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Some of the collection's strongest essays complicate Harrison's treatment of the literal. Among these is Peter Forshaw's discussion of the Lutheran alchemist Heinrich Khunrath (1560-1605). In a sense Khunrath was the ultimate literalist, offering radically material readings of the Genesis creation account. For instance, he figures God as a proto-alchemist, working in a kind of cosmic laboratory, and creating heavens which presage "the spirit of the alchemical quintessence … the Spirit, Water and Fire that the [alchemists] reveal in their laboratories." Paradoxically, however, Khunrath's exegesis is also highly symbolic, and teems with references to Hermes Trismegistus, Moses (who is for him the ultimate kabbalist), the ancient philosophers, and other alchemical discourse. Furthermore, he presents a lengthy argument on how Jesus parallels the Philosopher's Stone. Reading Khunrath's multi-layered, arcane texts is thus a dizzying affair, and suggests that the understanding of the literal in early modernity was quite multi-faceted.
James Fleming challenges Harrison's characterization of the literal as a trans-historical category that functions as a pre-condition for science. In a dense but rewarding account,Fleming contends that the very notion of literalism is itself a hermeneutical construct, one that arose simultaneously with the new science. Fundamental to his essay is the concept of "intensional literalism," a method that allows one to interpret not merely according to the meaning of the words of an utterance, but also by the speaker's intent—which may sometimes be the opposite of the utterance's grammatical and syntactical meaning. This sort of exegesis allowed Galileo and other early modern Copernicans to account for biblical texts that would seem to contradict their claims. Fleming shows that early modern theologians also practiced this kind of literalism. The rub, of course, was how to determine intent. One solution to potential hermeneutic anarchy was the formation of what Stanley Fish calls interpretive communities, that is, authoritative bodies that adjudicated conflicting readings. For centuries, the Catholic Church had functioned as such a community, yet strikingly, even though Galileo ran afoul of this body, he and other Copernicans nonetheless invoked interpretive communities when presenting their work to the public: Copernicus himself, along with Kepler, situated his findings in a Pythagorean tradition, while Galileo adduced speculations on geomotivity by Augustine, the Bishop of Avila, and other church authorities.
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