The Plunders of Codex Bezae

“Plunder,” the Oxford English Dictionary reports, entered the English language in the 17th century in the context of the Thirty Years’ War.[1] Employed initially to describe the theft of household goods by marauding or conquering troops,[2] by the late nineteenth century the term had gained a new meaning as a way to talk about the act of taking material from a literary, artistic, or academic work for one’s own purposes.[3] Plunder, then, involves the appropriation of the intimate possessions of another: what is felt to be peculiarly one’s own (a plate and a tablecloth, a head of cabbage intended for the soup, or a creative work) is employed to sustain some other purpose (the soup for the soldier, the table for the king, or someone else’s poem). In the process, the previous owner of the plate, cloth, cabbage, or poem is overlooked, forgotten, erased, or obscured as the tableware is given a new table, the soup is consumed, and the earlier artistic production supplanted by the new. Interpretation operates in a similar way: obscuring an earlier work by presenting it anew, an interpretation presents some other sequence of words, sentences, paragraphs, and plots ostensibly for the sake of excavating what the thing-interpreted really meant to say.

New Testament manuscripts like Codex Bezae (D/d 05) circulate within cycles of interpretation and plunder: carefully thumbed by readers, improved by marginal corrections and additions, used up or worn out but not discarded, manuscripts are re-purposed and preserved, their texts transferred to other purposes and their bodies conveyed to some other home.[4] Paradoxically, texts survive because they are interpreted; as objects worthy of interpretation they endure, even when an interpretation, by filling in a meaning a text has somehow failed to convey clearly, works to push out its competition—the thing-interpreted as well as the interpretations-of-others. Paradoxically, manuscripts also survive not only by rescue but by plunder; taken from one home to another, they are deposited in some other place, perhaps in another monastery, a museum, a library collection, or a digitized archive.[5] Bound by ties of belonging and wrapped up in economic, political, cultural, and aesthetic attributions of value, such procedures entail loss as well as gain, for people as well as their books. The willingness of institutional actors to claim ownership of objects is replayed in the related willingness to violate bodies from which objects are taken. Former homes and former owners also leave traces, however, and sometimes such traces endure, if one takes the time to look.[6] The history of Codex Bezae—likely copied in Syria and taken to Lyon, Geneva, and Cambridge—offers one illustration of what inhabiting cycles of rescue-interpretation-plunder can entail.

The Rescues of Codex Bezae

In 551 CE the port city Berytus, Syria, the “jewel of Phoenicia” (Agathias, Histories, 2.15.2) was almost totally destroyed by an earthquake.[7] The city’s illustrious law school collapsed, the silk trade found another primary port of call, and the city never fully recovered.[8] Literary accounts of Justinian’s patronage, modest archaeological remains, and comments by, among others, the Piacenza pilgrim,[9] show that Berytus endured, albeit in a reduced capacity. Still, with so much of the city’s and the port’s infrastructure in ruins, the golden age of Latin letters in Berytus was over. Late antique Christianity endured, however, as this manuscript can show.

There is a very good chance that Codex Bezae, the famous fifth-century bilingual copy of the Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles now held at the Cambridge University Library (D/d 05 Cambridge University Library Nn. 2.41), was a survivor of this calamity. As David Parker has shown, codicological, paratextual, and textual features place the manuscript in a setting very like late antique Berytus, if not Berytus itself.[10] Copied and regularly consulted somewhere in the East by some Christian community, Bezae was first corrected by a scribe familiar with both languages. Subsequent corrections and interventions neglect the Latin side of the manuscript, however, attending instead to the Greek. Over the course of about a century, liturgical annotations were added by as many as a dozen hands to the margins of the Greek, providing the earliest evidence for the influence of the Constantinopolitan liturgy outside of the capitol city.[11] Other additions include a Sortes apparatus supplied to the Gospel of Mark and distinctive running titloi that call attention to Jesus’s striking deeds. Such a pattern of production and use—an idiosyncratic Latin-Greek text copied from some earlier diglot exemplar(s) and many Greek marginal notations —places Bezae squarely in a location very like Berytus. If this is correct, after being copied ca. 400 CE and then well used for about a century and a half, Bezae was in Berytus during the disaster; some quick-thinking monk or cleric must have helped the codex escape just in time. It was then consulted and read until the mid-seventh century, as these marginal notations illustrate.

The codex entered center stage again in the nineteenth- and twentieth-centuries during the rise of modern New Testament textual criticism. A source of fascination for its aberrant text, the manuscript was an important focus of scholars and editors intent on explaining (away) its text’s odd readings. Scholars like F. H. A. Scrivener, Brooke Foss Westcott, Fenton John Anthony Hort, and J. Rendel Harris sought to identify the provenience of the manuscript so that they could better place its “Western text” within a hypothetical set of “text-types,” groupings of textual “nations” or “families” linked to geographical areas where textual revisions likely occurred.[12] By scrutinizing Bezae’s orthographic peculiarities, marginal notes, corrections, textual variants, and scribal slips, these critics looked for clues about this text’s origins; the manuscript’s origin was a secondary concern.[13] Thus Harris, for example, beginning with the knowledge that Bezae had once been held by a monastery in Lyon, proposed a Gallican setting for the text’s production, decried the “barbarism” of its readings, and lamented the willingness of scribes to treat the texts they had inherited so freely.[14] This “Western” identity of Bezae and its text also supplied Westcott and Hort with their paradoxical phrase “Western non-interpolations,” a term for those unusual instances when this manuscript as well as a few others preserve a shorter, rather than a longer, reading and so therefore (in theory at least) a text closer to the “original.”[15] Sorting texts on the basis of their “Western,” “Alexandrian,” or “Syrian” character, to borrow terms employed by Westcott and Hort, these critics labored to answer to the riddle of Bezae’s distinctive character by investigating first its moment of birth and second its life as a textual object, employing science to discover (i.e., to invent) a hierarchizable set of textual genealogical trees that could elevate some texts and facilitate the dismissal of others.[16] As such, Bezae-as-object gained a role as a disembodied text and Protestant scholars established their reputations as professional editors, uniquely qualified to apply the wonders of modern science to the corrupt text of the New Testament.[17]

By now, the “Western” origin of Bezae as a manuscript has been thoroughly discredited, thanks in part to Parker’s astute study,[18] and the text-type theory has been roundly criticized, despite a continuing confidence in genealogical methods. Still, the custom of extracting texts from manuscript witnesses remains the norm; the Coherence Based Genealogical Method, for example, removes texts from their manuscript exemplars even further than before, comparing texts by means of a rigorous procedure that collates test passages, compares variants, and produces sophisticated “text flow diagrams.”[19] This current presentation of Bezae re-enlivens the D-text in remarkable new ways. It also avoids the Orientalizing condescension of an earlier age.[20] But, like presentations of Bezae by Scrivener and Harris a century ago, editions produced by New Testament textual criticism—including the Editio Critica Maior of Acts, where Bezae looms large—also relegate manuscripts to a critical apparatus and elevate an eclectic text, scientifically established, to the status of “the text.” This tendency to prefer a disembodied text to embodied manuscripts is not only a certain kind of rescue, however; it is also a plunder, as Bezae’s history illustrates.[21] The evacuation of the significance of former chains of ownership—what is valued is the text, not the object itself, and therefore the people who produced and preserved it are at best a secondary concern—was already in play when Bezae was taken from Lyon to Geneva at the height of the Protestant Reformation.

The Plunders of Codex Bezae  

In 1546, Guillaume du Prat, Bishop of Clermont, brought Codex Bezae to the Council of Trent so that he could employ its distinctive reading at John 21:22 (“if I wish him to remain thus until I come”) to provide a biblical basis of celibacy.[22] “It was probably owing to the attention thus drawn to this manuscript,” Bruce Metzger explains, “that friends of the famous Parisian printer and editor, Robert Estienne, communicated to him from Italy a list of its noteworthy readings.”[23] Estienne included some of these readings in the critical apparatus he prepared for his 1550 edition of the Greek New Testament, the first to include such an apparatus.[24] Identifying the manuscript with the sigla β´, he called attention to approximately 350 variant readings drawn from Bezae in the margins of a Greek text that came to be known as the Textus Receptus.[25] That same year, Estienne migrated to Geneva, formally declaring his allegiance to the Protestant cause.[26] Beza, John Calvin’s secretary, was aware of Estienne’s variants; in his own annotated Greek and Latin New Testament, published in Basel in 1559, he mentions them.[27] By 1562, he had the manuscript personally in hand though, strangely, he failed to recognize it as the same manuscript that had provided the readings he knew from Estienne. He may have made an honest mistake, Jan Krans suggests: Estienne’s apparatus was riddled with errors, Beza did not approach variant readings systematically in his annotated edition (rather, he simply noted those he thought were significant), and all he actually knew about the manuscript is that it came from Lyon.[28] Still, if he had been paying closer attention he could have easily recognized the manuscript’s distinctive text and known who and what he was dealing with.

One unacknowledged detail, however, is certain: the manuscript made its way from Lyon to Geneva as a result of plunder and war. In 1562 the Huguenots[29] gained control of Lyon; statues were taken down from the façade of Saint-Jean Cathedral and thrown to the floor, church bells were melted for their metal, and the Abbey was destroyed. Somehow over the course of that same year, the manuscript was “liberated” from Catholic control and taken from the monastery in Lyon, its home since sometime before 850 CE, to Protestant Geneva.[30] As Scrivener noted: “It can hardly be doubted that someone who shared in the plunder of the Abbey conveyed this portion of it to Beza, who might naturally assume that of which he could have no direct information, that it had long lain there neglected to dust.”[31] David Parker proposed another possibility: perhaps Beza purchased the manuscript from a book seller in Geneva, brought by way of refugees displaced by the war.[32] Of course, we cannot actually know, but whether plundered or taken by a refugee, the manuscript had escaped calamity once again. From a Protestant perspective, perhaps the removal of Estienne’s witness β´ would have been not a theft but a justified re-appropriation. One cannot steal a book one already “owns.” 

Finally, the codex arrived in Cambridge in 1581, its current home, as a gift from Beza to Queen Elizabeth. Beza’s donation may not have been a simple gift; rather, this significant addition to the Cambridge University Library was likely intended to prop up his own reputation and also to help to consolidate the Protestant cause during what had been a turbulent year. In 1580, the Jesuit Edmund Campion and a group of missionary Catholics from Rome travelled through Geneva to London, stopping on their way to engage in a formal disputation with Beza.[33] Campion and his companions were captured in July of 1581 and imprisoned in the Tower of London until their execution that December. Meanwhile, much to the dismay of her Protestant subjects, Elizabeth was engaged in complex marriage negotiations with the Catholic Duke of Anjou, calling her own loyalties into question. During his six months of imprisonment, Campion was invited to confront his Protestant challengers formally in the context of four public disputations, the first of which featured Alexander Nowell, Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London and uncle to William Whitaker, then Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge.[34] Beza was present at these disputations in spirit if not in person: in the fourth disputation, Robert Walker, though tasked with defending the Protestant cause, nevertheless singled out Beza, among others, for having gone “too far” with their challenges to the Bible. “I am neither a Lutheran, a Calvinist, a Bezian, nor Zwinglian,” Walker insisted,” but “only a man of God and a free Christian of Christ” [35] Sending the codex off to Cambridge therefore seems to have been a strategic move, designed to remind the Queen and the University of their mutually advantageous ties to the Reformers in Geneva.[36]

Survival

The journey of Codex Bezae from Berytus to Cambridge was long, thrilling, and sometimes arduous: from earthquake, to liturgical handbook, to war, Bezae has had a much longer, richer, and more complex life than mere attention to its role as a “textual witness” has captured. Rescue, interpretation, and plunder were how this manuscript has survived. Its interpretive, literary, and material plundering, however, also call attention to another aspect of the circulation of treasured cultural objects: their rescue and re-use, their placement in a new home and their removal from the household of another, can invite a conspiracy of silences. How did this codex arrive in Lyon? Why did no one record its entrance into that monastery? What mechanisms brought it to Geneva? Did Beza actually fail to recognize its text? Was he aware that he was transmitting stolen goods when he gifted the manuscript to Queen Elizabeth? Is the Cambridge University Library aware of the problem? Does this history even matter?

To paraphrase W. G. Sebald, a well-kept secret of plundering and theft built into the foundation of a monastery, a museum, a library, or a field of scholarship can be as effective at binding a collectivity together as any positive goal, including the realization of a better text of the New Testament.[37] A collectivity bound by such an open secret, however, is bound to repeat the practices that demand this secret; keeping the secret may found the collectivity more securely than any text or scientific endeavor ever could.[38] If so, then cycles of rescue and plunder are written into the very fabric of New Testament scholarship. The point is therefore not whether Bezae was plundered—of course it was—but why, from whom, and for what purpose. From the monk who, I am guessing, saved this copy from the collapse of marble, timber, and bodies crushed by an earthquake in 551 CE, to the late antique annotators who tried to bring its text up to date, to Guilliame du Prat, Robert Estienne, Theodore Beza, Queen Elizabeth, and modern textual criticism, this manuscript endures because it has been wanted. Sometimes it has been wanted more than the people who once possessed it. Circulating silences about plunder have therefore granted scholars access to evidence that has been wanted—to texts capable of proving, for example, that textual criticism is necessary at all—but they have also led to the erasure of other bodies and lives.[39] At the very least, that secret should be acknowledged.

Jennifer Wright Knust is Professor of Religions Studies at Duke University.

[1] "plunder, v.2". OED Online. December 2018. Oxford University Press. http://www.oed.com.proxy.lib.duke.edu/view/Entry/146168 (accessed November 18, 2019). With gratitude to Mary-Jane Rubenstein who suggested that I look plunder up and to Elizabeth Castelli who also checked.

[2] The Swedish Dragooners “fell in among the lands of the said Lord Druches,” reports William Watts, “plundered the Townes of Wurtbach and Waldsee, neere unto Wingargen, and dispersed the Commotion” (William Watts, The Swedish Intelligencer, The Second Part, Wherin, Out of the Truest and Choysest Informations, are the famous Actions of that warlike Prince Historically led along: from the Victory of Leipsich, unto the Conquest of Bavaria [London: Nath, Butter and Bourne, 1632], 179, emphasis added).

[3] “I have been reading lately some of George Sand’s earlier novels,” Aubrey Beardsley wrote to his friend André Ravvalovich in 1896, “Mauprat, Indiana, Horace, etc. How abominably she has been plundered by everyone since” (in The Letters of Aubrey Beardsley [ed. Henry Mars, J. L. Duncan, and W. G. Good; Rutherford, Madison, and Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1970], 193, emphasis added).

[4] As Hugo Lundhaug and Liv Ingeborg Lied have reminded us, like other material manifestations of human activity, manuscripts embody not only texts but also the priorities, presuppositions, knowledges, technologies, and desires of those who produce and preserve them, both at the moment of initial production and thereafter; see their edited volume, Snapshots of Evolving Traditions: Jewish and Christian Manuscript Culture, Textual Fluidity, and the New Philology (UT 175; Berlin: De Gruyter, 2017).

[5] On findings in the “sands of Egypt,” see Brent Nongbri, God’s Library: The Archeaology of the Earliest Christian Manuscripts (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2018).

[6] A very old beaker commemorating the Thirty-Years’ War may end up in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, for example, but the everyday pots held by the residents of Waldsee in 1642 are perhaps less likely to survive, whether they were taken or not. Johann Schaper, 1664, Nuremberg. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art no. 50.211.285. Gift of R. Thorton Wilson, in memory of Florence Ellsworth Wilson, 1950. Discussed by Jessia McNab, “European Sculpture and Decorative Arts,” in “Ars Vitraria: Glass in the Metropolitan Museum of Art,” Metropolitan Museum Art Bulletin 59.1 (2001): 45-50 (at 47).

The cabbage for the soup has almost certainly been lost in the dirt of southern Germany, not only to the one who tended the garden but also to the soldier that ate it; still, perhaps there is a trace of cabbage on a tooth in a grave yet to be found.

[7] Agathias, The Histories 2.15.1-3. (ed. Rudolph Keydell, Agathiae Myrinaeihistoriarum libri quinque [CFHBz, SB II; Berlin: De Gruyter, 1967], 59; trans. Joseph D. Frendo, [CFHBz, SB IIA; Berlin: De Gruyter, 1975], 48).

[8] Adam Izdebski, Lee Mordechai, and Sam White, “The Social Burden of Resilience: A Historical Perspective,” Human Ecology 46 (2018): 291-303 (at 294-95); Ata Elias, Paul Tapponnier, Satish C. Singh, Geoffrey C. P. King, Anne Briais, et. al., “Active thrusting offshore Mount Lebanon: Source of the tsunamigenic A. D. 551 Beirut-Tripoli earthquake,” Geology 35.8 (2007): 755-58.

[9] Itinerary of the Piacenza Pilgrim 1 (ed. Paul Geyer, Itinera Hierosolymitana. Saecuili IIII-VIII (CSEL 39; Vindob: Tempsky, 1898], 159; trans. John Wilkinson, Jerusalem Pilgrims before the Crusades [Warmister: Aris & Phillips, 2002], 129): “…Then we arrived at the most renowned city of Berytus, in which, until recently, there had been a School of Letters, but it too was destroyed. According to the bishop of the city, they could identify the names of, at the very least, thirty thousand of the local people who died there, not counting visitors. This city is situated beneath the mountains of Lebanon.”

[10] D. C. Parker, Codex Bezae: An early Christian manuscript and its text (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 261-78.

[11] Parker’s thorough study of the manuscripts likely provenance is convincing. On the importance of Codex Beze for liturgical studies, see Jennifer Knust and Tommy Wasserman, To Cast the First Stone: The Transmission of a Gospel Story (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018), 237-46, 272-79, with bibliography.

[12] See the recent overview of the history of “text-types” in Tommy Wasserman and Peter J. Gurry, A New Approach to Textual Criticism: An Introduction to the Coherence-Based Genealogical Method (Resources for Biblical Study 80; Atlanta: SBL, 2017), 8-10. Important early studies of the codex include: Frederick H. Scrivener, Bezae Codex Cantabrigiensis: Being an Exact Copy, in Ordinary Type, of the Celebrated Uncial Graeco-Latin Manuscript of the Four Gospels and Acts of the Apostles. Edited with a Critical Introduction, Annotations, and Facsimiles (London: Bell and Daldy, 1864); J. Rendel Harris, Codex Bezae: A Study of the So-Called Western Text of the New Testament (Text and Studies 2.1; Cambridge, 1891); F. E. Brightman, “On the Italian Origin of Codex Bezae, II. The Marginal Notes of Lections,” Journal of Theological Studies 1 (1900): 446-54; and J. Rendel Harris, The Annotators of the Codex Bezae (with Some Notes on Sortes Sanctorum) (London: C. J. Clay and Sons, 1901).

[13] Also see Shawn Kelley, “Race, Aesthetics, and Gospel Scholarship: Embracing and Suberbing the Aesthetic Ideology,” in Prejudice and Christian Beginnings: Investigating Race, Gender, and Ethnicity in Early Christian Studies (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2009), 191-210 and Karen Fields and Barbara J. Fields, Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life (London: Verso, 2014).

[14] The Latin had been “vitiated by all sorts of decaying modes of speech” characteristic of “the provinces, probably to the west of the Alps” (Harris, Bezae, 3).

[15] The principle lectio brevior (prefer the shorter reading) has been a key principle of modern textual criticism. As Klyne Snodgrass pointed out in 1972, the “Western non-interpoloations” circumlocution was likely used because Westcott and Hort “could not bring themselves to speak of interpolations in their ‘Neutral’ text” (see his “Western Non-Interpolations,” JBL 91.3 [1972]: 369).

[16] Yii-Jin Lin, The Erotic Life of Manuscripts: New Testament Textual Criticism and the Biological Sciences (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).

[17] Jennifer Knust, “Editing Without Interpreting: The Museum of the Bible and New Testament Textual Criticism” in The Museum of the Bible: A Critical Introduction, ed. Cavan Concanon and Jill Hicks Keeton. Lexington Books, forthcoming and idem, “On Textual Nostalgia: Herman C. Hoskier’s Collation of ‘Evangelium 604’ Revisited,” in Herman Hoskier and the Future of Textual Scholarship on the Bible (ed. Garrick Allen; WUNT 417; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2019), 79-101.

[18] E. A. Lowe was the first to seriously discredit the theory; see his, “The Codex Bezae,” JTS 14.55 (1913): 385-88 (“If we remember that Roman law was the common property of all the provinces, and that the law books which went to the provinces came from one centre—in the fifth and sixth centuries it was probably Byzantium—we can understand why the b-d uncials are found in the different provinces,” 386). 

[19] See the important recent publication of the ECM of Acts for examples, introduction, and discussion: Holger Strutwolf, Georg Gäbel, Annette Hüffmeier, Gerd Mink, and Klaus Wachtel, eds. Editio Critica Maior, vol 3, Acts of the Apostles, 4 volumes (Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 2017).

[20] Though Victorian philology and racialized scientific essentialism should not be too easily confused, the slippage between them, at least at the level of discourse, is striking.

[21] Knust, “Editing without Interpreting.”

[22] Eldon Jay Epp, “The Late Constantin Tischendorf and Codex Sinaiticus: New Testament Textual Criticism without Them — An Exercise in Erasure History,” in Studies on the Text of the New Testament and Early Christianity: esays in Honour of Michael W. Holmes on the occasion of his 65th birthday (Ed. Daniel Gurtner, Juan Hernández, Jr., and Paul Foster; NTSD 50; Leiden: Brill, 2015), 37.

[23] Bruce M. Metzger, “The Influence of Codex Bezae upon the Geneva Bible of 1560,” New Testament Studies 8 (1961), 75.

[24] Caspar René Gregory, Textkritik des Neuen Testaments (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1909), vol. 2, 934. Estienne’s edition can be viewed at the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts: http://www.csntm.org/printedbook/viewbook/robertusstephanusnovumtestamentum1550

[25] Stephanus stated that his manuscript β’ was “a very old copy collated by friends in Italy” (Jan Krans, Beyond what is Written: Erasmus and Beza as conjectural critics of the New Testament [NTTSD 35; Leiden: Brill, 2006], 230).

[26] Celebrating this event, John Calvin remarked, “Robert Estienne is now wholly ours. Soon we shall be hearing what thunders his departure has provoked at Paris. Certainly, the schoolmen-philosophers will be absolutely raving.” John Calvin to Farel, 10 November 1550 (Opera XIII, 657), translated and discussed by Elizabeth Armstrong, Robert Estienne: Royal Printer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1954), 215

[27] Perhaps Beza had access to the collations or perhaps he simply made use of Estienne’s edition but, at any rate, he knew that such a manuscript existed and was worthy of further consultation (Metzger, 76. Krans, Beyond What is Written, 228-236).

[28] Jan Krans, Beyond What is Written, 232-34. Either that or he engaged in some kind of “impious fraud” (impia fraus) by presenting these readings as if they came from some other manuscript (229.)

[29] The label “Huguenot” equates these Protestants with ghosts who rattled doors and haunted people at night; Natalie Zemon Davis, “The Rites of Violence: Religious Riot in Sixteenth-Century France,” Past and Present 59 (1973): 51-91 (at 57).

[30] In the ninth century, missing folia were restored and the monk Ado employed it when preparing his Martyrologium. The connection to Ado was made by Henri Quentin, “Le Codex Bezae à Lyon au IXe siècle – Les citations du Nouveau Testament dans le martyrologe d’Adon,” RBén 33 (1906): 1-25. E. A. Lowe then made the connection with Florus, “Codex Bezae and Lyon,” JTS 25.99 [1924]: 270-4. Also see B. Guineau, L. Holtz, J. Vezin “Étude compare des traces à l’encre bleue du ms. Lyon, B.M. 484 et du fol. 384v du Codex de Bèzé,” in Codex Bezae: Studies from the Lunel Colloquium, June 1994 (NTTS 22; Leiden: Brill, 1996), 79-94. This history is reviewed in a compressed form by David C. Parker, “Codex Bezae: The Manuscript as Past, Present and Future,” in The Bible as Book. The Transmission of the Greek Text (ed. Scott McKendrick and Orlaith A. O’Sullivan; London: British Library, 2003), 44-45.

[31] Scrivener, Bezae Codex Cantabrigiensis, viii.

[32] Parker, Codex Bezae, 283.

[33] James V. Holleran, A Jesuit Challenge: Edmund Campion’s Debates at the Tower of London in 1581 (New York: Fordham University Press, 1999), 23.

[34] Holleran, 44. Whitaker was the notary present at the first disputation and the author of Nowell’s formal answer to Camion’s Rationes Decem.

[35] Holleran, 145. Beza’s fame and reputation, as well as his connections to Cambridge, were well established in England. When his friend Thomas Cartwright was deprived of his chair as Margaret Professor of Divinity at Cambridge, for example, Beza welcomed Cartwright Geneva, granting him time and the resources to begin the “Admonition to Parliament for the Reformation of Church Discipline” (William Baird, History of New Testament Research, Vol. 1, From Deism to Tübingen [Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992], 267).

[36] At any rate, the manuscript soon settled into its current home. It was given its current well-known name and secured in a locked cupboard by Andrew Perne, master of Peterhouse (1554-1589) during his reorganization of the library (https://specialcollections-blog.lib.cam.ac.uk/?p=14552).

[37] “The well-kept secret of the corpses built into the foundations of our state, a secret that bound all Germans together in the postwar years, and indeed still binds them, more closely than any positive goal such as the realization of a democracy ever could.” W. G. Sebald, On the Natural History of Destruction (trans. Anthea Bell; New York: Modern Library Paperback Edition, 2004), 13.

[38] Eviatar Zerubavel, The Elephant in the Rome: Silence and Denial in Everyday Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 

[39] Compare Steven O’Connor, “Spelling Things Out,” New Literary History 45.2 (2014), 183: Interpretation must “always deepen the obscurity it dispels, pile up the impediment it removes, incite the difficulty it resolves, infect with infirmity it cures.”