Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England

5. An Uncommon Book of Common Prayer

Chapter 5 An Uncommon Book of Common Prayer ‘‘. . . and what is the use of a book,’’ thought Alice, ‘‘without pictures or conversations?’’ —Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) Alice’s question applies not just to Victorian storybooks but also to Elizabethan prayer books, and this chapter offers one of them as an object lesson, a curious devotional volume that not only contains pictures and conversations but raises a series of searching questions about the uses of books in the English Renaissance. It is a manuscript copy of the entire printed Book of Common Prayer and Psalter—the two texts that together formed the established script for the ritual conversations between a minister and his congregation, on the one hand, and between individuals and God, on the other. It was made in the early 1560s and it features an elaborate decorative scheme drawing on the visual conventions of both printed books and manuscripts. The most striking feature (at least at first glance) is the ornamental initials that adorn almost every page, including some seventy capitals devised in the style of woodcuts from contemporary printed books (Figure 23), and another seventy illuminated letters that were recycled from three or more late medieval manuscripts using scissors and paste (Figure 24). Even these superficial details are sufficient to pose a number of immediate questions, few of which can be answered with confidence but all of which are worth exploring. Why would someone bother to make—or have made for them—a manuscript copy of the recently printed and readily available Book of Common Prayer and Psalter (and its 598 pages of closely written text could not have been either easy or cheap to produce )? Who might have wanted a book that looked like this, and who might have wanted them not to want it? In what spaces, and for what activities, was it intended to be used? Where might it have been produced , and was it the work of an amateur or a professional, a single scribe or a proper scriptorium? Where did the appropriated initials Figure 23. A manuscript Book of Common Prayer (1560–62, RB438000:354): typographical initial featuring rose and serpent. By permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California. Uncommon Book of Common Prayer 89 Figure 24. A manuscript Book of Common Prayer (1560–62, RB438000:354): plundered initials from late medieval manuscripts. By permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California, RB438000:87. come from and what did they mean to the person(s) who owned this book—did they just think they looked pretty and/or holy, or did they carry specific (and even charged) associations with the not-so-distant medieval past or with the Catholic devotional culture that had only recently been forced back underground? What kind of religious and textual mentality, in other words, could account for a book like this, and how does it fit into our received narratives of the transition from script to print and from Catholicism to Protestantism? James R. Page’s Used Prayer Books This volume caught my eye as I was making my way through the collection of prayer books and related materials assembled by James R. Page, 90 Reading and Religion one of the Huntington’s trustees and one of the directors of Union Oil of California. When the Page Collection was presented to the Huntington Library after Page’s death in 1962, its annual report called it ‘‘The outstanding special acquisition of the year’’; and it remains a rich and relatively unknown resource for scholars interested in the production and reception of devotional books between the fourteenth and twentieth centuries.1 Since I was more interested in the reception than in the production of religious books—and particularly in the marks left behind by early readers—I was pleasantly surprised to find that, unlike most of his fellow collectors, Page preferred books that are (as he himself put it in a passage I will consider more fully in chapter 8) ‘‘enlivened by the marginal notes and comments made by the many people . . . through whose hands they passed.’’2 By pursuing—or at least not shying away from—customized and quirky books, and even those considered by others to be ‘‘imperfect’’ or ‘‘soiled,’’ he not only found some extraordinary bargains but did a great service to future historians of past reading. The majority of Page’s acquisitions from the sixteenth...