God's Secretaries

Adam Nicolson

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English

Harper US
01 March 2004

Religion & beliefs

A net of complex currents flowed across Jacobean England. This was the England of Shakespeare, Jonson and Bacon; of the Gunpowder Plot; the worst outbreak of the plague England had ever seen; Arcadian landscapes; murderous, toxic slums; and, above all, of sometimes overwhelming religious passion. Jacobean England was both more godly and less godly than it had ever been, and the entire culture was drawn taut between the polarities. This was the world that created the ""King James Bible"". It is the greatest work of English prose ever written, and it is no coincidence that the translation was made at the moment ""Englishness"" and the English language had come into its first passionate maturity. Boisterous, elegant, subtle, majestic, finely nuanced, sonorous and musical, the English of Jacobean England has a more encompassing idea of its own reach and scope than any before or since. It is a form of the language that drips with potency and sensitivity. The age, with all its conflicts, explains the book. The sponsor and guide of the whole Bible project was the King himself, the brilliant, ugly and profoundly peace-loving James the Sixth of Scotland and First of England. Trained almost from birth to manage the rivalries of political factions at home, James saw in England the chance for a sort of irenic Eden over which the new translation of the Bible was to preside. It was to be a Bible for everyone, and as God's lieutenant on earth, he would use it to unify his kingdom. The dream of Jacobean peace, guaranteed by an elision of royal power and divine glory, lies behind a Bible of extraordinary grace and everlasting literary power. About fifty scholars from Cambridge, Oxford and London did the work, drawing on many previous versions, and created a text which, for all its failings, has never been equaled. That is the central question of this book: how did this group of near-anonymous divines, muddled, drunk, self-serving, ambitious, ruthless, obsequious, pedantic and flawed as they were, manage to bring off this astonishing translation? How did such ordinary men make such extraordinary prose? In ""God's Secretaries"", Adam Nicolson gives a fascinating and dramatic account of the accession and ambition of the first Stuart king; of the scholars who labored for seven years to create his Bible; of the influences that shaped their work and of the beliefs that colored their world, immersing us in an age whose greatest monument is not a painting or a building, but a book.

By: Adam Nicolson
Imprint: Harper US
Country of Publication: United States
Edition: New edition
Dimensions: Height: 203mm, Width: 137mm, Spine: 22mm
Weight: 297g
ISBN: 9780060838737
ISBN 10: 0060838736
Pages: 336
Publication Date: 01 March 2004
Recommended Age: From 18 To 99
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

Adam Nicolson lives on a 90 acre farm near Burwash with his wife and five children. In the past he has been both a publisher, founding his own company in the mid-1980s of which he remains a director, and a travel writer, spending 2 years walking around England on leaving university and then another 2 years walking around France. He has written books on Eastern Europe, the American West, the evolution of the small English town and the Somerset Levels. He has won both a Somerset Maugham Award and the British Topography Prize and has been shortlisted for Newspaper Feature Writer of the Year.

Reviews for God's Secretaries

""This scrupulously elegant account of the creation of what four centuries of history has confirmed is the finest English-language work of all time, is entirely true to its subject: Adam Nicolson's lapidary prose is masterly, his measured account both as readable as the curious demand and as dignified as the story deserves."" -- Simon Winchester, author of Krakatoa ""So few documents have survived this labor--apart, of course, from the translation itself--that piecing together the tale is at least as much a matter of intelligent guesswork as of hard research. This is what Adam Nicolson has done, and he has done it extraordinarily well."" -- Washington Post Book World ""This book is studded with intriguing information and answers to scholarly questions.... Nicolson frequently extols the eloquence, breadth, inclusiveness and beauty of the King James translation. He even connects the dots that lead from this majestic Bible to the contemporaneous King Lear."" -- Janet Maslin, New York Times ""Adam Nicolson's re-creation of this context is beyond praise. In God's Secretaries he brings off a brilliant freehand portrait of an England more rich yet insecure, more literate yet superstitious, more urban yet still rural in rhythm, more unified yet riven with factions."" -- Christopher Hitchens, New York Times Book Review ""Nicolson tells the King James Version's story so well that his book may prove to be the King James Version's indispensable companion for years to come."" -- Booklist (Starred Review) ""Nicolson makes that far-away world fresh for today's readers. And he makes the King James Bible seem all the more remarkable-for being the product of a divided age, when grudging cooperation led to a masterpiece of faith and prose."" -- Wall Street Journal ""A wonderful example of what the determined researcher can find and use where the less diligent or imaginative see only deficiency....Nicolson's greatest gift is his ability to portray the vibrant characters of the men responsible for the unfolding of this story."" -- Weekly Standard ""An astonishingly rich cultural tour of the art, architecture, personalities and experiences of Jacobean England: high and low entertainment, high and low churchmanship, courtiers, schoolmasters and ecclesiastics. [Nicolson's] picture is beguilingly full."" -- Times Literary Supplement (London) ""Humanely erudite, elegantly written, passionately felt....[Nicolson] is a skilled storyteller, and he compacts large amounts of research into alluring anecdotal packets."" -- James Wood, The New Yorker ""In fewer than 250 pages [God's Secretaries] places the King James Version in historical context, brings vividly to life many of those who worked on it, gives a plausible account of how the task was accomplished, and conveys in Nicolson's own passionate prose the full grandeur of the translation."" -- Chicago Sun-Times