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4 results

  • Chapter 7 - Richard Simon and the Limits of Erudition

  • Timothy Twining, KU Leuven
  • Book:
    The Limits of Erudition
    Published online:
    05 December 2024
    Print publication:
    12 December 2024, pp 245-290

  • Summary

    The seventh and final chapter presents a new interpretation of Richard Simon’s Histoire critique du Vieux Testament (1678). Having set out the course of his early career (and especially his study of Hebrew manuscripts in the library of the Oratory), it outlines how Simon presented a novel account of the practice and purpose of Catholic biblical scholarship. Its conclusion reflects on why this was found challenging by his contemporaries, and discusses how the reception of his work differed so extensively from that of Louis Cappel’s Critica sacra.

  • Conclusion

  • Timothy Twining, KU Leuven
  • Book:
    The Limits of Erudition
    Published online:
    05 December 2024
    Print publication:
    12 December 2024, pp 291-302

  • Summary

    The book draws to a close by assessing how far, by the end of the seventeenth century, the ‘limits of erudition’ were on the verge of being transcended. This chapter focuses in particular on the ways in which Louis Cappel and Richard Simon attempted to alter how their contemporaries construed the relationship between Scripture, scholarship, and given confessional positions. The book concludes by presenting a new interpretation of the significance of Simon’s work.

The Limits of Erudition
  • The Old Testament in Post-Reformation Europe
  • Timothy Twining
  • Published online:
    05 December 2024
    Print publication:
    12 December 2024
  • The history of early modern biblical scholarship has often been told as a teleological narrative in which a succession of radical thinkers dethroned the authority of the sacred word. This book tells a very different story. Drawing on a mass of archival sources, Timothy Twining reconstructs the religious, cultural, and institutional contexts in which the text of the Old Testament was considered and contested throughout post-Reformation Europe. In so doing, this book brings to light a vast array of figures from across the confessional spectrum who invested immense energy in studying the Bible. Their efforts, it shows, were not disinterested, but responded to pressing contemporary concerns. The Limits of Erudition employs a novel conceptual framework to resurrect a world where learning mattered to inquisitors and archbishops as much as to antiquaries, and in which the pursuit of erudition was too important to be left to scholars.