The far-reaching impact of the vernacular Bible on early modern English political discourse is now well established, thanks to the work of scholars like Christopher Hill, Debora Shuger, Kevin Killeen, and others. Yet direct and sustained attention has less often been paid to the political impact of biblical paratexts—annotations, prefaces, marginalia, woodcut illustrations, and the myriad other accompanying materials guiding the experiences of early English Bible readers. For Fulton, biblical paratexts are key discursive venues in which humanist scholars and theologians employ a range of interpretive methods to address issues of political authority, order, and governance. These politicized paratexts draw in turn the attention of literary artists, who interact with biblical paratexts to explore the same political issues in their poems and plays.

Chapters typically divide according to different versions of the English Bible, which correspond roughly to the reigns of different English monarchs, and generally speaking, each chapter sketches the wider religious and political context of a Bible/monarch before turning to the paratextual engagements of a single author. Despite his focus on the English context, Fulton is sensitive to the connections between England's evolving biblical and political cultures and leading Continental figures in the humanist and Reform movements. Hence chapter 1 focuses on Erasmus, whose rhetorical readings of Paul's epistles in his 1516 New Testament annotations were partly inspired by John Colet's lectures on Romans at Oxford, and whose reading of Paul's call to political submission at Romans 13 as relevant only to early Christians living under pagan tyrants, and by implication irrelevant to Christians living under (supposedly) righteous monarchs, persistently shaped English theories of political obedience and divine kingship, from Tyndale's Obedience of a Christian Man (1528), a major focus of chapter 2, to Milton's A Treatise of Civil Power in Ecclesiastical Causes (1659), addressed in the final chapter.

Other English-Continental connections emerge in chapter 3, which explores revisions to the 1537 Matthew Bible by minor theologian Edmund Becke, who cast Edward as a new Joshua receiving the English Bible figured as Mosaic book of the Law in an introduction to the text. Fulton then turns to the Strasbourgian Martin Bucer, whose political advice book On the Kingdom of Christ (1550) prescribed a plan for implementing Mosaic Law in England. Later chapters consider the influence of biblical paratexts on English literary writers. Chapter 5 connects Elizabethan nationalist-Protestant glosses on Revelation in the Geneva Bible to book 1 of Spenser's Faerie Queene (1590); Spenser “asserts a nationalist reading of Revelation's allegories in a world where many different readings vied for ascendancy” (166). Chapter 6 situates Shakespeare's Measure for Measure (1604) in the religious culture of James I's court, finding in the play an ironic treatment of the godly ruler's balance of justice and mercy, ideals depicted as allegorical figures flanking the monarch on the frontispieces of many Elizabethan bibles. The last two chapters focus on Milton, one exploring his imitations of the 1611 Authorized KJV's minimalist marginalia in his 1648 Psalm translations, the other highlighting his hermeneutic and theological differences with Tyndale.

The book is thoroughly researched and impressive in scope, but it lacks clarity, focus, and originality. There is no central argument, and many of the individual chapters do not propose or meaningfully advance arguments either, leaving the reader uncertain regarding what is at stake or where the discussion is bound. In addition, the immense bulk of biblically informed political and theological treatises addressed alongside the biblical prefaces and glosses begs an unanswered question—what counts as a biblical paratext?—even as it undermines claims for the distinctive influence of conventionally defined paratexts on a given author's work. Fulton claims, for instance, that “Spenser's allegory in The Faerie Queene is deeply structured by the presentation of church destiny in the notes of Protestant Bibles,” but the claim seems more or less arbitrary once a slew of other likely sources are introduced, including well-known treatises by Luther, Bale, and Broughton.

Finally, questions regarding the materiality of the book are treated superficially or not at all—a shame, given all the great images of rare books included from holdings in the Folger, Beinecke, and British Library. How might we theorize, for instance, Charles I's personal psalter as a physical object, with its purple velvet covering, silver spangles, and embroidery of silver, gold, and pearl? Fulton professes an unabashed enthusiasm for his subject in the book's introduction, but it's hard to share his enthusiasm when the most made of Milton's ink-splashed, food-stained, tear-soaked, burn-holed KJV is to suggest that it was “heavily used, as if with intense but messy utility” (213). Right.