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This chapter provides a narrative of the sustained use of Genevan forms of worship in the British Isles after Knox and Goodman’s return from exile. Genevan devotional practices were not strictly celebrated by the former exiles alone. The broader singing of metrical psalms in England aroused suspicion by authorities of a popular brand of Calvinism. It was not ultimately Cranmer’s Latin translation of the Bible that English and Scottish Protestants shared, but a common edition of the Bible produced by the English exile congregation in Geneva. Gaelic translations of the Geneva Bible intended for an Irish readership extended the edition’s use even further. The discussion also draws attention to Archbishop Adam Loftus’s missionary plan to deploy Goodman in Ireland in order to introduce reformed worship.

Chapter 3 treats the first editions of the major Elizabethan bibles. These are “official” bibles, their translation and paratexts, but also their printing, curated by the period’s competing magisteria: Archbishop Parker, the Marian exiles at Geneva, the leadership of the English College at Rheims and Douai; Theodore Beza, Calvin’s successor at Geneva; Pierre L’Oiseleur de Villiers, minister to London’s Huguenot congregation. As their provenance implies, these bibles were intended to set forth the distinctive theological visions of their respective faith communities; indeed the early Elizabethan ones—the Geneva and Bishops’ in particular—provide the earliest articulation of what in retrospect one instantly recognizes as hardline Calvinism and Hooker-style Anglicanism. The Rheims preface opens with an equally recognizable defense of Catholic traditionalism against the bible-spouting impudence of English heretics, but what follows is a quite sophisticated discussion, one without Protestant counterpart, of manuscript transmission, textual variants, and scribal corruption. The first half of the chapter focuses on the opening paratexts laying out these competing visions. The second turns to the myriad internal ones: to the psalm prologues, for example, where the same patristic homily, in the Bishops’ version, bears witness to the religious value of aesthetic pleasure, in the Douai’s, to the apotropaic power of sacramentalia; and to the Geneva’s prologue to Romans, whose account of predestination differs from that laid out in the Romans glosses that immediately follow.

This chapter tells the story of how the Gospel of John and its interpretive traditions and trajectories functioned in the culture of polemic surrounding the Trinity, particularly how exegeses of specific texts were contested, and became a liminal space where multivalent notions of orthodoxy and heresy were formed and controlled. It analyzes the exegetical and theological disputes surrounding the Gospel of John in early modern Europe, with particular attention to the way these debates further shaped the culture of English Christianity. It examines the politics of translation in which disputes over the Geneva Bible glosses, the Douay–Rheims New Testament, and a number of Annotations on the Gospel of John simultaneously clarified and clouded the issues surrounding Trinitarian orthodoxy. After a detailed analysis of a few key Trinitarian treatments of the Gospel of John, the chapter focuses on the various interpretive trajectories of the anti-Trinitarian Johannine exegesis, both Continental and English. It shows how a Huguenot pastor in London, Jacques Souverain, managed to synthesize previously radical ideas which saw the Gospel of John itself as a departure from primitive Christianity, and how the influence of the putatively Platonizing divinity, which he saw as an unbridled abuse of allegorical hermeneutics, further corrupted Christianity.

This chapter examines the following versions of the Bible, dealing principally with those from the Geneva onwards: Tyndale's New Testament (1525), Tyndale's Pentateuch (1530), Coverdale (1535), The Great Bible (1539), Beza's Latin New Testament (1556/7), The Geneva New Testament (1557), The Geneva Bible (1560), Beza's Greek New Testament (1565), The Bishops' Bible (1568), Tomson's New Testament (1576), The Rheims New Testament (1582), The Douai Bible (1610), and The Authorized (‘King James’) Version (1611).

This chapter discusses the variety of ways in which Vaughan employed borrowings from the bible, exploring the reasons for the belated critical interest in this aspect of his practice and for his employment of different translations, including the Vulgate, the Geneva Bible, and the Authorized Version. His careful collation of biblical texts in a search for the correct meaning is contrasted with Puritan claims to the certainty of direct inspiration. His use of the adapted form of typology developed during the Reformation to forge parallels between the Scriptures and contemporary experience, both personal and political, is also demonstrated. Scriptural phrases and allusions are shown to play an even more important role in his poetry than his borrowings from George Herbert.

This chapter examines the early English translations of the Bible, including those prior to Reformation. English translations since the fourteenth century include those associated with John Wyclif, William Tyndale, and Miles Coverdale. Also discussed are the Matthew Bible, published by John Rogers; the Great Bible, printed by Edward Whitchurch and Richard Grafton; the Geneva Bible; the Bishops' Bible; and the Douai-Reims Bible.

The Geneva Bible is commonly thought of as a single version produced by the Marian exiles with marginal notes which was disliked by King James VI and superseded by the Authorized or King James Version after 1611. The chapter shows that there were three major text forms in the Geneva Bible tradition: the ‘pure’ Genevans, the Geneva Tomson version which followed Beza’s Latin New Testament, and finally the Geneva Tomson Junius version which added a very extensive commentary to the Book of Revelation. Moreover, study of the material culture of what must be understood as the Geneva Bible ‘project’ shows that different typefaces and different bundling of paratextual additions were designed to appeal to different readerships. Two distinctive Geneva Bible versions were published in Scotland (the Arbuthnot/Bassandyne text of 1579 and the Andro Hart text of 1610). It is suggested that use of the Geneva tradition flourished in Scotland until about 1640 and fostered a highly informed, argumentative sense of separate religious identity.

This chapter assays the official attitude of the Protestant Church of England to Protestantism’s central text, the Bible. A closer examination of the claims made about Scripture’s authority in the English Reformation’s great flashpoint decades—the 1530s and the 1630s—reveals that the Bible’s relation to the Church of England was always more contested and uncertain than its advocates were willing to acknowledge. The King James Bible—with its implicit attack upon the idea of private scriptural study by the removal of marginal notes—signalled the end of the scriptural reformation in England, suggesting that the disavowal of sola scriptura was a defining hallmark of early modern ‘Anglicanism’.

This chapter discusses how the revolutionary tracts penned by Knox and Goodman drove their congregation to utilize to the full their time in exile. The great missionary endeavour of Calvin and his fellow Frenchmen to sustain the Protestant cause in France helped the English-speaking exiles to find their own purpose. The congregation saw their mission as preparing for the future in the British Isles and witnessing the present. They became a working model of a Reformed community embodied in Word, sacraments, and discipline resting upon a strong spiritual core. In a remarkable undertaking, they produced a community of texts—the Geneva Bible, the metrical psalter and their new liturgy. The “example of Geneva” which they created with the help of their zealous congregation became the model for everything Knox subsequently did.

Chapter 9 assesses reception in English literature. Jewish use is primarily twentieth century: a comparison of Psalms 1 and 2 in The Jewish Study Bible, The Artscroll Tanach, and Tehillim:The Book of Psalms illustrates how Jewish exegesis influenced English translation. Christian reception starts as early as the ninth century Anglo-Saxon Eadwine Psalter, and, later, The Psalter of Richard Rolle, and Langland’s Piers Plowman. By the sixteenth century translations proliferate: Coverdale, The Geneva Bible and The King James Bible illustrate different readings of Psalm 1. Poetic experimentation also becomes popular: examples include Sidney, and later, Sandys, King, Milton, and Burns. Modern translations have different preoccupations, namely gender-inclusiveness (Psalm 1) and political correctness (Psalm 2). The psalmists’ worldview becomes more open to criticism (Moore [Psalm 1], Jackson [Psalms 1 and 2], and Haiku). The conclusion notes the progression from an earlier interest in aesthetic representation to a present concern to make these psalms universally palatable and ‘moral’.

Allegoresis is interpreting a text written with straightforward literal intent as if it were an allegory. In typology, a literal person or object is treated as an anticipatory example of someone or something to come. The Bible was the most important text subject to this kind of reading, including by New Testament writers. A sampling of commentaries on the parable of the sower (Matthew 13) and the rivalry between Mary and Martha (Luke 10) demonstrates the stability of allegorical readings from the patristic to the early modern era. Although the extent to which the Bible was properly read allegorically was hotly debated in the sixteenth century, even William Tyndale’s practice had much in common with traditional four-fold interpretation. Marginal glosses from the Geneva Bible indicate the general acceptance (and by extension, the transparency) of allegorical reading. Spenser’s use of words like “type,” “shadow,” “image,” and “figure” refer to traditional biblical exegesis, adapting a method familiar to Elizabethans from religious sources.

In this chapter the ubiquity of references to the Prodigal Son in Shakespeare’s work is explored, leading to a discussion of Shakespeare’s use of the Bible in general and of the Geneva Bible in particular. Two plays are considered in detail: Henry IV Part 1 and King Lear. It is suggested that Shakespeare offers a creative exegesis, or midrash, of the parable in both plays. In the first, the parable is reworked in a way which leads the reader to question the motives of both Hal and the Prodigal in the original text. In the second, the complex overlay of the parable on the plot and characterization offers at least the possibility of grace and hope at the end of the play.

On a spring evening in 1676 boats began to arrive at the steps of the Dorset Garden Theatre, bringing a fashionable audience to a performance of Thomas Shadwell’s new comedy, The Virtuoso. Embedded within the comic goings on of this new play was a satirical commentary on an emerging way of thinking, which was poised to revolutionize intellectual life. This chapter focusses on the meaning of ‘virtuoso’ and its evolution into a term applied to a group of people who were dedicated to investigating natural phenomena. Their apparently obsessive preoccupation was the target of Shadwell’s play. The English virtuosi linked their novel philosophy to a radical new approach to the Scriptures epitomized by the so-called ‘Geneva Bible’.