Dr Nicholas Hardy

Munby Fellow 2016-17

Munby Fellow project: A study of the King James Bible (1611) in relation to contemporary biblical scholarship and theological debate

Dr Hardy writes on his fellowship project:

"In 2011, I identified two previously unnoticed sources for the translation of the King James or ‘Authorized’ Version of the Bible. One of the sources is a copy of the Septuagint (the ancient Greek version of the Old Testament, including most of the Apocrypha), copiously annotated by one of the translators, John Bois, and used by him both at the drafting and final revision stages of the translation. The other is a set of three letters between Bois and the French scholar Isaac Casaubon, addressing problems that arose during the translators' final revision of the Apocrypha. These sources represent the most substantial addition to the archival evidence for the translation since the seventeenth century, and the only new discoveries since the 1970s. During my time as Munby Fellow, I plan to use these and other related sources, many of them in Cambridge libraries, to shed new light on the translators' theological and literary priorities, the philological, historical and text-critical methods which they used, and their immersion in contemporary inter- and intra-confessional controversy."