Burning to Read: English Fundamentalism and Its Reformation Opponents

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Burning to Read

You could not be signed in. Sign In Forgot password? Don't have an account? American Academy of Religion members Sign in via society site. Sign in via your Institution Sign in. Burning to Read is a landmark in the study of fundamentalism. In James Simpson's radical reassessment, the Protestant Reformation appears not as a parent of the Enlightenment, but rather as a progenitor of the extreme and intolerant literalism that has seized every major world religion today.

Written with passion as well as scholarly authority, this is a compellingly readable and utterly persuasive study of a critical moment in world history. Amitav Ghosh How do we read religious books, what meanings do we take from them, and how did we come by these meanings? The history of reading scriptural texts has a renewed public importance. No period is more in need of fresh appraisal and insight than the Reformation. The way people read then informs how we read now. James Simpson's book could not be more timely: It is a book that demands to be read, and ruminated upon, as religious belief once again rages around us.

Brian Cummings, Professor of English, University of Sussex Drawing deeply on the history of biblical translation and of English literature from Tyndale through Thomas More to Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, Simpson's story often challenges conventional readings of the history of biblical interpretation.

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Publishers Weekly A polemic of incandescent force. Boyd Tonkin The Independent James Simpson's unremittingly clever new book suggests we re-examine the early 16th century in order to make sense of contemporary culture.


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His aim, however, is to disabuse us of the assumption that modern liberalism can lay claim to unproblematic origins in the Protestant Reformation. Marcus Nevitt Daily Telegraph The English Reformation is commonly held to have provided the intellectual basis for modern liberalism.


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James Simpson's fascinating revisionist account turns that traditional picture on its head. Here, the Lutherans appear as the forerunners of a dangerous fundamentalism, and the traditionalists display far more intellectual sophistication than is usually supposed. London Review of Books What makes this study distinctive is its alertness to connections between past and present, and its sympathetic re-evaluation of church traditions as a force that moderates the divisive effects of uncontrolled scriptural interpretation, drawing on such classic studies as George Tavard's Holy Writ or Holy Church?

One hopes its message will be heard well beyond Reformation studies. Alison Shell Church Times Simpson explores a familiar subject--the earlyth-century debate over vernacular scripture--from a surprising angle. Hill Choice James Simpson has dug up a large, complicated truffle, which he examines in precise, revealing detail.

In Burning to Read , this erudite and original student of later medieval and Renaissance literature focuses on a single, well-defined episode: His subtle, intense, beautifully written essay helps the reader to understand, historically and existentially, why seemingly reasonable people end up burning books and executing readers. Burning to Read is a book that matters, not only for specialists in the Renaissance and Reformation, but also for the general reader.

All of us, after all, now inhabit a world that uses some of Sir Basil Blackwell's beloved, beneficent books as weapons, and punishes others as if they were rebels and heretics. Anthony Grafton Times Literary Supplement James Simpson is Donald P. Would you like to tell us about a lower price? If you are a seller for this product, would you like to suggest updates through seller support? Learn more about Amazon Prime.

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Read more Read less. Prime Book Box for Kids. Customers who bought this item also bought. Page 1 of 1 Start over Page 1 of 1. The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, Believing in Order to See: Sponsored products related to this item What's this? A powerful holocaust memoir that will leave you breathless and heartbroken, yet, inspired and hopeful! How could a young child survive all this? The Healing Power Of Ayahuasca: Could it do the same for you too? For All It Was Worth: A health survival handbook for magicians and healers.

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Share your thoughts with other customers. Write a customer review. There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later. In Simpson's retelling, the Henrician Reformation is a story of the rise of fundamentalist discourse rooted in literalist textuality, a misanthropic and paranoid psychology of abjection, a hermeneutic of suspicion, and the basis for despotism and violence. Clearly this Reformation is not the unproblematic scene of modern liberalism's birth, which is Simpson's primary message. His reading of the momentous and tragically intertwined lives of Thomas More and William Tyndale is the strongest and most compelling one I've encountered.

Despite its problematic conclusions it alone is worth the price of admission. Simpson finds himself sympathetic to the comparative liberality of More's Augustinian humanism which he sees as a faith- and trust-based pragmatism that was destroyed by the harsh polemical discourse and political exigencies introduced by Luther and propagated to English readers by Tyndale.

Simpson doesn't quite let More off the hook for his complicity in the tragedy of his time, but he comes close. Josiah provides a biblical exemplar of kingship at a turning point of religious history with the book at the center of transformation. But his story also provides scriptural examples of violent, exclusionist practices against other religions, as when Josiah destroys [End Page ] the altars of the worshipers of Baal and sacrifices the priests themselves 2 Kings Christian violence was not only authorized by strict evangelical use of scripture, but it also reinforced the rigorousness with which scripture was read.

The next several chapters explore paradoxes in the evangelical program of reading, some related to this history of violence. By the early s, he had also translated much of the Hebrew Bible, which he labored over in prison before being convicted of heresy in , when he was then strangled prior to being burned.

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