Academic literature on the topic 'French biblical translations'

Abstract This article argues for intralingual intertemporal translations as a separate category within the field of translation studies. Not only do these translations seem to have common characteristics and behaviors, but it is precisely their particularities that make them a key to understanding more ‘typical’ translations. Two main sets of examples will serve as demonstration: translations from Old French into Middle and Modern French, and a Modern Hebrew translation of the Old Testament, originally written in Biblical Hebrew, as well as the public discussion following its publication.

The biblical figure of Lot’s wife in the novels of Mary Anne Sadlier functions typologically, assigning the role of Lot’s wife to both men and women. This essay explores how such an interpretative move functioned to reverse the charges leveled against Catholic men by muscular Christianity and Catholic women by the Protestant Cult of True Womanhood. Sadlier’s audience was the burgeoning Irish American immigrant community, but the ethnically porous character of Sadlier’s sources of inspiration for that community might be attested by her family’s Catholic catechetical publishing company’s reprint of Cardinal Wiseman’s Fabiola in the United States a mere two years after its initial publication in Britain and by her numerous translations from the French. The choice of a typological figure with a widely acknowledged perceived historical basis helped Sadlier to navigate between progressive and conservative Catholic biblical interpretation contemporary to her writing. Typology also facilitated Sadlier’s participation in the Catholic polemics against anti-Catholic, nativist literature by assimilating a negative biblical exemplar to biblically devoted Protestants.

The article offers a concise presentation of the project linked to the Library Fund of the Pontifical Urbaniana University, namely, to study the inculturation of the Christian faith by relating the documentation on the editions of the Bible to the catechisms in the territories entrusted to the pastoral care of the Congregation for Evangelization of peoples. The vastness of the project itself is marked today by the difficulty of using more extensive documentation than that present in the Fund of the same Library. However, more limited segments of the indicated material of interest can already be identified. More specifically, the African continent shows quite a varied phenomenology of the editions of the Bible: from translations of the Latin Vulgate into local languages, to translations from English or French, themselves translations from Latin. In the post-conciliar period, the translations of the Bible from the original biblical languages emerge. This is the case of the Kinyarwanda versions of the NT (1988, 1989) and of the OT-NT in a single volume (1990, 1992), in which, alongside pastoral purposes, the results of modern biblical exegesis are evident, to the point of proposing categorizations of literary bodies of biblical literature from an interconfessional and also interreligious perspective.

This article uses Mediated Discourse Analysis (Norris & Jones 2005) to investigate a dual translation: One, the English-Maori original Potiki by Patricia Grace (1986), a translation of Maori culture that issues a complex postcolonial challenge and neocolonial protest; and two, the German version of the book translated by Martini-Honus and Martini (2005 edition). Findings indicate that the book’s essence embedded in a complex interweaving of Maori myths and biblical parallels has not been recognized by professional reviewers of the German translation and that certain mistranslations distort important messages from the original. All readers of translations potentially contribute to indigenous people regaining their voice, but only if these readers can decipher the original actions and discourses in their languages. This article delivers a key to understanding Potiki, a classic text widely used in teaching and already translated into at least five languages, i.e. Dutch, Finnish, French, German and Spanish.

Newer and newer Bible translations from original languages tend to appear regularly. Their authors pursue a plethora of strategies, from interlinear to philological to dynamic ones, taking as the source text not only the Hebrew, but also the Greek canon. Since the 1980s, the books of the Greek Bible have been translated into German, English, Italian, Spanish and French; ten years ago, this group was comple­mented by the Polish rendering made by Rev. Prof. Remigiusz Popowski. Though enthusiastically received, the text was not much researched. This article is intended to make up for this paucity and present the Polish text of the Septuagint from the perspective of its bibliological process and that of descriptive translation studies: a brief account of its historical background, the author of the translation, a record of editions and the significance for the Polish biblical milieu is followed by a closer analysis and exemplification of strate­gies and techniques adopted by the author.

AbstractThis article focuses on Georges Balandier's autobiographical essayAfrique ambiguë(1957). Its translation into English,Ambiguous Africa: Cultures in Collision(1966), provides the basis for an examination of the concept of translation in its linguistic but also, and above all, transcultural dimensions. As a text,Ambiguous Africadoes not quite render the subtlety of the French original but beyond its translational shortcomings, Balandier's book is also shown to conduct an in-depth analysis of late colonialism in sub-Saharan Africa. This era is characterized by a high degree of cultural anxiety on the part of the colonizers and the colonized. Echoing other anti-colonial thinkers of the period – Balandier was a regular contributor toPrésence Africaine– he records the environmental, artistic, psychological,andlinguistic devastation generated by the colonial process in this part of the world. Balandier's assessment is pessimistic, but he identifies the ability of some unassimilated African intellectuals and members of messianic movements such as Matswanism and Kimbanguism to challenge the hegemonic status of the colonial Ur-Text. This emancipative move relies on vernacular intellectual and cultural resources and is driven by an attempt to re-write and translate biblical stories anew. It is argued here that this process of indigenous re-appropriation, however ambiguous it might have been assessed by Balandier, is postcolonial for it bears witness to a partial de-canonization of the colonial source text.

The article focuses on an analysis of the semantic character of the Greek adverb εὖ and its prefix role in the morphological formations of selected lexical units present in the texts of the New Testament. The author begins by addressing the possibility of creating lexical units using the selected prefix, listing the lexemes with the highest degree of productivity appearing in the chosen corpus. The units selected in this way are then analysed in terms of their functioning in Greek New Testament texts, with or without the prefix εὖ. The analysis makes it possible to indicate the semantic contribution that the studied prefix makes to the newly created linguistic formations. The work also focuses on a comparative analysis of the translations adopted in French biblical studies and suggests a deeper understanding of them based on the results of the proposed description.

Paul Claudel is a French writer of the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, known in Russia for his poetic works of the early period and dramaturgy. His short prose and poetic commentaries on theBible are practically unknown in the Russian-speaking scientific field. Most of his prose heritage consists of translations and commentaries on biblical books, including the apex text Paul Claudel inquires the Song of Songs(Paul Claudel interroge le Cantique des Cantiques). The purpose of this article is to introduce into sci-entific circulation the topic ‘Claudel as a prose writer, author of literary commentaries on the Bible’. It is this part of Claudel’s heritage that needs to be studied so that it would become possible to understand and assess the place of Claudel in the world culture of the 20thcentury. First of all, the paper deals with the method of Claudel’s work with the Bible (daily reading, reference to the works of the Church Fathers and concordan-ces), which forms the poetological foundations of the style. These books shape a creative laboratory from which a method of literary commentary on biblical texts grows. This is how Claudel’s biblical style is born. It can be defined as an attitude to the Scripture not as to a series of messages, but as to images. The preserva-tion of the centuries-old tradition of the Church in the interpretation of the Word leads the writer to a poetic commentary, a ‘Claudelian novel’ with the biblical characters and plot. Claudel makes the drama of the Holy Scripture the center of the reader’s interest, uniting the sacred and the profane, ennobling hypocrisy, direct-ing mimesis to biblical reality, the existence of which Claudel does not doubt. The writer emphasized that his works were exclusively literary. The understanding of the Claudel’s text as literary is deepened not only by the text itself, but by the reader’s experience and readiness to perceive it. Thus, Claudel turns out to be the creator of a new dialogical novel word.

Michael Edwards, professor of English literature at the Collège de France in Paris, poet, critic, and the first British subject to be elected to the French Academy, has turned his attention in recent years to biblical literature. In 2016 he published Bible et poésie (Paris, Fallois). A translation of the sequel, Pour un christianisme intempestif (Paris, Fallois), was released in February of 2022 by Fortress Press under the title, Untimely Christianity. In the same year, the English translation of his 2016 volume, under the title The Bible and Poetry, will be published by New York Review Books. This study examines the poet-scholar’s perspective on scripture, on theology, on the art of translation and his opinions of various modern translations of the Bible and highlights the most useful insights he contributes. The notion of Christianity’s radical alterity is an important key to Edwards’s work. Christianity is foreign to us, it is strange, so the scriptures that reveal it are also radically other. We Christians have been so desensitized to that otherness by our familiarity with the text that we seldom are challenged by it with the force that energized it originally. Its immense countercultural potential for transforming us and our world is blunted so that we don’t truly hear the voice of God in it. Edwards’s essential purpose is to help us reawaken our ability to hear the Bible in its untimely, countercultural power.

La Bible anglo-normande (B.a.n.) et la Bible de Jean de Sy (BJdS) sont deux traductions bibliques en langue d'oïl du XIVe siècle d'un intérêt considérable, mais encore peu étudiées. La B.a.n. est une traduction anonyme de la Vulgate, transmise par trois manuscrits. Elle représente non seulement l'une des premières versions complètes de la Bible en français, mais aussi peut-être la plus ancienne traduction biblique intégrale en prose produite en Angleterre. Au cours des dernières années, un intérêt renouvelé pour B.a.n. s'est manifesté par l'édition de livres isolés, mais l'œuvre reste en grande partie inédite.La BJdS fait partie d'un projet de traduction intégrale de la Bible en prose commandé par le roi de France Jean le Bon au frère dominicain Jean de Sy. Cependant, le travail de traduction s'est arrêté en 1356, après la capture du souverain à la bataille de Poitiers. L'ouvrage nous est parvenu dans un seul manuscrit incomplet, le ms. Paris, BnF, fr. 15397, chef-d'œuvre de l'enluminure médiévale qui contient uniquement le Pentateuque. Il n'existe à ce jour que des éditions de courts extraits du texte et de la riche glose exégétique qui l'accompagne.L'un des points les plus intéressants est le débat sur la relation entre ces deux traductions de la Bible : si, à la fin du XIXe siècle, S. Berger considère la BJdS comme une excellente réécriture de la B.a.n., en 2007, P. Nobel avance l'hypothèse que les deux ouvrages descendent d'une même source française perdue. D'autres chercheurs, en revanche, affirment l'indépendance des deux bibles, sans toutefois fournir de preuves à l'appui.Notre étude vise à fournir les éditions critiques du livre du Deutéronome de la B.a.n. et de la BJdS et à clarifier la relation entre les deux traductions. Le choix du Deutéronome nous permettra d'examiner un livre de la Bible au caractère hétérogène, qui alterne de courts passages narratifs avec des prescriptions juridiques et religieuses. Le présent travail doit donc être considéré comme un premier pas vers une édition plus complète de deux importantes traductions médiévales de la Bible en français, mais aussi comme une base pour de futures études traductologiques, linguistiques et lexicales.Le ch. 1 propose une contextualisation historique et culturelle des deux traductions, centrée sur leurs milieux de circulation respectifs : l'Angleterre du XIVe siècle et la cour royale de Jean le Bon. On explorera également le vaste commentaire exégétique de la BJdS et la possible relation entre la B.a.n. et une traduction du XIIIe siècle réalisée en Terre Sainte, la Bible d'Acre.Le ch. 2 est consacré à l'étude des rapports entre les deux bibles et leurs sources latines. Au sein de la vaste tradition de la Vulgate, on tentera d'identifier la famille à laquelle appartiennent les modèles latins utilisés comme base de traduction pour la B.a.n. et la BJdS. Les indices textuels compatibles avec une dynamique de révision sur la Vulgate dans les deux branches de la tradition de la B.a.n. seront analysés en détail.Le ch. 3 porte sur la délicate question des rapports entre la B.a.n. et la BJdS. La comparaison avec d'autres traductions, comme la Bible d'Acre et la Bible du XIIIe siècle, permettra d'avoir une vision plus approfondie du problème.Le ch. 4 présente l'examen linguistique des témoins : pour la B.a.n., l'analyse portera principalement sur le ms. L, manuscrit de surface de l'édition ; pour la BJdS, on procédera à une étude préliminaire des traits les plus importants, en l'absence de travaux antérieurs sur la langue du copiste.Une Note aux textes (ch. 5), avec des descriptions codicologiques et l'indication des critères de transcription et de reconstruction textuelle, précède les éditions du livre du Deutéronome de la B.a.n. et de la BJdS (ch. 6). Les deux textes sont accompagnés de commentaires philologiques et littéraires ; pour la seule traduction de Jean de Sy, on fournit également une liste des sources citées dans la glose par le dominicain
The Bible anglo-normande (B.a.n.) and the Bible de Jean de Sy (BJdS) are two 14th-century French biblical translations of considerable interest, but still largely unexplored. The B.a.n. is an anonymous translation of the Vulgate, of which three copies survive. In addition to being one of the earliest extant complete French biblical versions, the B.a.n. is probably the first full prose vernacular Bible produced in England. In recent years, a renewed interest in the B.a.n. has led to the edition of individual books, but the work remains largely unpublished.The BJdS was initially conceived as a full prose translation of the Bible, commissioned by the king of France Jean le Bon to the Dominican friar Jean de Sy. However, it was interrupted in 1356, with the capture of the sovereign at the Battle of Poitiers. The work is preserved in a single acephalous manuscript containing only the Pentateuch, the ms. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, fr. 15397, a well-known masterpiece of medieval illumination. Only small parts of the text and of its rich exegetical gloss have been published so far.The debate on the relation between the two Bibles is a point of special interest: while at the end of the 19th century S. Berger considered the BJdS an excellent revision of the B.a.n., in 2007 P. Nobel suggests that the two translations descend from the same lost vernacular source. Other scholars, on the contrary, affirm the independence of the two works, without providing the support of sufficient evidence.The present study aims to provide a critical edition of the book of Deuteronomy of the B.a.n. and the BJdS and to clarify the relationship between the two Bibles through the comparative analysis of the two translations. The choice of Deuteronomy allows us to examine a book of the Bible which alternates short narrative passages with legal and religious prescriptions, unlike Leviticus, in which the legislative aspect predominates. Moreover, Deuteronomy does not present the reiteration of fixed phrases that turn entire chapters of Numbers into monotonous lists, perhaps less significant from the point of view of translation. The present study is therefore intended as a first step towards a more complete edition of two important medieval French translations of the Bible, as well as a starting point for future linguistic, translation and lexical studies.The first chapter proposes a cultural-historical background of the two Bibles, with a special focus on their circulation contexts: 14th-century England and the royal court of Jean le Bon. It will also explore the BJdS's exegetical gloss and the potential connection between the B.a.n. and a 13th-century translation made in the Holy Land, the so-called Bible d'Acre.The second chapter investigates the relations between the two translations and their respective Latin sources. Within the vast tradition of the Vulgate, we will try to identify to which Latin family the sources used for the redaction of the B.a.n. and the BJdS belong. We will analyse in detail the textual evidence suggesting a revision on the Latin Vulgate in the two branches of the B.a.n. tradition.The third chapter deals with the controversial relationship between the B.a.n. and the BJdS, also through comparison with other medieval translations (Bible d'Acre and Bible du XIIIe siècle).The fourth chapter is dedicated to the linguistic analysis: for the B.a.n., we will mainly examine the ms. L, manuscrit de surface of the edition; for the BJdS, a preliminary study of the most relevant features will be conducted, in the absence of other linguistic studies on the witness.The description of the manuscripts and the explanation of the criteria adopted for the constitutio textus (fifth chapter) precede the critical edition of the book of Deuteronomy in the B.a.n. and the BJdS (sixth chapter). Both editions are followed by commentary notes; after Jean de Sy's text we present a list of the sources mentioned in the gloss
La Bible anglo-normande e la Bible de Jean de Sy sono due volgarizzamenti biblici in lingua d’oïl del XIV secolo di considerevole interesse, ma tuttora scarsamente indagati. La Bible anglo-normande (d’ora in avanti B.a.n.) è una traduzione anonima della Vulgata, trasmessa da tre manoscritti.1 Oltre a costituire una delle prime versioni complete della Bibbia in francese esistenti, la B.a.n. è verosimilmente il più antico volgarizzamento biblico integrale in prosaprodotto in Inghilterra. Negli ultimi anni, un rinnovato interesse per la B.a.n. ha portato all’edizione di singoli libri, ma l’opera rimane in gran parte inedita. Di conseguenza, restano ancora da chiarire aspetti relativi alla collocazione culturale del testo, alle sue fonti e alla circolazione. La Bible de Jean de Sy (BJdS) rientra invece in un progetto di traduzione integrale della Bibbia in prosa commissionato dal re di Francia Jean le Bon al frate domenicano Jean de Sy. Il lavoro fu però interrotto nel 1356, con la cattura del sovrano nella battaglia di Poitiers. L’opera ci è pervenuta attraverso un unico manoscritto acefalo contenente solo il Pentateuco, il ms. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, fr. 15397, conosciuto anche come capolavoro dell’arte libraria medievale. Nonostante la BJdS sia stata definita «la plus gigantesque tentative de traduction française et d'exégèse de la Bible qui ait vu le jour au Moyen Age» (AVRIL 1972, p. 123), ad oggi sono stati pubblicati solo brevi estratti del volgarizzamento e della ricca glossa esegetica che accompagna il testo. Il controverso rapporto tra le due traduzioni bibliche rappresenta un nodo di primario interesse: se alla fine dell’Ottocento Berger ritiene che la BJdS sia un’ottima riscrittura della B.a.n., nel 2007 Nobel avanza l’ipotesi che i due volgarizzamenti discendano dalla stessa fonte volgare andata perduta. Altri studiosi affermano invece l’indipendenza delle due opere, pur senza fornire il supporto di prove. Il presente studio mira a fornire un’edizione critica del libro del Deuteronomio della B.a.n. e della BJdS e a chiarire la relazione tra le due bibbie mediante l’analisi comparativa dei due volgarizzamenti. Il campo d’indagine è circoscritto al Deuteronomio, in quanto sezione completamente inesplorata di entrambe le traduzioni, al contrario della Genesi e dell’Esodo, dei quali sono disponibili per la B.a.n. l’edizione REVOL 2006 e il recente studio di SCHWALLER 2023. La scelta del Deuteronomio consentirà di esaminare un libro della Bibbia dal carattere eterogeneo, che alterna brevi brani narrativi a prescrizioni giuridico-religiose a cominciare dalla rievocazione dei Dieci comandamenti da parte di Mosè (Dt V, 1-21), diversamente dal Levitico, nel quale l’aspetto legislativo è nettamente predominante. Inoltre, il Deuteronomio è esente dalla reiterazione di formule fisse che riducono interi capitoli del libro dei Numeri a monotoni elenchi, forse meno significativi dal punto di vista della traduzione. Invitiamo dunque a considerare il presente lavoro come un primo passo verso un’edizione più completa di due importanti traduzioni medievali della Bibbia in francese, nonché come base per futuri studi traduttologici, linguistici e lessicali. Il capitolo 1 propone un inquadramento storico-culturale delle due traduzioni, con particolare attenzione ai rispettivi contesti di circolazione: l’Inghilterra del XIV secolo e la corte reale di Jean le Bon. Si approfondiranno inoltre l’esteso commento esegetico della BJdSe la potenziale relazione tra la B.a.n. e una traduzione duecentesca confezionata in Terra Santa, la cosiddetta Bible d’Acre (...)

Biblical intertextuality is paramount to the understanding of Jane Eyre. But in the twenty-one different French translations, the web of intertextual references to the Christian Bible has suffered many changes. As the history of Christianity in France dramatically differs from that in England, so too does the place of the Biblical texts and language in the literary culture. A comparison of seven different translations, written between 1854 and 2008, shows that the French translators very often alter the significance of the Biblical allusions, hiding, distorting or cutting the Biblical verses altogether.

Abstract From about 1780, in sharp contrast with the first part of the century, a new interest in translating the Bible was widely evident in Britain, prompted in part by recent German biblical criticism. Although this initial enthusiasm did not endure in the face of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars (see Sheehan 2005: 241–7), throughout our period, new and revised biblical translations were made quite often in both Britain and America. The most significant of these was the Revised Version of the King James Bible (the subject of § 10.2, below). Devotional texts were also frequently translated, to serve sectarian ends as well as personal needs, and a handful of these endured into the twentieth century. Finally, the massive task of translating the Church Fathers in bulk was largely accomplished at this time, and these translations continue even now to be in use.

Abstract Abstract: The stated use of the Latin Vulgate as a source text for translation is a characteristic feature of Catholic vernacular Bibles published before the twentieth century. In a milieu shaped and informed by confessional confrontations, Catholic translators often felt compelled by the declaration of the Vulgate’s authenticity at Trent in 1546 to recognize and deploy the Vulgate as their primary source in a clear and visible expression of Catholic identity. The later shift in the choice of source texts away from the Vulgate and toward the texts of Scripture in the original languages occurs as a result of developments both in Catholic biblical scholarship and in the understanding of the Tridentine decree, following the release of new information about Trent with the opening of the Vatican Archives in 1880. Changes in the choice and prioritization of the source texts of biblical translation are illustrated through a historical survey of Catholic Bibles in German, French, English, and Dutch.

Abstract The varied corpus of literature produced by Franciscans and Mexican scholars at the College of Santa Cruz in Tlatelolco ranged from Latin compositions to translations of Christian texts and original dialogues in Nahuatl. These different kinds of writing have seldom been considered in conjunction, and manuscript copies of Epistles and Gospels in Nahuatl from the 1500s have long been overlooked. Comparison of surviving manuscripts offer fresh insights on the way in which the translations were made and transmitted. Standard interpretations of some original works in Nahuatl, including the Colloquios y Doctrina christiana and the Huehuetlahtolli, can also be questioned, prompting consideration of the extent to which Latin humanism determined the nature of the first literature in Nahuatl. Chapter 5 consists of the following sections: I. Latin manuscripts by Mexican scholars: (i) Juan Badiano, Libellus de medicinalibus Indorum herbis, 1552; (ii) A trilingual vocabulary of Spanish, Latin, and Nahuatl, c. 1545; II. Status and achievements of the native translators; III. Biblical translation; IV. Religious literature in Nahuatl: translations and new compositions: (i) Colloquios y Doctrina christiana, 1564; (ii) translations of the Contemptus mundi and Spanish devotional literature; (iii) the Colloquios de la paz, c. 1540, and Espejo divino, 1607; (iv) The Huehuetlahtolli, c. 1601; and V. Conclusions: Latin humanism and Nahuatl literature.

Abstract For over thirty years, Wolfgang Musculus worked as a leader of the religious reformations in the cities of Augsburg and Bern. During that time, he authored a substantial corpus of writings that firmly established his reputation as a first-rate theologian and biblical scholar. One may gain some idea of his popularity as a theologian by examining the printing history of his theological magnum opus, the Loci communes sacrae theologiae. First published in 1560, this massive exercise in systematic theology was revised by Musculus for a new edition in 1561. Thereafter printings followed in 1563, 1564, 1567, 1573, and 1599. Furthermore, the work was published in English translation in 1563 and 1578 and in French in 1577, and portions were translated into German in 1618.

This chapter explores the seventeenth-century English background within which Isaac Newton’s refiguring of Biblical and classical antiquity took shape. Only once did Newton address his chronological studies in public. Angered by the unauthorized 1725 French translation of the abstract of his Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms, he lashed out at the Venetian abbé Antonio Conti—the “friend” who had “betrayed” Newton’s confidence—and then proceeded to downplay the nature and extent of his interests. However, for Newton chronology was anything but a diversion; indeed, the lion’s share of his investigations was carried out after his move to London in 1696. That Newton sought to portray his chronological studies as the dabbling of a weary mind partly reflects what he understood to be the relatively low status accorded chronology in the pyramid of learning.

Georges Cuvier has not been treated with much respect in the English-speaking world for his contributions to the study of Earth history. Charles Lyell is thought to have effectively demolished his claims of episodes of catastrophic change in the past, and it is only in the past few decades, with the rise of so-called ‘neocatastrophism’, that a renewed interest has emerged in his writings, which date from early in the nineteenth century. Cuvier was a man of considerable ability, who quickly rose to a dominant position in French science in the post-Napoleonic years. Though primarily a comparative anatomist, his pioneer research into fossil mammals led him into geology. He argued strongly for the extinction of fossil species, most notably mammoths, mastodons, and giant sloths, at a time when the very thought of extinctions was rather shocking to conventional Christian thought, and linked such extinctions with catastrophic changes in the environment. This view is expressed in what he called the ‘Preliminary Discourse’ to his great four-volume treatise entitled Recherches sur les Ossements Fossiles (Researches on fossil bones), published in 1812. This extended essay was immensely influential in intellectual circles of the western world, was reissued as a short book, and was repeatedly reprinted and translated into the main languages of the day. It became well known in the English-speaking world through the translation by the Edinburgh geologist Robert Jameson (1813), who so bored the young Charles Darwin with his lectures that he temporarily turned him off the subject of geology. According to Martin Rudwick, who has undertaken a new translation which is used here, Jameson’s translation is often misleading and in places downright bad. It was Jameson’s comments rather than Cuvier’s text that led to the widespread belief that Cuvier favoured a literalistic interpretation of Genesis and wished to bolster the historicity of the biblical story of the Flood. The English surveyor William Smith is rightly credited with his pioneering recognition of the value of fossils for correlating strata, which proved of immense importance when he produced one of the earliest reliable geological maps, of England and Wales, but the more learned and intellectually ambitious Cuvier was the first to appreciate fully the significance of fossils for unravelling Earth history.