Chapter 6 shows how the later 1650s and 1660s defy ready categorisation, with the practices and tools of biblical scholarship being drawn on in a range of different ways in a range of different contexts. Its three parts proceed concurrently, rather than chronologically, and successively analyse: the way in which debate concerning the Old Testament became increasingly polemical, framed in terms of a choice between the Masoretic Hebrew text or the Septuagint; how biblical scholarship differed according to different local settings (in this case Italy (and especially Rome) and the Dutch Republic); and how Benedict de Spinoza, comparatively disconnected from the confessionalised world of Old Testament scholarship, targeted a precise set of the views concerning the Bible held by others in his local Reformed and Jewish communities.

Chapter 5 is devoted to Brian Walton and the London Polyglot Bible. It shows how Walton’s work was not simply an erudite accumulation of information from print and manuscript sources, but rather took a precise stand in the debates concerning the Old Testament that swirled around the Protestant world of the early 1650s. It examines how this created problems for would-be collaborators elsewhere in Europe, how Walton justified his approach by presenting a novel synthesis in the work’s ‘Prolegomena’, and how the vernacular dispute between Walton and his most prominent opponent, John Owen, turned on how they justified their work in terms of contemporary Reformed scholarship.