Title: Biblical literalism and scholarship in Protestant northern Europe, 1630--1700
Description: This dissertation explores how seventeenth-century German and Dutch Protestants approached the task of interpreting the Bible according to its literal sense, or sensus literalis. It focuses on two of the most respected and learned Protestant theologians and exegetes active in the middle of the century and on their commentaries on Genesis. Chapter 1 evaluates current scholarship on the literal sense of the Bible and traces Christian scholars' conceptions of the literal sense from the second century to the seventeenth. Chapters 2 and 4 analyze the religious, academic, and political contexts of Lutheran Saxony and the University of Wittenberg, as well as the Calvinist Dutch Republic and the University of Leiden. Chapters 3 and 5 offer close readings of commentaries on Genesis 1-3 by the most prominent theologian-exegete from each university, Abraham Calov (1612-86) of Wittenberg and Johannes Cocceius (1603-69) of Leiden. The two chapters then compare Calov's and Cocceius's complex, often nuanced understandings of the literal sense to the frequently one-dimensional portrayals of the theologians in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century historiography. The conclusion examines the fate of the literal sense from the eighteenth century to the present.

By examining the relationship between text and context, this study concludes that there were four criteria that determined how Calov and Cocceius arrived at their respective understandings of the sensus literalis of a given verse in the Old Testament. They were: each man's grammatical and lexical approaches to interpreting the text, including his definitions of crucial Hebrew terms; the consensus of the Fathers and more recent commentators he respected; his doctrinal priorities; and what he hoped his commentary would accomplish, particularly in inter-confessional polemics. Those criteria could be applied, also, to how other contemporary Lutheran and Calvinist theologians and interpreters conceived of the literal sense. Past and even much current scholarship portrays reading according to the literal sense as a monolithic method for interpreting the Bible. I argue that, because of the interdependence of each interpreter's context and his understanding of the sensus literalis , there was not one literal sense; there were many.