152 Nicholas Hardy in This Fine-Grained Study of Biblical

152 Book Reviews

Nicholas Hardy Criticism and Confession. The Bible in the Seventeenth Century Republic of Letters. Oxford-Warburg Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. xii + 464.

In this fine-grained study of Biblical criticism in the early modern period, Hardy insists on the importance of confessional motivations to those scholars most closely involved in its development. Historians who have argued for a confessionally neutral ‘republic of letters’ have, in Hardy’s view, failed to take sufficient account of the theological agendas of those who made up that scholarly community. Rather than stand above and outside religious disagreements in order to pursue objective scholarship, Hardy argues, men like John Selden and Hugo Grotius sought instead to use their erudition in the service of their own theological agendas – and he demonstrates several facets of this process in compelling detail. Hardy focuses on some of the central and well-known figures of the seventeenth-century republic of letters, from Isaac Casaubon through to Louis Cappel, rereading key texts with sustained attention to the confessional context and to the way in which those texts were designed to pro- mote particular views of Christianity rather than others. The book, based on an Oxford D Phil, showcases Hardy’s impressive command of archival material and printed sources from across Europe. He is able to recreate the processes by which knowledge and evidence was shared, developed and circulated through networks shaped as much by religious tensions as by a shared commitment to scholarship. At several moments the research of scholars is, as Hardy shows, stymied by confessional hostility; Lucas Holstenius, the Vatican librarian, shared his research with Catholic scholars but withheld crucial information about a manuscript from the Protestant Patrick Young – that is, when he even bothered to reply to Young’s pleas for assistance. Scholarship, Hardy argues, was as much about promoting the superior claims of one’s own church as it was about an objective quest for historical truth. Hardy’s achievement is not only to draw our attention to the confessional biases in early modern biblical criticism, but to tease out how those biases op- erated, shaping the circulation of material, the reception of specific arguments and the treatment of authors. It was not simply that Catholics shared manu- scripts with other Catholics and vice versa, but that different confessional positions could lead to new approaches to evidence or new directions in scholarly research. To take one example: Hardy shows, over a couple of chapters, that the Huguenot scholar Louis Cappel was not simply (or perhaps not even) a histori- cally minded critic who sought to uncover the process by which the Hebrew text of the Bible had come to be punctuated and its vowels marked. Instead he was an active proponent of the particular style of theology associated with

Book Reviews 153 the French Protestant academy at Saumur and this agenda shaped the way he investigated the Hebrew text. His commitment to a typological approach, which held the Old and New Testaments closely together, was – Hardy argues – deeply connected to his willingness to use conjecture to amend the Hebrew text and to allow the multiplication of variant readings. The hostility which his works provoked was not a conservative reflex to proto-Enlightenment scholarship but based instead on an awareness of the confessional implications of the claims Cappel was making. Throughout these chapters, Hardy draws on letters exchanged between scholars but also on a wide range of theological texts, signalling the complex religious context in which these arguments took place. Hardy is as interested in the reception of scholarship as its genesis and there is a fascinating discussion of the reactions of both Protestant and Catholic theologians to the works of Hugo Grotius. Hardy shows that Catholic hopes for Grotius’s conversion encouraged them to display considerable sympa- thy towards him, much more than his fellow Protestants. Grotius’s Roman readers saw him, at least in the early 1640s, as a potential ally and they were not disposed to condemn him; instead it was Calvinists like André Rivet who were most concerned about the impact of his work. This section shows that Grotius was seen, in the 1640s, as a supporter of ecclesiastical authority – and explains why some of his Roman readers were surprised and dismayed when they learned of the publication of Grotius’s early ‘Erastian’ tract De Im- perio in 1647. That the scholars discussed by Hardy were in no sense neutral is clear, but sometimes more could have been done to analyse the implications of their religious ideas within a fluid and shifting confessional landscape. There is a long discussion of Isaac Casaubon, in which Hardy guides the reader through a series of fascinating debates – including the role of natural reason and the nature of the Mass – in which Casaubon was involved, debates which were fraught with theological significance. Casaubon seems to have developed his own distinctive synthesis, combining a fairly positive assessment of natural reason with a commitment to ecclesiastical discipline, while rejecting what he saw as an excessive reliance on the sacraments. Hardy shows how Casaubon’s research enabled him to develop and defend each aspect of this synthesis, de- cisively refuting any lingering belief that Casaubon was engaging in objective historical criticism. And yet Hardy says remarkably little about the conclusions that Casaubon drew or how they might have challenged existing theological positions, reshaping the contours of confessional thinking. Casaubon’s ideas on ecclesiastical discipline are described as ‘thoroughly Anglican’ (p. 149) but it is not clear what this label might mean in the mid-1610s, when the nature of grotiana 39 (2018) 105-159