Session Abstract

The subject of literal reading is at the core of European intellectual and religious history in the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries. The Protestant Reformation encouraged an increased focus on the literal sense in Biblical scholarship. Martin Luther and John Calvin urged their followers to reject the Catholic Church’s allegorical interpretations in favor of one “literal, historical sense.”  Scholars looking to determine the literal sense of Scriptures in the centuries following the Reformation, however, soon discovered that they disagreed about what constituted the literal sense.  The historical context of each scholar, including the academic environment in which he studied the Bible, affected his understanding of how to read the Bible literally.  This session will explore the connections between developments in scholarship and how scholars read the Bible and conceived of its literal sense.  Those developments include the rise of historical-critical methods of studying Scripture in the university in the eighteenth century, which will be analyzed in papers by Michael Legaspi (on reading the Bible in the Enlightenment University) and Adina Yoffie (contrasting textual communities in the university in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries with those outside the university in the nineteenth and twentieth), and the increased popularity of Copernicanism in the seventeenth century, which will be discussed by Aviva Rothman. In addition to appealing to historians of religion, this session aims at a broader audience of those interested in intellectual history in general and in the histories of universities, of reading, and of science, more specifically.