InsaneJournal

Books, 2008
1. God's Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible, by Adam Nicolson.

Underwhelmed is a good word. I was rather expecting something more along the lines of the actual making of the Bible, and less about a complex mish-mash of history, art history, politics, literature, and theology. And the mish-mash is made more complex by Nicolson's fairly inadequate retelling of the politics of the age, and of the positions of the players, and their philosophical backgrounds -- by necessity, this is a period that I know something about, and his telling is vastly more pop journalism than solid story-telling or reliable historiography. (I think that was all it was supposed to be, but like I said: underwhelmed.)

There are hints, here and there, of what he was aiming for (and what I wanted to read), but they are merely hints, unfleshed out and lacking depth and richness. And they also only last a paragraph or two.

On the other hand, I love his idea that the reason English portraiture of the era is so boring is that "there is, washing over it all, the clarity of a pure, unshadowed, Protestant light" (144).

But I don't quite buy his argument, at least, not the way he lays it out, and not the whole thing. A great unifying book, perhaps, a political compromise, certainly. But a reflection wholesale of an era, writ small in a book? Only insofar as every book is a reflection of its era. And I wish he'd have had a better editor -- any one of the several threads he's pulling would have made a wonderful book, but all of them together is just ugly.

However, from here several books have been added to the list: Allen, Translating for King James and Translating the New Testament Epistles, Allen and Jacobs, The Coming of the King James Gospels, Bobrick, The Making of the English Bible, Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe, de Hamel, The Book, Griffiths and Jenner (eds), Londinopolis, McGrath, In the Beginning, Robinson, Western Translation Theory from Herodotus to Nietzche, Steiner, After Babel, Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, Underdown, Fire from Heaven, and Wootton (ed), Divine Right and Democracy As usual, there are vastly more books that I want to read than time in which to read them.