The Bible and the Printed Image in Early Modern England: Little Gidding and the Pursuit of Scriptural Harmony by Michael Gaudio (review)

The harmonized Gospels and other scriptural "concordances" made at Little Gidding have attracted considerable attention in recent decades for what they show us about early modern practices concerning women's reading and handwork, scriptural and devotional practices, and textuality and bookishness. They have also had a particular interest for readers of Herbert, not only because of his close connection to Nicholas Ferrar, but because his poetic references to the physicality of scriptural reading, especially in "H. Scriptures II" suggest his deep affinity for this Little Gidding project. Until now, though, there has not been a book-length study of the concordances themselves. Happily, Michael Gaudio's book proves worth the wait.

Little Gidding was an experiment in reformed Christian community, undertaken by the Ferrar family, including Susanna (Ferrar) Collett and her daughters. The Collett sisters, following the plan of Nicholas, made the concordances by hand, by cutting and pasting the English biblical text alongside continental biblical illustrations. (A word on naming: the community called the books "concordances," but most of them work by harmonizing scriptural texts, and scholars have often referred to them as the "harmonies" of Little Gidding. Gaudio uses "concordance," as do I.) Doing so, as Gaudio ably recounts, they took up the monastic devotional tradition of book production and particularly the female tradition of cutting and pasting, but transposing this tradition into a reformed space. In doing so, they also produced the only illustrated English bibles of their time, combining the scriptural text conspicuously central to reformed worship with images produced primarily by Catholics, an act of combination that became increasingly politically charged over the time that the community was active (1625-40s). Their books, meant first as aids to family devotion, came to the attention of the court and Charles I as well as William Laud, at whose requests the family made their finest volumes.

In this thoroughly researched and richly illustrated study, Gaudio effectively situates the concordances within their various devotional, material, and political economies, without reducing the books to these economies; rather, he gives sustained attention to the books themselves, developing a full sense–perhaps sensibility is the better word–for how they work. Gaudio is an art historian, which sets him up well to talk about books full of engraved prints, but as he notes, these books in many ways do not fit the categories of art history. Both women and prints have traditionally been excluded from serious scholarship as "merely reproductive" (p. 36). These books, made by women cutting and recombining prints, are doubly-disqualified, or worse: the act of cutting and pasting, producing pages of collage and thus full of "seams," does not fulfill the traditional conventions of art. Gaudio's gift, though, is to take the concordances on their own terms, to realize how they work by letting them work. Doing so, he develops a way of seeing that takes seams seriously, and in a way that is grounded in the material, intellectual, and devotional habits of the early seventeenth century.

Notably, while Gaudio naturally spends most of his book discussing prints that are in the Little Gidding concordances, he contextualizes his argument around some prints that are not. He does so in order to foreground the politics of the image in early modern England, but also to name the ways of looking that this study takes up. I will attend to three of these prints in order to map the scope and shape of his project.

Gaudio begins with an anonymous anti-Laudian print of 1642 titled "The Sound-Head, Round-Head, Rattle-Head well plac'd, where best is merited" with the figure of the "Rattle-Head," a composite, implicitly duplicitous person standing between a Puritan divine (the "Sound-Head") on the left side and a friar...