Volume 54, Number 19 · December 6, 2007
Wars Over the Printed Word
By Frank Kermode
Burning to Read: English Fundamentalism and Its Reformation Opponents
by James Simpson
Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 346 pp., $27.95
James Simpson's book, Burning to Read, is a lively and detailed study of the early-sixteenth-century reformers (here described as 'fundamentalists') who believed the Bible and not the papacy to be the sole authority in matters of religious faith. His object is not merely to offer a new look at an old controversy but to argue that historians have long been under the delusion that the reformers can be regarded as the ancestors of modern liberal thought. On the contrary, says Simpson: for their insistence on the inerrancy of the Bible they deserve to be called the ancestors not of modern liberalism but of modern fundamentalism, which, as we are all aware, exists in many pernicious forms. The purpose of his book, then, is, first, to offer a fresh, authoritative account of a spectacular increase in Bible-reading some five hundred years ago and, second, to suggest that the threat of modern fundamentalisms is as great as, and may even derive from, the threat of an earlier fundamentalism to the authority and the inherited, extra-biblical wisdom of the Roman Church.
Review, 4357 words
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