Sacred Text and Secular Values

For years, historians of children's literature have only given lip service to the importance of Bible stories for children, if they mention them at all. As Ruth Bottigheimer herself comments, with the recent exception of Patricia Demers's Heaven upon Earth (1993) and articles by such critics as Mitzi Myers, "scholars and intellectuals have scorned moral and religious literature for children since the early nineteenth century" (226 n. 29). Bottigheimer has corrected this serious omission with a fascinating book—winner of the 1996 Children's Literature Association Book Award—that is the fruit of extensive research for more than ten years in forty-three libraries, personal collections, and bookstores in eight American and European countries and in at least five languages. As a look at her fifty-page bibliography of primary and secondary sources attests, she has consulted works ranging from the medieval period to books and articles published as late as 1993. Yet, in spite of its erudition, The Bible for Children avoids modern academic-speak, indeed is so clearly written and generally reader-friendly (with, for example, all foreign-language quotations translated and the original text relegated to the end notes), that it is suitable for interested undergraduates as well as graduate students and professors. This is not to say that the work lacks critical sophistication. Bottigheimer wrestles here with a number of difficult theological and social issues, including the woman question, and has initiated paths of inquiry that should provide provocative material for many further discussions.

Bottigheimer's major claim is that children's Bibles through the ages do not, as one might assume, simply retell Bible stories in simpler language. Rather, by means of additions, omissions, and the choice of illustrations, "children's Bible stories teach far more than Bible content . . . [they are] an important part of the transmission of cultural norms and values from one generation to the next" (xi-xii). Bottigheimer begins her book with a look at the means of transmission of biblical material, which can include such items as catechisms, summaries, poems, riddle books, puzzles, and coloring books. Her working definition of what her book is about, however, is "prose reworkings of the narrative sections of the Bible for child readers" (4).

The first of these prose re-workings, or "precursor texts," that Bottigheimer discusses is by a twelfth-century lecturer in the cathedral schools, Peter Comestor (c. 1100-1178). His Historica Scholastica consisted of only the narrative parts of the Bible, based on the Latin Vulgate, but also included material from other sources such as Josephus, Eusebius, and early and contemporary commentaries. The Historica Scholastica was an immediate success and translated into French by Guiart Desmoulins in 1289, with a number of alterations, and vernacular versions soon existed all over Europe. As Bottigheimer makes clear, Comestor's was a fluid text, and multiple copies exist in a variety of versions, illustrated and unillustrated, cheap and expensive, glossed and defaced by many hands. Although Bottigheimer states in this book that the Historica Scholastica was originally intended for university students (15), she now suspects that younger children may have been part of the intended audience (letter, 25 February 1997), as the simple language indicates. It is also well to remember that Comestor was a schoolteacher and that the actual age of most twelfth-century university students was between thirteen and sixteen. Printed for school use as late as the sixteenth century, by that time the Historica Scholastica was already well on its way to oblivion. Nevertheless, much of its content had become an integral part of popular culture, and the impact of some of Comestor's extrabiblical details has lasted well into the twentieth century. For example, in his account of Noah's drunkenness, Comestor added the word irridens ("mocking") to the Bible's neutral presentation of Ham's response to his father's nakedness, making the tale into one of filial disrespect (see 104 ff.). Thus Comestor provides a justification for Noah's curse on Ham and his...