The Apocryphal Apocalypse: The Reception of the Second Book of Esdras (4 Ezra) from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment

by Alastair Hamilton

This is the first study of the reception of the apocryphal Second Book of Esdras from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century. The author discusses the concepts of biblical apocrypha and canonicity in connection with the increasingly critical attitude to religious authority that developed with the humanists and intensified with the Reformation.

408 pages, Hardcover

First published September 16, 1999

Reviews

[Cali · Rating 5 out of 5]

For many scholars in the seventeenth century 2 Esdras was no more than a footnote to a study of an entirely different subject. Yet, in the intellectual history of the period, its reception, I believe, deserves more than a footnote. It was consulted and quoted by a minority, but to find a quotation of 2 Esdras in a text is often a signal that some deeper form of dissent or protest is at hand than might at first be apparent.

Who needs drugs when you have Alastair Hamilton? This man is singlehandedly saving my (academic) life right now.