The Political Bible in Early Modern England

Kevin Killeen is a Senior Lecturer at the University of York. He is the author of Biblical Scholarship, Science and Politics in Early Modern England: Thomas Browne and the Thorny Place of Knowledge (2009), which won the Council for College and University English Book Prize and was shortlisted for the Watson Davis and Helen Miles Davis Prize of the History of Science Society. He is editor of the Oxford Handbook of the Bible in Early Modern England, c.1530–1700 (with Helen Smith and Rachel Judith Willie, 2015) and Thomas Browne: Oxford 21st Century Authors (2014), and has won both the Council of University Deans Prize and the Renaissance Studies essay prize.

1. Introduction: the political bible; 2. Early modern hermeneutics and the Old Testament; 3. The sermon, the listener and enemy theory in the Thirty Years War; 4. Hezekiah, the politics of municipal plague and the London poor; 5. Constitution and resistance: the language of Civil War political thought; 6. Dividing the kingdom: Rehoboam and Jeroboam; 7. Hanging up kings: regicide and political memory; 8. Preaching on the ramparts: Hezekiah at war; 9. How Jezebel became sexy: Ahab, Naboth's land and Jezebelian hermeneutics; 10. Conclusion; Appendix. Chronology of Biblical kings; Bibliography; Index.