God's Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible
Adam Nicolson
Language: English
Pages: 336
ISBN: 0060838736
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
A network of complex currents flowed across Jacobean England. This was the England of Shakespeare, Jonson, and Bacon; the era of the Gunpowder Plot and the worst outbreak of the plague. Jacobean England was both more godly and less godly than the country had ever been, and the entire culture was drawn taut between these polarities. This was the world that created the King James Bible. It is the greatest work of English prose ever written, and it is no coincidence that the translation was made at the moment "Englishness," specifically the English language itself, had come into its first passionate maturity. The English of Jacobean England has a more encompassing idea of its own scope than any form of the language before or since. It drips with potency and sensitivity. The age, with all its conflicts, explains the book.
This P.S. edition features an extra 16 pages of insights into the book, including author interviews, recommended reading, and more.
Laurence and Hampton Court Conference Charles I, King Child mortality Chiswick Christian IV, King of Denmark and Norway Chrysostom, St John Church: government, internal conflicts and state Cicero Circumlocution Civil War (English) Civility: in Jacobean England Clapham, Henoch Clarke, Richard Class (social), see also Social order Coleridge, Samuel Taylor Commentary (Biblical) Communion Company: concept of Confirmation Conflict: between word and ceremony, within church
the nature of the conference and its outcome, and to the qualities of the Bible that would eventually emerge from it. As usual, in what is billed as a critical public meeting, a great deal had been squared off in private beforehand. There had been manoeuvrings for months, a little ballet at the heart of seventeenth-century England, in which bishops, both Calvinist and anti-Calvinist, moderate reformists, politically radical Puritans, an episcopally-minded but reformist-sympathetic king and a wary
into awkward corners, occasionally calling in Bilson and Bancroft, ‘and then for variety sake, rather then for necessity’. The four Puritans tried to parry the blows. John Reynolds was ‘the principall mouthe and speaker’, Chaderton ‘mute as any fishe’, Knewstubs spoke a little about his loathing of the cross (for which Lancelot Andrewes, at least in one account, took him to task) and the fourth, an obscure and moderate preacher called Thomas Sparke or Sparkes (who within a year or two would share
ever meant to die a true and perfect Catholic.’ The extraordinary Jacobean ability to dispute, to be witty on the brink of the precipice, at this of all moments, now came to the fore. John Overall, considering the claims of the Church of England to be the true primitive church, then said to the Jesuit, ‘But Mr Garnet, we are all Catholics.’ That curious reasonableness, Overall’s clever, witty face, that conversational tone, all in the presence of a violent death, the noose ready, the axe leaning
these comparisons. But this was a bluff. In his heart, Abbot was no courtier, and when it came to a conflict between royal and divine authority (over the famous divorce case of Lady Essex in the following decade) he, unlike other more intensely royalist bishops such as Lancelot Andrewes, voted for what he saw as God’s interest (no divorce) over the king’s explicit desire for a divorce to be granted. Abbot tried his hand at court manipulation. James was always vulnerable to male charm and beauty