Hilmar M. Pabel and Mark Vessey, eds. Holy Scripture Speaks: the Production and Reception of Erasmus' Paraphrases on the New Testament.

Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 2002. xvi + 398 pp. index, illus, bibl. $80. ISBN: 0-8020-3642-2.

Stephen Toulmin's Cosmopolis argues that the centuries of Cartesian dominion in the West were a mere episode of modernist rebellion against the earlier pre-post-modernism of Renaissance humanism. Holy Scripture Speaks, which, in publishing symposium papers delivered at Victoria University in 1999, seeks to awaken scholarly interest in Erasmus' long-neglected Paraphrases, also establishes them as a site for proving the point I ascribe to Toulmin while reassessing Erasmus' "textual universe" in its full social, cultural, and material reality. The book achieves all this by looking closely at Erasmus' theory and practice as humanist and Bible scholar, revealing the unavoidable generative interaction of his acts of reading, writing, and reforming.

The book begins with a fine introduction by Mark Vessey and is then divided, somewhat arbitrarily, into eight chapters examining Erasmus' production of the Paraphrases and five examining their reception, including the printing process and translation into French and English.

In the introduction and his paper, Vessey relates the Paraphrases to Erasmus' project of "repristinating" scripture and making it effective as preaching that could be heard and heeded by his own times. The Paraphrases are homiletic commentaries that perfect in theological actio the philological restoration of scripture carried out in Novem Testamentum. Vessey points up the rhetorical aspect of this scribal preaching by showing how Erasmus, in thus resurrecting the scriptural authors, differs from his role model, Jerome, in ways characteristic of another, more radical alter ego, the garrulous and acid-tongued "Dame Folly." This analysis of the Paraphrases as a synthesis of philology and reforming sacred rhetoric is continued by Bernard Roussel, who gives an account of the of biblical paraphrase in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as exegetical fiction and also makes thematic the problematic nature of "pluralistic" readings and writings of scripture that is in fact underlined by the volume as a whole.

There follow three chapters on specific ways in which Erasmus used his humanistic learning in providing voicing and historical specificity to the copia of his paraphrasing. Robert D. Sider and Jane E. Phillips both discuss the techniques he uses to make distinct the personae through whom he speaks, Sider looking at his voicing of, and self-identification with, Saint Paul and Phillips examining his fleshing out of Saint Luke. Mechtilde O'Mara shows how he used his reading of history in references to Roman triumphs, trophies, and spoils.

The first part ends with chapters by Irena Backus and Hilmer M. Pabel that were my favorites. Backus examines the asperity present in the relationship Erasmus' Jesus has with his family. Pabel discusses with great wisdom Erasmus' reform attitudes toward marriage underlining the humanist's willingness to ignore his earlier philological decision to call marriage a mystery rather than a sacrament in order to take advantage of all the persuasive force of the word "sacrament" in recommending marriage as spiritually equal to celibacy.

The second part of the book begins with a detailed account of some the printing history of the Paraphrases by John Bateman. Erika Rummel explains that Noel Beda was, of course, offended both by much in Erasmus' theology and by his effrontery in attempting as a mere grammarian to engage in theology at all. Guy Bedouelle shows how translation of the Paraphrases fit politically into the religious struggles in France and Gretchen E. Minton does something similar looking at the decision to make available an English Paraphrases and the significance of the non-Erasmian paraphrase of Revelation that was added to it. The last chapter, by John Craig, shows that the Paraphrases were certainly widely available in English parishes but that it is most difficult to establish anything certain about their influence.

This collection makes clear the historically embedded character of Erasmus' philological science and his awareness of a gap between philology and rhetoric bridged not by learned rediscovery of textual meaning by only by his reform insights and commitments. These essays make me more sympathetic with Noel Beda's frustration with Erasmus' literary activism but also more impressed with the strength (or audacity) of spirit embodied in that activism.

WOOD BOULDIN

Villanova University