The Reformation of the Literal: Prophecy and the Senses of Scripture in Early Modern Europe

What does it mean to read the Bible 'literally'? Recent debates on the Protestant reformers have focused on whether they were stridently literal interpreters or maintained a place for allegorical readings. However, in this nuanced book, Lundeen argues that the question of what in fact constituted the Bible's literal sense was also a key question in early modern debates.

There is no clean binary of literal versus allegorical; instead, reformers subtly produced a variety of competing literalis...