 'for thee', in general - recognised that the Biblical language of the passion was 'proper speech' indeed. By contrast, Ussher reflected, high Calvinist theologians, pursuing a refined orthodoxy, were systematically misidentifying signifieds as signs, undermining the plain style, and promoting excessive interpretive openness. In warning against the elaboration of 'trope or figure', therefore, his sermon was rooting its discussion of the death of Christ within the wider plain style and apparent closed-text preferences of the older puritan rhetoricians preferences the sermon described as providing for 'proper speech' - and was contrasting those approaches with the inadequate literary methods of the high Calvinists. …

Richard Hooker and the Lords Prayer: a chapter in Reformation controversy This article is a revision of a paper delivered at St Georges House, Windsor, on 18 September 2000, to commemorate the fourth centenary of the death of Richard Hooker.

The purpose of this article is to look at how the Lord's Prayer, with its scriptural base (Matt 6:9–13) and frequent use in late medieval piety, came under careful scrutiny at the Reformation: Luther retained it as central to catechesis and worship; Calvin regarded it as an essential guide to the character of all prayer, but was cautious about its liturgical use; and Thomas Cranmer took a conservative approach, so that it appeared in all the services of the Book of Common Prayer and sometimes twice. Richard Hooker, the late Elizabethan theologian, had to defend Prayer Book usage against Genevans in the English church, who were suspicious of ‘vain repetitions’ – the Geneva Bible's translation of Jesus' warning about prayer (Matt 6:7) – and sought to base his defence by seeing the prayer as an essential part of all worship, both at the daily offices and at the eucharist. Some of his arguments, however, have not stood the test of time, as witness the revisions of the twentieth century, where the prayer is recited only once at each service, and invariably with the doxology – which Calvin favoured, and which Cranmer did not adopt.

Dressed in Borrowed Robes: The Making and Marketing of the Louvain Bible (1578)

This paper examines the transformation of a Protestant Geneva Bible into a widely used Catholic one. This surprising metamorphosis occurred in two stages: first, the publication in Paris in 1566 of a French Bible for Catholics by René Benoist, a member of the Paris Faculty of Theology; second, the marketing of this Bible as a product of the Louvain Faculty of Theology by the famous Antwerp printer, Christopher Plantin. While the relationship between the Paris and Antwerp editions is known to French specialists, the origin of the Antwerp edition has been (understandably) misdescribed in several English reference works. The relationship between the two editions seems worth rehearsing here for it touches on more general issues of Catholic attitudes towards vernacular Scripture, the migration of texts across confessional lines, and the power of printers.

Hamlet and Protestant Aural Theater

Over past half-century many Shakespeareans have argued that either Protestantism or Catholicism informs general Christian ethos of Hamlet. John Dover Wilson, Raymond Waddington, Roland Mushat Frye are among many who find King Claudius a Lutheran who, though longing to repent of his fratricide, harbors a trapped, limed soul (3.3.68) whose inability to pray, to use Martin Luther's words, clearly manifest[s] that endeavor effect of free will are simply nothing (135). Peter S. Milward finds something Lutheran [Hamlet's] brooding emphasis on corruption of human nature (161), Charles Cannon stresses play's Calvinism, saying that the problems of theater dealt Hamlet lead Shakespeare [...] toward possibility of predestination (203). More recently, Anthony Low has argued that play stages dismissal of Catholic doctrine of Purgatory, Hamlet Purgatory Stephen Greenblatt echoes Low's claim. Still, a 2001 Commonweal review of Greenblatt's influential book, Edward Oakes approvingly quotes a Jesuit friend's comment on Hamlet: What a Catholic play that was! (29). My purpose here is not to argue that Hamlet is a Catholic or a play. Agreeing with David Daniell, I believe that Shakespeare's plays declare their author's allegiance to neither faith to exclusion of other (2). Thus, I will not assert that Hamlet's oblique instruction to Guildenstern, Hide fox, all after (4.2.30-31), is a cryptic reference to John Foxe's Book of Martyrs, (1) or that Horatio's description of post-haste romage land signals Denmark's energetic papalism (1.1.107). I will, however, argue influence of what Daniell calls Shakespeare's Protestant on Hamlet. Both play its eponymous hero seem specifically constructed to record display views on theater's potential for good or for evil, ideas expressed much English discourse near time of play's creation. Elsewhere I have argued that Shakespeare's exploration of those ideas at brink of seventeenth century inspired him to construct his greatest tragedy as an unusual anti-play (63). Here I will demonstrate that Hamlet's paradoxical drama may also be described as aural theater. I As Daniell has cogently maintained, Shakespeare's inheritance can logically be inferred from fact that, in his fifty-two years, Shakespeare lived a nation that was officially, aggressively, massively Protestant. Quoting Peter Lake, Daniell writes that, though some late-sixteenth century Catholics met barns private households, godly inherited public space of parish church, which altar was now a communion table the rood loft with its doom and images of saints had been removed. The liturgy was English, not Latin; mass had been replaced with a communion service. No trace of cult of saints or notion of Purgatory [...] was left either service book or outward ceremonial face of Church (2). Many of views expressed by most popular pastors of age--among them Thomas Playfere, Stephen Egerton, John Field, Lancelot Andrewes, whose London parish contained the Fortune Red Bull theatres whose services were eagerly attended by some players (Story xv)--showed influence of John Calvin's theology. In Shakespeare's lifetime, moreover, 142 editions of The Geneva Bible were printed; this, Daniell notes, ha[d] to do with demand (6). Whatever Shakespeare's personal beliefs or private instruction may have been, it is inarguable that his environment recurrently exposed him to strains of thought, it thus is not surprising that echoes of moral views should be found his greatest tragedy. The particular aspect of thought that I want to trace Hamlet is one Jonas Barish has famously called anti-theatrical prejudice. …

Book Review: A History of the English Bible as Literature

By David Norton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. ISBN 0-521-77140-4 (cloth), 0-521-77807-7 (paper). Pp. xii + 455. $85.00 (doth), $35.00 (paper). David Norton's A History of the English Bible as Literature is a revised and condensed version of his compendious two-volume series published in 1993. Norton's arrangement of his subject's 700-year history is literary-historical, and his methodology toward the English Bible as literature is genetic-critical. He traces the changes that have occurred to the scriptural canon and the ongoing effect that various translations of the Bible have had on English literary culture. Much of the history of the King James Bible (KJB) entails trying to define its power. Has the effect of the English Bible been spiritual, or was it merely poetic? Or are the two ultimately separable? The evolution of the English Bible from sacred text to literary classic rivaled only by William Shakespeare began in the movement for vernacular bibles that split Christendom. To the early Church, steeped in the sacred languages of Hebrew, Greek, and later Latin, translation was heresy: it separated biblical content from the languages in which God was presumed to have spoken to humankind. More of historical necessity than theological accuracy, the Latin of the Vulgate was for a millennium the intermediary between sacred languages and the vernacular. The central issue during the 300-year war over a vernacular English Bible was ownership of content, a struggle that endures in related areas of literature today. The Roman Church's argument against translation was that the laity was not qualified to interpret God's Word, which needed the mediation of a learned clergy. On the side of a vernacular Bible were those like William Tyndale and Miles Coverdale, who felt that the Roman clergy hindered the layperson's religious experience. The question at hand was ownership, but the question was not to be solved ultimately by the production of vernacular bibles. To solve the question of spiritual ownership, the Bible needed to be viewed as literature in the language of those who read it. According to Norton's chronology, the evolution of the Bible from inspired Word of God to literary classic moved forward by large figures in religion and literature. The earliest such interventionists in the dialectical struggle between the Bible as sacred text and the Bible as English literature were John Wycliff and Tyndale, the latter figuring as father of English biblical translation and martyr to the cause of wresting God's Word from the possession of the Roman Church. Although they championed a vernacular Bible, neither Wycliff nor Tyndale accepted the Bible's literary nature, which they regarded as a secular maculation on biblical purity. Perceived similarities between the English and the Semitic mind, however, permitted translation, since English as a language could bear, translators felt, the truths contained in the Bible without diminishing them. So strong was the perceived similarity among English, Greek, and Hebrew that English was regarded as superior in its power to capture the Bible's religious truths without Latinate loan-words and back-formations. Sir John Cheke, Professor of Greek at Cambridge, was among those who wanted to purge English of outside influences and inkhorn terres in order to increase the expressive similarity among English, Hebrew, and Greek. The early work of Wycliff, Tyndale, and Coverdale was incorporated into the Geneva Bible (1560), which Shakespeare himself read, one of the great Bibles that provided a theological and literary platform for development of the KJB (1611). On the Continent the translators of the Catholic Rheims-Douai Bible (1582 [New Testament], 1609 [Old Testament]) gave painstaking attention to literary matters, but those considerations placed further obstacles between the content of Scripture and the language of the common English speaker. …

Guyon and his Palmer Spenser's emblem of temperance

This article aims at a new and refined appreciation of the figure of the Palmer in The Faerie Queene, Book II, in which the identification of him with the virtue of prudence or right reason is seen to be no more than a starting-point. It is suggested that subtleties of Renaissance doctrines (both humanist and scholastic) concerning the taking of due care, the vice of curiosity, the gift of counsel, and the nature and function of guardian angels, among other things, may be used to illuminate the allegory of extraordinary complexity that is woven about the figure of the Palmer-most particularly (and paradoxically) in those episodes from which he is absent. Spenser appears to have conceived of the Palmer as representing the taking of due care as defined in Matthew's gospel, with Phaedria in canto vi and Mammon in canto vii of Book II signifying the two extremes (carelessness and carefulness respectively) of which the Palmer/prudence is the mean. It is also suggested that the Geneva Bible's gloss on Matthew 7-8 may have been the inspiration for Spenser's pairing of Tantalus and Pilate at the climax of Mammon's temptations. In a more selfreflexive reading, it may be that the figure of the Palmer (himself a hermeneut) functions as a meta-figure for the interpretation of the allegorical text or allegoresis, so that there is a fundamental correspondence between Guyon's struggling towards the related virtues of temperance and prudence and the reader's struggling towards a providential (prudens = providens) interpretation of The Faerie Queene, Book II.

The Word Within: Predicating the Presence of God in George Herbert's The Temple

The Word Within: Predicating the Presence of God in George Herbert's The Temple

Late Elizabethan Protestantism, Colonialism, and the Fear of the Apocalypse

The influence of Protestant interpretations of the Bible and readings of European history on the development of English colonial thought and practice has not often received significant attention. In this essay I argue that the millennia! reading of the Apocalypse inscribed in the Geneva Bible (1560), an interpretation that appeared to receivehistorical validity after the Massacre of Saint Bartholomew's Day in France (1572), had a huge impact on the writings of colonial propagandists. Writers such as M. M. S. (the translator of Bartolome de Las Casas), Richard Hakluyt, Richard Beacon, and Samuel Purchas, all argued for the importance of an English colonial presence in the Americas in terms of a struggle between the true religion of the Protestants and the false religion of the Catholic Antichrist. Beacon's Machiavellianinspired analysis of Ireland regards that country as a land torn between the two faiths and argues that lack of English vigilance could lead to violence as destructive as that unleashed on Protestants in France in the 1570s. Purchas's collection of travel writings revises Hakluyt's nationalistic focus in favour of travel as a religious allegory, thus exploding the tension between nation and faith implicit in Hakluyt's Principal Navigations.

He-Bibles and She-Bibles: Reflections On the Violence Done To Texts By Productions of English Translations of the Bible

AbstractThe political nature of English Bibles (Geneva Bible, Douai-Rhemes, KingJames Bible) in the long history of biblical translation is often neglected in the analysis of Bibles as ideological weapons ofwar in the theopolitical struggles of the time of their production. The eventual triumph of the KJB centuries later inscribed ideological traces of partisan versions of those struggles in "the English Bible." Violence is done to the biblical text and by readers of the text in the perpetuation of such Bibles as translations. Some examples of these kinds of violence are discussed, with observations on the hermeneutic constraints built into such translations.

“SIMPLY” READING THE GENEVA BIBLE: THE GENEVA BIBLE AND ITS READERS

geneva bible presented its readers as readers—believers without guile, willing to be led by the translators' annotations, and, collect ively, a persecuted community of reader-believers. It is a text which claimed authority over those who studied its pages: the powerful exhortation from The Argument to Revelation of St. John the Divine is an example of the application that the Geneva Bible required of its Read on its own terms the Geneva Bible demanded devotion rather than mere exegesis. It was this Bible that became the Bible of its generation, favoured by an impressive array of writers from Shakespeare and Spenser to Milton.2 purpose of this study is to evaluate the achievement of the Geneva Bible from the point of view of by examining what the translation asked of its original readers and how it changed their horizon of expectations. This method, adapted from the reception-theory of Hans Robert Jauss, provides a means by which to assess the readers' responses to the Geneva Bible. Central to the Geneva Bible's achievement was the model of it prescribed—simple reading: the readers of the Geneva Bible were called to become readers. Because of the historical nature of the discussion, I will begin by offering a summary of the circumstances of the period when the Geneva Bible was published. Section 2 offers a description of the charac teristics of a reader, via a definition of the word simple in its sixteenth century context; and the third section outlines the practice of reading found in the Geneva Bible's notes and details the ways in which the Geneva Bible differed generically from other sacred texts.

Population and Global Security (Environmental Challenges II), Edited by Nicholas Polunin & Mohammad Nazim. The Foundation for Environmental Conservation, Geneva, Switzerland, and Energy and Environment Society of Pakistan, Lahore, Pakistan: Limited Geneva Edition for the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) and others: price US $15 for individuals or US $25 for institutions (in both cases post-free) from the Foundation's Agent,

Population and Global Security (Environmental Challenges II), Edited by Nicholas Polunin & Mohammad Nazim. The Foundation for Environmental Conservation, Geneva, Switzerland, and Energy and Environment Society of Pakistan, Lahore, Pakistan: Limited Geneva Edition for the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) and others: price US $15 for individuals or US $25 for institutions (in both cases post-free) from the Foundation's Agent,

Notice of Publication: Population and Global Security Limited Geneva Edition

Notice of Publication: Population and Global Security Limited Geneva Edition

Limited Geneva Edition

An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. As you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.

Available Publication: Population and Global Security (Limited Geneva Edition)

Available Publication: Population and Global Security (Limited Geneva Edition)

Unsolved Problems in the Bibliography of J.-J. Rousseau

List of plates Foreword Acknowledgements and a note on the text Location of editions 1. The impact of Rousseau's Contrat Social in eighteenth-century France: Mornet's private libraries revisited 2. The pirates of 1762-1783 3. The Duchesne editions unravelled 4. The Geneva edition: the Confessions Appendix Select bibliography Index.