Nicholas Hardy is a Birmingham Fellow in the School of English, Drama and American and Canadian Studies at the University of Birmingham. He took his BA and DPhil at Oxford before becoming a Research Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge. Apart from his recent monograph, Criticism and Confession: The Bible in the Seventeenth Century Republic of Letters (2017), he has published on the early modern reception of the classical poet Lucretius, and on the King James Version of the Bible. He is currently working on the vernacular contexts and readerships of biblical philology in seventeenth-century England. Dmitri Levitin is a Research Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. He has published extensively on various aspects of early modern European intellectual culture. His first monograph, Ancient Wisdom in the Age of the New Science (2015), considered visions of the history of ancient philosophy in the seventeenth century. In 2016 he was awarded the inaugural Leszek Kołakowski Prize in the History of Ideas.

Its chapters stand individually as worthy contributions, including the highly detailed treatment of regional trends in confessionalization offered in Dmitri Levitin's introduction.

• PrefaceContributors1: Dmitri Levitin: Introduction: Confessionalisation and erudition in early modern Europe: a comparative overview of a neglected episode in the history of the humanities2: Arnoud Visser: Juan Luis Vives and the organisation of patristic knowledge3: Madeline McMahon: Matthew Parker and the practice of church history4: Anthony Grafton: Scaliger's chronology: early patterns of reception5: Nicholas Hardy: Roman Catholic biblical scholarship in the age of confessions: the case of Lucas Holstenius and the Barberini circle6: Simon Ditchfield: The Limits of Erudition: Daniello Bartoli SJ (1608-85) and the Misson of Writing History7: Aurélien Girard: Was an Eastern Scholar Necessarily a Cultural Broker in Early Modern Europe? Faustus Naironus (1628-1711), the Christian East, and oriental studies8: Jean-Louis Quantin: Confessional history and the authority of erudition: Bossuet, Burnet, and the English Reformation9: Dmitri Levitin and Scott Mandelbrote: Becoming heterodox in seventeenth-century Cambridge: the case of Isaac Newton10: Jan Loop: Language of Paradise: Protestant oriental scholarship and the discovery of Arabic poetryAppendix I: Joseph Beaumont's Determination on Newton's theology disputation, February 1677