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.

The book draws to a close by assessing how far, by the end of the seventeenth century, the ‘limits of erudition’ were on the verge of being transcended. This chapter focuses in particular on the ways in which Louis Cappel and Richard Simon attempted to alter how their contemporaries construed the relationship between Scripture, scholarship, and given confessional positions. The book concludes by presenting a new interpretation of the significance of Simon’s work.

The controversies that plagued the Critica sacra described in Chapter 3 took place while it was in manuscript. Chapter 4 shows what happened when it finally found its way into print, prompting considerable debate in both Catholic and Protestant Europe. In the former, it focuses on how the work was received in Rome, tracking the lengthy investigation it was subject to at the Congregation of the Index and then the Holy Office. In the latter, it charts the wide-ranging public disputes the work elicited, paying particular attention to reconstructing the scholarly views and methods that underpinned Johann Buxtorf II and Archbishop James Ussher’s engagement with Cappel’s work.

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 5 is devoted to Brian Walton and the London Polyglot Bible. It shows how Walton’s work was not simply an erudite accumulation of information from print and manuscript sources, but rather took a precise stand in the debates concerning the Old Testament that swirled around the Protestant world of the early 1650s. It examines how this created problems for would-be collaborators elsewhere in Europe, how Walton justified his approach by presenting a novel synthesis in the work’s ‘Prolegomena’, and how the vernacular dispute between Walton and his most prominent opponent, John Owen, turned on how they justified their work in terms of contemporary Reformed scholarship.

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.