Christian Hebraism in the Reformation Era (1500–1660): Authors, Books, and the Transmission of Jewish Learning . By Stephen G. Burnett. Library of the Written Word 19. The Handpress World 13. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2012. xii + 317 pp. $143.00 cloth.

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)Christian Hebraism in the Reformation Era (1500-1660): Authors, Books, and the Transmission of Jewish Learning . By Stephen G. Burnett . Library of the Written Word 19. The Handpress World 13. Leiden, Netherlands : Brill , 2012. xii + 317 pp. $143.00 cloth.Book Reviews and NotesStephen Burnett's book traces the rise of Christian Hebraism in Western Europe against the backdrop of the Reformation. It is based on the approximately 2,000 imprints published between 1500 and 1660 in which there was "a substantial amount of Hebrew type" (5). The comprehensive list of these books compiled by Burnett allows him to identify the most important Hebraist authors, publishers and works (Appendices 1-2). In addition, by considering the printing, reading, and collection of these imprints, Burnett reconstructs the larger context of why Christian Hebraism flourished in the sixteenth century.Like other scholars, Burnett points to the development of Renaissance humanism and Protestantism to explain the sharp growth in Christian interest in Hebrew and Judaica at this time. Burnett expands this narrative by discussing patronage, princely collections, and the increased university positions in Hebrew among both Protestants and Catholics.Burnett convincingly demonstrates developments in the Reformation influenced Hebraism, arguing that the process of confessionalization impacted both the scope and content of Christian Hebraism. Before 1560, Christian Hebraism was limited to a few discrete centers. Jews and converts from Judaism to Christianity were heavily involved in the project, and intimate relationships helped to fuel the production of Hebraist texts. In terms of content, 87.2% of Hebraist production comprised grammars, dictionaries, concordances, Bibles, and commentaries (95, Table 3.1; 135-136). The precision with which Burnett has calculated these figures speaks to the importance of his scholarly contribution and to the magnitude of the research he undertook for this project.Post-confessional Hebraist works differed from the pre-1560 production. A contrast of the pre- and post-1560 production reveals a slightly broader range of works, including liturgical texts. Book catalogues from fairs and specific publishers marketed these texts to a wider audience. This second period also saw the development of Christian Hebraism "independent of Jews and Judaism" (9).Burnett also notes confessional differences among Hebraist authors, including their educational exposure to Hebrew, employment patterns, and the degree to which they were clustered in a particular geographic location (64-79). Moreover, the kinds of books that Hebraists produced varied according to confession. Catholics, for example, wrote far more about the reliability of the biblical text; Lutherans focused on biblical interpretation, textual scholarship, and polemics; Reformed and Anglican Hebraists wrote more about the history of the biblical and Second Temple periods (275-276).Reformation-era Hebraism was "remarkable for both its sheer size and its rather narrow scope" (135). That only a limited set of topics from the Judaica corpus were of interest to Christian Hebraists is underscored by Burnett's references to Shifra Baruchson-Arbib's work, which examines Jewish reading practices based on Jewish libraries in Mantua (La Culture livresque des Juifs d'Italie a la Fin de la Renaissance . …