“ they could not see into the sense of the Scripture ” : Towards a Marginal History of Reading the Geneva Bible

Historian and divine Thomas Fuller’s comparison of the Geneva Bible’s marginal annotations to "spectacles" has proved captivating for critics. However, despite fitting neatly within a hermeneutic understanding of scriptural study in which readers search for "inner truths" inside a postlapsarian structure of signs and symbols, this figuration fails to encompass either the ambivalence of Fuller’s full appraisal or the various, complex ways through which readers came to encounter and comprehend their Bibles. This article proposes a new artefactual study of the Geneva Bible’s printed marginalia and their position within early modern reading practices. It demonstrates how the Geneva Bible's (para-)textual apparatuses existed in multiple unstable forms across the life of the translation, charting how different notational formulae impacted upon mise-en-page and, ultimately, upon exegetical praxis.

(or, at least, read very selectively).Ian Green, for example, quotes only "[see] the sense of Scripture" (Green 77) to imply that Fuller himself here argues for the Geneva notes' efficacy in enhancing the common man's reading of scripture.Although Beatrice Groves runs with Fuller's intriguing trope at greater length, noting how "the simile of spectacles illuminates the way in which the notes were used for individual interpretation […] spectacles are only used by one person at a time" (Groves 116), she too overlooks the church-history's clear, if underdeveloped, criticism of the Geneva marginalia's "defects and faults" (Fuller X.58).
As the research of Sharon Achinstein and Kevis Goodman indicates, Fuller's depiction of the Geneva marginalia as a mechanism to aid sight fits broadly within a hermeneutic understanding of scriptural study that grants the act of reading a spatial extension in which readers seek for "inner truths" behind -or inside -a postlapsarian structure of imperfect signs and symbols .
Crucially for my purposes, early-modern conceptions of textual remediation thus frequently operate through a double-logic wherein a fiction of improved immediacy in fact relies on a proliferation of intervening (para-)textual forms and strategies.Goodman refers to this as the "exertion of […] hypermediacy" (Goodman 26). 2 The "Epistle to Walsingham," with which translator and exegete Laurence Tomson introduces his revised English New Testament, exemplifies this logic, promising its "simple and vnlearned" reader that Tomson and Theodore Beza's marginal notes will "remove [a] cloke" from the scriptures, thereby illuminating the "plain light of euery worde" (YML-XXXI.D.21 sigs.aiii ravi r ).In an able rhetorical flourish, Tomson thus presents his marginal notes as correctives that simply remove confusion rather than adding an exegetical-interpretive structure.
Read in full, Fuller's appraisal indicates wariness towards Tomson's hermeneutic enthusiasm, warning that a flawed remediation ("rendring") of scripture acts like a distorting glass that amplifies "darknesse" and confusion.Early on in the church-history, Fuller chooses to omit the Geneva from his table of significant post-Tyndale translations (fig.1.), whilst his apprehensions regarding the overcirculation of vernacular exegeses are apparent in Book V on the Henrician Reformation wherein he highlights the dangers of seeking to acculturate the public too quickly to the intricacies of theology: Zealots of our Age will condemn the Laodicean temper of the Protestant-Bishops […] Such men see the faults of the reformers, but not the difficulties of Reformation […] Should our eyes be instantly posted out of mid-night into noon-day, certainly we should be blinded with the suddenesse and excellency of the lustre thereof (Fuller V.213).
In an intriguing twist to our metaphor of vision, any untimely surge of vernacular exegesis threatens blindness and panic amidst unlearned readers if they are not carefully mentored through scripture by degrees.Although antipathetic towards its regicidal politics, Fuller's church-history thus shares an affinity and a key antinomic trope of vision-as-blindness with John Milton's Eikonoklastes.Both texts seek to wrest interpretive control back from a public of "gazers […] stupefi'd and bewitch'd, into […] a blinde and obstinate beleef"  through overexposure to theological controversy.Kevin Killeen situates Fuller's A Pisgah-Sight of Palestine alongside Thomas Browne's Pseudodoxia as one of a select group of mid-century exegetical texts seeking to reclaim authority "in the face of a perceived hermeneutic anarchy" (Killeen 46) that stemmed from the over-availability of vernacular scripture.I wish to claim the same status for the church-history; Fuller's aim in bringing his long-gestated work to print in 1655 is to draw a timeline that comprehends the splintering of the Anglican Church during the Civil War period.Looking back across one hundred years since its earliest publication, the churchhistory praises both the scholarship and collaborative industry that produced the Geneva Bible.
However, Fuller also lays out a clear aetiology that situates sixteenth-century Puritan exegesis at the root of seventeenth-century England's misfortunes: "the penn-knives of that age, are grown into the swords in ours, and their [the Genevan Exiles'] writings laid the foundation of the fightings now adayes" (Fuller VIII.27).historiography that finally assesses the Geneva margins' complex and multifaceted contribution to early-modern reading practices.His optical-spatial configuration of hermeneutic reading will provide a through-line for this essay as I aim to précis some fruitful avenues and potential pitfalls for future study.
If this seems like a modest or tentative proposal, it reflects the scale of the task: by any metric, the Geneva Bible dominated the Bible market and, by extension, the wider print market in the decades leading up to the publication of the KJV.1604 aside, at least one new edition was printed every year between 1575 and 1611, with John N. King and Aaron T. Pratt estimating a total of 127 editions once the Geneva-Tomson and Geneva-Tomson-Junius revisions have been accounted for .Its readership was concomitantly wide and varied.
That said, this essay will make a decisive critical intervention in our understanding of earlymodern Bible-reading practices in two key ways: firstly, I shall redress the notion of "The Geneva margin" singular (Hill 59) by showing the extent to which the Geneva Bibles' (para-)textual apparatuses existed in multiple unstable forms across the life of the translation.By documenting the ways in which notational schema vary in extent and complexity across three distinct variants of the Geneva Bible, I will demonstrate how these different editions imbricate to greater or lesser degrees with other readerly aids in print across the period.Likewise, I will show how differing notational and typographic formulae impact upon page layout, the proxemic semantics of text and paratext, and therefore also the spatial contours of readerly interpretation.Secondly, I will seek to revise a prevailing and, in my view, slightly misleading truism surrounding the Geneva Bibles' notes: that they are, as it were, theologically neutral and by no means delimited a puritan reading of scripture.Critics have previously highlighted the doctrinal thrust of one or two individual notes, or otherwise have provided rough estimates of the proportion perceived to be Puritan or Protestant in content; David Daniell, for example, estimates that between a half and two thirds are "simple definition" and that " [t]hose that are doctrinal are […] not particularly Calvinist" (Daniell 304).Yet neither approach properly registers how a particularly prevalent type of note -one that is specifically Puritan in doctrine, typological in register, and proleptic in temporal reach -accretes in concentration around key passages of scripture in the Geneva's New Testament and books of prophecy.The cumulative effect of couching key passages of scripture in this type of note, I will argue, holds both political and theological implications that have yet to be fully appreciated across our histories of reading.
A key caveat I first need to address: although arguably the most influential case study in recent histories of reading, Lisa Jardine and Anthony Grafton's detailed analysis of Gabriel Harvey's reading strategies will not inform my own proposed study extensively, concerned as it is with an elite "reader as facilitator" (Jardine and Grafton 48) who undertook scholarly reading as a collaborative goal-oriented practice anterior to political action.Clearly for the reader addressed in biblical study aides such as Edward Vaughan's Ten introductions it is not public political status so much as a personal soteriological account that is at stake as he or she learns "to speake artificially and diuinely of all things necessarie to saluation" (Vaughan sig.K5 r ).Nevertheless, Jardine and Grafton's conclusions remain salient: Harvey at times made use of, glossed -but also frequently ignored -many different paratextual materials in conjunction with Livy's text-proper to produce multiple contradistinctive readings.Any analysis of mise-en-page, paratextual apparatuses, and exegetical notes can thus provide only an outline impression of how Geneva marginalia may have modulated reading practices across early modern England.To paraphrase Robert Darnton and Michel de Certeau, the material that readers "poached" remains ever easier to identify than their methods of "poaching" (Darnton 74;.A full-length study would necessarily consider handwritten marginal responses alongside accounts left by multiple Bible readers to draft a catalogue of reading strategies.
That said, my proposed study takes as its guiding principle Roger Chartier's assertion that readers never experience urtexts extracted from material conditions.Rather, they encounter and make use of "objects and forms whose structures and modalities govern their reading [and]  Such a study should analyse the Geneva Bible and its paratextual apparatuses as an aggregate set of "structures and modalities" that reinforced particular critical frameworks -even epistemes -through which readers perceived the Bible's continued relevance to their understanding of the world.
Two erroneous concepts must be jettisoned from the outset: foremost, we must relinquish Elizabeth Eisenstein's technological positivism, which envisages the precise mechanisms of a Protestant press making "exact, standardized, and ineradicable impressions on the mind of Europe" (Eisenstein 303).Not only does Eisenstein's thesis diminish the extent to which any text could be transmitted in stable form prior to the advent of print, it likewise exaggerates the possibilities for textual uniformity thereafter.Her argument, by extension, would situate the Geneva Bible as the stable and standardized technological consummation of a Protestant "book religion"  that encouraged the common man to internalise the word of God.Eisenstein's argument here, if stretched to its logical conclusion, threatens to take at face value John Foxe's climactic encomium to the providence of print: "as printing of bookes ministred matter of readyng: so readyng brought learning: learning shewed light, […] & finally Gods glory, w t trueth of hys worde, aduaunced" (Foxe 708).As Jean-François Gilmont observes, the doctrine of sola scriptura by no means advocated a free examination of the Bible; indeed, Luther, Beza, and Calvin in particular, all maintained that the common reader could not find edification in private Bible-reading alone.Furthermore, in a letter addressed to the Duke of Somerset, Calvin reveals a telling distinction: "may the people be instructed so as to touch them to the quick […] I say this […] because it seems to me that there is very little lively preaching in the kingdom, but instead most [preachers] recite as if they were reading" (qtd. in Gilmont 231).For Calvin, ministers should not simply facilitate congregational readings of scripture; to do so is to fail in inculcating a sound doctrine of practical theology.Rather, they must revive the word through rhetorical oral performance, centring themselves amidst the congregation through the art of homiletics.Tomson's "Epistle to Walsingham" likewise betrays this phonocentrism in enacting a rhetorical reconciliation (in fact highlighting division) between text/"voyce" (YML-XXXI.D.21 sig.aiii v ) and paratext/gloss that recalls James McLaverty's distinction between texts that act as "scores with utterances as their compliants" and those that act as "imitations of written discourse" (McLaverty 91,102).One form seeks to elicit a (sub-)vocal response, where the other, as Fuller's metaphor of the "spectacles" indicates, demands an interpretation of textual space.We find one crucible of Walsham's rapprochement in the practice of "prophesying", which I will address briefly in the conclusion to this essay.For now, it is simply worth keeping in mind Thomas Cartwright's assertion that "bare [Bible] reading is not able […] to deliuer one sowle", the kingdom of heaven being "ys as yt were locked" (Cartwright ccclxiiii, ccclxxx) to those deprived of good sermonising (qtd. in Walsham 53).
Secondly, we must dispute any too-broad an outline of "The Geneva margin" singular (Hill 59).
Although invaluable in accounting the initial conditions for production and the principle translators involved, works such as Daniell's The Bible in English have kept a narrow focus on the 1557 New Testament and the 1560 Geneva Bible as printed in roman font quartos by Conrad Badius and Rowland Hall respectively.The stark fact, as King and Pratt's bibliographic reappraisal makes clear, is that comparatively few in England would have encountered Badius's or Hall's beautifully illustrated renderings of scripture.Following the succession of Edmund Grindal to the archbishopric of Canterbury in 1575, royal printer Robert Barker received a license to print the Geneva translation in England for the first time, with all thirty-three subsequent quarto editions printed in black-letter and the vast majority of smaller formats printed in roman .For many (if not most) readers, the Geneva Bible came from Barker's London press and may have looked and, depending on format, felt markedly different to the roman font quartos of 1557 and 1560.More crucially for my purposes, the marginal apparatuses supplied by these different editions concomitantly vary extensively, which in turn affects how the texts connect to various biblical aids marketed to assist in active reading.To give an example from an aid we have already encountered, Vaughan's Ten introductions contains the following guide to early modern readers on how best to profit from the marginalia already printed in their Bibles: 3. By some notes after this foremarked as a starre * at the beginning of some verses, and sometimes at the end, and the one expounds the other, if you compare them.4. By these notes ¶ shewing the end of one matter, and the beginning of an other.5.These notes ǁ at the end, in the middle, or in the beginning, pointeth you to the margent for some short definition of wordes, desscription of places, or aetymologie of names.(Vaughan sig.I1 v ) For a reader with access to a Bible similar to YML-XVIII/4.B.5, such a guide corresponded precisely to the notes in their margin and could have assisted in constructing comparative studies of scripture.YML-XVIII/4.B.5 is a lavish folio edition equipped with a complex marginal apparatus that differentiates between "intratextual" references printed in italic, helpful "intra-commentary" sections of scripture denoted by the aforementioned asterisks, and glosses on names, places and alternative translations marked thus: "ǁ".To the owner of a cheaper edition such as BL-3037.e.1., however, this guide would have meant little.Within this small black-letter quarto, each note simply corresponds to a superscript alphabetical character imbedded in the text-proper, with no semiotic formula to differentiate the

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Alexander Hardie-Forsyth 7 content of the notes aside from intratextual references, which remain in italic; typological commentary, etymology, and alternative translations all here blend together without typographic distinction.
Our view is further complicated in the late 1580s with the publication of the Beza-Tomson revised versions in which the marginal notes become truly prolix, often occupying more space on the page than the text-proper.Not only are the notes in these editions more extensive, their typographical and hermeneutic sophistication has likewise much increased.To demonstrate how this complex textual apparatus functions, I refer to fig. 2 and fig. 3. Fig. 2 reproduces the opening prolegomenon to YML-XXXI.D.21, a small octavo impression of the Beza-Tomson revised New Testament.This address, ostensibly from "the printer to the diligent Reader", explains how the marginal notes will interlock through an intricate key in which five lesser-used non-alphabetical symbols (⸪, * etc.) refer the reader to intratextual references in the margin.Meanwhile, notes keyed to the "figures of Arithmeticke" (1, 2, 3…) will "declare the effecte or summe of the doctrine conteined betweene one of the said figures, and the next that followeth..." which in practice permits Beza and Tomson to construct a running commentary in which they can extrapolate an argument point-by-point from the text as it develops.
This system also allows Beza and Tomson to comment on the "method and arte which the Apostles vse", the significance of which will become apparent as we look at fig. 3  Q3 v , Q4 r .Fig. 3 illustrates how this interlocking system of marginalia appears when laid out across the page.What is initially striking is the extent to which the exegetical paratext has come to subsume the biblical text-proper; "marginal" notes now occupy the centre of the page whilst the main body of text sits toward the top-left-hand corner.If we combine Fuller's metaphor with McLaverty's distinction between "scores" and "imitations", the Tomson-Beza Testament thus radically reconfigures the proxemics of "voice" and gloss.The marginal apparatus of remediation now conspicuously predominates the mediated word and the notion that paratexts delimit as well as permit interpretation likewise gains a visual dynamic through the constraints placed on the typographical flow of the textproper.With "paratext" now afforded a central rather than a liminal position, one can wryly appreciate the difficult task William Fulke accepted in answering Gregory Martin's shrewd accusation that Beza had begun "creeping out of the margent into the texte" (Fulke 40). 24Key here is the extent to which the functions of the notes imbricate and overlap, creating a complex interpretive manifold.Take, for example, the note u, which glosses the line "that Worde was made flesh" (M-XXXI.D.21, 1 John 1.14) thus: "That is man, so that the part is taken for the whole, by the figure Synecdoche: for hee tooke vpon him all our whole nature, […] a true bodie, and a true soule".Sitting amidst the numeric points that deconstruct Matthew's account of how "the Sonne of God […] took vpon him mans nature", note u is ostensibly keyed simply to define "darke words & phrases".In fact, note u construes meaning in terms of "method and arte", extraordinarily detailing how the son of God saves all mankind by means of a rhetorical figure.This metaleptic intricacy -a quite literary way of reading scripture -in which the "reality" expressed is inextricably tied to a method of expression that is entirely missing from all earlier editions of the Geneva Bible.It is thus not enough to say, as Femke Molekamp's 2015 survey does, that the Beza-Tomson marginal apparatus is simply "more extensive" with "an increase in Calvinist exegesis packed around the biblical text" ("Genevan Legacies" 49).
This brief exercise demonstrates that when historians such as Christopher Hill refer to "The Geneva margin" (Hill 59), they often flatten a complex and interconnected structure of paratextual apparatuses which, although they share a "microstructural" focus on internal harmony, vary quite radically in design and thus provide quite different experiences in encountering scripture. 3Contrary to Eisenstein's argument, sixteenth-century vernacular scripture was never exact, standardized, or stable, but instead existed in multiple, variant and contradistinctive forms simultaneously.
I now wish to draw a temporal axis across the Geneva Bible's mise-en-page.Our future study of the Geneva's marginalia must also account for the cumulative effect of couching biblical verse in notes that continually recall the reader to the contemporary valence and applications of scripture, paying particular regard to the books of prophecy and the New Testament.Such a study would necessarily need to provide a much more extensive reading on the content of these notes than has hitherto been ventured.
Although critics such as Green and Daniell have sought to downplay the Geneva margins' doctrinal reach, arguing that "about three-quarter of the Old Testament, and half to the New, are simple definition […] Those that are doctrinal are scriptural, and not particularly Calvinist" (Daniell 304), this view, I would suggest, is somewhat reductive, ignoring the aggregate impression that extensive passages of doctrinal marginalia may have left upon readers.That the inclusion of printed Biblical marginalia in all their manifestations proved politically contentious can be taken as read considering the state's official proscription against their inclusion in the Authorised Version. 4 The Arminian controversies of the earlyseventeenth century similarly saw the authors of the Genevan notes ("those he termeth glossers") denounced in a series of homilies delivered by John Howson at Oxford. 5 Contra Daniell's claims of benignity, we should not, I think, dismiss such handwringing as wholly invalid.I wish here to highlight further evidence in support of Molekamp's assertion (Women and the Bible 63) that, despite William Perkin's belief that Protestant divines should reject the Scholastic model of "4.senses of the scriptures, the literall, allegoriall, tropological, & anagogical" in favour of "one onelie […] literall" sense , many of the Geneva's notes in fact operate within a typological register that delimits a proleptic -and thus politically charged -reading of biblical history.Such a study may yield fruit in several different fields.It could, for example, further our understanding of how dialogic forms of biblical exegesis came to dominate the radical pamphleteering of the Civil War period.When Milton seeks to intervene in the drama of history  by recasting Charles I's image in the likeness of Ahab and Belshazzar (Milton 390), he does so supported

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Alexander Hardie-Forsyth 11 by a Bible that presents Jezebel's atrocity at Naboth's vinyard as "[an] example of monstrous crueltie [that] the holy Ghost leaueth to vs to the intent that wee should abhorre all tyrannie" (BL-3037.e.1.,I Kings 21.17-19.n). 6Likewise, when Abiezer Coppe assumes the register of an Old Testament prophet to forge his rhetoric of "apocalyptic immanence", he does so with the Geneva's assurance that the true ministers and prophets of God "by his word haue power to beate down whatsoeuer lifteth it self vp against God" (BL-3037.e.1.,Jeremiah 9.10.n). 7Crucially, these notes and those following all appear in BL-3037.e.1, printed prior to the more doctrinaire Beza-Tomson revisions.Thus, even in their earlier less extensive forms, the Geneva notes asked readers to view contemporary events through a lens of biblical examples divinely tooled to prefigure the coming of -and sufferings of -Christ's church.BL-3037.e.1.'s margin thus constructs a complex temporal-spatial cartography that maps past onto present, Holy Land onto Geneva-Rome-England, and vice versa.
That the bulk of these typological renderings appear in the books of prophecy, the Pauline epistles, and the Acts of the Apostles comes as little surprise, centred as these are on the exile of the Jews in Babylon and the foundation of the early church respectively.The summary notes to Romans 9, for example, teach the lesson that "God euer hath his Church although it be not seene to mans eye" (BL-3037.e.1.,Romans 9.n), contravening the doctrinal pre-eminence of the Catholic "church-visible" that Edmund Campion would later defend in his trial debates.Meanwhile, a further note to the same chapter predicts that "God wil make such wast of the people that the few, which shall remaine, shal be a worke of his iustice.And shall set forth his glorie in his church" (BL-3037.e.1.,Romans 9.28.n),illustrating how salvation is attainable only for the few elect whom God has deigned to deliver.The note to Romans 12.6, though less gnomic in voice and apocalyptic in tone, nonetheless draws the reader to the historical foundation and contemporary triumph of Genevan ecclesiastical polity: "By prophecying here he [Paul] meaneth preaching & teaching & by office or ministerie, al such offices, as apperteine to y e Church, as Elders, Deacós, & c…" (BL-3037.e.1.,Romans 12.6.n).
These are just three examples drawn from one book of the Bible in which marginal notes interpret scripture's role in prefiguring the struggles and triumphs of the Protestant Church.To take Ezekiel from the books of prophecy as a further example, a marginal note for 6.8 asserts that Ezekiel here "sheweth that in all dangers God will preserve a fewe, which shall be as the seede of his Church" (BL-3037.e.1, Ezekiel 12.6.n).This note and those that follow stress how the true church will emerge from an elect, or final, remnant that God deigns to spare through times of crisis.Similarly, for Ezekiel 11.16: "they shalbe yet a little church shewing that the Lord wil euer haue some to cal vpon his name, whom he wil preserue and restore" .Significantly for Coppe, the gloss to Ezekiel XVII's famous "levelling" passage from which A Fiery Flying Roll takes its pledge "to Levell with a witnesse […] High Mountains!Lofty Cedars!" (Coppe 78) runs thus: "This promes is made to the Church which shal be as a final remnant, and as the top of the tree" .
Whilst few of these notes individually stand out as exclusively Calvinist-Protestant in content, they accrete in concentration around key books and passages, asking their owners to read the contemporary struggles and future rewards of God's Church through a lens of archetypes, maxims, and examples of endurance through tyranny.
To conclude, I want briefly to address a nascent avenue of research into Bible-reading practices.
In doing so, I must return to a previous paragraph in which I left Thomas Cartwright advocating the collective practice of "prophesying" over "bare [Bible] reading".Any account of the Geneva margins' impact on reading practices must eventually leave the "structures and modalities" of the page to analyse contemporary advice on -and accounts of -usage.Here, we must tread cautiously.Since Patrick Collinson's seminal account of The Elizabethan Puritan Movement's practice of prophesying, it has been tempting to envisage seventeenth-century congregations of "the godly" sitting in equanimity "with their Geneva Bibles open on their laps, searching for the texts cited by preachers" (Collinson175).Such intratextual practices of Bible navigation, facilitated through the Geneva's division of scripture into chapters and verses, have been detailed by Daniell, Molekamp, Stallybrass and others.I won't re-tread ground here other than to note that as early as 1564 biblical aids and commentaries were explicitly referencing the chapter and verses "set foorth in the Byble printed at Geneua" as "the most expedite and ready way for speedy finding of the same" (Vermigli sig.Biii r ).Aids such as Vaughan's Ten introductions, as we have seen, assumed their readers could consult exegetical apparatuses specifically tooled to the Geneva translation.The practice of prophesying, in theory, permitted communal use of the Geneva's exegetical apparatuses, crossing Calvin's line between reading and preaching.William Perkins's Arte of Prophecying, for example, not only liberally references the Geneva's chapters and verses to justify its theological praxis, it also argues that a good minister, as mediator between "the voyce of God" and the "voyce of the people in the acte of praying, Ier 15.19.", should aide the "memorie and understanding" (Perkins 3,12) of his congregation through the practice of common-placing.Such active encounters with scripture, in which readers "poach" key passages to combine and impress to memory under "heads of euery point of diuinitie" (Perkins 28), may have drawn on a range of navigational and interpretive aids including intratextual references and interpretive notes.To what extent did Perkins's theory affect practice across real congregations of the godly?Did the Geneva marginalia play a central role in such practice?These are questions future study must address. 8Notes 1.The Geneva New Testament was first published in quarto in 1557, followed by the first edition of the Geneva Bible in 1560 (again, in quarto).
4. David Norton's modernisation of BL-MS Add 28721's instructions to the KJV's translators reads thus: "No marginal notes at all to be affixed, but only for the explanation of the Hebrew or Greek words, which cannot without some circumlocution so briefly and fitly expressed in the text" (Norton 8).
5. The Arminian controversies, or the anti-Calvinist discourse of the early seventeenth century, take their name from the works of the Dutch theologian Jacobus Arminius.As Nicholas Tyacke notes, "what finally determined that the name of Arminius, rather than that of any other theologian, became synonymous with anti-Calvinism was the Synod of Dort" (Tyacke 8), an international Calvinist gathering which met in 1619 to condemn the doctrines of Arminius and his proselytes.More broadly, we can understand the Arminian discourse of early seventeenth-century England as a tranche of Protestantism which disputed justification by faith and the Calvinist predestinarian schema as depicted in works such as William Perkins's A golden chaine.
6. Milton's Civil War prose, alongside that of his contemporaneous pamphleteers, provides a particularly compelling example of polemic that rigorously applies Biblical examples and archetypes to immediate political circumstances.As Thomas Fulton notes, "unlike Thomas Hobbes or James Harrington, Milton did not sit down to write political theory but to address a particular situation with particular adversaries.His public writing during the 1640s took a form that is deeply enmeshed in its discursive and historical context" (Fulton 4).The fact that Milton references no biblical passages whatsoever in his surviving commonplace book (Fulton 57) seems extraordinary yet is hardly conclusive, given that Milton elsewhere references his compositional use of a separate and specific Indicem Theologicum, which is currently lost to us (Fulton 61).As Fulton again notes, the surviving commonplace book is heavy on historical reading and tends to focus on accumulating "facts or concepts" (Fulton 57) rather than expedient aphorisms.
Milton, we know, owned a 1612 KJV Bible (BL-Add MS 32310 in the British Library) -one of the few extant ex-libris books from his own collection -in which he recorded the births and deaths of family members.He also commonly used the Beza-Tremellius-Junius Latin Bible, notably as the basis for the proof-texts in De Doctrina Christiana .I do not here wish to suggest that Milton was regularly using an English Geneva Bible, although Fulton's analysis of The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates suggests that he was attuned to key differences in terminology between "magistrate" and "ruler" in the Geneva and KJV's translations respectively .Rather, I would argue that the Geneva Bible's interpretive notes had already established the legitimacy of a typological reading of scripture later promulgated by pamphleteers throughout the Civil War period.

Fig
Fig. 1.Table of significant post-Tyndale English translations of the Bible in Fuller, VII, 387.
Fuller's decidedly ambivalent view on the Genevan exiles and their translation's interpretive apparatuses, then, serves as an extended introduction to what I would like to propose as a new textual thus the possible comprehension of the text read" (Chartier 3).Likewise, the work of Jerome McGann and D.F. McKenzie reminds us that we cannot understand copies of the Geneva Bible as variant "channels of transmission" through which the Word was received so much as discreet examples of "transmissive interaction" (McGann 11) in which material form (format, typography, mise-en-page etc.) holds an expressive function (McKenzie 18).Broadly speaking, I thus propose an artefactual approach to reading Geneva marginalia -a history of textual experiences in which the products of print remain foremost in view.
Calvin's phonocentrism is likewise shared by many of the Protestant divines examined in Alexandra Walsham's survey of providence in early modern England.Contrary to Eisenstein's perfect amalgam of reproductive technology and theological emancipation, Walsham outlines a tentative rapprochement in which Calvinist divines gradually submitted "the gesture and countenance of[their]    livinge [sermons]" to the "dead letter" (King sig.*4 r ) of the printing press (qtd. in Walsham 54).
. Finally, notes indicated by superscript alphabetical letters provide alternative translations and also serve to "expound & lighten the darke words & phrases immediately following them".
8. I wish to thank Brian Cummings at York and Thomas Fulton at Rutgers for their comments on earlier drafts of this article.
Table of significant post-Tyndale English translations of the Bible in Fuller, VII, 387.