Here I set no some: because I wolde all men shuld reade the chapter thorow- oute
~Summary to Exodus 23, 1537 Matthew BibleIntroduction
While organizing preparation of the 1568 Bishops’ Bible, Archbishop Matthew Parker gave the now-infamous instruction for the editors “to make no bitter notis upon any text, or yet to set downe any determinacion in places of controversie.”Footnote 1 These “bitter notis” chiefly recalled those of the Geneva Bible, which contained lengthier and more controversial paratexts than any previous English Bible.Footnote 2 However, substantial biblical paratexts were hardly unprecedented.Footnote 3 From the Glossa Ordinaria, whose pages held more paratext than scripture, to the King James Version, paratextual notes were an accepted and often extensive component of Bibles. Parker’s rejection of “bitter notis,” though oft quoted, is not an attempt to banish paratextual content from Bibles but rather to ensure the paratexts were of the correct sort. The same desire arises with the King James Version, whose editors were instructed to prefix “new arguments. . . to every book, and new headings to every chapter,” replacing those of the Bishops’ Bible.Footnote 4 Paratexts allowed noncanonical material into Bibles and conveyed politics and theologies that some figures feared could influence interpretation and even prove seditious. We see evidence for this in such instances as James I’s aversion to the Geneva Bible notesFootnote 5 and the 1525–1526 placards that banned Dutch and French Bibles that contained reformist notes;Footnote 6 as Christopher Hill summarizes, “The Geneva margin raised the question of who should decide: the individual conscience or authority in church and state? What was to happen when they came in conflict?”Footnote 7
This essay ventures some answers to the question of how paratexts, specifically chapter summaries, could participate in shaping early modern theologies and politics. Paratexts have only become the subject of sustained scholarship in recent years. Gérard Genette’s landmark work on the topic, Seuils, did not see English translation until 1997, and although early modern paratexts have received increasing attention since then,Footnote 8 the paratexts of Bibles—arguably the most influential paratexts in the early modern period—remain neglected.Footnote 9 The limited existing scholarship on these paratexts focuses on glosses and marginal notes and almost entirely neglects other paratextual content, one of the most substantial types being the casus summarii, or chapter summaries. In most instances, they appear immediately before a chapter and summarize its most notable features in order to aid navigation and learning. These paraphrastic texts contract thousands of words of scripture into only a few dozen. Significant biblical events or controversial subjects can be condensed, omitted, reframed, rephrased, or otherwise represented to suit the editor’s purposes.
Beginning with a table demonstrating their intertextuality, this article presents the first investigation into these summaries, focusing on those within the 1537 Matthew Bible, the Geneva Bible, and the King James Version.Footnote 10 The influence of the Geneva Bible and the King James Version is widely recognized, whereas the Matthew Bible is notable for providing the paratextual basis of all early modern Bibles to come. I will only discuss the major editions of these works and not re-editions with altered summaries. The essay discusses their format, translation, and effects on exegesis. It dwells on notable trends, anomalies, or other points of interest in each, aiming to demonstrate their importance and interest for future scholarship. In doing so, this article provides an introduction to one of the most neglected facets of the most influential books in the early modern period.
Regarding terminology, I use casus summarii in reference to the chapter summaries that appear before each chapter of the Bible. This term is meant to exclude other paraphrastic texts such as contents lists, running-heads, titles, or other synopses not found before the chapter. Some Bibles, most notably the Geneva, contain a second form of paraphrase in addition to the casus summarii, known as the “arguments.” These appear before each book but not each chapter. Although “argument” as a term is used broadly in early modern writings and is often used in reference to the casus summarii, for clarity I will only use the term “argument” to refer to those synopses which bear the label.
The summaries are closely related in form, cultural role, and—occasionally— content to other types of biblical paraphrase. Paraphrases were a long-established facet of early modern encounters with scripture. Prior to the advent of vernacular translations, the lay English Christian’s engagement with scripture would almost always be mediated by a third party, most obviously the priest as preacher, but also commentary, concordance, catechism, poetry, and, for the less learned, songs, stained glass, woodcut, textiles, and other visual interpretations. As James H. Morey argues, “The Bible in the Middle Ages, much like the Bible today, consisted for the laity not of a set of texts within a canon but of those stories which, partly because of their liturgical significance and partly because of their picturesque and memorable qualities, formed a provisional ‘Bible’ in the popular imagination.”Footnote 11 Before the popularization of accessible print Bibles and the concordant increase in literacy, the Bible was not encountered as a book but rather a series of third-party paraphrases; “the Bible” was experienced as a patchwork of sermons, stories, poems, and pictures. Inheriting this tradition of scriptural engagement, the inclusion of chapter summaries in English Bibles would seem an entirely natural and explicable consequence, cemented by their long history in the Vulgate and, before that, the existence of marginalia and titloi in the earliest manuscripts.
Given this history, it is unsurprising that these summaries were reproduced as separate texts. A Collection of the Contents, of All the Chapters Contained in the Bible (1605), which was reprinted as H. S.’s A Diuine Dictionarie in 1615, was derived entirely from the casus summarii of the Great Bible and sought to serve mnemonic and organizational ends by reproducing noncanonical descriptors for the scriptures. From the preface “To the Christian Reader”: “I could not so readily finde the same but by turning ouer a great Volume: now for the readier finding thereof, I haue made this briefe collection of the contents of all the Chapters conteined therein, whereby the same may be the more easily found.”Footnote 12 The work contains condensed forms of the chapter summaries, presenting a precis of a precis, as well as summaries of the whole book. Reprinted frequently,Footnote 13 these works provided another vehicle by which the casus summarii were encountered, where they are divorced from scripture and treated as a useful authority in their own right.
The ubiquity and acceptance of the concept of the paraphrase results in there being little explicit discussion of their role in early modern texts. The Geneva New Testament provides a rare exception:
They may serue in stede of a Commentarie to the Reader: for many reade the Scriptures with myndes to proffit, but because they do not consider the scope and purpose wherfore the holy Gost so writeth and to what ende (which tiling the Arguments do faithfully expresse) they either bestowe their tyme without fruit, or els defraude them selues of a great deale which they might atteyne vnto otherwise. To the intent therfore that, not onely they which are already aduanced in the knollage of the Scriptures, but also the simple and vnlearned might be forthered hereby, I haue so moderat them with playnenes and breuitie, that the verie ignorant may easely vnderstande them and beare them in memorie.Footnote 14
This preface prioritizes the summaries’ utility, presenting them as tools to aid efficient and accurate interpretation of scripture, as well as offering the mercurial advantage of “seru[ing] in stede of a Commentarie to the Reader” and preventing the customer from needing to purchase additional commentaries (and give their money to a rival bookseller). This is characteristic of the Geneva Bible’s use as a personal Bible and also, perhaps, of the lesser financial means of its intended demographic. They compete with other paraphrases; in aiming to displace commentaries, the summaries may offer instead a hegemonic, contained, authoritative explication of scripture. The presumed or even intended aim may be primarily humanistic— seeking to provide the unlearned with all the necessary tools to interpret scripture without necessitating clerical intervention or additional texts—but it also promotes interpretive homogeneity. The familiar paradox of Protestant humanism and anti-clerical attitudes is present: the Geneva Bible allows the unlearned physical access to scripture without need of a priest, but the necessary hermeneutic tools are also provided to ensure the reader constructs the “correct” reading. Without these appropriate hermeneutic tools, the uneducated may “defraude them selues of a great deale.” Similarly, under the guise of ensuring the accessibility of scripture to the unlearned, the Geneva proclaims its implicit modification of scripture in its synoptic goals: the scripture has been “moderat[ed] […] with playnenes and breuitie,” implying the insufficient plainness of scripture (or of this translation).
Tables of Intertextual SummariesFootnote 15
Many summaries were reused in subsequent Bibles. The following table details the percentages by which English Bibles borrow casus summarii from their predecessors.
These percentages denote identically duplicated strings, and thus which summaries have been edited the least. An entirely new summary will score the same as one that contains the same words in a different order. By necessity, this analysis used keyed TCP editions. No edition of the Matthew Bible has been keyed, so this material was obtained manually.
This data was collected by first extracting the summaries from the full keyed texts. TCP errata were then corrected where possible. To conduct the analysis, each book was first processed through VARD 2 with training on the summaries.Footnote 16 VARD autonormalized spelling at 20%, and the remaining variants were manually standardized. The standardized texts were cleaned of verse numbers and punctuation, then spell checked and proofed before being subjected to a text similarity checker.
Minor tense or grammatical disagreements were ignored, while variant spellings of proper nouns were not. Purely coincidental similarities were discounted.
This analysis involved processing nearly 200,000 words of data. The final percentages were checked against an entirely manual and subjective process of comparison to ensure there were no significant errors. Some mistakes are unavoidable with data of this size, due to VARD’s standardization or human error, so the results should be taken with this in mind.
Format
In this section I will discuss the format and transmission of the casus summarii across the English Bibles. As the above data demonstrates, these summaries are highly intertextual, and no Bible presents entirely new material for its summaries. If one wishes to investigate the origins of the 1611 King James Version paratexts, one must look to the 1568 Bishops’ Bible that formed its base, from which one must look to the 1560 Geneva and 1539 Great Bibles from which that text borrowed; these Bibles in turn made use of the 1537 Matthew Bible, whereas both the Geneva and Matthew Bible made use of the 1534 Lefèvre and 1535 Olivétan French Bibles. From here we could work our way back into the medieval French and Vulgate Bibles from which these texts borrowed, and some elements can be ultimately traced to the earliest patristic commentaries—but it is necessary to draw the line somewhere. Therefore, I begin in sixteenth-century France, with the 1534 Lefèvre Bible.Footnote 17 It is this Bible, with its copious paratexts, that provided Protestant martyr John Rogers with the source for the paratexts of the 1537 Matthew Bible.
The Lefèvre Bible provides the greatest early contribution to English biblical paratexts. The same cannot be said for Tyndale’s New Testaments, despite providing the first casus summarii in an English Bible.Footnote 18 The summaries of the 1535 Coverdale Bible had more staying power, as Rogers combined these summaries with those of the Lefèvre Bible and inserted them into the Matthew Bible.Footnote 19 Rogers redistributed Coverdale’s summaries from a prefatory list appearing before each book to interstitial summaries appearing between each chapter, as was the common formatting in editions of the Vulgate. When summaries appear before each chapter, they must either be read or consciously skipped, promoting stronger links between the summary and the scripture than summaries read in bulk at the beginning of a book. Rogers’s placement ensures a greater integration of paratext.
While publication of what would eventually become the Bishops’ Bible continued to delay, Thomas Cromwell and Thomas Cranmer commissioned Coverdale to revise the Matthew Bible to provide an English vernacular Bible in the interim. Coverdale augmented the Matthew Bible with translations from the Vulgate and German Bibles. It is an entirely minor revision of the Matthew Bible, and David Daniell writes that there is “little change” between the two editions.Footnote 20 Though Daniell makes this comment about the translation, it is similarly applicable to the paratexts. Between the English Bibles, there are greater similarities between the Great and Matthew Bible summaries than there are between those of any other two Bibles, although the Bishops’ Bible’s similarity to the Geneva Bible is not a distant second.
The Matthew Bible may have had little new to offer in the way of scriptural translation, being mostly a revision of Tyndale and Coverdale’s work, but it provided a wealth of new paratextual material—or, at least, paratextual material that was new to English audiences. The Great Bible makes fewer inventions. It omits much of the contentious preliminary matter of the Matthew Bible, including its rather Lutheran table of principal matters, but maintains many of the casus summarii. Its fidelity to the summaries of the Old Testament and New Testament varies significantly, which is unsurprising with Coverdale as the reviser. Coverdale retains almost entirely the New Testament summaries of the Matthew Bible, which were themselves a repurposing of the prefatory summaries Coverdale authored for his 1535 Bible. Coverdale evidently judged these he had authored himself as needing little alteration, and many (including most of those of the gospels) are identical to those Coverdale first authored in 1535 as prefatory contents.
Though a milestone in English vernacular Bibles, by the latter half of the sixteenth century the Great Bible had been outclassed by the Geneva Bible. With its broad margins, running heads, numeration, and lucid, attractive layout, the Geneva Bible established what became the familiar format of the English Bible. Its summaries are expansive, often twice or thrice the length of those in the Great and Matthew Bibles, and each book was preceded by an extensive “argument” in addition to its summary. Much of the arguments’ content is Calvinistic; it is through these arguments that “the English Geneva Bible delivered Calvin’s theology to an English readership,” as Femke Molekamp writes.Footnote 21 The summaries are less theologically adventurous, though important exceptions will be discussed under “Exegesis” below. One innovation entails the integration of verse numbers into the summary, so it is clear exactly to what part of the scripture the parts of these longer summaries correspond. This also has the effect of reconceptualizing the whole summary as a series of shorter summaries attached discretely to scriptural passages, rather than a single grand summing-up of the entire passage. Exceptions to this usually comprise summaries of laws, genealogical lists, and prophecies. This facilitates the conceptualization of chapters broken into discrete chunks rather than a single concept, which is exacerbated by the further abstraction of these chunks as running-heads.
The Geneva Bible’s formatting was mimicked by the Bishops’ Bible, including its long summaries, though the arguments are dropped. The Bishops’ Bible was the primary authorized pulpit Bible from 1568 to 1611, though it continued to be printed into the 1630s. Given Archbishop Parker’s rule against “bitter notis,” one might expect the Bishops’ Bible to depart drastically from the paratexts of its forebears, yet the Bishops’ Bible replicated not only much of the formatting but also the content of the Geneva Bible summaries. This is especially true of the New Testament, in which nearly all summaries from 1 Corinthians onwards are copied from the Geneva Bible. It is uncertain who was their author and compiler, though the evidence suggests Parker; in the “Note as to the Translators,” Parker allocates to himself the authorship of various prefatory materials, including “the argument of the scriptures,” so he is most likely the compiler of the casus summarii.Footnote 22
The King James Version follows in the example of the Bishops’ and Geneva Bibles when it comes to formatting and layout, though it had the most significant break in the content of casus summarii of all English Bibles. It is far more difficult to establish the extent to which the King James Version borrowed from its predecessors than earlier Bibles, as augmentations to summaries in other Bibles are usually far less integrated. For example, Gen 3 of the Matthew Bible is summarized thus: “The serpent deceaveth the woman. The serpe[n]t the woman & the man are cursed / and dryven out of Paradise. Christ oure sauvour is promysed.” This is modified in the Great Bible as the following: “The serpent deceyueth the woman. The serpent is cursed: the punishment of the man and woman. Adam driuen out of Paradise. Chryste our sauyour is promysed.” The alterations can be clearly delineated. In the King James Version summaries, there are enough terms and phrases in common with the Bishops’ Bible that it is clear some extent of influence occurs, but it cannot be easily reduced to a percentage. This is most true of the New Testament summaries, and the Old Testament summaries may be completely new inventions. This would accord with the editors’ instruction to create “new headings” and “new arguments” for the Bible, though even with this instruction the summaries produced were still not entirely new; repackaging of existing content as new material is hardly a novel phenomenon among biblical editors. The King James Version summaries have unsurprisingly enjoyed the greatest longevity among the summaries of early modern Bibles and are still used today to aid navigation of the King James Version and the Geneva Bible texts.Footnote 23
Translation
Although the primary aim of these Bibles was to provide English translations of scripture, they also often provided English translations of continental paratexts. The Bibles to which this is most directly relevant are the Matthew and Geneva Bibles, but translated paratexts appear throughout the other English Bibles as well, as later editors copy the material of their predecessors.
The first to feature substantially translated paratexts is the Matthew Bible. Its editor, John Rogers, has not received much critical attention outside of Joseph Lemuel Chester’s nineteenth-century biographical text,Footnote 24 and little new research had been conducted on his work. This is unfortunate, as Rogers’s editorial practices had lasting effects on the shape and content of English Bibles; as David Daniell writes, Rogers’s editing “was pioneer work in Protestant glossing in English.”Footnote 25 Rogers assembled a wealth of paratextual content for the Matthew Bible, including “The Summe [and] content of all the holy Scripture,” “A Table of the pryncipall matters conteyned in the Byble,” running-heads, casus summarii, prologues, and an index titled “The Table wherin ye shall fynde the Epistles and the Gospels.” Much of this was translated from the 1534 Lefèvre Bible and its successor, the 1535 Olivétan Bible,Footnote 26 including the casus summarii of the Lefèvre Old Testament; however, Rogers’s translations are not as faithful as is usually assumed.Footnote 27
There has been little scholarly discussion of Rogers’s translational practices. Molekamp simply writes, as is exemplary of critical attitudes to Rogers’s paratexts, “Many of the English paratexts are direct translations of those found in the French Bibles.”Footnote 28 This is indeed true of some of the paratexts, such as Thomas Malingre’s “Indice des principales matieres,” which became Rogers’s “Table of pryncypall matters,” but Rogers was far less faithful in translating the Old Testament summaries. Sometimes he presents verbatim English renderings of the French vocabulary and syntax, and sometimes he departs to so great an extent that the result should be taken as his own invention entirely. Although these paratexts are usually referred to as “translations,” Footnote 29 much of their content is pure Rogers, while other elements draw on Coverdale’s Old Testament summaries. The Lefèvre Bible casus summarii usually summarize scripture without adjectival flourish or editorializing interjection, whereas Rogers’s translations, when they diverge, are invariably longer and more evocative, some examples of which I will discuss below. For the New Testament, however, Rogers opted to use the summaries Coverdale had written as prefatory matter for the 1535 Coverdale Bible; these are lifted identically.Footnote 30 In reducing Rogers’s contributions to mere translations of the French, we overlook notable aspects of the work, some of which had lasting repercussions for later editions.
One such repercussion concerns Rogers’s translation and interpretation of references to sin, wickedness, and transgression in the paratexts. Rogers tends to collapse a wide variety of French vocabulary into more limited English terms. This happens frequently with “wicked” or “wickedness.” Rogers translates a variety of disparate French terms as wicked or wickedness, such as mauvais (4 Kgs 21, 3 Kgs 15), iniquite (Job 16), and perverse (Ezek 22). He also adds the term to comparably neutral summaries, introducing an element of moral judgment not present in the French. “La desolation de Hierusalem par les Romains” introduces “wycked Jewes” in Dan 9; linfidele in Job 18 is expanded to “unfaythfull [and] wyckyd.” In the summary to Ezek 22, as well as translating perverse as “wicked,” Rogers adds entirely new references to both “wyckednesses” and the “wickednes of the people.” The summary for Jer 31, a lengthy and original contribution of Rogers’s, includes that “all the wycked dye in their wyckedness,” prompting an intratextual reading with Ezek 3:19. The word is very common in Rogers’s summaries and is used in translations and expansions of, as well as departures from, the French summaries. It appears more often than any other word suggesting moral judgment. Another example of this is Rogers’s translation of a variety of French terms with a single English word, such as giving both fornicatresse and femme paillard as “harlot” (Lev 21, Judg 11). He does similarly with references to “idolatry,” a term employed in Exod 34, Judg 4, Judg 6, Judg 13, and 3 Kgs 3; in the Lefèvre Bible, the word is only present in Exod 34. Rogers’s fondness for the term might be prompted by its anti-Catholic suggestion. Even in Exod 34, however, the syntax differs, with the French “ydolatrerie des gentils” translated as “and their ydolatrie also.”Footnote 31
We also see a conscious toning down of Rogers and Lefèvre’s more exotic phrasings in later English Bibles. One such instance concerns the summary to Prov 1 and its synopsis of Prov 1:10. In the Lefèvre Bible, the casus summarium strikingly refers to the “incitations voluptueuses des pecheurs,” summarizing Solomon’s instructions not to consent to the invitations of sinners. The French translation of Proverbs references the pecheurs and their attempts to invite or attract (attirer), but the paratextual interpretation of this as “incitations voluptueuses” is quite the departure. In the Matthew Bible, Rogers maintains Coverdale’s translation of Prov 1:10, urging one to “co[n]sente not unto synners, if they entyce the,” but he translates the French casus summarium with relative fidelity: “We may not herke[n] unto the voluptuous provocacion [and] inticynges of synners.” This is maintained verbatim into the Great Bible, though the reference to sinners’ “voluptuous provocation” is then dropped from the Bishops’ Bible. The summaries to Prov 1 in the Bishops’ Bible retain the syntax and sense of the Great Bible summary but mitigate the prurient phrasing of Lefèvre and Rogers. Given that the Bishops’ Bible lifts casus summarii verbatim from the Great Bible and that these instances are too similar in syntax and vocabulary to their predecessors to be wholly new inventions, it is reasonable to conclude that the editors were consciously copying and mitigating the more characterful summaries of the Great Bible.
Another passage on transgression subject to paratextual disagreements is Gen 19, the destruction of Sodom. Rogers’s summary for Gen 19 is the second-longest synopsis in the fifty chapters of Genesis, second only to Gen 1. Here, Rogers’s summary is not only a significant departure from the French but uniquely prurient: “The fylthy lustes of the Sodomytes.” There is, strangely, no use of “wicked” in the summary, despite Rogers’s predilection for the term and its appearance in scripture at Gen 19:7. Rogers instead uncharacteristically opts for a more prurient phrasing. “Fylthy” is absent from scripture, though Tyndale’s translation of Genesis included in the Matthew Bible does feature the word “lust” in Gen 19:5. Here, the Sodomites say of the angels, “brynge the[m] out unto us that we may do oure lust wyth them.” The translation of the Hebrew העדנו as “that we may do oure lust” was not widely accepted by early modern translators; it was rejected by Coverdale and all subsequent revisers, who instead render this passage as “that we may know them.” The ultimate consensus of “know” as the appropriate translation is possibly the result of the similar sense in Gen 4:1, “Adam vero cognovit Havam uxorem” in the Vulgate, which Wycliffe renders, “Forsothe Adam knewe Eue his wijf.”Footnote 32
Although the “lustes” of Rogers’s paratext derive from Tyndale’s translation of Gen 19:5, “filthy” is entirely Rogers’s. Later revisions replaced Tyndale’s “do oure lustes” with the more accurate “know,” but Rogers’s casus summarium remained. Both the Great Bible and the Geneva Bible retained Rogers’s “the fylthy lustes of the Sodomites”—despite eschewing the translation that led to the original inclusion of the words. This is not the only instance in which Sodom will be treated with unusual paratextual emphasis, as will be discussed under “Exegesis” below.
Another phenomenon concerns the translation of proper nouns. The denomination of Eve presents an interesting case. הַוָּח (ḥavvah) in Hebrew and Εὔα (eua) in the Greek, her name was variously translated as Eve, Eva, Heva, Hava, and Heváh in English Bibles. The name is translated inconsistently between scripture and summary, despite being rendered almost exclusively as either Eve or Eva in other texts. Why, when the Old Testament scripture has been translated with a more Hebraic version of the name, do editors reject it in favor of the more common Eve or Eva in the summary? This question also concerns not only what she is called, but where, as most Bibles (Tyndale, Coverdale, the Matthew Bible, the Great Bible, the Geneva Bible, the Bishops’ Bible) give her name inconsistently between the Old Testament and the New Testament. In the King James Version, she is only called Eve, a decision prefigured by her paratextual designation which prioritizes vernacular usage over accuracy.
The English convention of naming the first woman “Eve” derives from the Vulgate. There, the name is rendered “Eva” in both the Old and New Testaments.Footnote 33 “Eve” and “Eva” had been the common English translations for the name of the first woman for centuries, but when translating from Hebrew to English it became necessary to reassess how that name should be translated and whether it should be translated in the same manner in both the Old and New Testaments. Tyndale accepted inconsistency and printed her name “Eve” in the New Testament and “Heva” in the Old Testament. This New Testament designation is followed by every English Bible, but her Old Testament denominations are not so consistent. Following Tyndale’s lead, the Coverdale, Matthew, Great, and Bishops’ Bibles name her “Heva” in the Old Testament. In the summaries, however, she is “Eva” in the Coverdale and Great Bibles, “Heva” in the Bishops’ Bible, and unmentioned in the Matthew Bible.Footnote 34 Only the Taverner Bible, the Douay-Rheims Bible, and the King James Version refer to her in all instances as “Eve”; all other Bibles contain some degree of variation.
The Geneva Bible uniquely renders the name as “Heváh’,” and does us the kindness of explaining the reasons for its naming practices. In the introduction to “A brief table of the interpretation of the propre names which are chiefly founde in the olde Testame[n]t,” wherein the meaning of “Heváh” is glossed as “liuing, or giuing life,” the naming practices of previous translators are condemned:
Whereas the wickednes of time, and the blindnes of the former age hathe bene suche that all things altogether haue bene abused and corrupted, so that the very right names of diuerse of the holie men named in the Scriptures haue bene forgotten, and now seme strange unto us, and the names of infants that shulde euer haue some godlie aduertisements in them, and shulde be memorials and markes of the children of God receiued into his housholde, hathe bene hereby also changed and made the signes and badges of idolatrie and heathenish impietie.Footnote 35
These accusations of abuse and corruption are veiled attacks on those names popularized by Catholic use, a suggestion most lucid in the coded accusations of “idolatrie and heathenish impietie.” For the Geneva translators, the restoration of “Heváh” and removal of “Eve” from the Old Testament is a rejection of Catholic corruption. Yet these attempts to introduce or restore an aspirated version of Eve’s name were unsuccessful, as Heváh, Heva, and Hava are all rarely used in comparison to Eve or Eva and the spellings were not taken up by subsequent English Bibles. While the Geneva translators tried to break from the corrupted tradition of “Eve,” quite the reverse was true in the Coverdale, Taverner, and Great Bibles, wherein colloquialism triumphed over accuracy. The King James Version renders her name as “Eve” in not only the summaries but also the scripture, breaking from the tradition of “Heva” maintained since Tyndale. Bishop Bancroft explains the decision: “The Names of the Prophets, and the Holy Writers, with the other Names of the Text, to be retained, as nigh as may be, accordingly as they were vulgarly used.”Footnote 36 Here, “names” encompasses the proper nouns, including “Eve,” and this instruction for how such names were “vulgarly used” includes the vernacular “Eve.” Bancroft, then, instructs the translators to prefer the common, though more inaccurate, names over both those in the original languages and those chosen by earlier translators.
Eve is not the only figure to have her name altered in this way; Isaac is another whose corrupted, Anglicized, colloquial name triumphed over a more accurate moniker. Isaac’s name (קחָצְיִ) was rendered “Izhak” in the more Hebraic Geneva Bible and “Isahac” in the Bishops’ Bible, but “Isaac” remained the most popular form in England (and, not coincidentally, the form in which he is designated in casus summarii). As a result, he is “Isaac” in the King James Version. On the translation of Isaac’s name, Jeffrey Shoulson writes, “The King James translators are reassimilating a figure who threatened to become alien and exotic with an unfamiliar name. . . the King James translators’ preferred name for the second patriarch effectively sustains his conversion from a Jewish, Hebraic figure (קחָצְיִ) to a Christian, English one (Isaac).”Footnote 37 The same is true, even more so, of Eve. Unlike Isaac (who is variably denoted as Isaac in the Coverdale Bible, Isaac in some Great Bibles and Isahac in others, and Isahac in the Bishops’ Bible), Eve is consistently called “Heva” in her Old Testament references. Shoulson’s emphasis here on the fear of these names becoming “alien” and “exotic” echoes the anxiety of the Geneva translators, whose acknowledgement of the Hebraic names becoming “strange” is given as evidence for the restoration of those Hebraic names. By the time of the King James Version, that strangeness was no longer something to be rehabilitated but a reason for which such names should be rejected altogether. In rejecting the existing Hebraic legacy of naming the first woman “Heva,” the King James Version not only established consistency in the English naming conventions between the Old and New Testaments, but definitively chose popular, vernacular usage over accuracy. The legacy of Eve—and not Heva—is the triumph of the vernacular over Hebraic authority.
Whether this shift was facilitated by the summaries is difficult to determine, but they are certainly a signpost for it. That the paratexts summarize scripture with less accurate, vernacular terms demonstrates an editorial willingness to sacrifice accuracy for familiarity and the acknowledgment that the vernacular is preferred for navigating the Bible, even if Hebraic terms are provided for the translation of scripture. The summaries thus act as barometers for when the vernacular contradicts scripture. A reader goes searching for Eve, not Heváh.
Exegesis
Summaries play an important role in popularizing titles. “Parable of the X” is a common titular construction, with titles such as the parable of the two eagles (Ezek 17) and the similitude of the wretched infant (Ezek 16) originating with or being popularized by the casus summarii. The most influential of these is the parable of the prodigal son (Luke 15:11–32), whose English usage is almost entirely a result of its inclusion in the “Table of Principal Matters” in the Matthew Bible and subsequent integration into the summaries of the Geneva Bible, Bishops’ Bible, and King James Version. The passage had previously been known in English as the parable of the “lost” son, but Rogers’s translation of “prodigal” from Lefèvre’s table (and its subsequent inclusion in summaries) encouraged its English use. The term “prodigal” was best known from Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, and the prominent inclusion of “prodigal” in these Bibles’ summaries and running-heads resulted in a spate of Aristotelian exegeses of Luke 15:11–32.Footnote 38 To add to this, the Geneva and Bishops’ Bibles both reference Christ’s praise of “liberality” in the summary to Luke 16, another word strongly associated with Aristotle’s work, the inclusion of which is very likely inspired by the frequency with which Lukan economics were being read via Aristotle.
Another phrase codified by its inclusion in the summaries is that of Esau selling his birthright for a “mess of pottage” (Gen 25:29–34). The phrase is wholly noncanonical, though it was already in vernacular use dating from the fifteenth century.Footnote 39 The phrase “Esau selleth his birthright for a messe of potage” is used in the Matthew, Great, and Geneva Bibles’ summaries, integrating the colloquial “mess of pottage” into the summaries. Despite the wide use of the phrase, the Bishops’ Bible and the King James Version drop it in favor of the more faithful “Esau selleth his birth right,” omitting the colloquialism. Unlike the denomination of Eve, this colloquialism was apparently too vulgar. A final example concerns the Sermon on the Mount (Matt 5–7). This title is less self-suggesting than it might appear and did not, in fact, come into common use until the sixteenth century. Its English use and lasting popularity can be traced to Coverdale’s casus summarium for Matt 5, which refers to “the moste excellent [and] louinge Sermon of Christ in the mount.” The two aspects of this designation— the discourse being both a sermon and delivered on a mountain—are not derived directly from the text. Matthew 5 contains no reference to the discourse as a “sermon,” and even the translation of the location as “mount” or “mountain” was not universal.Footnote 40 The title finds its earliest articulation in St Augustine, who titled his exegesis of the passages, “De Sermone Domini in Monte secundum Matthaeum.”Footnote 41 This Latin title was sufficiently widely used to appear as a title in the Vulgate, wherein the section is titled “Sermo in monte.” Despite its Latin popularity, it was not until Coverdale that a comparable designation appeared in English, wherein Matt 5 was first said to contain the “Sermon of Christ in the mount.” The English designation is sometimes dated to a later point,Footnote 42 but Coverdale appears to be the earliest source.Footnote 43
These examples are easily traced by virtue of their linguistic particularity. Demonstrating hermeneutic trends not rooted in uncommon words or phrases is a more substantial task. I aim here to illustrate two examples of summaries affecting exegetical trends by analyzing the works of those writers who used the Bibles in which these summaries are contained. The first example concerns the seduction of Eve in Gen 3, the second the inclusion of “sodomy” in Lev 20.
The concept of Eve’s seduction concerns her culpability for the Fall as well as the extent to which there is a sexual element to both her deception by the serpent and her giving of the forbidden fruit to Adam. “Seduce” acquired its sexual suggestion in the late sixteenth century and many early modern uses of the term are nonsexual in nature, yet its increasingly sexual usage frequently occurs in reference to Eve. Though sexualized conceptions of the Fall have a long history, as in Petrarch’s De viris illustribus, the specifically sexual usage of the English “seduce” to describe the events of Gen 3 only developed during the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. I posit that this usage is due in part to the Gen 3 summary in the Geneva Bible, wherein the events of Gen 3:1–5 are summarized as “The woman seduced by the serpent,” despite the absence of “seduce” or its derivates in scripture. This section will examine the practical implications of the summary’s content by investigating the usage of “seduce” throughout the work of writers who used the Geneva Bible, and argues that the paratextual inclusion of the term facilitated the sexualization of Eve’s deception and giving of the fruit.
Before discussing the paratext in the Geneva Bible, we must address the contemporary context in which Gen 3:1–5 was interpreted. The most important text is the Vulgate, which contains two references to the events of Gen 3 that use seducere. These are “Timeo autem ne sicut serpens Hevam seduxit astutia sua” (2 Cor 11:3) and “et Adam non est seductus: mulier autem seducta in prævaricatione fuit” (1 Tim 2:14). The seductus/seducta of the Vulgate translation of 1 Timothy will echo throughout early modern exegeses of Gen 3; however, whereas in Timothy this figures as a denial of Adam’s seduction and citation of Eve’s, the early modern repetition reconfigures this as Eve’s seduction by the serpent and then Adam’s seduction by Eve. The patristic conception of the seduction of Eve and the seduction of Adam as separate events are conflated into one phenomenon in such texts. As the Vulgate translation uses various forms of seducere, it is unsurprising that the obvious English derivates (seduce, seduction) would also be used to refer to Gen 3; however, “seduce” did not enter the English language until the fifteenth century, and it only retained its nonsexual Latinate meaning for about a century before developing a sexual connotation. Importantly, 2 Cor 11:3 and 1 Tim 2:14 are not translated with any form of “seduce” in the Geneva Bible. Excepting the Doauy-Rheims Bible, all English translations used “beguiled” for 2 Cor 11:3 and “deceived” for 1 Tim 2:14. The Doauy-Rheims Bible unsurprisingly translates the Vulgate’s seduxit, seductas, and seducta as “seduced” in all instances, and Catholic exegeses of the Fall as a sexualized seduction are commonplace. Genesis 3:13, on the other hand, wherein Eve explains, “The serpent beguiled me” (Geneva Bible), the verb is either “beguiled” or “deceived” in all English translations, including the Douay-Rheims Bible; in the Vulgate, it is decepit.
Despite the absence of any description of Gen 3 as a “seduction” in the Geneva Bible, exegetical descriptions of it as such by readers of the Geneva Bible are commonplace. Its Gen 3 summary, “The woman seduced by the serpent,” likely hails from French Bibles, as references to “Le serpent seduict la femme” appear as a marginal note in the Olivétan Bible and a summary in the Lefèvre Bible. These French paratexts probably derive from 2 Cor 11:3 and 1 Tim 2:14, which both use seduict. But the Geneva Bible eschews the term in scripture, maintaining it only in the summary. There is, therefore, a disagreement between the Genevan scripture and its paratexts. To what extent is Eve beguiled and deceived, and to what extent is she seduced?
It must be emphasized that the sexual meaning of “seduce” was not as prominent in the sixteenth century as it is today. It is not recorded in an early modern lexicon as having a sexual meaning until 1598.Footnote 44 Interestingly, if coincidentally, the earliest recorded use of “seduce” in a sexual sense is 1560, the Geneva Bible’s year of publication.Footnote 45 After 1560, descriptions of Gen 3 as a “seduction” and implications that this seduction is sexual in nature become increasingly common among Protestant exegetes who take the Geneva Bible as their text.
The first evidence in favor of this trend is the scarcity of descriptions of Gen 3 as a seduction prior to the publication of the Geneva Bible, despite its use in the Vulgate. Aside from two direct translations of the Vulgate, the only instance I have found is in Thomas Cranmer’s Certayne Sermons (1547), with a reference to Eve having been “seduced by the subtile perswasion of the Serpent.”Footnote 46 This usage is rare compared to the rate at which instances appear after the publication of the Geneva Bible. The writers discussed here all used the Geneva Bible as their primary source for scripture, as can be ascertained by examining their scriptural quotations. In George Gifford’s A Catechisme Conteining the Summe of Christian Religion (1583), the early presaging of what will later become an unambiguously sexual usage of “seduce” is apparent. He writes, “The Diuell in the Serpent did seduce the woman, perswading her that their estate shoulde bee bettered by eating of the fruite forbidden: she entised the man and so they sinned.”Footnote 47 There is an echo of the parallelistic syntax of the Vulgate translation of 1 Tim 2:14, “Adam non est seductus: mulier autem seducta,” in Gifford’s “the Serpent did seduce the woman … she entised the man.” The shift from “seduce” to “entise” moves from the more neutral “seduce” to a term with a more prominently gendered and sensual, if not necessarily sexual, meaning.Footnote 48 This exaggeration of the scripture to emphasize the gendered, sensual, and sexual qualities of Eve’s being seduced and seducing were longstanding features of Genesis exegesis, but their grounding in the English “seduce” will become more apparent in the following texts.
Two texts in 1601 and 1610 by Nicholas Gibbons and Richard Stock respectively make more neutral use of the term, showing that it still had the capacity to suggest wholly nonsexual usage by the seventeenth century.Footnote 49 The 1607 Certain Godly and Learned Sermons by Edward Philips is more carnal, however, and departs rather bizarrely from scripture. For Philips, it is necessary to invent several motivations and actions on Eve’s behalf. He writes, “The Serpent indeed blew the coles, but the fire was in her owne heart, and she would not confesse that shee abused her selfe to bee seduced by the Serpent.”Footnote 50 This “fire” in Eve’s “heart” reconfigures the serpent’s seduction from a corruption of innocence to the encouragement of an existing sinful impulse, totally contrary to the idea of prelapsarian innocence. Philips’s Eve has no state of innocence. He then asserts fictitiously that Eve “would not confesse” of her seduction, despite Eve quite clearly doing so at Gen 3:13: “’Why hast thou done this?’ And the woman said, ‘The serpent beguiled me, and I did eate.’” The imagery of fire, coals, and Eve having “abused” herself enhances the damnatory and carnal invention of Eve’s prelapsarian sin, and finally, this invention makes it entirely and emphatically Eve, rather than the serpent, who is at fault for the Fall. Philips’s syntax, “seduced by the serpent,” is exactly that of the summary.
This sexualized misogyny is particularly apparent in Joseph Hall’s 1612 work, Contemplations vpon the Principall Passages of the Holy Storie, and it is here the idea of the “seduction” of Eve is presented as innately sexual. Hall writes, “A woman seduced Adam, women betray these sons of God, the beauty of the apple betrayd the woman, the beauty of these women betrayd this holy seed, Eue saw and lusted, so did they, this also was a forbidden fruit, they lusted, tasted, sinned, died.”Footnote 51 Sexual suggestion chimes in the emphasis of Eve’s beauty, the betrayal of seed, and the repetition of “lusted.” Eve’s deception by the serpent is here reconfigured as a knowing betrayal of Adam, absolving him of the Fall. Despite Eve’s canonical giving of the fruit to Adam being based on her assessment of the goodness of the fruit (Gen 3:6), Hall roots the responsibility in Eve’s “beauty.” For Hall, the fruit being “pleasant to the eyes” becomes “the beauty of the fruit,” which is then elided with the “beauty” of Eve, and herein lies the blame for the Fall. The semenic suggestion of the genealogical “seed” heightens this, though it is the repetition of “lust” that elevates this reading to sexual extremes. In Hall’s rewriting, Eve harbors a sexualized desire for a fruit that mirrors her own beauty, and with her beauty she knowingly betrays Adam’s patrilineage through their shared lust. Hall’s misogyny is likely prompted by the Pauline reference to Eve having “deceived Adam” (1 Tim 2:14), but his interpretation of Genesis roots that sexual reading in the noncanonical “seduce.”
Another misogynistic reading, contemporary to Hall, is Thomas Bentley’s The Sixt Lampe of Virginitie (1612). Bentley quotes scripture with a parenthetical insertion of his own exegesis: “THE Lord God said vnto the first woman Eue [which being seduced by the serpent, did first taste, and afterward entised her husband Adam to eate of the forbidden fruite in Paradise, contrarie to Gods commaundement] Woman, why hast thou done this?”Footnote 52 The work is an often misogynistic instructional text directed at women, telling of “the seuerall duties and office of all sorts of women in their vocation out of Gods word, with their due praise and dispraise by the same.” This particular section is titled “The penal punishmentes, and terrible threatnings of God in his worde, against all sortes of vngodlie women, for their sinnes and wickednesses” and perhaps unsurprisingly makes no mention of any fault of Adam in Gen 3. No typographical shift marks the end of his quotation of scripture, and he shifts immediately into misogynistic exegesis, writing that “thus doth the Lorde punish the bodie of woman.” Again, Eve’s giving of the fruit to Adam becomes an “entise[ment].” The sexual suggestion, though less emphatic than Hall’s hypersexualized reinterpretation, is nonetheless present. 1 Timothy 2:14 might be seen informing Bentley’s parenthetical exegesis, wherein the parallel deceived/deceived becomes Eve “being seduced by the serpent. . . and afterward entised her husband”; however, the Pauline reading of Eve simply repeating the actions of the serpent in deceived/deceived, which might cast her as more blameless, is eroded into the exaggeration of seduced/entice.
A third contemporary text is Francis Rollenson’s Twelue Prophetical Legacies (1612). Rollenson’s topic is the pains of conception and childbirth, related in uncomfortably graphic detail with reference to women being “ript vp” before delivery. He lists the various discomforts and pains to which the pregnant and delivering female body is subject, citing Pliny, Aristotle, and St. Basil, all of which are a result of Eve having been “seduced by the Serpent.”Footnote 53 There is no reference to Paul here, and Rollenson’s phrase immediately precedes the quoted scripture from Gen 3:16, mimicking the formatting of the Geneva’s prefatory summary. His description of Eve having been “seduced by the Serpent” is identical to the paratextual syntax.
Finally, Robert Wolcomb’s A Glasse for the Godly (1612) offers an exegesis with the characteristic absolution of Adam’s blame in favor of Eve as the corrupted corrupter. Wolcomb exhibits a peculiar bias in which he and his readers are allied with Adam against Eve. He writes, “Should we not haue cried out and said vnto him; ô thou wretch, take heede to thy selfe; see thou doe it not; the woman is seduced; beleeue not her entisements?” Again, Eve offering Adam the fruit becomes the far more suggestive “entisement.” There is also the familiar introduction of a verbal component to Eve’s offering to Adam of the fruit, which in scripture is an entirely physical act. This idea, what Petrarch calls the sussurro femmineo, of Eve’s having addressed Adam with a linguistic enticement transfigures the giving of fruit into a verbal seduction.Footnote 54 As for the grammar, Wolcomb’s “seduced” here shifts from a transitive verb to an adjectival state; seduction is not an action the serpent performs on Eve but a transformative process that renders her “seduced” and therefore corrupt. It is because of this corruption, Wolcomb implies, that Adam should not have believed her. Finally, Wolcomb continues his reinterpretation of the giving of the fruit as a discursive situation by arguing that he and the (presumed male) reader would have tried to prevent the Fall by rhetorical means: “Should this haue béene our perswasion to Adam, that he should looke to himselfe, and shal we not perswade our selues after the same manner, when we are compassed & thronged with the like tentations?”Footnote 55 If we could speak to Adam this precis of Deut 4:9, then the Fall could have perhaps been prevented. Here, then, the seduction of Eve no longer denotes the deception by the serpent but a state of corrupt, sexual seduction.
During the fifty years from the publication of the Geneva Bible and the earliest recorded sexual use of “seduce” to the publication of the King James Version and Hall, Rollenson, and Wolcomb’s exegeses, “seduce” acquired a prominent sexual meaning. In these texts we see Gen 3 continually conceptualized as a seduction by exegetes who use the Geneva Bible as their source, despite the absence of any such reference to the event as a seduction in scripture. The only reference to Gen 3 as a seduction is paratextual. In the absence of scriptural corroboration, the term remains and enables sexual and misogynistic readings of the Fall.
My second example concerns the King James Version summary to Lev 20, which contains the following: “10 Of adulterie. 11. 14. 17. 19 Of Incest. 13 Of Sodomie. 15 Of Beastialitie. 18 Of uncleannesse.” This “13 Of Sodomie” references Lev 20:13, “If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination,” though it also has close association with Lev 18:22, “Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it [is] abomination.” The summary plainly labels Lev 20:13 as a description “Of Sodomie.” The term introduces an interesting recursive intratextuality, as the passage itself makes no reference to Sodom or Gen 19. Such intratextuality is unusual in casus summarii, as such practices are left to the purpose of cross-referential marginal notes, and among the many such notes to Lev 20 there is no encouragement to turn to Gen 19. This use of “Sodomie,” then, is less an encouragement to cross-referential reading or a deliberate moment of intratextuality but rather the editor’s deferment to the contemporary common usage of sodomy to denote homosexual acts, which derives from Gen 19. Sodomy was not the favored legal term; this was “buggery,” according to the Buggery Act 1533, and could refer to penetrative bestiality or homosexual anal intercourse.Footnote 56 Sodomy retained a semantic broadness, also being used to denote bestiality, and there is a discrepancy between the early modern English usage of the term and its paratextual role here, wherein it strictly denotes a man “l[ying] with mankind.” Bestiality is given its own category, “15 Of Beastialitie,” denoting Lev 20:15. There is then a blurring here between the twin meanings of sodomy denoting specific sexual acts and the ambiguousness of the Levitical “lie with,” though my interest here is rather in the codification of sodomy by religious writers as the descriptor for the acts described in Lev 20:13 and 18:22. I suggest that the inclusion of “sodomy” in the King James Version summary functions taxonomically in contrast to the other sexual acts listed (adultery, incest, bestiality, uncleanness), that the word as descriptor for the acts described in Lev 20:13 and 18:22 was taken up by subsequent writers as a result of this inclusion, and that this contributed to the codification of “sodomy” as the name of such acts as described in Leviticus.
Though Levitical readings of Gen 19 are common among certain modern Christian groups, the popularity of this intratextuality appears to be an early modern phenomenon. In assessments of medieval interpretations of Gen 19, Leviticus is conspicuously absent.Footnote 57 Peter Cantor provides an exception, but, as John Boswell notes, this reading “had been ignored or treated allegorically by most writers since the Council of Jerusalem.”Footnote 58 I have found no intratextual gloss of Gen 19 and Leviticus prior to the King James Version. Indeed, even in more general exegetical writings, I have found no English instance of this intratextuality before 1591Footnote 59 and only one instance quoting from the Vulgate.Footnote 60 While earlier examples of the intratextuality probably exist, their obvious rarity suggests the Levitical reading of Sodom was absent from the popular imagination. Notably, while the association between “sodomy” and intermale sex was longstanding, it is not until 1656 that an early modern lexicon establishes the connection,Footnote 61 though there are casual uses of the definition predating this. After the publication of the King James Version, instances of primarily religious writers describing Lev 20:13 as such occur far more frequently.
One trend entails writers simply citing Leviticus as the definition of sodomy. Henry Ainsworth (1627) provides an early example. He writes of the “unnaturall sin, which the Scripture calleth lying with the male, Lev. 18. 22. and 20. 13. is called Sodomy, as being first practised in Sodom, and the cities about it.”Footnote 62 When Ainsworth writes that this sin “is called Sodomy,” he omits the authority responsible for the definition, while the citation of what “Scripture calleth” the “unnaturall sin” immediately prior confuses the source from which the denotation of sodomy derives. A similar phenomenon occurs in Samuel Danforth’s The Cry of Sodom (1674), wherein Danforth cites Lev 20:13 and references the titling of this act as “called Sodomy.” He exaggerates Gen 19 and subsequently confuses the etymology of the term: “This sin raged amongst the Sodomites, and to their perpetual Infamy, it is called Sodomy.” It is unclear among whom this “infamy” has developed, and Danforth’s phrasing suggests that the definition may derive from scripture despite this being inaccurate.Footnote 63 John Trapp (1649) again quotes Lev 18:22 and calls it “the Sodomites sin,” as does a 1647 anonymous text. Footnote 64
Lancelot Andrewes’s The Pattern of Catechistical Doctrine at Large (1650) has a more interesting usage, as he formats sodomy as a navigational marginal note.Footnote 65 Andrewes’s marginal notes are otherwise almost entirely scriptural citations, mimicking the use of cross-referential notes in the Bibles themselves, and most that are not scriptural references act as navigational titles (the section on “uncleanesse” also uses rape, whoring, and polygamy as marginal notes). Sodomy, then, is not here merely a descriptor invoked for its recollection of Gen 19 but a navigational descriptor, performing an analogous navigational function as it does in the King James Version.Footnote 66 This kind of taxonomic use appears again in George Mackenzie’s The Laws and Customes of Scotland (1678). Despite the legal conflation of bestiality and homosexual acts under the single category of “buggery,” Mackenzie maintains a distinction between the behaviors. He quotes Lev 20:13–15 as detailing sodomy and bestiality, two terms both absent in the scripture yet present in the summary.Footnote 67 This replication of the summary as a kind of taxonomy of the behaviors discussed in Lev 20 is repeated more extensively in Samuel Cradock (1683), where it is very clearly derived directly from the King James Version summary. Here, Cradock reproduces the taxonomy of the King James Version summary as a bullet-pointed contents list for describing those behaviors from which “we are forbidden.” As can be seen with reference to the King James Version summary, Cradock’s taxonomy is a straight derivation. His list comprises: “Fornication with a Bond-Maid betrothed,” “Adultery,” “Incest,” “Sodomy,” “Bestiality,” and “Lying with a woman having her Sickness.”Footnote 68 Cradock makes frequent reference to Lev 20 in this section, and, aside from the expansion of adultery into two categories and the rephrasing of menstruation, the taxonomies are identical in order and vocabulary.
The minister John Webster in his The Displaying of Supposed Witchcraft (1677) advances this taxonomical habit to the point of implying Moses makes direct use of the term “sodomy.” Webster argues that mortals cannot copulate with Devils since Moses makes no reference to the act amongst those prohibited sexual acts in Leviticus. In referencing the topics Moses discusses, Webster erroneously claims, “Moses. . . named and prohibited the less sins of bestial Copulation and Sodomy.”Footnote 69 While Moses’s description of how man must not “lie with a beast” (Lev 20:13) is semantically close to “bestial copulation,” there is no instance in which Moses describes man “l[ying] with mankind, as he lieth with a woman” as “sodomy.” This should not be taken as a misquoting of scripture; Webster is not claiming Moses literally described the act as “sodomy.” What occurs here is the complete absorption of the Levitical description into the word sodomy to such an extent that Webster can use the term interchangeably with the scriptural quotation itself. Sodomy is no longer here an act merely associated with homosexual acts or one possible interpretation of Gen 19, but an interchangeable synonym for when “man lie with mankind.”
By the latter half of the seventeenth century, the term also appears in a similar manner in legal texts, with the Levitical description given as the definition for sodomy.Footnote 70 The frequent citation of sodomy in conjunction with Lev 20:13, that such a citation is unusual prior to the publication of the King James Version, and that such citations often replicate the taxonomic role or format of the summary strongly suggest the inclusion of “sodomy” in the Lev 20 summary contributed to both its association with the passage and its general use to denote homosexual acts.
Conclusion
Even if we are tempted to see claims summarizing the King James Version—such as David Norton’s declaration that it is “the most important book in English religion and culture” and Gordon Campbell’s that it is “the most celebrated book in the English-speaking world”—as hyperbolic, there is no shying away from the King James Version’s status as a book of paramount influence.Footnote 71 It should, then, go without saying that its paratexts are also worthy of committed scholarship, and those works that shaped those paratexts’ form and content should be similarly deserving of critical consideration. Even setting aside such acclaim for the King James Version, these texts were each vital and important works in their day, and their study is of significant benefit to early modern scholarship. The casus summarii, however, are only one form of synoptic biblical paratext. Along with the arguments, contents lists, indices, topic tables, titles, and running heads, the amount of synoptic content in early modern Bibles comprises an intimidating corpus, and one worthy of further attention. There is much contained in early modern Bibles beyond the scripture, and this article has aimed to demonstrate the importance of attending to it.
