Exploring the production and consumption of British commerical family bibles, this book sheds light on the history of women's sexuality, and the English view of such taboo subjects as same-sex relations, masturbation, menstruation and circumcision.

In celebration of the work of the translators of the King James Bible and the fruit of their labors, the authors of this volume, representing a wide range of disciplines and perspectives, examine the cultural and religious monument that is the King James Bible. After David G. Burkes introduction to the volume, Alister McGrath, Benson Bobrick, Lynne Long, and John R. Kohlenberger III explore in part 1 The World of Bible Translation before the King James Version. In part 2, A. Kenneth Curtis, Barclay M. Newman and Charles Houser, and Jack Lewis investigate The Making of the King James Bible. In part 3 Leonard J. Greenspoon, Cheryl J. Sanders, Lamin Sanneh, David Lyle Jeffrey, and James R. White review The World of Bible Translation after the King James Bible. Paperback. 296 pages.

The modern media world came into being in the nineteenth century, when machines were harnessed to produce texts and images in unprecedented numbers. In the visual realm, new industrial techniques generated a deluge of affordable pictorial items, mass-printed photographs, posters, cartoons, and illustrations. These alluring objects of the Victorian parlor were miniaturized spectacles that served as portals onto phantasmagoric versions of 'the world.' Although new kinds of pictures transformed everyday life, these ephemeral items have received remarkably little scholarly attention. Picture World shines a welcome new light onto these critically neglected yet fascinating visual objects. They serve as entryways into the nineteenth century's key aesthetic concepts. Each chapter pairs a new type of picture with a foundational keyword in Victorian aesthetics, a familiar term reconceived through the lens of new media. 'Character' appears differently when considered with caricature, in the new comics and cartoons appearing in the mass press in the 1830s; likewise, the book approaches 'realism' through pictorial journalism; 'illustration' via illustrated Bibles; 'sensation' through carte-de-visite portrait photographs; 'the picturesque' by way of stereoscopic views; and 'decadence' through advertising posters. Picture World studies the aesthetic effects of the nineteenth century's media revolution: it uses the relics of a previous era's cultural life to interrogate the Victorian world's most deeply-held values, arriving at insights still relevant in our own media age.

In this collection of essays, thirty scholars from diverse disciplines offer their unique perspectives on the genius of the King James Version, a translation whose 400th anniversary was recently celebrated throughout the English-speaking world. While avoiding nostalgia and hagiography, each author clearly appreciates the monumental, formative role the KJV has had on religious and civil life on both sides of the Atlantic (and beyond) as well as on the English language itself. In part 1 the essayists look at the KJV in its historical contexts—the politics and rapid language growth of the era, the emerging printing and travel industries, and the way women are depicted in the text (and later feminist responses to such depictions). Part 2 takes a closer look at the KJV as a translation and the powerful precedents it set for all translations to follow, with the essayists exploring the translators’ principles and processes (with close examinations of “Bancroft’s Rules” and the Prefaces), assessing later revisions of the text, and reviewing the translation’s influence on the English language, textual criticism, and the practice of translation in Jewish and Chinese contexts. Part 3 looks at the various ways the KJV has impacted the English language and literature, the practice of religion (including within the African American and Eastern Orthodox churches), and the broader culture. The contributors are Robert Alter, C. Clifton Black, David G. Burke, Richard A. Burridge, David J. A. Clines, Simon Crisp, David J. Davis, James D. G. Dunn, Lori Anne Ferrell, Leonard J. Greenspoon, Robin Griffith-Jones, Malcolm Guite, Andrew E. Hill, John F. Kutsko, Seth Lerer, Barbara K. Lewalski, Jacobus A. Naudé, David Norton, Jon Pahl, Kuo-Wei Peng, Deborah W. Rooke, Rodney Sadler Jr., Katharine Doob Sakenfeld, Harold Scanlin, Naomi Seidman, Christopher Southgate, R. S. Sugirtharajah, Joan Taylor, Graham Tomlin, Philip H. Towner, David Trobisch, and N. T. Wright.

In Victorian Reformations: Historical Fiction and Religious Controversy, 1820-1900, Miriam Elizabeth Burstein analyzes the ways in which Christian novelists across the denominational spectrum laid claim to popular genres—most importantly, the religious historical novel—to narrate the aftershocks of 1829, the year of Catholic Emancipation. Both Protestant and Catholic popular novelists fought over the ramifications of nineteenth-century Catholic toleration for the legacy of the Reformation. But despite the vast textual range of this genre, it remains virtually unknown in literary studies. Victorian Reformations is the first book to analyze how “high” theological and historical debates over the Reformation’s significance were popularized through the increasingly profitable venue of Victorian religious fiction. By putting religious apologists and controversialists at center stage, Burstein insists that such fiction—frequently dismissed as overly simplistic or didactic—is essential for our understanding of Victorian popular theology, history, and historical novels. Burstein reads “lost” but once exceptionally popular religious novels—for example, by Elizabeth Rundle Charles, Lady Georgiana Fullerton, and Emily Sarah Holt—against the works of such now-canonical figures as Sir Walter Scott, Charles Dickens, and George Eliot, while also drawing on material from contemporary sermons, histories, and periodicals. Burstein demonstrates how these novels, which popularized Christian visions of change for a mass readership, call into question our assumptions about the nineteenth-century historical novel. In addition, her research and her conceptual frameworks have the potential to influence broader paradigms in Victorian studies and novel criticism.

Women in the Victorian period were acknowledged to be the "religious sex," but their relationship to the doctrines, practices, and hierarchies of Christianity was both highly circumscribed, which has been well documented, and complexly creative, which has not. Gray visits the importance of the literature of Christian devotion to women's creative lives through an examination of the varied ways in which Victorian women reproduced and recreated traditional Christian texts in their own poetic texts. Investigating how women poets redeployed the discourse of Christianity to uncover the multiple voices of the scriptures, to expand identity and gender constructions, and to question traditional narratives and processes of authorization, Gray contends that women found in religious poetry unexpected, liberating possibilities. Taking into account multiple voices, from the best-known female poets of the day to some of the most obscure, this study provides a comprehensive account of Victorian women's religious poetic creativity, and argues that this body of work helped shape the development of the lyric in the Victorian period.

Big name contributors such as Malcolm McDonald, Julia Kirby and Morris Holbrook First book to focus on marketing in the publishing industry Stephen Brown is a well known name in this sphere of marketing

This book provides a comprehensive description of how evangelicals in Northern Ireland interpreted the Troubles (1966-2007) in the light of how they read the Bible. The rich and diverse landscape of Northern Irish evangelicalism during the Troubles is ideally suited to this study of both the light and dark sides of apocalyptic eschatology. Searle demonstrates how the notion of apocalypse shaped evangelical and fundamentalist interpretations of the turbulent events that characterized this dark yet fascinating period in the history of Northern Ireland. 'The Scarlet Woman and the Red Hand' uses this case study to offer a timely reflection on some of the most pressing issues in contemporary negotiations between culture and religion. Given the current resurgence of religious fundamentalism in the wake of 9/11, together with popular conceptions of a 'clash of civilizations' and the so-called War on Terror, this book is not only an engaging academic study; it also resonates with some of the defining cultural issues of our time.

An innovative study of the manuscript history of the New Testament, encompassing its paratexts—titles, cross-references, prefaces, marginalia, and more. How did the Christian scriptures come to be? In Words Are Not Enough, Garrick V. Allen argues that our exploration of the New Testament's origins must take account of more than just the text on the page. Where did the titles, verses, and chapters come from? Why do these extras, the paratexts, matter? Allen traces the manuscript history of scripture from our earliest extant texts through the Middle Ages to illuminate the origins of the printed Bibles we have today. Allen’s research encompasses formatting, titles, prefaces, subscriptions, cross-references, marginalia, and illustrations. Along the way, he explains how anonymous scribes and scholars contributed to our framing—and thereby our understanding—of the New Testament. But Allen does not narrate this history to try to unearth a pristine authorial text. Instead, he argues that this process of change is itself sacred. On the handwritten page, scripture and tradition meet. Students, scholars, and any curious reader will learn how the messy, human transmission of the sacred text can enrich our biblical interpretation.

The history of archaeology is generally told as the making of a secular discipline. In nineteenth-century Britain, however, archaeology was enmeshed with questions of biblical authority and so with religious as well as narrowly scholarly concerns. In unearthing the cities of the Eastern Mediterranean, travellers, archaeologists and their popularisers transformed thinking on the truth of Christianity and its place in modern cities. This happened at a time when anxieties over the unprecedented rate of urbanisation in Britain coincided with critical challenges to biblical truth. In this context, cities from Jerusalem to Rome became contested models for the adaptation of Christianity to modern urban life. Using sites from across the biblical world, this book evokes the appeal of the ancient city to diverse groups of British Protestants in their arguments with one another and with their secular and Catholic rivals about the vitality of their faith in urban Britain.