The aim of this collection of essays is to bring together new comparative research studies on the place and role of the Bible in early modern Europe. It focuses on lay readings of the Bible, interrogating established historical, social, and confessional paradigms. It highlights the ongoing process of negotiation between the faithful congregation and ecclesiastical institutions, in both Protestant and Catholic countries. It shows how, even in the latter, where biblical translations were eventually forbidden, the laity drew upon the Bible as a source of ethical, cultural, and spiritual inspiration, contributing to the evolution of central aspects of modernity. Interpreting the Bible could indeed be a means of feeding critical perspectives and independent thought and behavior. Contributors: Erminia Ardissino, Xavier Bisaro, Élise Boillet, Gordon Campbell, Jean-Pierre Cavaillé, Sabrina Corbellini, François Dupuigrenet Desroussilles, Max Engammare, Wim François, Ignacio J. García Pinilla, Stefano Gattei, Margriet Hoogvliet, Tadhg Ó hAnnracháin, and Concetta Pennuto.

Exploring the nexus of music and religious education involves fundamental questions regarding music itself, its nature, its interpretation, and its importance in relation to both education and the religious practices into which it is integrated. This cross-disciplinary volume of essays offers the first comprehensive set of studies to examine the role of music in educational and religious reform and the underlying notions of music in early modern Europe. It elucidates the context and manner in which music served as a means of religious teaching and learning during that time, thereby identifying the religio-cultural and intellectual foundations of early modern European musical phenomena and their significance for exploring the interplay of music and religious education today.

This volume explores the production, transmission, and reading practices of vernacular Bibles in early modern Europe. This varied collection of essays provides historical, book historical, literary, theological, and art historical perspectives to the movements of manuscript and printed Bibles. The contributions concern Bibles in many different languages and from across the European continent, from Ireland to Portugal. Rather than perceiving Scripture and the material carriers of Scripture as static things, this volume demonstrates how Bibles constantly acquired new meanings and functions as they moved through time and space, and were touched by the hands of makers, readers, and users.

The English Bible in the Early Modern World addresses the most significant book available in the English language in the centuries after the Reformation, and investigates its impact on popular religion and reading practices, and on theology, religious controversy and intellectual history between 1530 and 1700. Individual chapters discuss the responses of both clergy and laity to the sacred text, with particular emphasis on the range of settings in which the Bible was encountered and the variety of responses prompted by engagement with the Scriptures. Particular attention is given to debates around the text and interpretation of the Bible, to an emerging Protestant understanding of Scripture and to challenges it faced over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

This volume explores how and by whom early modern Dutch Bibles were used. Through a detailed analysis of paratextual features and readers’ traces in over 180 surviving Bible copies, Renske Hoff displays how individuals manifested their faith in owning, reading, and personalising the Bible, in a period characterised by religious turmoil. From nuns and countesses to tailors and merchants: Bibles were read by a diverse public. Printer-publishers shaped the contents and paratextual features of their Bible editions to suit the varied wishes of the reading public. Readers themselves added marginalia, corrected the text, or pasted texts and images in their books, displaying their creativity as users as well as stressing the malleability of the material Bible.

'The Open Access publishing costs of this volume were covered by the Dutch Research Council (NWO), Veni-project “Leaving a Lasting Impression. The Impact of Incunabula on Late Medieval Spirituality, Religious Practice and Visual Culture in the Low Countries” (grant number 275-30-036).' This volume explores various approaches to study vernacular books and reading practices across Europe in the 15th-16th centuries. Through a shared focus on the material book as an interface between producers and users, the contributors investigate how book producers conceived of their target audiences and how these vernacular books were designed and used. Three sections highlight connections between vernacularity and materiality from distinct perspectives: real and imagined readers, mobility of texts and images, and intermediality. The volume brings contributions on different regions, languages, and book types into dialogue. Contributors include Heather Bamford, Tillmann Taape, Stefan Matter, Suzan Folkerts, Karolina Mroziewicz, Martha W. Driver, Alexa Sand, Elisabeth de Bruijn, Katell Lavéant, Margriet Hoogvliet, and Walter S. Melion.

“Wonderful . . . offers and provokes meditation on the timeless nature of censorship, its practices, its intentions and . . . its (unintended) outcomes.” —Times Higher Education Forbidden Knowledge explores the censorship of medical books from their proliferation in print through the prohibitions placed on them during the Counter-Reformation. How and why did books banned in Italy in the sixteenth century end up back on library shelves in the seventeenth? Historian Hannah Marcus uncovers how early modern physicians evaluated the utility of banned books and facilitated their continued circulation in conversation with Catholic authorities. Through extensive archival research, Marcus highlights how talk of scientific utility, once thought to have begun during the Scientific Revolution, in fact began earlier, emerging from ecclesiastical censorship and the desire to continue to use banned medical books. What’s more, this censorship in medicine, which preceded the Copernican debate in astronomy by sixty years, has had a lasting impact on how we talk about new and controversial developments in scientific knowledge. Beautiful illustrations accompany this masterful, timely book about the interplay between efforts at intellectual control and the utility of knowledge. “Marcus deftly explains the various contradictions that shaped the interactions between Catholic authorities and the medical and scientific communities of early modern Italy, showing how these dynamics defined the role of outside expertise in creating 'Catholic Knowledge' for centuries to come.” —Annals of Science “An important study that all scholars and advanced students of early modern Europe will want to read, especially those interested in early modern medicine, religion, and the history of the book. . . . Highly recommended.” —Choice