ABSTRACT
In the beginning was the word – that is, the spoken word. In the early modern period, anyone with even the most basic familiarity with the Bible knew that the world had been brought into being by an act of speech: ‘God said, Let there be light: and there was light’ (Genesis 1:3). In one of the most famous textual emendations of the Renaissance, Erasmus had translated the Greek word logos (John 1:1) into Latin as ‘sermo’ rather than ‘verbum’ in order to emphasise that the divine Word was a spoken utterance, not merely a tacit concept in the mind of God. 1 Even the written word of scripture was perceived in oral terms as a form of divine speech: thus John Donne could declare in a sermon that ‘the Scriptures are God’s Voyce; the Church is his Eccho; a redoubling, a repeating of some particular syllables, and accents of the same voice’. 2 In that sense God’s sermo, his original speech act, had never died away but was constantly repeated whenever the scriptures were read or preached.
