The Dark Bible Cultures of Interpretation in Early Modern England

The Dark Bible explores early modern England's interactions with difficult aspects of the Bible. For the early modern reader, although the Bible was understood to be perfect, sufficient, and transcendent (indeed, the Protestant Reformation required it), it was not always experienced as such. While traditional interpretive precepts, such as the claim that all dark passages could be read in the light of clear ones, were frequently recited by early modern commentators, their actual encounters with the darkness of the Bible suggest that writers, commentators, and translators were often deeply uncomfortable with the disjunction between what the Bible should be, and what it actually was. The Dark Bible investigates writers' and translators' attempts to explain, accommodate, circumvent, and repair problematic texts across a range of genres and contexts. It charts early modern English use of biblical scholarship in vernacular culture and investigates how vernacular writing in various genres could give voice to questioning and confused biblical interactions. The Dark Bible demonstrates that early modern writers and critics engaged extensively with the Bible's difficulties, attempting to circumvent and repair problematic texts, and otherwise reconcile the darkness of the Bible with theories of the Bible's perfection and clarity.

1 - Contradiction
2 - Ambiguity
3 - Defects
4 - Disorder
5 - Idiom
6 - Figures

Alison Knight received her PhD from the University of Cambridge in 2012. She has held a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship and a European Research Council Fellowship at the University of Cambridge. In 2020, she joined the English and History departments at Royal Holloway, University of London, as Lecturer in Interdisciplinary Early Modern Studies. She has published articles in Studies in Philology, The John Donne Journal, and several prominent edited volumes. She received the John Donne Society's 2018 Distinguished Publication Award.