Chapter 1 focuses on the practice and purpose of biblical scholarship in the Catholic world in the later sixteenth and early seventeenth century. It traces the fortunes of three prospective polyglot editions of the Bible in Spain, the Southern Netherlands, and France to examine how the publication of authoritative Roman editions of the Septuagint (1587) and Vulgate (1592) posed new challenges for Catholic scholars and editors of the Bible.

Where Chapter 2 assessed the origin and content of Morin and Cappel’s works, Chapter 3 shifts to consider aspects of their reception, tracing both the debates prompted by Morin’s publications and the difficulties Cappel faced in publishing the Critica sacra. These, it shows, were interlinked, as many of the problems Cappel encountered stemmed from the way in which his Protestant contemporaries learned about Morin’s claims and followed the disputes he provoked. It draws particular attention to how scholars in Switzerland came to oppose Cappel’s work, showing how this was shaped by a conjunction of differing views about the practice of biblical scholarship and how Protestant scholars ought to conduct themselves in the Republic of Letters.

Chapter 2 turns to the genesis and gestation of a succession of major Protestant and Catholic publications in the 1620s and early 1630s. It shows how the work of two scholars, Louis Cappel and Jean Morin, can be understood as alternative ways of responding to the challenge posed by Johann Buxtorf’s Tiberias (1620), a pathbreaking account of the history of the Masoretic text.