The Sacred Community: Art, Sacrament, and the People of God

5. The Community of the Book and the King James Bible

65 Chapter 5 The Community of the Book and the King James Bible Domine labia. Lord þow schalt opene my lyppes. And my mouþ schal schewe thi preisyng. God tak hede to myn help. Lord hiȝe the to helpe me. Ioyȝe be to the fadir and to the sone and to the holygoost. As it was in the bigynnynge and now and euere in to the werldis of werdlis.­—Henry Littlehales, The Prymer1 In the Qur’an, Islam, Judaism and Christianity are spoken of as communities of the book.2 In different ways, they hear and receive the word of God through the pages of a sacred text. But what is it to understand this designation in a more immediate and domestic sense, not through the text of scripture itself, but rather through a book of prayers? The first half of this chapter has its beginnings in the reading of two books by the historian Eamon Duffy on the changes that took place in English religion at the end of the Middle Ages and in the early years of the English Reformation. The first book is his well known The Stripping of the Altars, and the second, with which I shall be more concerned, his more recent Marking the Hours: English People and Their Prayers, 1240–1570 (2006), which is based on his Riddell Lectures, given at the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne in 2002. This latter volume is an investigation into the history and widespread use in the late Middles Ages in England of family books called the books of hours, or more popularly “primers”—manuals of 66 The Sacred Community private devotion based on the daily monastic pattern of prayer, the Opus Dei called the hours, in the seven offices from Matins to Vespers and Compline. There was no standardized content, though a fairly typical manuscript of about 1410 contains the Hours of our Lady, the seven Penitential Psalms, the fifteen Gradual Psalms, the Litany, Vespers and Matins from the Office of the Dead, the Commendations (Psalms 119 and 139), the Lord’s Prayer, the Hail Mary, the Apostles’ Creed, the Ten Commandments, and the Seven Deadly Sins.3 These books for the community of the Christian laity ranged in the earlier part of the sixteenth century from the sumptuous to humble printed volumes, as laboriously copied and beautifully illustrated copies written on vellum began to give way to the technology of mechanical and mass reproduction, printed on paper and in simple, portable bindings. Within families, these books were often a symbol of status or a treasured possession, frequently marked with the records of events in the history of the family or bearing the traces of sometimes cruel political and religious changes as the English Reformation took its course and the more stark liturgical forms of Protestantism replaced the Catholic devotions of medieval Christendom. As Henry Littlehales notes in his introduction to his edition of The Prymer: It is impossible to withhold one’s sympathy from those who for many years had been wont to reverence and care for their Prayerbook , a book that had in probably many cases been for generations a cherished possession and family heirloom. To be compelled to give it up for public destruction must have been very hard. . . . Every existing Prymer must have a stirring history, many an one, probably, a history filled with pathetic details, of which we know nothing and can guess but little.4 Although there were primers edited and printed in the 1530s in the reign of Henry VIII that reflected strong leanings toward Lutheran reform, and anticipated the later prayer books of Archbishop Thomas Cranmer produced under Edward VI, their days as manuals of popular devotion were numbered.5 In later centuries, as those devotions and affiliations that gave rise to the primers vanished, they were replaced in family use by the great family Bibles on which often were written the names of those born, married, and deceased within the families—a record and history of a small community kept within the covers of the word of The Community of the Book and the King James Bible 67 God itself, some of which Bibles survive to this day. Duffy’s interest in Marking the Hours is in precisely those writings and scratchings in the margins or end covers, the marginalia, emendations, deletions, and additions that might, by some, be regarded as deviations from and...