In accordance with the pervasive metaphor of God's two books, European intellectuals of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries understood the study of both scripture and nature as hermeneutic exercises. This collection of thirteen articles focuses on this commonality. Its point of departure is Peter Harrison's provocative thesis, put forth in The Bible, Protestantism and the Rise of Natural Science (1999) and restated and expanded in the The Word and The World's first chapter. Harrison offers a novel take on a classic and vexed theme: the link between Protestantism and the emergence of modern science. He seeks the link, not in a distinctive Protestant ethos (à la Weber or Merton), but rather in Protestant biblical interpretation, which privileged the literal and typological levels of scriptural meaning. The allegorical hermeneutics of the patristic and medieval periods had ascribed multiple layers of symbolic meaning to nature as well as scripture. By freeing nature of the burden of allegory — though still imbuing it with divine purpose — Protestant literalism allowed the natural world to be organized and investigated by new empirical and mathematical principles. With more subtlety and intelligence than this brief synopsis can capture, Harrison's argument inverts the commonplace view that biblical literalism was an obstacle to the development of modern science, and that new empirical forms of scientific inquiry led to the abandonment of traditional forms of biblical interpretation.
The following chapters examine the relationship between biblical exegesis and the study of nature among thinkers such as Francis Bacon, Tycho Brahe, Christoph Clavius, Thomas Browne, Cornelius Valerius, Heinrich Khunrath, Marin Mersenne, and Giordano Bruno. Collectively, they reinforce some aspects of Harrison's argument — such as the claim of an influential and productive dialogue between biblical studies and natural science, and the importance of literalism — while qualifying and challenging others. Many of the articles complicate Harrison's depiction of literalism, its relationship to Protestantism, and the generalization that methods of interpreting nature parallel those of interpreting scripture. Francis Bacon, Steven Matthews shows, was a paradigmatic “literalist” when it came to reading the book of nature, but, despite his Protestantism, favored an allegorical interpretation of scripture. Articles by Peter Forshaw and Leo Catana show how Heinrich Khunrath and Giordano Bruno proliferated rather than restricted the levels of biblical exegesis. Furthermore, for Khunrath the “literal” meaning of Genesis was best explicated by recourse to alchemical allegories. James Dougal Fleming analyzes the paradox inherent in the very idea of the non-figurative “literal” meaning of a text. Showing how much hermeneutic labor early modern exegetes expended to produce the Bible's supposedly self-evident, “literal” sense, he questions Harrison's claim that literalism created a “post-hermeneutic” space. This leads him to modify the meaning of biblical literalism, but still affirm its importance for the development of modern science.
Several chapters emphasize the importance of biblical literalism among early modern Catholic scholars, especially Jesuits, calling into question the singular importance that Harrison accords to Protestantism and highlighting the ambivalence of literalism's scientific consequences. Irving Kelter's treatment of Cornelius Valerius and Cardinal Bellarmine shows how a literalist reading of scripture led these Catholic scholars to radically nontraditional conclusions about the corruptibility and fluidity of the heavens at the same time that it rigidified their adherence to geocentrism. In both respects they closely resemble the devout Protestant astronomer Tycho Brahe, whose Lutheran apocalypticism — the subject of Håkan Håkansson's excellent chapter — was a world away from their Tridentine Catholicism. The link between Protestantism and rise of modern science remains as difficult to pin down as ever. But this illuminating volume amply demonstrates the link between early modern biblical scholarship and the study of nature.
The Bible's privileged status and the metaphor of God's two books make it worthwhile to inquire specifically about the relationship between natural science and scriptural exegesis. But it is also important to ask, when are we dealing with issues specific to the interpretation of sacred texts? For example, Paul Mueller's identification of intriguing parallels between Mersenne's empirical natural science and contemporary methods for establishing authoritative texts from conflicting manuscripts suggests the influence of classical as much as sacred philology. This is not surprising. Early modern biblical exegesis partook of broader trends in humanist philology. The Word and the World is a contribution not only to the literature on science and religion, but also to the growing body of scholarship that examines the dynamic interaction of humanist scholarship and natural knowledge in the age of the scientific revolution.
