In his First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women, John Knox works to establish his thesis that

To promote a woman to bear rule, superiority, dominion or empire above any realm, nation, or city, is repugnant to nature, contumely to God, a thing most contrary to his revealed will and approved ordinance; and finally, it is the subversion of good order, of all equity and justice.

Or, put even more simply, that to have women ruling over men in society is unnatural, unbiblical, and destructive.

Within the past year, Knox’s First Blast has come under attack by Christians from certain quarters, who urge that its thesis must be rejected as false and unbiblical. For the one who wants to study the Blast to evaluate such claims, though, the options I found were:

• a non-modernized edition on Google Books, too obscure for general study and interaction;
• a modernized online PDF claiming full copyright restrictions,^[1] presumably for its updates in grammar and spelling; and
• a couple of print edition books

None of these existing options served my goal of making this work available in accessible and unrestricted written and audio formats to facilitate pastors’ and churchmen’s ability to interact with Knox’s work; thus this new edition.

This edition is based on the 1878 edition edited by Edward Arber, and I am releasing it into the public domain.^[2] For this edition I have modernized grammar, spelling, and capitalization, and corrected references; I have also updated a few archaic words, especially words that have changed meanings confusingly since the time of Knox’s writing (for instance, I updated facts to deeds). I have kept several other less common words, such as contumely and delation, when I couldn’t find a more common word that had the same force as Knox’s usage–in our day looking up such words in an online dictionary is the work of a moment for the reader, and I wanted to stay as close to the original as possible. I chose the King James Version (KJV) for all standalone Scripture quotes in the footnotes, due to the public domain status of the KJV in the United States. Emphasis is mine in all footnotes.

Where English translations of Knox’s references are in the public domain I have generally brought liberal amounts of the context of the source surrounding Knox’s quote into the footnote for ease of study; along with links, wherever possible, to the full work the quote comes from. As the careful reader will note, there are several references I have been unable to find.^[3] If you find one of the missing references (or any mistakes in my editing), please let me know^[4] and I’ll be happy to make the correction.

I pray that my work is useful to Christ’s church.

Soli Deo Gloria!

Daniel S. Meyer, B.A.
Indianapolis, Indiana
February 2019

To the extent possible under law, Daniel S. Meyer, ed. has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women. This work is published from: United States.