Perhaps the most influential of all those included here is the “Challenge Sermon” (ed. Torrance Kirby) that John Jewel preached in 1560: a denunciation of the “great and evident abuses” that he said overshadowed in the medieval church the meaning of the death of Christ and “the holy mysteries of our salvation” (257). Jewel vowed to yield his opinions only if he could be shown examples in scripture or the primitive church that disproved him. His challenge unleashed a torrent of controversy that lasted for decades. As Morrissey noted in Politics and the Paul’s Cross Sermons, by widening divisions in society, Jewel’s “Challenge Sermon” absorbed theologians in debate at the same time that it won the laity for Elizabeth’s church. Other sermons in this volume are less well known and were preached by men who are now obscure. They include Richard Rex’s edition of a Good Friday sermon by Simon Matthew (tentatively dated to 1537) from the only known copy in the State Papers collection of the National Archives in London, and John Copcot’s 1584 sermon (ed. P. G. Stanwood) from a manuscript preserved at Lambeth Palace Library. Kirby studied for a second time a 1535 Lenten sermon by Robert Singleton, chaplain to Anne Boleyn, which survives in a unique printed copy in Lincoln Cathedral’s Wren Library. It gives a rare glimpse of the evangelical message that the queen endorsed dur- ing her brief ascendency. The editors provide each sermon in this volume with its own introduction, appara- tus, and notes. Mark Rankin presents two sermons that were preached during the reign of Mary I, both of which deserve the meticulous attention he devotes to them. In one, James Brooks argued in 1553 that the church in England had died, but now, just as Christ raised the daughter of Jarius, so with God’s help the church in Queen Mary’s day “shal revive” (181). It is difficult to know if the handful of sermons presented here are representative of the many thousands that were delivered at Paul’s Cross in the twelve decades that the volume covers. As a miscellany, the editors of the individual sermons have often followed their own conventions, particularly for the notes. The results can be uneven. Nevertheless, Sermons at Paul’s Cross provides welcome attention to the political exercise of preaching in Reformation England. Susan Wabuda, Fordham University doi:10.1017/rqx.2018.76 Scriptural Authority and Biblical Criticism in the Dutch Golden Age: God’s Word Questioned. Dirk van Miert, Henk Nellen, Piet Steenbakkers, and Jetze Touber, eds. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. xvi + 450 pp. $110. Scholars from the early modern Low Countries played an important role in biblical crit- icism, which also challenged the authority of the Holy Writ. The four editors in the REVIEWS 341 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. 06 Apr 2021 at 01:39:46, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use. https://www.cambridge.org/core introduction sketch biblical criticism as an innovative force. Humanists’ philological criticism of the Bible contributed to the decline of ecclesiastical truth claims, whereas until recently only the rise of the sciences was attributed this role. Synchronic with this shift, awareness grew that we cannot think in terms of a “post-Spinozist period” as con- stituting the rise of biblical criticism, but Spinoza’s contribution rather fits in an ongo- ing development. Philology, historical criticism, historicism, and the increasing knowledge of Oriental languages contributed to this development. Nellen and Steenbakkers, in their magisterial chapter that serves as an introduction (“Biblical Philology in the Long Seventeenth Century: New Orientations”), discuss this role (or, rather, these roles) in a broad and in-depth study. They treat the role of biblical philology and its ways of working, starting with Lorenzo Valla and, particularly, Desiderius Erasmus in the sixteenth century. However, this philology was moderated by practical circumstances and theological demands, and philology was used by both orthodox theologians and radical libertines to prove their points. Such discussions were of the highest importance, since they hit the heart of the sacrosanct status of the Bible, and the issue of the primacy of reason or revelation, and of fact or faith. Between orthodox and libertines, irenic authors steered a middle course, and strived in some way or another at reconciliation and unity of the church, the very position that paradoxically put them outside the established church. An excellent passage in the introduction is devoted to the remarkable Lodewijk Meyer (1629–81), a physician, poet, translator, theater manager and playwright, literary critic, grammarian and lexicographer, and philosopher in the entourage of Spinoza. In the words of Nellen and Steenbakkers, he was one of the scholars who “dismantled the divine message” in a way similar to Thomas Hobbes. The two authors also discuss the position of Spinoza in the field, discussing the findings of Grafton and Israel in the volume. The volume is arranged in seven parts. Part 1 is “Famous Cases of pia fraus,” featuring Erasmus and the forged Cambridge manuscript that contained the Johannine Comma by McDonald, thus saving the biblical status of the doctrine of Trinity; and Krans on the “Velesian Readings,” textual variants of the Greek New Testament collected by Pedro Fajardo, Marquis of los Vélez, which should confirm the status of the Vulgate. Part 2, “The Boundaries of Orthodoxy Challenged,” on Heinsius and Grotius (van Miert), and a chapter on Grotius’s adversary, the orthodox Calvinist French Hebraist André Rivet (Ossa-Richardsons). Part 3 discusses the Bible in early modern Judaism by Kromhout and Zwiep (“God’s Word Confirmed”), and Benjamin Fisher (on the controversial Jewish scholar Menasseh ben Israel). Part 4 is the heart of the volume with two challeng- ing chapters by Grafton and Israel, who argue that the philological passages of the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus were unoriginal and that Spinoza’s most original contribu- tion was the distinction between factual truth and authorial meaning, respectively. Part 5 discusses “Innovative Exegesis by Remonstrant, Mennonite, and Other Liberal Thinkers,” such as Philip van Limborch (Daugirdas), Pierre Bayle (Bernier, and RENAISSANCE QUARTERLY342 VOLUME LXXII, NO. 1 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. 06 Apr 2021 at 01:39:46, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use. https://www.cambridge.org/core Pitassi), and Anthonie van Dale (Mandelbrote). Part 6 deals with orthodox Reformed exegetes: Gisbertus Voetius (Goudriaan) and the second half of the seventeenth century in general, by Touber. The final part, 7, turns to biblical criticism in the eighteenth cen- tury by German theologians who had connections with the republic: Hermann von der Hardt (Mulsow) and Johann Scheuchzer (1672–1733) (Roling). Thus the volume gives a wonderful overview of Dutch seventeenth-century biblical scholarship in the Golden Age, from orthodox, libertine, and Jewish points of view, and even in the period after the Golden Age Republic had waned in the 1670s. Of course, not everything or everybody is covered, but those who want to learn about seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century biblical scholarship will find much valuable in this collec- tion of essays. Jan Bloemendal, Huygens Institute for the History of the Netherlands / Ruhr-Universität Bochum doi:10.1017/rqx.2018.77 Political Theology in Medieval and Early Modern Europe: Discourses, Rites, and Representations. Montserrat Herrero, Jaume Aurell, and Angela C. Miceli Stout, eds. Medieval and Early Modern Political Theology: Historical and Theoretical Perspectives 1. Turnhout: Brepols, 2017. 398 pp. €80. The modern discourse of political theology has developed in two major directions in the wake of Carl Schmitt, its ostensible founder. The first is philosophical or theoretical, differently exemplified by the likes of Hans Blumenberg and Giorgio Agamben. The second is exemplified by Ernst Kantorowicz’s 1957 book The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology. As recent scholarship by Victoria Kahn and Lorna Hutson has shown, Kantorowicz’s book does have a veiled anti-Schmittian the- oretical bent, and yet the book itself reads more as an attempt to trace the historical development of ideas around the intersection of sacral and juridical kingship. Both approaches are on evidence in the collection of essays here under review. The essays in the first section take a more theoretical tack. Montserrat Herrero sets out to trace the myriad afterlives of Schmitt’s political theology, offering a useful gene- alogy of how the field has unfolded over time. William Cavanaugh argues that political theologians read too little theology, giving the field a tilt toward modern secularism and away from religion; he hopes to open democracy to transcendence without Schmitt’s authoritarianism or Catholic nostalgia. António Bento offers a richly suggestive essay on Schmitt’s and Kantorowicz’s competing conceptions of the church, arguing that Schmitt’s invisible church never collapses entirely into the visible, whereas for Kantorowicz the juridical and mystical bodies of the church coincide. REVIEWS 343 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. 06 Apr 2021 at 01:39:46, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use. https://www.cambridge.org/core