Introduction

Summary

The book opens by setting out the vital import of erudition in early modern Europe, when it was believed historical knowledge would confirm and illuminate religious truth. It explains how, in this context, the Bible came to be a subject of particularly fraught investigation owing to the way in which different versions of the text in different languages became associated with different confessional groups. The Introduction presents the work’s novel conceptual framework that draws on techniques and approaches associated with the history of knowledge and the social history of ideas to reconstruct the processes involved in creating knowledge about the Old Testament in post-Reformation Europe.