This volume in the New Cambridge History of the Bible has, like its companions in the series, been the work of many hands and of more years than any of us intended. Throughout it all I have appreciated and benefited from the help and support of Kate Brett and Laura Morris, successive religion and theology editors at Cambridge University Press. Their encouragement and occasional spurring-on has enabled me to believe that I could complete editing a project of this size while heavily committed in so many other areas.

My thanks go out above all to the many contributors who have made this volume possible. To those authors who wrote their contributions early in the process, and have endured patiently while the volume reached its final form, I owe infinite thanks for their promptness, civility, and tolerance. To those authors who bravely took on the most challenging, complex commissions and wrote, often under pressure of time, works of astonishing scope, I offer my admiration as well as gratitude. All alike have collaborated in the book's production stages helpfully and promptly when asked. The preparation of the manuscript for the press has been made easy and collegial by the copy-editing team of Regina Paleski and Mary Starkey.

Histories of the Bible are products of a particular historical and cultural moment. We write the history of sacred texts once we appreciate that, however sacred we may hold them, they are products of their cultural environment. As human society takes different forms and undergoes new influences, approaches to ancient texts change and develop. No age in the history of Scripture saw more dramatic transformations in attitudes to the Bible than the early modern period in Europe. It has been a privilege – and a challenge both intellectually and spiritually – to observe those transformations through the eyes of my colleagues and fellow-historians.