Output details

The Social Universe of the English Bible : Scripture, Society and Culture in Early Modern England

Chapters 1–2 were submitted as articles to RAE2008. Both were reworked here with additional Hebrew, Latin, Greek, German, and English sources, including manuscript sources, most notably the only remaining working-copy of the King James Bible (samples newly reproduced). These additional sources augmented the apparatus of chapters 1–2. The conclusion, written in 2009, reiterates inter alia points from chapters 1–2. Please asses it alongside the introduction and chapters 3–4, as it distils all four and argues further to the point that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

To write this book, I shifted my research interests to the sixteenth century, polished up my Latin and Aramaic, learned ancient Greek, and mastered huge bibliographies on early modern community relations, the ecclesiastical history of marriage, slavery and labour, government and Civil War, and biblical translation. The arguments required me to synthesise, crystallise, and innovatively conceptualise all, while comparing meticulously word-use in at least forty biblical versions, and working in seven ancient and modern languages. Therefore although this book is comparatively short, and two chapters were published before 2008, I ask the panel to accept it as a double-weighted output.