Reformed Protestant culture may or may not have disenchanted the world, but it did generally rid the world of sacred objects – with one dramatic and uneasy exception. In 1557 the Protestant lay preacher Richard Woodman was challenged by his interrogators: if you threw a Bible onto the fire, would you thereby burn God's Word? Yes, Woodman stoutly replied. His interrogators mocked him for this – you could buy a new one for a few pence! – and even the martyrologist John Foxe winced, cautioning that the physical book is not the same as the Word it contains. But Woodman was no simpleton. If a Bible were to be destroyed in an housefire, he added, that would be inconsequential. It was the deliberate destruction of such a book, out of spite towards its contents, that was intolerable blasphemy. This was not, in the end, the charge for which Woodman died, but for others the fate of physical Bibles did become a matter of life and death. In 1593 the Huguenot Margaret Pierron was given the opportunity to save her life by casting her French Bible on the fire: she refused, and the Bible was burned in front of her before she was executed. During ‘King Philip's War’ in New England in 1676, one settler refused to flee a Native American attack, insisting that his Bible would protect him. His body was eventually found disembowelled, with the book lodged in his entrails.

In other words, Avner Shamir has hit on a terrific subject. This monograph is based on his much-consulted 2010 PhD thesis, but it has been very thoroughly rewritten and restructured, and its chronological focus has shifted to include the entire eighteenth century (although, despite the title, there is quite a lot of pre-1640 material here too). The result is a mature, well-written and rounded consideration of the subject. The meat of the book is in three long thematic chapters (the others serve as introduction and epilogue). Chapter ii looks in the round at certain historical moments where Bibles were, or were said to have been, burned or desecrated: the Irish rebellion of 1641, the English Civil War, the rise of the Ranters and Quakers, the Jacobite rising of 1745–6, the aftermath of the publication of Paine's The age of reason in 1794. Chapter iii covers the same ground, but focuses on specific, documented cases where real burnings or desecrations seem to have taken place and where there is detail to be examined. This distinction is necessary because, in most cases, there seems to have been more smoke than fire. Shamir is inclined to credit the ‘persistent rumours’ of Bible-burnings by Paine's readers in Scotland, but I would be readier to join him if he were able to produce a single example of a named individual Bible-burner or of a burning which took place on a specific date or at a specific place.

Yet some incidents clearly happened. If Ranter Bible-burnings, like all other matters Ranter, were wildly inflated by moral panic, some Quaker anti-Scripturians certainly burned Bibles, while most other Quakers scrambled to dissociate themselves from the gesture. And not all Bible-burnings were deliberately provocative theological statements of that kind. Some were ill-advised over-enthusiasm, as when an anti-Catholic mob in Edinburgh burned a copy of the Vulgate in 1704. Some were collateral damage: from the Dutch iconoclastic fury to the English Civil War, attacks on church furnishings and liturgical books sometimes also damaged church Bibles by accident, providing a propaganda gift to their opponents. And some Bibles were attacked because their specific physical manifestation undermined the eternal Word that they purported to contain. Parliamentarian troops ripped the Apocrypha out of church Bibles, and may also have targetted the infamous Scottish edition of 1633, filled with idolatrous illustrations. No-one at all objected to the bonfire of the ‘Wicked Bible’ of 1631, whose printer had been foolish enough to omit the word ‘not’ from the Seventh Commandment.

Not all Bible-burnings were pious. In the 1780s one Charles Bull, apparently infuriated by his wife's sudden turn to religion, burned her Bibles rather as he might have burned letters from her lover: his older, penitent self looked back on the act as the worst of his many sins. The recurrent tales of secret societies of atheists who burned Bibles as initiation rituals – or who, in one preacher's tale, lost their nerve on the point of doing so and were snatched back from the jaws of hell by grace – feel a little too pat for me to believe them as Shamir does, but the notion is not inherently implausible. It was an extension of standard alehouse blasphemy, and if none of the eighteenth century's Hellfire Clubs ever witnessed a Bible-burning, they hardly deserve their name.

The most compelling and intellectually ambitious part of the book is chapter iv, ‘The gesture’, which looks at the varied cultural meanings of defacing, burning or throwing away Bibles, whether in theory or in reality. The central point is unsurprising: in an aniconic culture, this object was uniquely freighted with, and was therefore uniquely able to convey, meaning and power. Sometimes it was a demonstrative gesture of spiritual despair, or (as in cases of possession) of defiance: in those cases, the Bible's authority was recognised even as it was rejected. Sometimes it was a full-scale declaration of independence: ‘a liberating gesture, an act that was meant to enable behaviour or a code of conduct which was unfettered by the old morality’ (p. 126). Bible-burning was a uniquely powerful taboo: therefore it was rare, and those who did it did it because it was taboo. In 1668 a pirate-mutineer seized his ship and then flung the captain's Bible overboard. His confederates protested, but he supposedly replied, ‘You cowards, what do you think to go to Heaven and do such Actions as these? No, I will make you officers in Hell under me’ (p. 127). Like all acts of violence, destroying a Bible forced people to choose a side.

Shamir tells a compelling, formidably researched and many-faceted story, and the book comes warmly recommended, with two reservations. First, his bloodhound pursuit of any whiff of burned Bible means that he is sometimes prone to over-interpretation. It was a uniquely potent gesture, but it was a detail in some of the stories he tells, and he does not always retain his sense of perspective. He ends with a sermon by John Newton that included a throwaway rhetorical challenge to those who neglected Bible-reading: you would scruple to burn a Bible, so why do you not scruple to leave it unread? It is a good line. But I am not sure that it is ‘truly peculiar’, that it reveals ‘Bible burning as a hypothetical desire’ or that for Newton ‘Bible burning seems to be an expression of the normal behaviour of the usual believer’.

Second, Shamir has been the victim of a subtle act of biblioclasm himself, because the production of this book is miserable. A brief, perfunctory index; a glossy cover printed with a generic abstract design entirely unrelated to the book's theme; no blurb, summary or even description of the author anywhere on the cover or in the preliminaries. Routledge's parent, Taylor & Francis, seem actively to be trying to undermine their own shrinking academic-monograph business. Anyone considering publishing with them should take note.