Biblical Scholarship in an Age of Controversy: The Polemical World of Hugh Broughton (1549-1612) [Book Review]

Kirsten Macfarlane is the first scholar to attempt an intellectual biography of Hugh Broughton, one of the most proficient linguists and biblical scholars in England during the three decades prior to his death in 1612, and certainly the most irascible. The book exhibits scholarly ambition and its own form of polemic: all previous scholars (myself included), Macfarlane contends, have gone astray in their interpretation of Broughton, in following, and further sullying, a construal fashioned by John Lightfoot, editor of Broughton's works and his first biographer, which amounted to a 'historical revision with its corollaries of erasure and simplification', especially regarding Broughton's confessional ambiguity and its bearings on his polemics (2). This risks misrepresenting previous scholarship and underplaying the book's indebtedness to it. The book elucidates, in six chapters, key elements of Broughton's learned endeavours: scripture chronology, Bible translation, biblical genealogies, anti-Jewish polemics, the controversy over Christ's descent into hell, and Broughton's views about a New Testament translation. There is much of value here, both in terms of the scholarly contexts of each topic and Macfarlane's presentation of Broughton's own contribution. Nevertheless, Macfarlane's over-riding objectives and the conceptual framework she chooses to build on are problematic.