ABSTRACT
Although there had not been an acknowledged, legal Jewish presence in England since 1290, Christian Hebraism, according to Chanita Goodblatt, could be discerned as a significant intellectual and religious movement in Reformation England. Bunyan himself had no understanding of Latin, Greek, or Hebrew. The precise level of the educated Early Modern Englishman's Hebrew proficiency is not known; yet Paul Davis argues that: There was a babel of Languages of Canaan in Bunyan's England. Recent studies of the intellectual history of the Early Modern period in Europe, in posing the question of the extent to which Hebraic knowledge was available to literate Christians, have noted that some of the earliest books printed in moveable type in Italy were in Hebrew. During the 1650s and 1660s, there was awakened interest in contemporary Jews. The reference to the kings of the Medes and Persians should not be taken as a claim for a parallel between those kings and post-Restoration monarchs.
