Erik Lundeen's magisterial study of the way the Protestant Reformers read Old Testament prophecy brings both clarity and order to what might otherwise resemble a Babel-like confusion of sixteenth-century opinions as to what counts as literal interpretation. The Reformation of the Literal accomplishes something the Reformers themselves could not: it makes explicit the implicit assumptions about meaning and interpretation that they, and we, inevitably bring to the all-important task of reading the Bible as the church's authoritative Scripture.

Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, USA

Erik Lundeen has written a masterful study of early Protestant interpretations of Old Testament prophecy. Complicating the view that the reformers accepted only the literal sense of Scripture, he highlights the difficulty of defining “literal.” With Johannes Oecolampadius's commentary on Isaiah at the center of his analysis, he draws attention to the influence of Erasmian biblical humanism and shows how the reformers interacted with patristic, medieval, and Jewish exegetical traditions and with each other. This is a major contribution to our understanding of the history of exegesis that addresses important questions about allegory, typology, and what it means to interpret prophetic texts literally.

Amy Nelson Burnett, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, USA

This is an extraordinary work of scholarship. Erik Lundeen asks what it meant for the Protestant reformers to read the Bible literally, as they claimed to do. The result is a groundbreaking and wide-ranging examination of early modern biblical culture. The literal meaning of the Bible was far from straightforward and the reformers took different routes in their search for clarity. Lundeen reveals the diversity of Protestant scriptural interpretation and transforms our understanding of the fraught world of the Reformation Bible.

Bruce Gordon, Yale University, USA