Samuel Head

Research Topic

The sacred history contained within the Book of Genesis fascinated the early modern mind. Yet, in comparison to other biblical eras such as the Kingdom of Israel in the Old Testament and the primitive church in the New, the significance of the most ancient period in sacred history--as a description of the earliest origins of religion--for early modern thinkers has gone unnoticed. My thesis argues that, in a late Elizabethan and early Stuart England rocked by religious contentions, repeated attempts were made to think through questions about the nature of a religious community using Genesis as a historical guide to the "beginning". These forays into sacred history, which were presented in learned commentaries, annotations, sermons, and lectures that were printed and popularly read, were always also reflections on the contemporary. Amongst the sources at the centre of my project are some of the most renowned English-language studies on Genesis produced in the early seventeenth century, including Andrew Willet's Hexapla in Genesin (1605) and Henry Ainsworth's Annotations upon the first book of Moses (1616), as well as lesser known texts produced by more familiar figures including Lancelot Andrewes and Nathaniel Culverwell. By drawing together a diverse range of works centred around the Bible's opening book, I argue for the importance of Genesis' sacred history as a shared, and disputed intellectual resource for evaluating contemporary religious issues. My project offers an alternative (though complementary) focus to recent works within the history of biblical scholarship, which have focussed on the transmission of scholarly works, specific theological-philological controversies, and the vital role of what now seem obscure disciplines such as chronology.

In recent years, the importance of sacred history as one of the major 'languages' (to use J. G. A. Pocock's famous phrase) with which early moderns discussed pressing religious and political issues has not only been recognised but considered in depth. However, the potential of a vast array of materials concerned with biblical and ecclesiastical history as new avenues into the history of religion and intellectual history in this period has yet to be fully realised. Inspired by recent scholarship that has shown how important it is to combine intellectual history with the history of scholarship and of educational institutions, my thesis argues that intellectual historians must consider biblical commentaries, annotations, sermons, and lectures, and the circumstances in which they were produced, if they are to more fully understand the role that biblical history played in early modern England's religious disputes. In particular, Genesis' history appealed to theologians and ecclesiastical historians because it contained an account of the most ancient period of all, and this was an era when accusations of religious novelty were best refuted by proving the antiquity of the church's customs and legal status using scripture itself and guides to Genesis produced in earlier periods.

This project is about the reception of Genesis within specific early modern English contexts. As such, it draws upon the field of Biblical reception history and the history of reading too. In reading Genesis and projecting an interpretation onto the scriptural text, English commentators and lecturers attempted to shape the views of their readers--that is, ministers, scholars, and lay thinkers--regarding Genesis' account of the beginnings of religion. This could play out in a variety of ways, as each of my substantive chapters aims to show. In the period I consider in my thesis (c.1590-1660), the Church of England was increasingly riven by theological and ecclesiological disagreements, indeed it was eventually disestablished during the English Civil Wars (1642-51). Throughout these turbulent times, ministers and scholars repeatedly turned to Genesis, with its account of the beginning, as they sought to legitimise their own normative visions for a religious community. This insight offers an important counter-point to the much discussed influence of Revelations and millenarian thinking in this era. Between them, Genesis and Revelations define the arc of Christian history. In the early modern period, individuals readily transposed contemporary events into this cosmic narrative and, 'with extraordinary mental agility' (Lamont), teased out interpretations of scripture that suited their religious preferences. I argue that the impulse to reform, which characterised this period of English religious history, was foremostly inspired by the book about creation, corruption, and renewal: Genesis.    

Supervisor: Dr Sarah Mortimer