Alison Knight: The Dark Bible: Cultures of Interpretation in Early Modern England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022.

Alison Knight’s monograph joins a number of recent studies on the practices of biblical interpretation in England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by scholars such as Kevin Killeen, Naomi Tadmor and Victoria Brownlee, among many others. But while Knight argues that previous studies have “tended to create a picture of the Bible as a universal treasury, a straightforward source for doctrine”, The Dark Bible intervenes by focusing on interpretive practices and discourses relating to obscure and contradictory biblical passages, anachronic biblical narratives, translation challenges, and problems of figurative language. Knight’s study delves into moments in the biblical text that give way to confusion, passages admitted to be dark and obscure even by proponents of sola scriptura like Luther, Tyndale and Calvin. The monograph’s strength lies in its wide array of primary source material, surveying Catholic and Protestant voices, including political polemic, translator’s prefaces, how-to guides, assessments of lay reading, as well as poetry (John Donne, George Herbert, and Robert Southwell, among others).