Brill is an academic publisher headquartered in The Netherlands. Founded in 1683, “Brill’s publications focus on the Humanities and Social Sciences, International Law and selected areas in the Sciences.” This includes books on religion, all religions. Two of its main subject areas are “Religious Studies” and “Theology and World Christianity.” Brill is one of the largest (and most expensive) academic publishers in the world, and “publishes close to 1,400 books and reference works per year in both print and electronic format” and over 330 journals titles.” The reason that Brill is the first publisher mentioned here at The Preacher’s Library is simply because I recently received a marketing e-mail from Brill. Unfortunately, the e-mail was to announce that Brill was recognizing Pride Month in June, and contained a link to books and journal articles in that genre. This should come as no surprise, as Brill is not a Christian publisher nor even a religious one. Am I going to boycott Brill because they are pandering to the “LGBT community” and people interested in such nonsense? Of course not. Why should I deprive myself of important books just because I don’t like the politics or the publications of a publisher? Most major corporations, including those in the USA, recognize and even celebrate Pride Month. I would have to boycott them as well to be consistent. I am not aware of any Christian publishers that recognize Pride Month, but the ugly truth is that there are some Christian publishers that publish books in defense of abortion and same-sex marriage. I will address this in a future post on the state of Christian publishing.
I have just a few books in my library published by Brill:
- Novum Testamentum ab Erasmo Recognitum (the scholarly critical edition of the New Testament Greek text and Latin translation of Erasmus, edited by Andrew J. Brown).
- The English Bible in the Early Modern World, edited by Robert Armstrong and Tadhg Ó Hannracháin (2018).
- Beyond What Is Written: Erasmus and Beza as Conjectural Critics of the New Testament, Jan Krans (2006).
- Richard ‘Dutch’ Thomson, c. 1569-1613: The Life and Letters of a Renaissance Scholar, Paul Botley (2016).
- Labourers in the Vineyard of the Lord: Erudition and the Making of the King James Version of the Bible, edited by Mordechai Feingold (2018).
These last two books are very important as concerning the history of the King James Bible. Richard Thomson was one of the translators. Richard ‘Dutch’ Thomson, c. 1569-1613: The Life and Letters of a Renaissance Scholar is the only scholarly biography of one of the King James translators that I am aware of. Part I (29 short chapters, pgs. 3-140) traces Thomson’s life and Part II (pgs. 143-354) contains a critical edition of all of his surviving correspondence. The 78 letters are in Latin, but have an English synopsis and explanatory footnotes. An appendix details 24 manuscripts and 35 books from his library.
Labourers in the Vineyard of the Lord: Erudition and the Making of the King James Version of the Bible is one of the most important and scholarly books on the history of the King James Bible and its translators ever published (for $172, it better be). The book was not published in time for me to mine its resources for the second edition (2016) of my book King James, His Bible, and Its Translators, but I have done so for the forthcoming third edition. The table of contents and previews of each chapter can be seen at the above link. These two books are not light reading, and may be two of the most scholarly books you will ever read.