-
Chapter 8. The Word Made Flesh: Reading Women and the Bible
- University of Pennsylvania Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Chapter 8 The Word Made Flesh: Reading Women and the Bible Janice Knight Throughout the trauma of captivity, Mary Rowlandson built her comfort on her Bible: it was at once sacred text and solacing icon, her ‘‘Guid by day,’’ her ‘‘Pillow by night.’’ In this reliance on Scripture, Rowlandson practiced the fundamental devotional act of her community. Protestantism has often been called a religion of the book; nowhere was this truer than in Puritan America, where reading the Bible was not only the legislated obligation but also the deepest desire of every believer. The union of Sola Fides and Sola Scriptura—the spiritual autonomy enabled by a new emphasis on experimental faith and a new availability of vernacular Bibles—not only democratized religious authority but also promoted the expansion of literacy across gender and status boundaries. Since a priesthood of all believers mandated immediate and personal knowledge of Scripture, reformers such as Thomas Cartwright preached that Bible study was the ‘‘necessary duty’’ of ‘‘all ages, all sexes, all degrees and callings, all high and low, rich and poor, wise and foolish.’’ As early as 1642 New England law required that all ‘‘children & apprentices’’ be given ‘‘so much learning as may inable them perfectly to read the english tongue.’’1 But Protestant culture was deeply rooted in forms of transmission and expression that exceeded any narrow understanding of ‘‘the book’’ as a specifically printed artifact. At church and at home verses of Scripture were heard and repeated, becoming internalized first as oral memory. Children knew their Bibles long before they were able to decipher the printed book, a circumstance that sorted well with the Puritans’ understanding of the text as divine dictation and their commitment to the value of the preached word. As David Hall has noted, the Bible was inscribed in a variety of devotional settings and practices: it was rehearsed aloud in prayers and sermons, meditated on privately as a 170 Knight written text, and in what might be called a convergence of the oral and the written, experienced as a ‘‘revelation’’ first delivered to the heart by the voice of the Holy Spirit and then confirmed in the reading of scriptural promises.2 Moreover, the act of reading also included the arts of interpretation, of producing ‘‘readings’’ of Scripture and apprehending patterns of daily experience in light of sacred truths. In this broad sense, then, reading in Puritan America might be understood as a practice involving not just print artifacts but also various modes of hearing and speaking, of interpreting and acting in the world. Expanding our understanding of ‘‘reading’’ practices to include orality , acoustics, and articulation, as well as interpretive arts that challenged conventions of typology and exemplarity, is particularly crucial for understanding ‘‘women readers’’ in early America. By focusing on the intersection between scriptural interpretation, lay authority, and gender politics in early America, this essay will reflect on the ways women read not only their Bibles but also their lived experiences in and through God’s Word. In particular, it will focus on the uses of typology as a way of tracking the emergence of cultural norms enabling, shaping, and restricting women’s reading practices. In the hands of conservative exegetes such as Samuel Mather, typology was understood as a ‘‘science’’ of reading that not only united the two Testaments but also governed interpretation of the symbolic dimensions of the literal text. More than mere resemblances or analogies, Old Testament persons, institutions, ceremonies, and events were divinely instituted prefigurations of things fulfilled in the New. Thus, Adam ‘‘typed’’ the Messiah; the exodus of the Jews foreshadowed Christ’s journey in the wilderness. When applied more liberally, however, such types could serve as allegories for eternal spiritual states and for more immediate and personal struggles: Mary Rowlandson, for example, found her experience writ large in the trials of Job and in the promises delivered to David. The extension of typology encompassed but was by no means limited to such recapitulative identi- fications. Over time, the developmental logic uniting the two Testaments also authorized prospective readings of Puritan history in light of biblical schemata: Old Testament types not only were fulfilled in the life of Christ but also pertained to the present-day Church in the world, establishing ‘‘a literary-spiritual continuity between the two Testaments and the colonial venture in America.’’3 New England was not only an antitype of Israel but also an anticipation of the New Jerusalem. American Puritans...