I

Appearing in 1713, Jacques Lelong’s Discours historique sur les principales éditions des Bibles polyglottes presented an historical survey of an early modern publishing phenomenon: the polyglot Bible. Lelong’s work was the first of its kind and at its outset he highlighted that it was incumbent on him to define this particular textual form, lest he face criticism for omitting texts he ought otherwise to have included. He would, Lelong explained, follow the customary way the term ‘polyglot Bible’ was understood: a polyglot Bible was correctly so designated when it presented the biblical text in at least three different languages.Footnote ¹ Employing such a definition meant Lelong could delimit his subject rigorously and direct his attention to some eighteen projects that met his criteria and were devised – if not necessarily brought to fruition – in the period from the early sixteenth to late seventeenth centuries. Lelong connected the polyglot Bibles’ mise-en-page with the way in which such works were principally used. In displaying multiple versions of the biblical text in different languages, they enabled one to compare the texts rapidly and ascertain how they agreed with or differed from one another. Polyglot Bibles were catalysts for textual analysis.Footnote ²

Subsequent scholarship would come to refine and extend Lelong’s approach, linking ever more closely a common textual form with a common set of intellectual contentions. Exemplary, in this respect, stand Peter Miller’s publications dedicated to the Paris (1645) and London (1653–7) Polyglots.Footnote ³ Miller subtly recast Lelong’s opening exposition. Where Lelong had spoken in terms of ‘the principal use’ (‘le principal usage’) of polyglot Bibles, Miller instead paraphrased Lelong’s account in terms of their ‘principal purpose’.Footnote ⁴ In doing so, Miller altered the focus of analysis, moving from the book-as-object at the turn of the eighteenth century to the intentions of the polyglot Bibles’ various creators. Miller then proceeded to revivify an early modern scholarly world that was united by a view of the relationship between historical scholarship and providential history. The study of the past was the study of ‘the plan of the One Creator’, in which there was no conflict between reason and the truth of revelation. Scholarship was enjoined as a means of serving the sacred, since history, philosophy, archaeology, and geography could all be employed to confirm ‘the triumph of Christianity’.Footnote ⁵ Polyglot Bibles embodied this process of ‘antiquarianization’. By setting out multiple versions of the revealed Word they vouchsafed the overall integrity of the Scriptures, at once bearing witness to the universality of Christian revelation while also allowing one to correct and emend any minor infelicities that had crept in over time.Footnote ⁶

While Miller foregrounded the continuous existence of a shared vision of scholarship spanning the early modern period, recent research has adopted a different perspective, revealing how the common textual form could be the vehicle for very different editorial views than the universalist message Miller prioritized. The polyglot Bibles themselves contained evidence that pointed in this direction. In the prefatory material of the Complutensian Polyglot Bible (1514–17), Cardinal Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros described the work’s layout in terms of how the Latin text preferred by the Church was framed by ‘two thieves’, the Hebrew and Greek texts. The seeming deprecation of Hebrew learning and scholarship on which the Complutensian Polyglot was founded, Theodor Dunkelgrün has shown, was subsequently upended in Antwerp half a century later, as Benito Arias Montano and his colleagues endeavoured to reinsert Hebrew material removed from the Complutensian edition to produce a hitherto unheralded textual accomplishment that Dunkelgrün christened a ‘Christian Masoretic Bible’.Footnote ⁷ It has also been contended that the London Polyglot Bible and the opinions of its chief editor Brian Walton stood some distance from the doctrinal ‘minimalism’ posited by Miller, as they were specifically intended to meet a range of distinctly Protestant objectives.Footnote ⁸

A focus on a common conception of the historia and philologia sacra has consequently been increasingly replaced by one that emphasizes the various editorial priorities that marked polyglot biblical publications. In this way, the study of the early modern polyglot Bible has been made part of a broad trend in recent research that has shown how early modern scholarship was deeply enmeshed in its contemporary cultural and religious worlds. Above all, and as work by Nicholas Hardy, Dmitri Levitin, and Kirsten Macfarlane has demonstrated, the world of early modern scholarship was a world of confessionalized erudition, one in which learning was pursued for its value in contemporary confessional conflict, rather than as an end in itself.Footnote ⁹

Lelong and Miller’s works culminated chronologically with the biblical scholar Richard Simon and his proposal for a new polyglot Bible. In Lelong’s case this was a matter of timing, since he located no major schemes that merited inclusion in his survey between Simon’s exposition of his plan in the mid-1680s and the composition of his own Discours historique. Yet, Lelong also indicated that there were reasons to view Simon’s scheme as a departure from its predecessors. The earlier polyglot Bibles had been exercises in expansion, with each of the celebrated editions of Alcalá de Henares, Antwerp, Paris, and London adding more texts in more languages to their predecessors. Simon shifted in the opposite direction, removing superfluous columns to create an abridged text that would be useful to scholars. For Miller, meanwhile, Simon’s decision to surround the reduced number of columns with a mass of variant readings heralded the passing of an era. Where the earlier polyglot Bibles’ majestic parallel columns displayed the unanimous testimony of antiquity on behalf of revelation, so Simon’s variorum edition constituted the arrival of the ‘Age of Criticism’.Footnote ¹⁰

This article is intended to reassess Simon’s engagement with polyglot biblical scholarship and its intersection with confessionalized erudition. Instead of approaching Simon’s work as the end point of a print form and the supersession of an early modern mode of scholarship, it considers the multiple ways Simon himself used the notion of the polyglot Bible throughout his career. It first elucidates Simon’s distinctive plan for a new polyglot, discussing in turn its origin in the context of his Histoire critique du Vieux Testament (1678) and the course of the work’s planning and execution until it was broken off in the mid-1680s. It then shifts in focus some fifteen years to a less well studied period of Simon’s life to examine his work in vernacular biblical translation, analysing how Simon’s attempt to use the notion of the polyglot Bible to justify his biblical translations stood in tension with the confessionally inflected content of those self-same translations.

By bringing together and contrasting these different moments in Simon’s life, this article unsettles a longstanding image of Simon as a scholar chiefly preoccupied with history and philology whose career ultimately foundered on the opposition of the contemporary French authorities. Instead, it presents an investigation into the confessional politics of biblical scholarship, showing how confession, faith, and erudition remained indelibly connected in the later seventeenth century. It reveals how scholarly life was located in a world and subtly structured by it, shaped by regimes of censorship, print culture and print technology, and received and widely held views concerning the biblical text and its relationship to given confessions. The article hews away, however, from demonstrating how learning could be enlisted to accomplish clearly defined confessional ends or used as a weapon to target one’s religious opponents. Instead, it brings out the multiple ways Simon negotiated the religious boundaries of late seventeenth-century Europe, in the process repeatedly modifying the confessional salience of his work to his contemporaries. In so doing, it directs attention to what could be termed the varieties of confessionalized erudition.

II

In tracing Richard Simon’s formation as a scholar, one regularly traces his encounters with polyglot biblical publications, particularly in the form of Brian Walton’s London Polyglot. Having been educated by the Oratorians and Jesuits in Dieppe and Rouen, Simon then studied in Paris in the late 1650s and early 1660s before joining the Oratory in 1662. Once there, his first superior, Jean Bertad, encouraged him to pursue his interests and facilitated his access to the most recent works of biblical scholarship, among them a copy of the London Polyglot Bible.Footnote ¹¹ Bertad’s early support, and the time he was granted then and thereafter at the institution, permitted Simon to consolidate an auspicious start. Much of Simon’s research took place in the library of the Oratory, an institution whose collection of Hebraica he was deputized to catalogue. Simon was not solely dependent on its resources, however, as he also accumulated his own collection of books. The London Polyglot Bible appears once more in this setting. Simon would obtain a copy for his personal library, one which was geared towards scholarship by having had pasted into it multiple blank sheets of paper to enable note-taking.Footnote ¹² All of this work and research would be drawn on to good purpose in the crowning achievement of this period of his life: the composition and completion of the Histoire critique du Vieux Testament by the later 1670s. Walton’s work loomed large in Simon’s elaboration of his own views, especially when Simon partly formulated his account of how to write a ‘critical history’ of the Bible as a response to Walton’s ‘Prolegomena’ to the London Polyglot Bible.Footnote ¹³

It was also at the end of the Histoire critique du Vieux Testament, in an appendix on the ‘chief editions of the Bible’, that Simon first outlined his own vision for a new polyglot Bible.Footnote ¹⁴ Although he provided no information regarding the project’s intended timescale, the plans were assuredly set out and presented in terms of a future project he seemed confident he would execute. Such ostensible optimism would soon be dispelled. As is well known, Simon’s career would be fatefully affected by Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet’s opposition to the Histoire critique du Vieux Testament, which led to its immediate prohibition, the destruction of the vast majority of its print run, and Simon’s expulsion from the Oratory. These events had deleterious consequences for Simon. He lost ready access to the resources held by the library of the Oratory, a deprivation that was especially calamitous considering how many of the central findings of the Histoire critique du Vieux Testament relied on the comparative study of Hebrew manuscripts in the library’s possession. Bossuet’s antagonism would be enduring, thereby creating a problem for how Simon could publish any subsequent works in Paris. As someone from modest means and without independent wealth Simon had long faced pecuniary problems and the inability to receive even a small income from new publications in France made his position all the more difficult.Footnote ¹⁵

In the years after the prohibition of the Histoire critique du Vieux Testament, Simon tried to mitigate his situation. Having failed to persuade Bossuet of the merits of the work via a mémoire composed to defend it, he would come to publish a succession of pieces to vindicate his scholarly endeavours. He turned an earlier publication to his own advantage, reprinting his translation of Leon Modena’s Historia de gli riti hebraici (1637) with an additional supplement that substantiated his claims concerning the continuities between Judaism and Christianity. He linked his work ever more closely with his august Catholic precursors, publishing a biography of Jean Morin and a collection of Morin and his contemporaries’ correspondence, the Antiquitates ecclesiae orientalis (1682), that closely assimilated his own and their objectives as scholars. And he composed a condensed version of the major claims of the Histoire critique du Vieux Testament, the Disquisitiones criticae (1684), that foregrounded how his findings were founded on careful manuscript scholarship.Footnote ¹⁶

In many ways, all these efforts were unsuccessful, as there would be no breakthrough for Simon in France in these or the following years and his prospects there, and in Catholic Europe more generally, appeared bleak. Rather than retreat entirely from public scholarly life, Simon instead chose to publish his works abroad. After printing some books in England, Simon turned to the Dutch Republic – at this time the great entrepôt of the European print trade – and came into contact with the printer-publisher Reinier Leers, based in Rotterdam.Footnote ¹⁷ Leers profited by exploiting the vagaries of European censorship: in a period of strict press controls in France, he assembled a formidable roster of French writers who were unable to obtain permission to publish their works in that country.Footnote ¹⁸ Indeed, his close collaboration with authors associated with Port-Royal, the so-called Jansenists, who were themselves Simon’s longtime adversaries, would eventually lead to a breakdown in his and Simon’s relationship in the 1690s.Footnote ¹⁹ In the intervening decade, Leers would act as Simon’s principal publisher, putting out the authorized edition of the Histoire critique du Vieux Testament (1685), a three-volume critical history of the New Testament, and an array of works on ecclesiastical history and the Eastern Churches.Footnote ²⁰

It was also with Leers that Simon published a short Latin tract in 1684, the Novorum Bibliorum polyglottorum synopsis, which set out his plans for a new polyglot Bible by developing and expanding the exposition in the Histoire critique du Vieux Testament. Simon’s proposals moved counter to the broad trend in early modern polyglot biblical publishing. There, the trajectory had been expansionist, with each edition frequently adding more languages, a process exemplified by the way in which one after another of the four great editions of Alcalá, Antwerp, Paris, and London exceeded its predecessor. Simon dismissed this preference for ever larger works, a rage for increase, he laconically put it, that merely led to repetitiveness.Footnote ²¹ Rather than print each text in each language in full, he argued, one should instead include a comparatively limited number of columns to which an array of critical notes could then be added.Footnote ²² The final result would be a fruitful medium, one whose text-critical value meshed effectively with its size and scope in order to make it convenient and affordable to individual scholars.Footnote ²³

In selecting the texts to be printed as complete columns, Simon balanced learned objectives with a series of considerations regarding which versions of the biblical text had been used by the Church historically. In terms of the former, the plan for the new polyglot was closely linked to Simon’s claims regarding the ‘original’ texts of Scripture adumbrated in the Histoire critique du Vieux Testament. In that work, Simon’s approach had been undergirded by an account of the relationship between Scripture and tradition that separated the authority of the biblical text in matters of doctrine from it as a subject of inquiry.Footnote ²⁴ Simon’s aims in this regard fulfilled a dual purpose, at once vouchsafing the authority of religious truth while also freeing the scholar to analyse every aspect of the text and history of the Bible itself. The Synopsis did not deploy or develop these arguments, potentially owing, it might be thought, to the fact that it was being published in a Protestant context where any claims on behalf of ecclesiastical tradition would be viewed less than favourably. It did, nevertheless, maintain the key position Simon’s broader reconceptualization had allowed him to make: the biblical critic should be concerned in the first instance with the ‘original’ texts of Scripture. In its time, this was a challenging move for a Catholic scholar, since it necessarily shifted attention away from translations, such as the Latin Vulgate and Greek Septuagint, that had long been prioritized by Catholics. The design for a new polyglot faithfully followed through on the implications of Simon’s position. The Hebrew Old Testament and the Greek New Testament would both be included, and, as we shall see in more detail shortly, accorded special significance.

Simon’s prospective polyglot combined this concern for the ‘original’ texts with recognition of the import of later versions and translations. In the first formulation of his project in the Histoire critique du Vieux Testament, Simon had highlighted how the decisions he made concerning which additional columns to add rested on the links between given versions and given religious groups. In providing the Old Testament in its original Hebrew together with the Latin Vulgate and the Greek Septuagint, the polyglot would offer readers the main versions of the Bible used by the Jews and the Western and Eastern churches.Footnote ²⁵ The Synopsis only slightly modified this design. Besides those three columns, its pages containing the Old Testament would include a fourth column with a translation of the Septuagint, approximating the text known as the Vetus Itala, the Latin translation of the Bible used by the Church in the West in the period preceding Jerome’s translation.Footnote ²⁶ The complete Vetus Itala was no longer extant and consequently the polyglot would print the version produced by Flaminio Nobili, published in Rome in 1588. While elsewhere Simon acknowledged this meant some might view the column as superfluous in text-critical terms, he still believed it met a need, both in terms of according due weight to the versions used by the Church, while also rendering the work more accessible to those less well versed in Greek.Footnote ²⁷ In the case of the New Testament, a subject not mentioned in the Histoire critique du Vieux Testament, Simon indicated his edition would have two columns, including the Latin Vulgate alongside the Greek New Testament.

The new polyglot would compensate for the diminution in the number of columns by adding a dual system of critical notes: brief, terse points regarding specific readings in the margins; longer, fuller annotations on the meaning of the text and how it had been understood and translated at the base of the page. Simon spent considerable time discussing this system. He detailed the sorts of sources that would be drawn on for the marginal notes of each of the respective columns. The Hebrew column of the Old Testament, for instance, would print an edition of the Masoretic Hebrew text surrounded with notes taken from three broad categories: first, additional versions and alternative manuscripts of the Old Testament in Hebrew, ranging from the Samaritan Pentateuch to Hebrew biblical manuscripts; second, variant readings found in traditions of Jewish scholarship; third, variant readings from ancient translations.Footnote ²⁸ Other columns would likewise be treated according to the specificities of their origin and subsequent transmission: the Septuagint column would print the text of the celebrated Codex Vaticanus, while adding marginal notes from other Greek sources (including other manuscript copies and printed editions of the Septuagint and patristic quotations) and variants drawn from translations made on the basis of the Greek text; the Greek column of the New Testament, besides providing readings taken from additional Greek manuscripts, would offer variants drawn from Old Latin translations.Footnote ²⁹

The purpose of accumulating this mass of evidence was to facilitate textual criticism, presenting a wealth of information without substantial duplication. When Simon detailed which readings would be added as marginalia to which columns he did so with a specific end in view: the material was selected on the grounds that it would provide the best-available evidence to try and reconstruct the earliest version of the text found in the respective column. In this sense, Simon’s plan lent considerable import to the versions he had chosen to include as separate columns, each of which merited reconstruction largely in its own terms and in the context of its history and transmission. Versions that were printed in full in earlier polyglot Bibles were now relegated to subsidiary roles: the Samaritan Pentateuch, a text whose rediscovery had been heralded in the first decades of the century, was now categorized as one among many sources of readings for the Hebrew text; the Arabic and Syriac versions were offered simply as sources of variant readings to the Greek text from which they were originally translated.

Yet, unlike some of his most prominent precursors, Simon did not argue that he had divided the columns in this way in order to insist on the independence of each column as constitutive of a specific textual tradition. Such a view had been a hallmark of the work of Simon’s predecessor at the Oratory, Jean Morin, whose succession of publications in the later 1620s and early 1630s had separated the Septuagint and the Latin Vulgate from the Hebrew text with a view to valorizing the ecclesiastical versions at the expense of Protestant Scripture.Footnote ³⁰ Simon moved in the opposite direction, reinscribing the centrality of the original texts in contrast to the later versions. In discussing the column containing the Vulgate, Simon acknowledged that at times the text did not accurately express the Hebrew text and that he would use the system of marginal notes to explain how the two differed.Footnote ³¹ The centrality of the original texts was further brought out in the case of the annotations Simon would put at the base of each page. Lengthier and more digressive than the marginal notes, these would focus on the original texts, since they were the fontes from which the others had ultimately been derived.Footnote ³² The scope of the overall project thus matched the Janus-faced quality of Simon’s critical works: looking back towards the past, it was intended to help scholars try and work out the earliest possible text of the Bible; facing the future, it was designed to enable scholars to produce versions of the original texts that could then be used as the basis for new translations.Footnote ³³

III

The Novorum Bibliorum polyglottorum synopsis appeared in a period in which Simon and Leers employed a variety of publishing strategies. One distinctive category of works was that of his critical histories of the Old and New Testaments, all of which were published in authorized editions carrying Simon’s name and the correct details of Leers’s print shop. Others were packaged in different ways, ranging from those that amalgamated true information with various aliases or deceptive particulars to those that presented fictitious details.Footnote ³⁴ Simon’s – and perhaps Leers’s – motivations for employing these stratagems for some works rather than others can be difficult to divine conclusively and often seem to depend as much on their fancy as a sophisticated plan to deceive the authorities. The Histoire critique de la créance & des coûtumes des nations du Levant (1684), for example, purported to be written by ‘Le Sr. de Moni’, a moniker whose playful tone and resemblance to Simon’s own name might on the face of it be thought to belie any determined plan to hide Simon’s authorship. Some contemporary readers, particularly those who were well informed when it came to the Dutch print trade, were aware who the author was. In his Nouvelles de la République des Lettres (1684–7), Pierre Bayle – someone who knew Leers and had even worked in his print shop for a period – not only indicated he knew who was responsible for the treatise but also enabled readers to discover Simon had written this and other works.Footnote ³⁵ Yet, information of this sort circulated unevenly. While John Locke lived in the Netherlands during this time and was familiar with those in Leers’s and Bayle’s circles, when it came to recording his purchases of Simon’s works and entering their details in his library catalogue he appears to have been uncertain over the authorship of some publications: while he noted it was believed that the Histoire de l’origine & du progrés des revenus ecclésiastiques was by Simon (‘creditur esse P. Simonis’), his entry for the Histoire critique de la créance & des coûtumes des nations du Levant evidenced greater uncertainty.Footnote ³⁶ Despite originally writing ‘par le Sr: de Moni vel potius le P. Simon’ (‘by the Sr: de Moni or rather the P[ère] Simon’) he subsequently struck out ‘vel potius le P. Simon’, and in the many extracts he made from the work referred to its author as ‘Moni’.Footnote ³⁷ For those further removed from the Northern European book market it could be even more challenging to obtain reliable and up-to-date intelligence. In Rome, Simon’s identity was not recognized by the Congregation of the Index when it prohibited the Histoire critique de la créance & des coûtumes des nations du Levant following a censure by the ecclesiastical historian Emmanuel Schelstrate.Footnote ³⁸

The pseudonym Simon chose for the prospective polyglot – Origenes Adamantius – bore a family resemblance to others he had used, hearkening back, with ‘Origen’, to an eminent scholarly predecessor and editor of his own celebrated multilingual work and, via ‘Adamantius’ (‘man of steel’), a patristic reference to Origen’s dedication that portrayed him as a ‘kind of superhero of Christian piety and scholarship’.Footnote ³⁹ Unlike Simon’s other works from this period, the Synopsis’s ruse necessitated additional embellishment, since, rather than a standalone piece or polemical response to one of his critics, it purported to seek the aid of other scholars. The tract opened with a note from the bookseller to the reader that claimed that the work had been drawn up by a man from the Low Countries, who sought help to bring the project it described to fruition.Footnote ⁴⁰ The request was explicitly international, listing a series of booksellers in Paris, London, and Frankfurt, together with Leers himself in Rotterdam, to whom correspondence could be addressed.Footnote ⁴¹ News of the project was disseminated elsewhere. Bayle published a warm discussion of the proposal in the Nouvelles, while also relaying the information regarding where offers of assistance could be sent.Footnote ⁴² Simon himself pressed the ploy further by publishing another pseudonymous letter that responded to his own design.Footnote ⁴³

The scheme’s advertisement and the attempt to enlist others had mixed results. The reports of Leers and Bayle indicate that the request itself was broadly successful, with replies roused from as far afield as France, England, and Germany.Footnote ⁴⁴ Some, however, had raised concerns about its pseudonymous author and their confessional allegiance. Writing in the Nouvelles, Bayle conveyed that he knew a number of ‘bons Protestans’ were nervous since the compiler was rumoured to be a Catholic. He assuaged their fears, assuring them that the work would not be compiled in furtherance of any specific religious group, while also explaining how the plan advocated a praiseworthy approach to the critical study of the biblical text.Footnote ⁴⁵

It has heretofore proven difficult to supplement Bayle and Leers’s comments with much additional testimony about the response to Simon’s proposal. The only substantial portion of extant correspondence known to have been sent to Leers concerning the polyglot project came from Jean Le Clerc, the young Arminian scholar who had recently settled in Amsterdam.Footnote ⁴⁶ But his lengthy initial missive was met with a blunt reply on Simon’s part that only served to antagonize Le Clerc.Footnote ⁴⁷ Rather than make headway with the project itself, their exchange instead led to a polemical debate between the two men over the Histoire critique du Vieux Testament. Le Clerc and Simon’s letters can, however, now be supplemented by some additional and hitherto unnoticed correspondence that can be found in the papers of Edward Bernard, then professor of astronomy in Oxford and who was at this time preparing an edition of the works of the first century Jewish historian Josephus.Footnote ⁴⁸

Bernard approached the polyglot project having long held an interest in biblical scholarship and in Simon’s work and views. He had followed the disputes that had spanned the previous decades over the relative merits of the Masoretic Hebrew text and the Septuagint and would come to possess a more than passing acquaintance with some of the leading participants in those disputes, notably Isaac Vossius, a prominent Dutch scholar who had become well known for his forthright defence of the Septuagint against the Hebrew text. Bernard had also had the opportunity to visit Paris in 1677, where he had become familiar with those who were part of Simon’s social circles, among them the Huguenot Henri Justel. An indication of how these threads could be drawn together would come in early 1680: upon learning that Vossius’s latest salvo, De Sibyllinis aliisque quae Christi natalem praecessere oraculis (1679), had been published, Bernard wrote to Justel that he was intrigued to learn what Simon thought of Vossius’s claims.Footnote ⁴⁹

Some half a decade later Bernard would be taken with the idea of a new polyglot Bible, and upon reading the Synopsis addressed a letter to its author. Having opened the letter by recording his appreciation of the proposal, Bernard then provided a few thoughts on the project itself. He was doubtful whether the polyglot ought to include the suggested fourth Old Testament column containing the Vetus Latina: as most of the original translation had been lost, Nobili’s work was a poor substitute.Footnote ⁵⁰ It would be better, he counselled, simply to print three columns: Hebrew, Greek, and Latin. When it came to those columns themselves, Bernard’s observations recalled the long-running controversies over the Masoretic text and the Septuagint. Bernard was critical of the merits of some of the evidence the author of the Synopsis proposed to include in the marginalia of the Hebrew column, especially wondering whether the vast bulk of Masoretic notes were worth encumbering the page with when they frequently concerned inconsequential matters.Footnote ⁵¹

Bernard’s decision to write led to a polite exchange of letters between the two men. For his part, Simon thanked Bernard for his comments, noting that he too hoped it might be possible for the work to comprise a single volume.Footnote ⁵² What made this challenging, however, was precisely the issue of the Septuagint and the quantity of variant readings that merited being included. He knew, for example, that in addition to those already available to him, Oxford possessed Arabic manuscripts marked with critical sigla that could provide valuable additional readings. In the future, he added, he hoped to compose a lexicon dedicated to the ancient translations that would be able to resolve their various discrepancies.Footnote ⁵³ In his reply, Bernard confirmed the existence of two such manuscripts in Oxford – part of Archbishop William Laud’s collections – that preserved Origen’s critical sigla.Footnote ⁵⁴ The study of this and other such material, he highlighted, ought to be a prime concern of contemporary scholars, whose priority should be to understand the text and textual history of the Septuagint and its various editorial interventions.

It appears Simon did not reply to Bernard – at the very least, no further letters between them have yet been uncovered and there is no evidence of subsequent collaboration between them. As such, their exchange was fair minded but short lived and without lasting impact despite what might have been the apparent scope for it. One might well attribute this to Simon’s own predilections, since his career would not be marked by extensive successful cooperation with others. In this case, personal preference meshed rudely with the reality Simon faced in this period of his life, and the manner in which his design apparently required the assistance of others for its completion. The fitful and unprepossessing exchange could also be explained with reference to the circumstances in which it had arisen – and Simon’s unwillingness to try and transcend these. Even though he was aware Simon was the author of the Synopsis, Bernard’s letters preserved the work’s pseudonymous ruse, addressed, as they were, to Origenes Adamantius; Simon maintained the ploy, responding via the pseudonym rather than using his own name.Footnote ⁵⁵ By transferring and maintaining patterns of pseudonymity deployed in print to the realm of scholarly correspondence, Simon’s disinclination to disclose his identity contributed to foreclosing the possibility for mutually productive interpersonal exchange and left him, here as at other points in his life, in a more shadowy corner of the contemporary Republic of Letters.

The comparatively unfruitful results of his exchanges with Le Clerc and Bernard also raise questions regarding how much work Simon accomplished and how seriously he pursued the project. The available evidence on this score is equivocal. In the second of his replies to Le Clerc, Simon implied that he had completed a substantial amount of work, particularly in terms of noting faults found in the Hebrew, Greek, Syriac, and Arabic texts of the Paris and London Polyglots.Footnote ⁵⁶ This work, it is fair to posit, would have relied on his own copy of the London Polyglot Bible, a copy into which, as we have seen, had been pasted additional white sheets for just this sort of research. It is unfortunate, considering the close links between this labour and Simon’s polyglot project, that this copy is no longer extant among the rest of his library in Rouen. Nevertheless, expectations regarding these volumes ought to be tempered. Lelong detailed that while researching his Discours historique he had examined the books Simon bequeathed to Rouen’s cathedral library and found that his copy of the London Polyglot did not match the high hopes he had for Simon’s project as a whole: while it was interleaved with sheets for Simon’s use, the notes and comments only filled some of the first pages.Footnote ⁵⁷

Other testimony, nonetheless, suggests that Simon had completed a considerable amount of work that could have been drawn on for the project. When replying to Le Clerc, Simon also added that he had filled the margins of multiple Bibles in his possession with variant readings, among them a copy of Menasseh ben Israel’s Hebrew Bible (1631–5).Footnote ⁵⁸ Unlike in the case of the London Polyglot, Simon’s exemplar of Menasseh’s edition is still extant and its margins are filled with his notes and comments. Further, and more important still, these notes can be linked to the polyglot project. As well as commenting in general on the kinds of evidence the polyglot Bible’s various columns would include, Simon’s Synopsis had provided examples of the sorts of variant readings that would be placed in the margins of the Hebrew column: he would note cases where words read defectively in the Masoretic text but fully in the Samaritan text (as in Genesis 1:14); he would highlight instances where the Samaritan text matched the readings found in other ancient translations (writing, ‘Sa. ut in S.’, i.e. ‘in the Samaritan text as in the Septuagint’); and he would point out how the similitude of letters in the Hebrew square script had led to variant readings in the Masoretic text that were not found in the Samaritan Pentateuch (providing, by way of example, the case of Genesis 3:15 and the question of whether it read היא or הוא).Footnote ⁵⁹ His copy of Menasseh’s work is full of comments on just these types of issues, including the identical reference to Genesis 1:14; cases, such as Genesis 3:6, where the Samaritan Pentateuch read as in the Septuagint (both employing the third person plural ‘and they ate’); and instances, such as Genesis 3:12, that evidenced places where היא might have been correctly preserved in the Samaritan text while the Masoretic Hebrew now read הוא.Footnote ⁶⁰ It would not go too far to suggest that Simon’s copy of Menasseh’s work could even be viewed as a draft version of the Hebrew column of the future polyglot.

Whether relying on the notes in his copy of the London Polyglot Bible, his edition of Menasseh ben Israel’s work, or some other sources, by mid-1685 Simon had provided Leers with material to draw up a specimen containing the first page of Genesis.Footnote ⁶¹ At this point, the highwater mark of Simon’s ambitions was reached, and the years that followed would not see him make progress in bringing the polyglot Bible project to completion. While we may wonder how seriously and strenuously Simon pursued the plan, he was at least unsuccessful in enticing others to lend their efforts towards its completion: Leers himself, writing earlier to Le Clerc, had noted that he would not himself venture on such a technically and linguistically challenging work; the exchanges with Le Clerc and Bernard, meanwhile, are symptomatic of Simon’s failure or unwillingness to engage in sustained cooperation with contemporary Protestant scholars when his status and reputation in the Catholic world was at a low ebb.Footnote ⁶²

The fate of the polyglot Bible is emblematic of many of the ambiguities of Simon and his scholarship at this stage in his career. As much as his emphasis on the centrality of the original texts of Scripture opened the door to inter-confessional collaboration, this was seemingly foreclosed by a combination of Simon’s Catholic commitments and – albeit to a degree that is difficult to assess definitively – his personal inclinations. Unwilling to leave France himself, Simon’s employment of an overseas press allowed him to publish his works abroad. And yet, rather than decisively benefit his reputation or help build a reliable international network, the multiple publishing strategies he and Leers adopted often occluded his authorship, in patterns of pseudonymity that then seeped into and affected his correspondence. What emerges, it might be suggested, is a picture of a scholar still desirous of vouchsafing their Catholic credentials as well as their scholarly merit, but as far as possible on their own terms, and without unwelcome compromise.

IV

In the years to come, Simon did not abandon his interest in publishing new editions of the Bible. Instead, his plans in this field were recalibrated before being reconceived in an alternative form, as Simon came to concentrate on crafting new vernacular translations of the biblical text. Simon had never overlooked vernacular versions of the Bible or the potential relevance of his work for them. Besides being involved in a cross-confessional scheme to translate the Bible in the 1670s, he also discussed vernacular translation in the Histoire critique du Vieux Testament and his design for a new polyglot. In each of these works, Simon’s basic position was consistent, as he contended new translations ought to be based on the original Hebrew and Greek texts. From the later 1680s, however, he began to advocate a different view. If the prospective version of the Bible, he explained, was designed to be used by the people at large, rather than chiefly scholars, then it was essential to provide them with reliable renditions of the version of the Bible used in the Church.Footnote ⁶³ French translations made for this purpose consequently had to be based on the authorized Latin Vulgate, rather than the original texts. Simon set out this view across his publications in the later 1680s and early 1690s, and his own efforts towards such a translation would culminate in translations of the Pentateuch and the New Testament on the basis of the Vulgate.Footnote ⁶⁴

Simon’s vision for how the Vulgate ought to be translated and presented in a printed book did not remain completely consistent. His initial expositions of his views would be attacked by a number of contemporaries, foremost among them Antoine Arnauld, who argued that in only providing believers the text of the Vulgate, Simon denied them the ‘true word of God’. It was incumbent on the vernacular translator, Arnauld insisted, to use all extant versions of the biblical text, and especially those in the original languages, to attempt to reconstruct the meaning intended by the text’s canonical authors.Footnote ⁶⁵ Simon’s translations of the Pentateuch and the New Testament pursued a modified strategy that answered Arnauld’s criticism. The main text contained Simon’s version of the ecclesiastically sanctioned Vulgate, a choice once more justified on the grounds that this was the version used in the Church. It was then supplemented by a system of textual notes. While these notes fulfilled more than one function, ranging from clarifying the meaning of difficult or obscure Latin terms to offering information regarding the relationship between Jewish and Christian customs and beliefs, their chief role was to provide information as to places where other versions of the Bible read differently, particularly in cases where the ‘original’ text and the Vulgate varied. In creating such an edition and providing the people with a translation that included both the text used by the Church and that of the ‘original’ versions, Simon claimed he had created what could be described as a ‘sort of little polyglot’.Footnote ⁶⁶

V

Simon’s ‘petite polyglotte’ did not meet the criteria Lelong would later use to define what constituted a polyglot Bible. Yet, Simon evidently hoped that even while printing translations of the biblical text in single columns in the vernacular, it might still be possible to associate his accomplishment with some of the ambitions of that august textual form. Simon was not the first to try and make the methods and findings of advanced polyglot scholarship more accessible to contemporaries. The London Polyglot Bible had included an array of charts of different alphabets, and a companion piece by Walton, the Introductio ad lectionem linguarum orientalium (1655), instructed readers in how to begin their studies in the ‘oriental’ languages. If Walton’s work was still aimed at a broadly Latin-reading audience, others in England and the Dutch Republic led the way in presenting abstruse philological issues for the vernacular public.Footnote ⁶⁷ In France, impetus towards publishing in the vernacular was encouraged by those associated with Port-Royal, who were responsible for an array of translations that ranged from the Bible to patristic works.Footnote ⁶⁸ In this setting, Simon’s ‘little polyglot’ might be described as a pre-eminent example of an area of learned endeavour that has recently been termed ‘vernacular biblical scholarship’.Footnote ⁶⁹

Previous accounts of Simon as a biblical translator have focused less on the audience to which his work was addressed than his choice of method. His work stood, such arguments have held, as a landmark in the history of French vernacular translations of the Bible for how it used historical and philological rather than theological or overtly confessional modes of scriptural interpretation.Footnote ⁷⁰ The significance attributed to Simon’s work in this context focused on his reconstruction of the sense of Scripture: if previous translators and commentators had justified their work via an appeal to the text’s mystical or spiritual senses, Simon was notable for attempting to recover and translate it according to the text’s literal sense. Identifying the literal sense was portrayed as a purely scholarly task, which required the translator to depend on various learned techniques, including the use of the ‘rules of criticism’ to establish the most probable text on which to base one’s work, attention to the grammatical meaning of the text, and the sense intended by the text’s author in the context of the linguistic conventions of their time.

A quintessential case of how such theoretical points were put into practice came in Simon’s treatment of the relationship between Christianity and Judaism in the first century CE. Simon underlined, like many early modern scholars, that Christianity had to be understood in terms of its origin in a Jewish setting and the Christian use and adoption of Jewish customs and practices. This point had been at the centre of the supplement he had added, in 1681, to his translation of Leon Modena’s Historia de gli riti hebraici. In his New Testament translation, Simon’s annotations would trace the origin of aspects of Christianity such as extreme unction, the laying on of hands, and penitence to their Jewish antecedents.Footnote ⁷¹ A further point of emphasis for Simon centred on Jewish scriptural interpretation. To understand the New Testament, Simon held, one had to understand that the modes of exegesis employed by Christ and the Apostles were embedded in the hermeneutical landscape of contemporary Judaism. When Paul tried to persuade unconverted Jews, for example, one could not expect his arguments to match later Christian norms of literal exegesis. Instead, his citations from the Old Testament, especially those that linked Jesus with Jewish beliefs concerning the Messiah, depended on derash, a form of mystical exegesis.Footnote ⁷²

While Simon legitimated these claims in scholarly terms, recent research has shown that his arguments were linked to his confessional views. In connecting New Testament allegoresis to methods of interpretation used by Jewish precursors, that is, Simon also reinscribed the centrality of tradition in Christianity.Footnote ⁷³ These findings have contributed to a broader reassessment of Simon and his work, one in which scholars increasingly recognize how far many of his arguments were precisely targeted attacks on Protestant views.Footnote ⁷⁴ Simon’s work on biblical translation has been made part of this reappraisal, particularly in terms of his decision to prioritize making translations on the basis of the Latin Vulgate rather than the original text.Footnote ⁷⁵

In some ways, the justification Simon provided in the preface to his translation of the New Testament might be seen as his definitive late career view of the relationship between criticism and confession, one that at once combined the ecclesiastically sanctioned text with the reading present in the original Scriptures. The two versions complemented each other, with one valid in the context of worship, the other in that of textual scholarship. This characterization stands in some conflict, however, with other aspects of how Simon executed his biblical translations. The notes added to his translation of the Pentateuch, for instance, as much as they offered information on readings found in the Hebrew original were also marked by how their system of notes frequently confirmed or vindicated the Vulgate. A typical example can be found at Genesis 30:32, where the Vulgate departed from the Masoretic text in a number of places, notably by beginning ‘Go round through all thy flocks’ (‘Gyra omnes greges tuos’) instead of ‘I will pass through all thy flock today’ (׳אעבר בכול־צאנך היום׳). In the main text, Simon’s translation broadly followed the Vulgate (albeit adding the ‘today’, found in both the Hebrew text and the Septuagint): ‘Repassés aujourdhui tous vos troupeaux’. In the annotation, Simon explained that here and in what followed Jerome was not especially committed to the words of the Hebrew text, ‘but only to the sense, which he expresses very well’.Footnote ⁷⁶ There was, he continued, little need to comment on all these sorts of minor differences that were of no significance for the sense overall.

Throughout the rest of his translation of the Pentateuch, Simon repeatedly praised Jerome, emphasizing how effectively he had captured the meaning of the Hebrew text before him even while not following it word-for-word. Simon’s pretended lack of care regarding the precise wording might well in this and other such instances be linked to the differing purposes of his work on vernacular translation compared to his exercises in polyglot scholarship stricto sensu: his projected polyglot Bible was chiefly concerned with text-critical matters and needed to consider every minor textual detail; his vernacular translations were preoccupied with accurately translating the meaning of the text at hand (particularly, in this case, the Vulgate). These incommensurate ambitions may well explain why, unlike in the case of Simon’s prospective polyglot, there are a remarkably small number of overlaps between his translation of the Pentateuch and the notes that filled his copy of Menasseh ben Israel’s Hebrew Bible. Nevertheless, Simon’s ambition to present Jerome’s version accompanied with notes containing alternative readings from the original text created scope for tension, especially when it was evident that such differences owed not to points of interpretation but to variant readings, whether drawn from different manuscripts or alternative textual traditions.

At times, Simon’s work did appear to maintain the kind of judicious exposition indicated in the preface to the New Testament, even on points loaded with confessional significance. An exemplary instance in his Pentateuch translation came at Genesis 3:15, a place in which Catholic and Protestant editions had long varied from one another with the former reading: ‘I will put enmities between thee and the woman, and thy seed and her seed: she shall crush thy head, and thou shalt lie in wait for her heel’; the latter: ‘And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel’. The key difference here turned on whether one read ‘ipsa’ or ‘ipse’, with the former (feminine singular) supporting a mariological interpretation, and the latter (masculine singular) referring to Christ or the Messiah. The main text of Simon’s translation followed the Vulgate and with it the Catholic reading. Yet, in the attendant note, Simon was circumspect. He related that the reading ‘ipsa’ was found in multiple ancient manuscripts of the Old Latin text since the time of Augustine and had been kept in the text by the revisors of the Vulgate in the previous century, even while ‘ipse’ had also been found in others and was the reading in the Hebrew text.Footnote ⁷⁷ Simon’s discussion avoided making a final determination regarding which reading should be preferred, and one could therefore read into it either an implicit preference for the original Hebrew or alternatively see it as legitimizing the Vulgate reading by reference to its own antiquity.

Elsewhere, Simon used evidence in less equivocal ways. His New Testament translation differed in at least one important respect from that of the Pentateuch. When the Pentateuch translation discussed variant readings, it did so in terms of the original Hebrew text and its subsequent ancient and modern translations and only on a dozen or so occasions referred to extant manuscripts (and, even then, without identifying specific manuscripts). Things were quite otherwise when it came to the New Testament. An inkling of Simon’s potential use of manuscript evidence would have been evident to anyone opening the first volume and leafing through the prefatory materials, which, in the key to the work’s annotations, contained references to the abbreviations ‘ms.’, ‘mss.’, and ‘Cambr. Cambridge’.Footnote ⁷⁸ While the first two are readily identifiable as denoting a ‘manuscript’ or multiple ‘manuscripts’, the third referred to Codex Bezae, a diglot manuscript of the New Testament that was in the possession of the university library in Cambridge.Footnote ⁷⁹ These initial references provided little sense, however, of just how widely Simon’s New Testament annotations would draw on manuscript material. Some of these were, like Codex Bezae, referred to as named manuscripts, with Codex Claromontanus and Codex Sangermanensis being described as ‘de Clermont’ and ‘de S[aint] Germain’, respectively. Others were referred to in various ways, whether in terms of the library they were found in (for example, ‘a manuscript of Mr. Colbert’ (‘un ms. de Mr. Colbert’)), or in terms of representative exemplars of certain categories of manuscript, as in ‘some old Greek manuscripts’ (‘quelques anciens mss. grecs’) or ‘several Greek copies’ (‘plusieurs exemplaires grecs’).Footnote ⁸⁰

Simon’s terminology reflected judgements about this array of manuscripts and their texts. In the preface to the New Testament translation Simon singled out the named manuscripts such as Codex Bezae in order to comment on how they differed from the bulk of Greek manuscripts. They had, he explained, been intentionally edited in various ways that meant they could not be viewed – as had been incorrectly done by Denis Amelote in his own earlier translation – as authentic or original copies of the text.Footnote ⁸¹ But these apparently unpromising remarks did not encapsulate Simon’s view of these manuscripts or their potential value to biblical scholars. Simon had long intended to include them in his various biblical editions and he had singled them out in the Synopsis as among those texts whose readings would be placed in the margins of the Greek column of the New Testament.Footnote ⁸² In this setting, Simon’s decision was rooted in the value of Codex Bezae, Codex Claromontanus, and Codex Sangermanensis as diglot manuscripts: in addition to containing the Greek text, they also appeared to offer versions of the Old Latin translation that was used by the Church in the era preceding Jerome’s revision.

The significance of this fact only becomes fully apparent in the context of Simon’s broader account of the history of the text of the New Testament. Simon’s default position, as we have seen, was that biblical scholars’ first attention and implicit preference ought to be accorded to the ‘original’ texts of the Bible. While relatively clear and unwavering in the case of the Hebrew text of the Old Testament, Simon’s treatment of the New Testament text was more complex and variegated, since, he noted, that text was never fixed in a manner equivalent to the Masoretic text.Footnote ⁸³ Manuscripts of the New Testament in Greek, Simon explained, had been edited and altered at various points in their history, a process of revision that continued into and after the era following Jerome.Footnote ⁸⁴ It was consequently imperative for scholars not to simply identify extant later Greek manuscripts with the original text of the Greek New Testament. The value of manuscripts like Codex Bezae was that their Old Latin texts could offer readings that preceded Jerome’s work, thereby offering insight into versions of the text that potentially even dated back nearly to apostolic times.Footnote ⁸⁵ It was on these grounds that Simon would defend Codex Bezae against the prominent detractions of Antoine Arnauld, who postulated that its divergences from other Greek texts meant it was probably a later fabrication.Footnote ⁸⁶

Simon’s elaboration of his views regarding the text of the New Testament in his critical works meshed well with the plan enunciated in the Synopsis for his abridged polyglot Bible, with its notes and annotations enabling the critic to sift through the best available evidence to ponder how the original Greek text once read. In his translation of the New Testament, however, he used the evidence he had accumulated in a much less nuanced, and much more confessionally inflected, manner. He did so by deploying it in two chief ways. First, he drew on it to buttress and support the authority of readings found in the Vulgate. Second, he revealed the full extent of textual variation that existed throughout the Greek textual tradition, especially between the textus receptus and extant Greek manuscripts. The degree to which Simon pursued these two goals can perhaps best be brought out in quantitative terms. In the Gospel of Matthew, Simon’s annotations refer to manuscript readings on seventy-eight occasions. Of these, twenty-seven use manuscripts to confirm that the reading present in the Vulgate is found in a manuscript of some kind (in eleven of these cases Codex Bezae). On another thirty-six occasions, Simon pointed out variations between the textus receptus and Greek manuscripts. From the remaining fifteen annotations, thirteen could fairly be described as making observations regarding textual variation that did not directly lead to conclusions regarding either the Vulgate or the textus receptus, and in only a few instances did Simon’s comments imply manuscript evidence could lead one to doubt the reading found in the Vulgate. Much as Origen’s own Hexapla, a momentous six-column edition of the Bible in Hebrew and Greek, was later heralded both as a textual accomplishment and a valuable tool in inter-religious polemic between Christians and Jews, so Simon’s New Testament, on a much smaller scale, had thus used the language and scholarly methods of polyglot biblical scholarship in the service of inter-confessional controversy.Footnote ⁸⁷

While later scholarship would come to assert Simon’s New Testament translation was noteworthy for its commitment to historical and philological scholarship, contemporaries were much less certain. When reviewing the edition for the Leipzig-based Acta eruditorum in February 1704, the Lutheran theologian Valentin Ernst Löscher admired some aspects of the work, such as the short prefaces Simon had added to each part of the New Testament.Footnote ⁸⁸ The critical observations Simon had included at the foot of the page, he commented, were also worth reading, crammed as they were with information gathered from ancient manuscripts and old translations.Footnote ⁸⁹ But, Löscher was quick to add, this industry was not entirely praiseworthy, since whenever Simon deployed this evidence his main ambition was to undermine the textus receptus or stabilize the Vulgate; for every slight fault one might find in the Latin text, so Simon had found a justification for its reading from ancient manuscripts like Codex Bezae, Codex Claromontanus, or Codex Sangermanensis.Footnote ⁹⁰ What was for Löscher cause for complaint had elsewhere been offered as a reason to promote the work. A notice advertising its publication in the Parisian Journal des sçavans in August 1702, long viewed as being composed by Simon himself, hailed the work’s annotations for the way in which they could be used to convince Protestants: they could hardly continue to cleave solely to the Greek New Testament once they saw how frequently the reading found in the Vulgate coincided with old Greek manuscripts.Footnote ⁹¹

VI

Despite Simon’s best efforts, his attempts to justify his works did little to shift the views of those who mattered most – at least when it came to his status and that of his scholarship in France. Foremost in this respect stood Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, whose opposition to Simon’s New Testament translation was implacable, as it had been in the case of the erstwhile Oratorian’s earlier publications. Bossuet’s disapproval has long contributed to creating an image of Simon’s work that foregrounded its most ostensibly radical elements, fixing the impression of him as a novel textual critic who confronted a reactionary ecclesiastical establishment. This article has questioned this depiction by shifting the focus of analysis, directing attention away from Simon’s conflicts with Bossuet and others and instead towards the ways he tried to chart his career in the aftermath of the Histoire critique du Vieux Testament’s prohibition. In so doing, it has revealed and then clarified previously under-acknowledged moments of disjuncture in Simon’s career, exploring issues ranging from his working relationships with contemporary scholars (especially on the Protestant side), to the challenges involved in negotiating the boundary between manuscript and print in multiple geographical locations and the various ways he construed the relationship between the ‘original’ texts of the Bible and their subsequent versions and translations.

What emerges from this analysis is a picture of a world of scholarship marked by a much more complex set of interwoven narratives than any posited transition from a shared vision of the historia sacra into an age of criticism. In particular, this study has shown the ways in which this era continued to be marked by an indelible association between learning and confession. Rather than transcend such a connection, Simon’s case is more notable for how he recognized it, construing the link between his work and its confessional salience in manifold ways. On one level, this saw him argue that different biblical texts were pertinent in different settings: as Catholic works of critical scholarship should be chiefly centred on the original text, so editions intended for use in religious worship or by the broader French reading public necessarily relied on the ecclesiastically sanctioned Latin Vulgate. Yet this strict demarcation was by no means rigidly applied, and Simon’s completed works often had a much more multifaceted character: his putative polyglot Bible’s chosen columns were selected largely on the basis of their ecclesiastical significance; his vernacular translations attempted to co-opt multilingual scholarship by describing them as a ‘petite polyglotte’, even while their notes revealed their more confessionally inflected characteristics.

As much as these works evidence the continuation of confessionalized erudition, so the case of Simon also begins to pose its own questions to this historical category, framed less in terms of scholarship rapidly shifting from a world dominated by confessional objectives to purely critical ones, and more in terms of its explanatory power to track change through time. One of the great strengths of the rubric has been the way in which it has allowed historians to capture the motive force that drove much early modern scholarly endeavour, often effectively linked to the way in which the value of such scholarship was publicly advocated on the grounds of its import to given confessional groups. Then and subsequently, indeed, this process has been framed in analogical terms as a form of early modern military contest.Footnote ⁹² If the tendency of these arguments has thus been towards drawing together tightly the works of early modern scholars with their confessional purpose (often directly linked to clearly defined or even monolithic confessional groups), rather less attention has been paid to evaluating the various ways the relationship between a given work and a given confession could be described. The case of Richard Simon, this article has shown, reveals how an individual scholar framed and reframed their arguments, at once maintaining a confessional character throughout, even while the specific nature of this confessional dimension altered through time. What is still to be seen is how far Simon was exemplary or exceptional in this respect, and whether the ways in which he construed his works’ confessional salience have their own histories that remain to be written.