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John Bois, Isaac Casaubon, and the Case of 1Esdras*

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John Bois, Isaac Casaubon, and the Case of 1Esdras* chapter 8 Revising the King James Apocrypha: John Bois, Isaac Casaubon, and the Case of 1Esdras* Nicholas J.S. Hardy Introduction: Isaac Casaubon and the Revision of the King James Bible When the Huguenot scholar Isaac Casaubon left Paris for England in October 1610, he hoped to fulfil several ambitions.1 One was to protect himself, and eventually the rest of his large family, from a new wave of religious violence that he feared might break over France after the assassination of his patron and the author of the Edict of Nantes, King Henri IV.2 Another ambition, not unconnected to the first, was to write more freely on the subject of religion, and especially the early history of the Church, than he had been able to in his Catholic homeland.3 Casaubon’s third ambition was to continue the work on * I would like to thank Paul Botley, James Carley, Mordechai Feingold, Thomas Fulton, and Kirsten Macfarlane for their advice and assistance with this chapter. For quotations from the King James Bible, I have used Gordon Campbell, ed., The Holy Bible: Quatercentenary Edition (Oxford, 2010). Biblical verses referred to outside of quotation marks have been made to correspond with this edition. For the text of the Septuagint, beside the early modern editions, I have consulted Alfred Rahlfs, ed., Septuaginta, 5th edn. (Stuttgart, 1952); and, for 1Esdras in particular, the full apparatus criticus in Septuaginta: Vetus Testamentum Graecum auctoritateAcademiaeLitterarumGottingensiseditum, 16 vols. (Gottingen, 1931–), vol.VIII. For the Geneva Bible, I have used The Geneva Bible: A Facsimile of the 1560 Edition (Madison, WI, 1969); and for the Bishops’ Bible, The Holy Bible (London, 1602). Many of the issues addressed in the present chapter will be covered more fully in my forthcoming monograph on the production and reception of the King James Bible. 1 The daily entries in Casaubon’s diary record that he left Paris on 8 October 1610 and arrived in London, having passed through Canterbury, on 30 October 1610: see Isaac Casaubon, Ephemerides, ed. John Russell, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1850), 2:766–781. 2 For Casaubon’s reaction to the assassination of Henri IV, see e.g., his letter to Claudius Salmasius, 19 May 1610, Isaac Casaubon, Epistolae, ed. Theodoor Jansson van Almeloveen (Rotterdam, 1709), 352. 3 Casaubon’s anti-papal treatise of 1607, De libertate ecclesiastica, had been suppressed by royal officials and the papal nuncio in France before its printing was complete, but one of the © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi: 10.1163/9789004359055_009 revising the king james apocrypha 267 classical as well as Judeo-Christian literature and history that had made him the most widely acclaimed living humanist.4 Prior to his arrival in England, Casaubon probably neither knew about, nor expected to participate in, the revision of the Bishops’ Bible which King James I had commissioned in the wake of the Hampton Court Conference of 1604. And yet Casaubon’s papers in the British Library include letters between him and John Bois, one of the members of the Cambridge Apocrypha company and the final revision committee. The Bois-Casaubon correspondence reveals how the translators dealt with a small number of specific problems with a level of forensic detail unmatched by any other document pertaining to the King James Bible. Combined with other evidence, they also show that Casaubon probably assisted in the revision of all of the apocryphal books. Seeing the King James Bible through Casaubon’s eyes can thus provide new insights into the mechanics of the translation, but it can also allow us to apprehend the broader scholarly and theological factors that shaped it. In one respect, Casaubon was an unsuitable candidate to advise on an English translation of the Bible: he barely understood the target language. Casaubon had been asked for advice about vernacular translations of the Bible before, but only in languages which he could read.5 Casaubon spent nearly four years in England before his death in July 1614, and his efforts to learn English are witnessed by his annotated copy of Francis Bacon’s Advancement of Learning. The book is marked up with accents to indicate where stress was to be placed in pronouncing words, and marginal glosses translating unfamiliar terms into French, Latin, or Greek; but Casaubon apparently never achieved fluency in unfinished copies was received enthusiastically by Archbishop Bancroft and other members of the English hierarchy. See Paul Botley, Richard ‘Dutch’ Thomson, c. 1569–1613 (Leiden, 2016), 114–115, for its English reception; and, more generally, Nicholas Hardy, ‘Religion and Politics in the Composition and Reception of Baronius’s Annales Ecclesiastici: A New Letter from Paolo Sarpi to Isaac Casaubon’, in For the Sake of Learning: Essays in Honor of Tony Grafton, ed. Ann Blair and Anja Goeing, 2 vols. (Leiden, 2016), 1:21–38, esp. 21–22. 4 For Casaubon’s classical scholarship and its religious implications, see Anthony Grafton and Joanna Weinberg, ‘I Have Always Loved the Holy Tongue’: Isaac Casaubon, the Jews, and a Forgotten Chapter in Renaissance Scholarship (Cambridge, MA, 2011); Anthony Grafton, ‘Protestant versus Prophet: Isaac Casaubon on Hermes Trismegistus’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 46 (1983), 78–93. 5 For instance, Italian: see his letters to Giovanni Diodati, 1 May and 11 June 1608, Casaubon, Epistolae, 603, 314–315, respectively. For Diodati’s translation, see T.H. Darlow and H.F. Moule, Historical Catalogue of the Printed Editions of Holy Scripture in the Library of the British and Foreign Bible Society, 2 vols. (London, 1903–1911), 2:811–812..
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