Sola scriptura, it seems, is not as simple a proposition as it presents on its surface. For Scripture is not a stasis of inviolable content, but is often a material object used to construct and negotiate relationships among those who interface with it. This understanding of the Bible as a site, rather than merely a source, of authority forms the basis for Seth Perry's intriguing study. Perry acknowledges the arguments made by Mark Noll and others for the primacy of Scripture in early American culture, but he seeks to dive beneath the surface of these claims to discover ‘what it means for a text to act as an authority’ (p. 3). He lays the book's conceptual groundwork through appropriating scholarship on religious ritualisation and genre theory. The authority of the Bible, Perry asserts, was at base a dialogical process. Drawing on Vincent Wimbush's concept of ‘scripturalisation’, Perry's study focuses on the mutually-constitutive relations of speaker, Bible and audience that created a ‘privileged contrast’ from other texts. Perry thus reconceptualises how the Bible functioned, adding to a growing literature on the role of the Bible by Mark Noll, James Byrd, Eran Shalev and Paul Gutjahr, to name a few of the more significant contributors. From a methodological standpoint Perry's work has a parallel with Meredith Neuman's on seventeenth-century ‘sermon culture’, which shows how preacher and auditor co-authored and co-authenticated the sermon in a discursive process.

The book is organised in two parts – the first dealing with explicit reference to the Bible, the second with how communities interacted with the Bible. In the first, Perry investigates American presses’ imagined readership for its Bibles – marginally literate, lower-class and often female – before looking at innovation with regards to biblical references. Part ii examines the effects of biblical citation – how early Americans relied on scripts from their holy book in defining their conduct (‘performed biblicism’), construction of authority through visionary accounts such as The vision of Isaac Childs, and Joseph Smith's Mormonism as a premier example of a uniquely American scripturalised community. Since the ways in which the Bible conveys authority morph over time, Perry concludes, ‘the identities quarried from it were of infinite diversity and particularity’ (p. 135).

An innovative analysis, Bible culture and authority in the early United States primarily contributes to our understanding of what the Bible is really doing in society. Mining a wide-ranging source base of biblical marginalia, it illuminates how religious authority related to the text instead of letting assumptions of authority as inherent in the Bible go unquestioned. Perry's project also raises an important question, however: if the focus should not be on the content-meanings of Scriptures themselves but on the process and relationships of power through another proclaimer, what do we make of the numerous testimonies from early Americans of private encounter with the hard words of Scripture, producing conversion? While still a dialogical process between reader and Bible, Scripture in such cases functioned less as a place for exertion of power by a religious authority figure. This notwithstanding, Perry's investigation succeeds in offering a theoretical framework that demonstrates how Bible-based authority was constituted in people's lives and shaped national identity. In so doing, it is sure to appeal to scholars of religion, the early American republic and print culture.