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date: 06 December 2019

Abstract and Keywords

This chapter examines Miles Smith’s King James Bible preface, ‘The Translators to the Reader’, excavating the polemical, hermeneutic, and literary contexts that frame the preface and determine its rhetoric, style, and tone. Smith’s preface took shape in response to successive installments of the Catholic Douai-Rheims translation and the Sistine Vulgate of 1590, and drew on classic Protestant principles of argument and exegesis. At stake in these debates was the question of a textual and doctrinal return ad fontes, as both Reformed and Roman polemicists claimed the authority of the early church for their cause. In a detailed examination of the paratexts of the Rheims New Testament and the King James Bible, a compelling case study of the debates surrounding reform and interpretation is provided.

Keywords: church in history, hermeneutics, linguistics, philology, ecclesiology, paratexts, translation

Katrin Ettenhuber

Katrin Ettenhuber is Fellow and Director of Studies in English at Pembroke College, Cambridge, and Newton Trust Lecturer in the Cambridge English Faculty. She is the author of Donne’s Augustine: Renaissance Cultures of Interpretation (Oxford, 2011), co-editor, with Gavin Alexander and Sylvia Adamson, of Renaissance Figures of Speech (Cambridge, 2007), and editor of vol. v of the Oxford edition of the Sermons of John Donne (Oxford, 2015). She has published widely on the religious literature and culture of the early modern period, and is currently working on a new project on conceptions of sacred time in seventeenth-century writing.

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