The Political Bible in Early Modern England (Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History)
Cambridge University Press
Edition: 1st Edition, 12/15/2016
EAN 9781107107977, ISBN10: 1107107970
Hardcover, 322 pages, 22.8 x 15.2 x 2.3 cm
Language: English
This illuminating new study considers the Bible as a political document in seventeenth-century England, revealing how the religious text provided a key language of political debate and played a critical role in shaping early modern political thinking. Kevin Killeen demonstrates how biblical kings were as important in the era's political thought as any classical model. The book mines the rich and neglected resources of early modern quasi-scriptural writings - treatise, sermon, commentary, annotation, poetry and political tract - to show how deeply embedded this political vocabulary remained, across the century, from top to bottom and across all religious positions. It shows how constitutional thought, in this most tumultuous era of civil war, regicide and republic, was forged on the Bible, and how writers ranging from King James, Joseph Hall or John Milton to Robert Filmer and Thomas Hobbes can be better understood in the context of such vigorous biblical discourse.
1. Introduction
the political bible
2. Early modern hermeneutics and the Old Testament
3. The sermon, the listener and enemy theory in the Thirty Years War
4. Hezekiah, the politics of municipal plague and the London poor
5. Constitution and resistance
the language of Civil War political thought
6. Dividing the kingdom
Rehoboam and Jeroboam
7. Hanging up kings
regicide and political memory
8. Preaching on the ramparts
Hezekiah at war
9. How Jezebel became sexy
Ahab, Naboth's land and Jezebelian hermeneutics
10. Conclusion
Appendix. Chronology of Biblical kings
Bibliography
Index.