Specialists of religious and literary history are well acquainted with the work of Lori Anne Ferrell, presently professor of English and History at Claremont Graduate University. Her book Government by Polemic, James I, the King's Preachers, and the Rhetorics of Conformity, 1603 –1625 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998) changed the way we now consider James I's religious policy, and students of the Elizabethan and Stuart periods cannot do without the excellent sourcebook on Religion and Society in Early Modern England (New York: Routledge, 2005) that she edited with David Cressy. Five years ago Ferrell curated an exhibition on The Bible and the People at the Huntington Library to mark the fourth centenary of the 1604 Hampton Court Conference. A spin-off from this event, the present book shares its title, highlights, and limitations. “The Bible” here means the Christian Bible in English, and “the People” the inhabitants of the British Isles and the United States from the eleventh to the twentieth century.

Structured in eight chapters—four for the period 1066–1800, followed by two thematic ones on Bible reading and illustration, then two on the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries—The Bible and the People is less a scholarly work than a free-wheeling commentary about some of the principal elements of the Huntington exhibition, here represented by fifty-five black-and-white photographs that range from the Gundulf Bible produced in Rochester during the second half of the eleventh century to the 2003 magazine-format New Testament, Revolved, for teenage girls.

Ferrell wears her vast erudition lightly. Her book has no bibliography and the notes are scant. Decidedly personal in tone, it abounds in one-liners that should catch the attention of the undergraduate students who appear to be the intended audience of The Bible and the People: the scriptures were a “delivery system for spiritual and secular ideas alike” (5); the Geneva Bible “a book that today undoubtedly would be called the Bible for Dummies” (83); and so on.

But does this winsome book fulfill its objective of drawing the English Bible “into the realm of cultural history” (6)? Ferrell is convincing in her overall description of the Bible in post-Reformation society as torn “between its textual inaccessibility and its textual availability” (156). The Protestant doctrine of scriptura sola did paradoxically create a “boom market in scriptural aids” (132) right from the start in the sixteenth century that would end up in the twentieth with the “scripture's seemingly inexhaustible malleability in appealing to … strategic groups of the population” (220). She is also right to balance the impressive variety of forms taken by biblical artifacts (which Ferrell takes undisguised pleasure in describing) with the “remarkable stability of the Christian Bible as a text” (242).

The Bible and the People is nevertheless marred by oversimplifications verging on downright error that seriously compromise its utility. This is particularly evident in the chapters that deal with medieval Christianity and the Catholic Church after the Reformation. The role of the papacy in biblical matters during the medieval period, for example, is greatly exaggerated. Pope Damasus might arguably be considered “the leader of the Christian church based in Rome” in 382, but he certainly did not “proclaim the Christian Bible's canon” at that time (7). The attribution to Damasus of the chapter De libris recipiendis et non recipiendis in the Decretum Gelasianum was made only at the end of the eighteenth century. Widely accepted throughout the nineteenth century, the major part of the Decretum Gelasianum is now generally considered by specialists to be an anonymous sixth-century forgery, following Ernst von Dobschutz's study Das Decretum Gelasianum de libris recipiendis et non recipiendis in kritischen Text herausgegeben und untersucht (Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs, 1912) and Charles Pietri's, Synode de Damase ou Decret de Gelase in Roma Christiana (Rome: Ecole francaise de Rome, 1976). Philological evidence apart, the idea that the pope as bishop of Rome would have then had the authority to impose a scriptural canon on the nascent Christian empire is anachronistic. Similarly the period 800–1100 was not “characterized by the extent of the political and religious influence of the papacy” (14) in the diffusion of the Vulgate. The great editions of the Jerome translation during the Carolingian era did not involve the papacy at all but were due instead to ecclesiastical advisors to Charlemagne and his successors, such as the Anglo-Saxon Alcuin of York, and promulgated by order of the emperor, not the pope. It is equally misleading to assert that after the Council of Trent “in the … Roman Catholic Church, access to the Bible was restricted to the clergy, a rule effectively enforced by the concomitant rule that the text remain in Latin” (86). That was by and large true of Italy and Spain but certainly not of the rest of Catholic Europe. In France, in the Catholic states of Germany, and in Netherlands, Catholic translations in the vernacular were immediately counterposed to Protestant ones and continued to be published throughout the early modern period. In these mixed Catholic/Protestant territories the vernacular scriptures were considered to be the “judge of controversies,” and it was essential that each Christian “people” have its own translation to be employed in the ideological battles that separated them.

This travesty of things medieval, Continental, and “popish,” should not be brushed off as marginal to the project of The Bible and the People. The Protestant Bible in English cannot be properly understood in its full originality without a serious presentation of the world from which it was “wrested … to be returned to ordinary believers” (3). All in all, the book is a disappointment. One expected, and expects, far better from such a fine scholar as Lori Anne Ferrell.