From its foundations, the interdisciplinary field of book history has aimed to shed light not just on the production of material texts but on their consumption, too. Book historians inspired in particular by the French Annales school of social history have long sought to understand how books are used—that is, how they are bought and sold; how they circulate within and between different demographics; how they are bequeathed, collected, stored, or otherwise preserved; and, perhaps most importantly, how they are read. Kate Narveson's study, Bible Readers and Lay Writers in Early Modern England, makes an important contribution to this area of inquiry, providing a detailed examination of English reading practices between 1580 and 1660. Yet, because it focuses specifically on the interactions of post-Reformation readers with the vernacular scriptures, it also fills an otherwise gaping void in early modern literary studies. Much attention has been given of late to the “Englishing” of the Bible. Indeed, multiple monographs and essay collections (some timed to coincide with the four-hundredth anniversary of the 1611 King James Bible) have recounted how the English scriptures came to be produced, recalling the various collaborations (and conflicts) between the many translators, printers, smugglers, and sponsors involved in the project of translation. However, none of these recent publications has probed the ways in which lay readers, for whom the effort of biblical translation was first undertaken, responded to the “Englished” text. Narveson's book more than makes up for this lack.
The answer to the question of how the laity actually read the scriptures in late Tudor and early Stuart England, Narveson reveals, is both complex and provocative. In brief, Narveson's argument is that a close relationship emerged in the period between reading the Bible, on the one hand, and learning to write, and especially learning to write about one's own experiences, on the other hand. This relationship, Narveson explains, was causal: lay folk were given directives about how to read the Bible (by their own ministers, as well as in published guides), and those directives led them to develop new writing habits. As Narveson observes, early modern lay readers were taught to respond to the Bible in a range of material forms. They were instructed to keep an ongoing record of what they read, to excerpt verses relevant to specific occasions, to compare (or collate) passages from different sections, and to note how the scriptural texts that they encountered might be applied to their own lives. Over just a few decades, this kind of active pen-in-hand reading inspired the production of ever more extensive compositions in what the age referred to as “Scripture phrase”; thus the laity grew in readerly and writerly confidence as they created prayers and meditations, homilies for household use, letters of godly encouragement (or reproach), and various types of spiritual account books. Ultimately, Narveson posits, the rise of biblical literacy in the years following the Reformation contributed vitally to the emergence of the manifold genres of life-writing and self-reckoning that were to become central to English literary culture in the second half of the seventeenth century (and beyond).
The material evidence that Narveson draws on, and that witnesses to the growth in these dialectical reading and writing practices, survives predominantly in manuscript notebooks and miscellanies, both in working copies (scribbled spontaneously during times of prayer) and in fair copies (transcribed with care, and often intended as bequests). The majority of the extant manuscripts in this vein were produced by members of the aristocracy and land-owning gentry, but others were composed by middle-class readers and writers: guildsmen who made a living in the trades and crafts, city and town officials, and the heirs of ministers. One of the great strengths of this study is that it draws from a wide variety of such manuscripts, now housed in libraries and archives on both sides of the Atlantic. Narveson takes us expertly from the prayers of Elizabeth Hastings, the countess of Huntington, through the diaries and devotional meditations of country gentlewomen and members of the upwardly mobile mercantile classes (like Elizabeth Isham and Katherine Austen), to the more than fifty spiritual notebooks of Nehemiah Wallington, a London wood turner. Narveson's interest, in other words, lies as much with the “common reader” as with the elite, professional, or learned interpreters of the time.
Bible Readers opens with an introduction that situates Narveson's argument in relation to current scholarship (in both book history and literary studies) and outlines the plan of the study as a whole. The main body of the work is divided into two principal parts, of four and three chapters respectively. Part 1 traces the shifts in attitudes and material conditions that enabled scriptural literacy in post-Reformation England. Part 2 examines the role of gender in shaping the routines of devotional reading and writing. Here, the central text is the 900-page fair-copy manuscript of meditations left by Lady Grace Mildmay to her daughter in 1620. But Narveson takes care to put Mildmay's work in conversation with the spiritual accounting practices of Nehemiah Wallington and Elizabeth Isham, as well as with the marginal annotations made by an anonymous male reader in the Folger Library's copy of Thomas Bentley's Monument of Matrones (1582). A conclusion considers Sir Richard Baxter's Apologie for Lay-Mens Writing in Divinity (1641), which defends lay scriptural literacy against anxious attacks by the clergy.
What, one might ask, is Narveson's take on the matter of gender? Bible Readers presents a story of ever-increasing freedom—for the laity in general and for women in particular. The processes of Bible reading and Bible writing that became widespread at the end of the sixteenth century and beginning of the seventeenth century, Narveson argues, not only opened up religious discourse and scriptural exegesis to lay folk, but also facilitated independence, self-understanding, and self-determination apart from, and even at times in opposition to, the institution of the church (thus it was not unusual, Narveson notes, for early modern commoners to feel empowered enough to reprimand their ministers in writing). Countering the oft-reiterated notion that women produced devotional literature because no better option was available to them, Bible Readers suggests instead that women gravitated to the practice of writing “in Scripture phrase” because it offered certain specific advantages: it provided them, Narveson posits, with a source of both spiritual authority and representative agency.
Narveson's refusal to read women's writing in isolation of men's writing, as so much earlier scholarship has done, is to be commended. Nevertheless, some caution might be urged in relation to the liberatory gist of the book's main thesis. The flip side of Narveson's narrative of early modern (Protestant) lay liberation, of course, is that it posits an inhibited, or bound, medieval (Catholic) laity. And, unfortunately, Narveson does tend to give the erroneous impression that there were no opportunities for lay folk to read or respond to scriptural materials in the vernacular before the Reformation. More frequent and more explicit glancing back to instances of biblical literacy in England prior to the Elizabethan era may have helped to mitigate this problem of unexamined periodization. Nonetheless, Bible Readers offers a stimulating investigation into a hitherto largely unexamined set of reading and writing practices at an important historical juncture. Scholars in book history, literary studies, gender studies, and religious studies will find much of interest in this rich study.
