Embodied Experience shows how literature reveals and heals binary structures which debase women and matter. Its ethical materialism affirms that literary belongings matter, and that it matters when characters sensuously connect to these things and to the knowledge they harbor. Delving into literature’s thing-life archaeologically, it finds characters digging deep into things, finding them radiant and baffling – only to begin again: this is the fluid story of belonging with. In quarrying things, the book benefits from Spinoza’s Ethics, especially his idea that there is joy in activity and that, in striving to live, one lives virtuously. Thus, female characters who embrace their bodies and mind as one also claim the right to vitality and ethics without having to sacrifice energy and volition. These archaeological journeys highlight how the authors discussed themselves initiate a theory and praxis of human–nonhuman camaraderie that embodies belonging with, and Embodied Experience suggests that readers should emulate them in discovering these prismatic interrelations.

The seventh and final chapter presents a new interpretation of Richard Simon’s Histoire critique du Vieux Testament (1678). Having set out the course of his early career (and especially his study of Hebrew manuscripts in the library of the Oratory), it outlines how Simon presented a novel account of the practice and purpose of Catholic biblical scholarship. Its conclusion reflects on why this was found challenging by his contemporaries, and discusses how the reception of his work differed so extensively from that of Louis Cappel’s Critica sacra.

Chapter 6 shows how the later 1650s and 1660s defy ready categorisation, with the practices and tools of biblical scholarship being drawn on in a range of different ways in a range of different contexts. Its three parts proceed concurrently, rather than chronologically, and successively analyse: the way in which debate concerning the Old Testament became increasingly polemical, framed in terms of a choice between the Masoretic Hebrew text or the Septuagint; how biblical scholarship differed according to different local settings (in this case Italy (and especially Rome) and the Dutch Republic); and how Benedict de Spinoza, comparatively disconnected from the confessionalised world of Old Testament scholarship, targeted a precise set of the views concerning the Bible held by others in his local Reformed and Jewish communities.

This chapter considers how Spinoza’s treatment of scriptural origins in the Theological-Political Treatise is used to found his political argument. It argues that concepts of secularity and secularization have been inaccurately applied to Spinoza’s discussion of the Bible’s textual history, and that Spinoza cannot be viewed simply as a debunker of Scripture, even as his treatment of Scripture is theologically radical and has profound political implications. It shows how his claim that the Bible’s origins lie in the human imagination undergirds his argument that religious belief can be separated from religious conduct, a distinction not only central to his argument for the political state’s control over religion, but also central to the secular states associated with modernity. The chapter proceeds to show the oppressive and illiberal implications of Spinoza’s political-theological argument for religious minorities. Spinoza’s non-traditional account of the Bible and religion thus both founds a distinction which proved fundamental to modern secularity, even as, it is argued, Spinoza’s theological-political argument itself resists a straightforward identification as secular.