Mapping and Unmapping Jewish History in Early Modern Bibles

Monday, February 13, 2:30-4:00 PM: Jeffrey S. Shoulson

Elie Wiesel Center for Jewish Studies, 147 Bay State Road, 2nd Floor Library

Boston University Jewish Studies Research Forum and the BU Program in Scripture and the Arts are pleased to welcome Professor Jeffrey S. Shoulson. Shoulson is Doris and Simon Konover Chair of Judaic Studies, Director of the Center for Judaic Studies and Contemporary Jewish Life, Professor of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages, and Professor of English at the University of Connecticut. He is also author of Milton and the Rabbis: Hebraism, Hellenism, and Christianity (2001) and Fictions of Conversion: Jews, Christians, and Cultures of Change in Early Modern England (2013). He is also co-editor of Hebraica Veritas? Christian Hebraists and the Study of Judaism in Early Modern Europe (2004).

“Mapping and Unmapping Jewish History in Early Modern Bibles” will examine the role played by maps depicting the Holy Land and other biblical locations—printed in Bibles as well as in other accounts of the region—in the construction of spaces construed as “Jewish.”

Background: Maps first appeared in printed Bibles nearly fifty years after the first illustrated, printed Bible was produced in 1483. In the century that followed, maps became an increasingly common supplement to the new Bible translations proliferating throughout Europe. Those Bibles that contained maps were overwhelmingly Protestant editions. Not surprisingly, the new emphasis Reformers placed on the literal/historical reading of Scripture sought and found support from the visual depictions of the geography of biblical texts. And nowhere was the spread and popularity of biblical maps during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries greater than in England. As the English Reformation progressed, the visualization of the Holy Land and its inhabitants functioned as a site for contested claims about a Jewish past and present that could be aligned with or distinguished from varieties of English Protestant identity.