Volume 6, Issue 2 - Special Issue: Late Medieval and Early Modern Bibles and their Readers, Guest Editors: Sabrina Corbellini, Wim François and Thomas Fulton

Vernacular Bibles and biblical texts were among the most circulated and most read books in late medieval and early modern Europe, both in manuscript and print. Vernacular scripture circulated throughout Europe in different ways and to different extents before and after the Reformation. In spite of the differences in language, centers of publication, and confessional orientation, there was nonetheless considerable collaboration and common ground. This collection of essays explores the readership of Dutch, English, French, and Italian biblical and devotional texts, focusing in particular on the relationships between the texts and paratexts of biblical texts, the records of ownership, and the marks and annotations of biblical readers. Evidence from early modern biblical texts and their users of all sorts – scholars, clerics, priests, laborers, artisans, and anonymous men and women, Protestant and Catholic – sheds light on how owners and readers used the biblical text.

The historiography of Dutch Bible translations has largely focused on Jacob van Liesvelt’s 1526 “protestantizing” version, and Willem Vorsterman’s subsequent efforts to transform that version into a “Catholic” Bible (1528–1529). Less attention has been given to the following stage in the Antwerp printers’ competition to attract Bible readers: In 1532 Van Liesvelt published a Bible, containing a large number of annotations in the margins of the Old Testament, which chronologically situate the biblical events in the history of the world and the economy of salvation, next to other paratextual elements. Vorsterman responded by bringing a “catholicizing” glossed Bible to the market (1533–1534), in which typological annotations were also included in the margins. While giving an analysis of the text, paratext and imagery of the abovementioned Bibles, this article will investigate how the interplay of these elements on the page contributed to the creation of specific reading habits and strategies and stimulated the readers to perform specific reading and devotional activities. Also the inclusion of topical registers and liturgical reading schedules as navigational tools will be taken into consideration.

This article investigates a book-archeological approach to early modern Bible reading that maps the complex interactions between the substantive elements of a book (text, paratext, illustrations) on the one hand, and its historical readers and the traces they left on the other. That method is applied to all 43 extant copies of the Dutch Vorsterman Bible of 1533–1534. The editions printed by Willem Vorsterman were for a long time regarded as Protestant. However, the Bibles had the approval of the secular and ecclesiastic authorities and were intended for a Catholic public. The edition of 1533–1534 is a glossed Bible with many historicizing, chronological, linguistic and typological paratextual elements. The former owners of the 43 Bibles and their confessional background are examined. Intended and unintended traces of use give clues to the actual use of the Bible. The article turns at the end to a heavily annotated copy, examining the religious ideas of the annotator and the way in which he used the Bible.

The production and reception of early modern vernacular Bibles was not a uniform enterprise: printed scripture appeared in different sizes, translations, confessional colours, layout, and content. Through the analysis of the paratextual material in several Dutch Bible editions, this paper aims to determine whether different editions stimulated and framed different biblical reading practices, with a focus on complete Bibles and New Testaments published between 1522 and 1544 by the Antwerp printer Jacob van Liesvelt. The comparison of the paratextual features of Van Liesvelt’s complete Bibles and his other, smaller editions, shows that both types animated non-canonical, discontinuous and essentially active reading. However, whereas Van Liesvelt’s New Testaments seemed to encourage the reader to approach the book as a practical tool in his or her daily life, shaped by the rhythm of the zodiac and liturgy, the paratextual features of the complete Bibles facilitate a studious, almost encyclopaedic reading of the book.

Printed vernacular Bibles appeared in many European languages well before the Protestant Reformation, but in England the story is quite different. The first Catholic English New Testament was not printed until 1582, long after numerous Protestant editions had flooded the English Bible market. This article focuses on readers of this 1582 annotated Rheims New Testament, published by exiles in France and shipped surreptitiously northward for missionaries to convert, affirm, and educate British Catholics. Once in England this edition garnered an immense outpouring of printed confutations. Particularly significant was a 1589 dual printing of the Rheims text alongside the official version of the Church of England with extensive annotations by William Fulke. Reader markings in both the 1582 Rheims New Testament and its 1589 confutation, however, show early readers staking out confessional positions independent of the polemic of the printed texts, often putting these texts to purposes contrary to those intended.

This article discusses artisans and people doing manual work in the French-speaking areas of Western Europe who owned and read the Bible or parts of its text during the late Middle Ages and the early sixteenth century. The historical evidence is based on post-mortem inventories from Amiens, Tournai, Lyon, and the Toulouse area. These documents show that Bibles were present in the private homes of artisans, some of them well-to-do, but others quite destitute. This development was probably related to a shift in the cultural representation of manual work in the same period: from a divine punishment into a social space of religion. The simple artisan life of the holy family, as imagined based upon the Gospel text, and their religious reading practices were recommended as an example to follow by both lay people and clerics.

From the fifteenth century onwards, devotional texts represented a prominent part of the output of the Italian printing press. Much of this production, which often represented a privileged way to access the biblical text, is still largely unexplored. My article will analyse a selection of devotional writings printed at the end of the fifteenth century and in the first three decades of the sixteenth century that were directed to a large audience of laymen and women of medium to low literacy. I will analyse how these texts entered the domestic devotional practices of Italian devotees, focussing especially on reading. I will take into account their suggestions about how, when, and by whom reading should be performed; what readings devotees were encouraged to pursue; how the ideal reader was shaped in the paratextual apparatuses; and, finally, what textual tools the readers were offered to perform their reading practices.