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Chapter 4 ‘‘The Book thus put in every vulgar hand’’: Marking the Bible These Bibles have been used. —S. L. Greenslade, The Cambridge History of the Bible As we approach the four hundredth anniversary of the publication of the King James (or Authorized) Version, historians of the printing revolution and the Protestant Reformation have put us in an ideal position to appreciate the process by which the Bible became a layperson’s book.1 To gain a fuller understanding of this crucial development in Western culture, however, we need to push beyond the limits imposed by traditional bibliographical and ecclesiastical history and examine ‘‘the Book thus put in every vulgar hand’’ (as John Dryden put it in a decidedly ambivalent formulation to which I shall return); to take a more intimate look, that is, not just at the Bible’s production by translators , editors, and printers, and its circulation by booksellers and preachers , but also at its reception and use by readers. For obvious reasons, the need to attend to all of the agents and activities in Robert Darnton’s socalled communications circuit2 is especially pressing with a text such as the Geneva Bible, which went through more than 140 editions between the 1560s and the 1640s and sold more than half a million copies in the sixteenth century alone—making it, in all likelihood, the most widely distributed book in the English Renaissance,3 and the one that played the most crucial role in changing the patterns of lay book ownership in the age of print. By 1600, there had been a dramatic increase in the number of people in England who owned a book compared with only forty years previously, and the mass production of the Geneva Bible had an immediate impact: the probate records that Peter Clark has examined in Kent show an increase in book ownership between the 1560s and the 1600s from 8.3 to 33.3 percent in Canterbury and from 15 to 40.6 percent in Faversham.4 72 Reading and Religion Indeed, the bible was closely connected to the drive toward literacy: as early primers show, literacy did not mean just reading; it meant reading the Bible. The New-England Primer is a striking example: along with a cut of the Marian martyr John Rogers (one of the translators of the vernacular Bible) it featured a rhyming alphabet. For B we find ‘‘Thy life to men/ This Book attend’’ (sometimes illustrated with a cut of the ‘‘Holy Bible’’), and for H, ‘‘Thy Book and Heart/ Must never part.’’ And most primers also included a catechism with the alphabet: to learn A, one learned ‘‘Adam,’’ and thus the entry into the alphabet was not just associated with the first name-giver but mapped onto the genesis of mankind and the beginning of the Bible.5 And this ought, at least, to give us pause for thought when we find the penmanship exercises that cover so many leaves of early modern Bibles dismissively described as ‘‘childish scribbles ’’ rather than as a sign of someone joining the community of godly readers. For a host of less obvious reasons, scholars have been surprisingly slow to take a closer look at what the growing number of readers did with the growing number of religious texts that were made available to them.6 Despite the fact that Renaissance households were far more likely to contain a Bible than any other volume, religious books have attracted less attention from historians of reading than used books from the fields of literature, rhetoric, politics, law, mathematics, and medicine. Early printed Bibles are now historical relics, and they are often encountered —literally and figuratively—behind glass: if this is notoriously true of the Gutenberg Bible, the string of vernacular translations leading up to the King James (or Authorized) Version of 1611 also share something of its special status. It is easy to lose sight of the spaces and hands through which these volumes have passed, from the moment of their inception to the arrival in their current resting places. But the transcendence of their texts notwithstanding, Bibles—like all books and, in some ways, more than other books—are material objects, created, circulated, and used by actual people, in specific settings, for particular purposes. And while religious texts shaped almost every aspect of the lives of Renaissance readers (structuring their daily routines, guiding their beliefs and behaviors, and even inflecting their language), readers for their part did not hesitate to...

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