Bible Culture and Authority in the Early United States by Seth Perry (review)

“I have often taken up a book, and have talked to it, and then put my ears to it, when alone, in hopes it would answer me; and I have been very much concerned when it remained silent.” So Olaudah Equiano, the young African slave, describes his curious encounter with the Bible and the art of reading. To be sure, Equiano, aka Gustavus Vassa, more than penetrated the mystery of creative reading—and writing—books, all in due time. More important, as he discovered his new self in the lives of its divine heroes, the Bible did speak to him in ever new ways. It taught him to “scripturalize” his new identity; it lent him moral authority to assume, as the occasion warranted, the mantle of Jeremiah or the persona of Bunyan’s Christian. It enabled him to subject slaveholders and contemporary readers alike to the censure of their self-avowed creed. “Scripturalizing,” then, is a dialogic process of speech-act performativity that privileges the scriptural source text and authorizes the texts that cite, copy, paraphrase, imitate, or emulate the scriptures even as it elevates to positions of moral authority those who signify on the Bible. Even though Perry does not discuss Equiano’s Interesting Narrative (1791), the trope of the talking book does demonstrate how scripturalizing raises the story of a born-again slave to the level of authenticity. All told, then, this rhetorical device can radically transform a text into secular hagiography, even create new scriptures and holy books, through intersubjective use of the Bible when couched in the language and metaphors of the King James Version (KJV).

Scripturalization in all its forms and manifestations in the early national period is Seth Perry’s investigative focus in his fresh study Bible Culture and Authority in the Early United States. A significantly revised dissertation (U of Chicago Divinity School, 2013), Perry insists—convincingly, to my mind—that by itself the Bible as an inert physical object does not command power, for “books do not act as authorities without readers” (2). In probing this truism, Perry goes where few of his fellow historians of early national biblicism have gone before, asking, “What does it mean for a text to act as an authority? What is the relationship between personal and textual authority? What did the concept of religious authority mean to those bound by it in the early nineteenth century?” (3). In developing answers to these conceptual questions, Perry aims to move beyond static notions of biblicism. He explores what lived religion and biblical authority meant to individuals and how their practical application of the Bible redefined this authority in an emerging democratic society.

Bible Culture and Authority in the Early United States is divided into two parts, five chapters, an introduction that is grounded in the discourse theories of Mikhail Bakhtin, Kenneth Burke, J. L. Austin, and Vincent L. Wimbush, among others; and a conclusion that sketches early nineteenth-century biblicism and the impact of religious print culture on America’s national identity as fostered by numerous American Bible and tract societies. This concluding section encapsulates the seeds of his next book with the working title “Abandoned Quarries,” arguing that the importance of the Bible in secularized nineteenth-century America did not decline or become flat as historians are prone to claim, but shifted in innumerable ways to form new identities and authorities. In his first two chapters, “Creating the American Bible Reader, 1777–1816,” and “Taking a Text: Reading and Referencing the Bible in the Early Nineteenth Century,” Perry brings to bear his knowledge of discourse theory on the shifting fortunes of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Bible print culture. Unlike the distinguished European publishing houses whose heavily annotated and cross-referenced polyglot volumes mostly catered to an audience of learned male readers, American publishers—most notably Mathew Carey & Sons (1760–1839) in Philadelphia—discovered new lucrative markets for Bible-reading Americans: Protestants, Roman Catholics, and Mormons. For instance, in...