|
|
God’s Last Words - Katz, David S. - Yale University Press
- Related Categories
- Religion
History
Literary Studies
|
God’s Last WordsReading the English Bible from the Reformation to Fundamentalism
Out of Print.
Selected by Choice Magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title for 2005
This wide-ranging book is an intellectual history of how informed readers read their Bibles over the past four hundred years, from the first translations in the sixteenth century to the emergence of fundamentalism in the twentieth century. David Katz re-creates the response of readers from different eras by examining the “horizon of expectations” that provided the lens through which they read.
During the Renaissance, says Katz, learned men rushed to apply the tools of textual analysis to the Testaments, fully confident that God’s Word would open up and reveal shades of further truth. Other developments that altered readers’ experiences included the politics of the English Civil War, Newtonian and Darwinian scientific theory, the rise of the disciplines of anthropology, archaeology, and geology, and the development of the novel and a concept of authorial copyright. Katz discusses all of these and more, concluding with the growth of fundamentalism in America, which brought biblical interpretation back to the Lutheran certainty of a demonstrable authority.
David S. Katz holds the Abraham Horodisch Chair for the History of Books at Tel-Aviv University.
A main selection of Readers Subscription
TOP
|