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Elongated esses in Ye Olde Fashioned Typefaces will never be not amusing.
In my collection on Books Given To Me By My Mom's Friends (Who All Inexplicably Think I'm Brilliant Or Something; Please Do Not Enlighten Them On This Matter) I have another book from Ellen, the lovely lady who gave me the biography of Gertrude Bell I read earlier this year and that book on museums stealing shit. This one is called God's Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible and I have had it sitting around for years. Ellen gave it to me shortly after I read Alister McGrath's In the Beginning: The Story of the King James Bible and How it Shaped a Nation, a Language and a Culture, which, ironically, is the second thing that shows up on amazon.com if you search for "God's Secretaries." Since I bought and read In the Beginning when I went to London in my junior year of high school, we can deduce that I have had this book sitting around for a shamefully long time.
This book has good points and bad points, which can be summed up roughly as follows:
GOOD POINTS: This book provides fascinating historical background on the culture and politics of the Jacobean court, a lot of biographical information about the translators, and some really fascinating (if you're a huge dork like me) insight into the administrative and organizational aspects of producing a Bible translation by committee.
BAD POINTS: This book is sufficiently not actually about the translation itself that when the author does start actually quoting from the JKV Bible and offering discussion and opinions about the word and syntax choices of the text you end up going "d00d I think you have gotten really off track please get back to the stuff this book is actually about." This is exacerbated in that this guy is clearly a solid historian but not much of a linguist, so his discussion over syntactical choices basically consists of giving the KJV verse next to two or three other Bible translations of the same verse and going "Man, aren't they clunky?" and possibly throwing a couple of poetry-criticism buzzwords in for scholarly flavor. I may be jaded on this point, however, because In the Beginning does have a much more textual/linguistic focus overall and so I had rather higher standards for Learning Something New in that regard than was going to be provided in a 250-page history book anyway.
I still overall really liked this one, because the world of the Translators (it was capitalized back then) is one I am not as familiar with as I should be, and the Jacobean court was just a freakin' weird place. The sectarian/theological squabbles of all these once-Super Important Church Guys are kind of hilarious to read about, and Adam Nicholson (that's the author) really shines the most when essentially acting as a gossip columnist for five-hundred-year-old petty Mean Girl shit (or Mean Priest shit, as the case may be), enlivened by extensive primary documentation (with delightful early sixteenth century spellings!) of so-and-so being totally not best friends anymore with such-and-such.
On the totally opposite end of the "important things" spectrum, it was interesting to get a good perspective on the Separatist cell that would become the Pilgrim Father from the point of view of the Establishment that they were being all Persecuted by, because it turns out that the Crown actually considered everything to be quite peaceful at the time and went relatively easy on the Pilgrims, being, at best, mildly annoyed that they had to put in the effort to deal with them at all, but, y'know, you can't totally ignore the few remaining uncooperative fringe groups, powerless as they may be, as long as they are still being uncooperative. They were like the least important people in all of England, which was totally taking a break from the religious unrest and persecution thing.
Also: lots of discussion of ROYAL BUDGETS. Due to recent US news and asshaberdashery, I am lately finding discussion of other governments' budgets and financial problems unendingly fascinating, so I really was sitting there on the T all last week totally glued to this book being like "F***ING BUDGETS, MAN, AWESOME. THIS IS SUPER DRAMATIC!!" Other readers may feel differently.
Basically, I think this book was great in every respect except its discussion of the actual King James Bible. Oops?
In my collection on Books Given To Me By My Mom's Friends (Who All Inexplicably Think I'm Brilliant Or Something; Please Do Not Enlighten Them On This Matter) I have another book from Ellen, the lovely lady who gave me the biography of Gertrude Bell I read earlier this year and that book on museums stealing shit. This one is called God's Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible and I have had it sitting around for years. Ellen gave it to me shortly after I read Alister McGrath's In the Beginning: The Story of the King James Bible and How it Shaped a Nation, a Language and a Culture, which, ironically, is the second thing that shows up on amazon.com if you search for "God's Secretaries." Since I bought and read In the Beginning when I went to London in my junior year of high school, we can deduce that I have had this book sitting around for a shamefully long time.
This book has good points and bad points, which can be summed up roughly as follows:
GOOD POINTS: This book provides fascinating historical background on the culture and politics of the Jacobean court, a lot of biographical information about the translators, and some really fascinating (if you're a huge dork like me) insight into the administrative and organizational aspects of producing a Bible translation by committee.
BAD POINTS: This book is sufficiently not actually about the translation itself that when the author does start actually quoting from the JKV Bible and offering discussion and opinions about the word and syntax choices of the text you end up going "d00d I think you have gotten really off track please get back to the stuff this book is actually about." This is exacerbated in that this guy is clearly a solid historian but not much of a linguist, so his discussion over syntactical choices basically consists of giving the KJV verse next to two or three other Bible translations of the same verse and going "Man, aren't they clunky?" and possibly throwing a couple of poetry-criticism buzzwords in for scholarly flavor. I may be jaded on this point, however, because In the Beginning does have a much more textual/linguistic focus overall and so I had rather higher standards for Learning Something New in that regard than was going to be provided in a 250-page history book anyway.
I still overall really liked this one, because the world of the Translators (it was capitalized back then) is one I am not as familiar with as I should be, and the Jacobean court was just a freakin' weird place. The sectarian/theological squabbles of all these once-Super Important Church Guys are kind of hilarious to read about, and Adam Nicholson (that's the author) really shines the most when essentially acting as a gossip columnist for five-hundred-year-old petty Mean Girl shit (or Mean Priest shit, as the case may be), enlivened by extensive primary documentation (with delightful early sixteenth century spellings!) of so-and-so being totally not best friends anymore with such-and-such.
On the totally opposite end of the "important things" spectrum, it was interesting to get a good perspective on the Separatist cell that would become the Pilgrim Father from the point of view of the Establishment that they were being all Persecuted by, because it turns out that the Crown actually considered everything to be quite peaceful at the time and went relatively easy on the Pilgrims, being, at best, mildly annoyed that they had to put in the effort to deal with them at all, but, y'know, you can't totally ignore the few remaining uncooperative fringe groups, powerless as they may be, as long as they are still being uncooperative. They were like the least important people in all of England, which was totally taking a break from the religious unrest and persecution thing.
Also: lots of discussion of ROYAL BUDGETS. Due to recent US news and asshaberdashery, I am lately finding discussion of other governments' budgets and financial problems unendingly fascinating, so I really was sitting there on the T all last week totally glued to this book being like "F***ING BUDGETS, MAN, AWESOME. THIS IS SUPER DRAMATIC!!" Other readers may feel differently.
Basically, I think this book was great in every respect except its discussion of the actual King James Bible. Oops?
