Criticism and theology in seventeenth-century Europe

Nicholas Hardy's dissertation, Criticism and confession : the Bible in the seventeenth-century Republic of Letters, is part of the recent renewal of the history of scholarship, which increasingly concerns itself with the study of learned practices not only with what early modern scholars were saying, but with what they were actually doing. N. Hardy examines a series of majorfigures (Casaubon, Selden, Grotius, Cappel...), whom historiography long presented as spearheads of a secularising process. He takes pains to reinsert them into the context of their own time and to study their reception by contemporaries, including in the form of censorship. He thus successfully demonstrates, in a rigorous and lucid manner, that their work remained deeply confessional. Farfrom being the preserve of an allegedly progressive party, criticism was equally practised by orthodox divines.