Imperial Bibles Domestic Bodies

Exploring the production and consumption of British commerical family bibles, this book sheds light on the history of women's sexuality, and the English view of such taboo subjects as same-sex relations, masturbation, menstruation and circumcision.

This volume examines the development and use of the Bible from late Antiquity to the Reformation, tracing both its geographical and its intellectual journeys from its homelands throughout the Middle East and Mediterranean and into northern Europe. Richard Marsden and Ann Matter's volume provides a balanced treatment of eastern and western biblical traditions, highlighting processes of transmission and modes of exegesis among Roman and Orthodox Christians, Jews and Muslims and illuminating the role of the Bible in medieval inter-religious dialogue. Translations into Ethiopic, Slavic, Armenian and Georgian vernaculars, as well as Romance and Germanic, are treated in detail, along with the theme of allegorized spirituality and established forms of glossing. The chapters take the study of Bible history beyond the cloisters of medieval monasteries and ecclesiastical schools to consider the influence of biblical texts on vernacular poetry, prose, drama, law and the visual arts of East and West"

Jewish Bible Translations is the first book to examine Jewish Bible translations from the third century BCE to our day. It is an overdue corrective of an important story that has been regularly omitted or downgraded in other histories of Bible translation. Examining a wide range of translations over twenty-four centuries, Leonard Greenspoon delves into the historical, cultural, linguistic, and religious contexts of versions in eleven languages: Arabic, Aramaic, English, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Russian, Spanish, and Yiddish. He profiles many Jewish translators, among them Buber, Hirsch, Kaplan, Leeser, Luzzatto, Mendelssohn, Orlinsky, and Saadiah Gaon, framing their aspirations within the Jewish and larger milieus in which they worked. Greenspoon differentiates their principles, styles, and techniques—for example, their choice to emphasize either literal reflections of the Hebrew or distinctive elements of the vernacular language—and their underlying rationales. As he highlights distinctive features of Jewish Bible translations, he offers new insights regarding their shared characteristics and their limits. Additionally, Greenspoon shows how profoundly Jewish translators and interpreters influenced the style and diction of the King James Bible. Accessible and authoritative for all from beginners to scholars, Jewish Bible Translations enables readers to make their own informed evaluations of individual translations and to holistically assess Bible translation within Judaism.

This Companion explores the Bible's role and influence on individual writers, whilst tracing the key developments of Biblical themes and literary theory through the ages. An ambitious overview of the Bible's impact on English literature – as arguably the most powerful work of literature in history – from the medieval period through to the twentieth-century Includes introductory sections to each period giving background information about the Bible as a source text in English literature, and placing writers in their historical context Draws on examples from medieval, early-modern, eighteenth-century and Romantic, Victorian, and Modernist literature Includes many 'secular' or 'anti-clerical' writers alongside their 'Christian' contemporaries, revealing how the Bible's text shifts and changes in the writing of each author who reads and studies it

Early Americans claimed that they looked to "the Bible alone" for authority, but the Bible was never, ever alone. Bible Culture and Authority in the Early United States is a wide-ranging exploration of the place of the Christian Bible in America in the decades after the Revolution. Attending to both theoretical concerns about the nature of scriptures and to the precise historical circumstances of a formative period in American history, Seth Perry argues that the Bible was not a "source" of authority in early America, as is often said, but rather a site of authority: a cultural space for editors, commentators, publishers, preachers, and readers to cultivate authoritative relationships. While paying careful attention to early national bibles as material objects, Perry shows that "the Bible" is both a text and a set of relationships sustained by a universe of cultural practices and assumptions. Moreover, he demonstrates that Bible culture underwent rapid and fundamental changes in the early nineteenth century as a result of developments in technology, politics, and religious life. At the heart of the book are typical Bible readers, otherwise unknown today, and better-known figures such as Zilpha Elaw, Joseph Smith, Denmark Vesey, and Ellen White, a group that includes men and women, enslaved and free, Baptists, Catholics, Episcopalians, Methodists, Mormons, Presbyterians, and Quakers. What they shared were practices of biblical citation in writing, speech, and the performance of their daily lives. While such citation contributed to the Bible's authority, it also meant that the meaning of the Bible constantly evolved as Americans applied it to new circumstances and identities.

"A very satisfying book, persuasive in showing how material culture and household devotion are central to the workings of `lived' Anglicanism in eighteenth-century Virginia." David D. Hall, Harvard Divinity School.

Victorian Poets and the Changing Bible charts the impact of post-Enlightenment biblical criticism on English literary culture. --from publisher description.

In this collection of essays, thirty scholars from diverse disciplines offer their unique perspectives on the genius of the King James Version, a translation whose 400th anniversary was recently celebrated throughout the English-speaking world. While avoiding nostalgia and hagiography, each author clearly appreciates the monumental, formative role the KJV has had on religious and civil life on both sides of the Atlantic (and beyond) as well as on the English language itself. In part 1 the essayists look at the KJV in its historical contexts—the politics and rapid language growth of the era, the emerging printing and travel industries, and the way women are depicted in the text (and later feminist responses to such depictions). Part 2 takes a closer look at the KJV as a translation and the powerful precedents it set for all translations to follow, with the essayists exploring the translators’ principles and processes (with close examinations of “Bancroft’s Rules” and the Prefaces), assessing later revisions of the text, and reviewing the translation’s influence on the English language, textual criticism, and the practice of translation in Jewish and Chinese contexts. Part 3 looks at the various ways the KJV has impacted the English language and literature, the practice of religion (including within the African American and Eastern Orthodox churches), and the broader culture. The contributors are Robert Alter, C. Clifton Black, David G. Burke, Richard A. Burridge, David J. A. Clines, Simon Crisp, David J. Davis, James D. G. Dunn, Lori Anne Ferrell, Leonard J. Greenspoon, Robin Griffith-Jones, Malcolm Guite, Andrew E. Hill, John F. Kutsko, Seth Lerer, Barbara K. Lewalski, Jacobus A. Naudé, David Norton, Jon Pahl, Kuo-Wei Peng, Deborah W. Rooke, Rodney Sadler Jr., Katharine Doob Sakenfeld, Harold Scanlin, Naomi Seidman, Christopher Southgate, R. S. Sugirtharajah, Joan Taylor, Graham Tomlin, Philip H. Towner, David Trobisch, and N. T. Wright.