This chapter analyzes the gradual and escalating development of human rights and religious freedom protections over the past two millennia. The chapter surveys the discovery and accumulation of rights and liberties in biblical texts and their interpretations over the centuries; in classical Roman law and the medieval civil, canon, and common law sources that built on the Bible and Roman law; in the Protestant Reformation and the Protestant–Catholic conflicts and revolts that followed; in Enlightenment liberalism and modern constitutional reforms born of democratic revolution; and in twentieth-century international human rights documents beginning with the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Setting up the more detailed studies that follow, the chapter identifies several essential and enduring questions about the intersections of religion, human rights and religious freedom that still confront states and churches today.

This chapter analyzes the gradual and escalating development of human rights and religious freedom protections over the past two millennia. The chapter surveys the discovery and accumulation of rights and liberties in biblical texts and their interpretations over the centuries; in classical Roman law and the medieval civil, canon, and common law sources that built on the Bible and Roman law; in the Protestant Reformation and the Protestant–Catholic conflicts and revolts that followed; in Enlightenment liberalism and modern constitutional reforms born of democratic revolution; and in twentieth-century international human rights documents beginning with the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Setting up the more detailed studies that follow, the chapter identifies several essential and enduring questions about the intersections of religion, human rights and religious freedom that still confront states and churches today.

Between a hundred and two hundred manuscripts connected with Brittany, written in the ninth and tenth centuries, can be identified by their script, contents and Old Breton glosses; they survived the Viking age by being taken to Francia or England, and open a window on the sources and external contacts of Bretons’ scholarly culture. The manuscripts contain a wide variety of Latin texts, biblical, legal, grammatical, technical and historical. One of the most important subsets consists of manuscripts of the Irish canon law compilation, Collectio Canonum Hibernensis: it is unclear whether the text was obtained from Ireland or via Irish-influenced centres on the Continent, but the ability of Breton scribes to access both the extant versions in full, together with some of their source-texts, implies contact with the milieu of the original compilers. Glosses show that even texts that were widely available on the Continent, like grammars and the scientific writings of Bede, reached Bretons through Irish contacts. Some manuscripts reveal collaboration between annotators writing in Irish, Welsh and Breton, providing a context for the sharing of hagiographical information discussed in the previous chapter. The occasional sharing of rare texts allows us to pinpoint a few centres where such encounters may have taken place, among them are Reichenau and Echternach. The survival of Breton manuscripts in England suggests that Breton scholarship played a considerable part in the reconstruction of the English Church in the tenth century, after the Viking age.

This chapter explores Blake’s vocation to a public role and his exploration of creativity and conformity in his engagement with the Bible, literature and art. In his engagement with Milton and the Bible, Blake carved out for himself a creative space in his use of both, and criticised their shortcomings, while recognising the significance of what he had taken from them. In wrestling with Milton’s texts, Blake pioneered an interpretative method for any who sought a more creative and contemporary relationship with the tradition they received. Similarly, engaging with the Bible’s major themes informed his critique of the contemporary church and politics and enabled him to criticise other, to him, less palatable biblical themes, as well as pointing to a different kind of society. In so doing, Blake brought out the latent meaning of the words of the Bible, exposing the shortcomings of the biblical texts while preserving their truths. A crucial part of this hermeneutical process is the way in which Blake regarded boundaries and constraints as the necessary complement to inspiration and imagination, both crucial components of Blake’s art and his understanding of human life.

This chapter moves to the French Enlightenment, arguing that echoes of Renaissance humanism emerge in the Encyclopédie. This project, famous in the history of the book, was the brainchild of Diderot and D’Alembert, two luminaries who believed that a comprehensive account of all branches of human knowledge was needed. They financed the project themselves, through subscriptions, made expert use of illustrations, and created a monument in the history of the book. In their comprehensiveness, Diderot and D’Alembert were the heirs to Poliziano’s multidisciplinary drive. In their views of religion, they were the distant progeny of Valla. And in their antiinstitutional nature, they reflect Italian Renaissance humanism, a cultural movement whose protagonists often took care to situate themselves outside of existing institutions. After the treatment of the Encyclopédie, Thomas Jefferson makes a cameo appearance. In his “Jefferson Bible,” he literally cut and pasted parts of the New Testament that he believed showed Jesus’s true nature – not, in Jefferson’s view, as a divine personage (Jefferson discarded all the stories of miracles), but rather as an ethical exemplar. Doing so, Jefferson reflected one very important tendency in history of philology, one that Valla had begun, the Protestant Reformation spread, and the French Enlightenment completed: the desacralizing of the Bible

This chapter examines the fifteenth-century thinker Lorenzo Valla (1406–57), whose work serves both as an emblem of a certain style of reading in the fifteenth century and as a connector to today’s debates on the humanities. Through his meticulous reading and scholarship, Valla accomplished a number of things. He uncovered a historic forgery claiming that the Church was owed substantial property by secular rulers, doing so with both emotional appeals to common sense and technical criticism of the language of the forgery. He wrote the most successful presentation of the Latin language’s grammar and syntax in the Renaissance – an exceedingly important accomplishment, since Latin was the language of international scholarship. He opened the floodgates to the later, 16th-century Reformation by suggesting that the Latin Vulgate Bible’s language could be changed to reflect the meaning of the original Greek in which the New Testament was written. This move was momentous, since by Valla’s day 1,000 years of Christian theology had been practiced with the Latin Vulgate as its basis. The chapter also argues that to understand him – and by extension the humanities at large – emotions need to be brought into the picture.

Though world literature is often considered a modern phenomenon, a range of world literatures developed in cosmopolitan cultures in antiquity, as was already recognized by the early comparatist Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett. This essay discusses examples of world literature created in the Hellenistic and imperial Roman world and the ancient Near East, looking in particular at relations between imperial centers and colonial peripheries.

This chapter moves to the French Enlightenment, arguing that echoes of Renaissance humanism emerge in the Encyclopédie. This project, famous in the history of the book, was the brainchild of Diderot and D’Alembert, two luminaries who believed that a comprehensive account of all branches of human knowledge was needed. They financed the project themselves, through subscriptions, made expert use of illustrations, and created a monument in the history of the book. In their comprehensiveness, Diderot and D’Alembert were the heirs to Poliziano’s multidisciplinary drive. In their views of religion, they were the distant progeny of Valla. And in their antiinstitutional nature, they reflect Italian Renaissance humanism, a cultural movement whose protagonists often took care to situate themselves outside of existing institutions. After the treatment of the Encyclopédie, Thomas Jefferson makes a cameo appearance. In his “Jefferson Bible,” he literally cut and pasted parts of the New Testament that he believed showed Jesus’s true nature – not, in Jefferson’s view, as a divine personage (Jefferson discarded all the stories of miracles), but rather as an ethical exemplar. Doing so, Jefferson reflected one very important tendency in history of philology, one that Valla had begun, the Protestant Reformation spread, and the French Enlightenment completed: the desacralizing of the Bible

Describes the key issue of translation in religious discourse, including not only the translation of religious texts, but other important documents for the development of doctrine, touching on issues of grammar, lexis, and socio-historical context.

As the preeminent black orator and author of the nineteenth century, Frederick Douglass filled his speeches and writings with intertextual references, from the Western classical tradition to the Bible to contemporaneous British and American writers. In his various roles as antislavery activist, writer, editor, and publisher, Douglass employed intertexts as tools of rhetorical suasion and authority. As his fame grew, so too did the complexity and range of literary references. This essay looks at intertexts in Douglass’s speeches, his 1845 Narrative, and his 1853 novella, The Heroic Slave.

Introduces the key concept of sacred texts and their role in religious belief and practice, focusing specifically on how the reading of sacred texts can create a spatial and temporal experience of the divine for readers.

The introduction outlines the book’s argument that biblical and constitutional debates over slavery introduced a sense of historical distance from the founding era and the biblical past. It also defines key terms, including historical distance, sacred texts, and favored pasts, and outlines developments by which the Bible maintained its status as a sacred text, while the Constitution achieved a similar kind of status in antebellum America. These developments set the stage for the process by which debates over slavery began to historicize the biblical and constitutional pasts. This process corresponded with the broader emergence of a modern historical consciousness. And yet, the nature of American religious and legal culture, and the presence of slavery, gave unique shape to American historical awareness. The book makes its most innovative move in showing how slavery encouraged interpretive shifts to read both the Bible and the Constitution as historical texts. I focus on a range of thinkers and interpreters and read their writings with an eye toward measuring historical consciouness. This approach demonstrates that the crisis over slavery in America became a crisis of historicity.

The prologue spotlights twenty-first-century uses of both the founding era and the biblical past to introduce the book’s central contention that biblical and constitutional debates over slavery cultivated a sense of historical distance in antebellum America. The prologue points to examples of how contemporary Americans both ignore and highlight historical distance in making political use of the founding era and the biblical past. It suggests that in both the antebellum era and in the twenty-first century, politics has shaped American approaches to these pasts and their corrsponding texts – the Bible and the Constitution. At the same time, the prologue maintains that the idea of the past as distant, which has become a common assumption in our period, only began to emerge in the antebellum era. To highlight the continuities and differences between antebellum and twenty-first century thought, the prologue references phrases such as “black lives matter” and “make America great again,” even as it points towards its central focus on the antebellum developments that shed light on the meanings of such phrases.

The epilogue indicates continuities and changes in American historical thought, highlighting the persistence of the ways in which politics inform historical awareness, and also showing that Americans continue to read the Constitution and the Bible in spite of – or in light of – historical awareness. While drawing attention to these continuities, the epilogue emphasizes differences in thought as well, particularly the fact that Americans today are more likely than their antebellum predecessors to engage in or to be confronted by conversations revolving around ahistorical and historical thinking. Twenty-first-century historical consciousness can be seen in aspirationalist readings of the Constitution and approaches to the Bible that deliberately account for historical distance. In attending to both continuities and changes, the epilogue underscores Americans’ continued efforts to bridge the meaning of founding documents to our new times, while also emphasizing the limitations of these approaches. A focus on the founders has allowed white Americans to avoid fully confronting the facts of slavery and racial prejudice in our past and, as a result, in our present.

Chapter 3 tabulates the English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC) entries for extant Bibles held in libraries around the world today and discuss what the ESTC data can and cannot tell us about the eighteenth-century Bible trade. An overview of the history of the trade, particularly of the career of John Baskett, royal printer in London from 1710 to 1742, described by an early historian of the Bible trade as “one of the greatest monopolists of Bibles who ever lived” (Lee 179) shows that the number of ESTC catalogue entries do not correlate to changes in the popularity of the Bible. However, the ESTC data does tell us about shifts in the competitiveness or relative openness of the English Bible trade and the book trade more generally. The Bible becomes a nongovernmental book after the 1730s, and the geographical centers of English Bible production shift from Amsterdam and Oxford in the 1680s to London in the early 1700s to Cambridge and Edinburgh in the 1760s. This chapter also describes a variety of cultural associations that the English Bible accrues through its commodification in the period: a charity gift, an overseas book, and a luxury item.

Chapter 4 looks at ways the Bible functioned as an instrument of legal power around the turn of the eighteenth century in county assizes, in reports by the ordinary of Newgate, and in the majority of printed sermons from the period. I then discuss the different responses to that legal power in writing about the Bible by John Locke, Anthony Collins, and Matthew Henry. This chapter argues that it is not the aesthetic, narrative dimensions of the Bible that have been eclipsed in the modern age, as Hans Frei contends, so much as the scope of its legal and political address.