Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.University of California Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Huntington Library Quarterly.

No abstract

While “religion” as an ecclesiastical, institutional, and doctrinal phenomenon in seventeenth-century England has been subject to intensive scrutiny, the language of scriptural thinking remains a blind-spot to scholarship. One example of the inattention to the Bible as a working currency of political thought in the seventeenth century is the widespread notion of the English regicide as unprecedented and unthinkable in the early modern mind before it actually occurred, surprising most right-thinking opponents of the king. This essay will look first at the vast repertoire of regicidal instances in the Bible, which were so embedded in English historical memory, and second, will explore the ways in which these biblical instances were woven into constitutional arguments about the abolition of monarchy.

This article takes a look at a set of responses to the continental crisis and the origins of the Thirty Years War in the sermon literature of the 1620s. It argues that the pulpits of England were full of what might be called a biblical Enemy Theory. It considers the case that there was a language of scriptural politics that dominated the early modern pulpit. The article finally examines the basis, the theological, and the exegetical of typology.

This essay explores Thomas Browne's Pseudodoxia epidemica (1646), with its lengthy book on 'errors' in animal lore. In the limited critical literature on Browne's natural history, this author is generally seen as stumbling towards a zoological idiom and clearing away the emblematic 'clutter' of earlier writers on natural history--Gesner, Aldrovandi, Topsell or Franzius. This essay proposes that Browne is working with a more complex set of co-ordinates in his thought, beyond his experimental inclinations and his Aristotelian assumptions. It will explore the extent to which his studies of animals emerge from, and duplicate, the presumptions of his biblical hermeneutics, and it will suggest that Browne regularly exports terms from scriptural exegesis--the categories of the literal, the figurative, and the emblematic--into his investigations of the natural world.