Poleg's examination of three-and-a-half centuries of English bible production is a finely balanced work, identifying the key developments between late medieval, Wycliffite and early printed Bibles effectively, but also highlighting continuities where one might not expect them. His book explores the production of a material artefact, its use and reception as a functioning product. In mastering this balance, Poleg draws attention to how production decisions ‘encouraged, if not determined, the ways in which subsequent readers have used their Bibles’ (p. 182).

The first core chapter addresses the scribal culture surrounding single-volume late medieval Bibles. Beginning in the 1230s, we enter the story of the English Bible at a point of significant transformation. Teams of scribes and illuminators were creating small, highly regular, simple Bibles with innovative systems of biblical divisions and references, which enabled ‘the LMB to become a highly versatile and accommodating tool’ (p. 17). Poleg contributes meaningfully to our understanding of how these Bibles impacted upon medieval scripture reading, the composition of sermons and prayer, with particular emphasis on the Psalms. This chapter reminds the reader that whilst this was a transformative period, these Latin Bibles remained the preserve of a highly professional readership and dissemination ‘beyond the confines of the friaries, colleges, monasteries and cathedrals’ (p. 39) was only just beginning.

Thereafter, the book turns its focus to the first English vernacular Bible, the Middle English Wycliffite Bible. Poleg quickly steers the discussion from confessional tensions and questions of orthodoxy and heterodoxy, moving into the motivations of a vernacular Bible ‘whose rhetoric addressed the uninitiated, while its practice favoured the learned’ (p. 44). The textual variations in surviving Wycliffite Bibles, notably the often missing or reduced general prologue, are an integral part of their story and their lack of fixity contributed to their gradual development and transition to use within orthodox worship.

The second half of the book addresses the expansion of English Bible production following the dawn of print, beginning with Thomas Berthelet's 1535 Latin Bible. Poleg is keen to provide this first complete Bible printed in England with the scholarly attention it merits, overshadowed as it has been by the Coverdale Bible printed in Cologne in the same year. In particular, some probing technical analysis of hidden annotations, with three figures from the Lambeth Palace Library copy, pulls an annotated table of lections from a seemingly blank page to provide an enlightening source helping us to understand bible reading practices in sixteenth-century England (pp. 108–13). The far more famous ‘clandestine contemporary’ and ‘material opposite’ to Berthelet's Bible, the Coverdale Bible, meanwhile, receives relatively short shrift (p. 100). Poleg recognises the richness of the earlier scholarship in this area, and his penetrating investigation into Berthelet's Latin Bible surely captivates more than a recap of the Coverdale Bible (1535), Matthew Bible (1537) and Taverner Bible (1539) but risks marginalising these critical moments in the history of the English Bible for newcomers to the field.

Chapter iv, ‘The Great Bible as a useless book’, moves quickly into the iconography of the book, aided by four fine figures of the Great Bible title pages and a thorough examination of a hand-coloured copy housed at St John's College, Cambridge (pp. 124–7). Thereafter, Poleg discusses tensions and resistance surrounding the Great Bible, its layout and liturgical use. The withdrawal of Archbishop Cranmer's draft liturgy 1538/39, Poleg states, ‘left the new Bible in a liturgical vacuum’ wherein it ‘accorded neither with liturgical reading nor with performance’ (p. 142). Poleg relays the gravity of the accomplishments of the Great Bible's production (accepting it as the first English parish Bible and a national standard for royal authority) but merely, and reasonably, questions its fitness for that function.

The penultimate chapter addresses bible production in the reign of Edward vi, which brought biblical production ‘into fast forward’. Poleg, seeing beyond the fact that no new translations of the Bible were completed during these years, notes how ‘Size, readership and addenda demonstrate how printers were free to experiment with their bibles’ (p. 154). The chapter focuses first upon translations and addenda before turning to the changing presentation of the Bible through the diversification of format. Critically, this chapter also casts light upon Cranmer's renewed efforts to reform the English liturgy (through the Book of Common Prayer) at once advancing the Reformation, lay scripture engagement and bringing greater relevance to the Great Bible. The institution of the Book of Common Prayer marked a fundamental change, which ensured that ‘the parish Bible which had been mandated during Henry viii's reign began to make liturgical sense’ (p. 174).

When addressing the early printed Bibles in England, particularly during the reign of Edward vi, Poleg's omission of separate printed New Testaments – although appropriately defended during the introduction (pp. xxx–xxxi) – leaves us with a less comprehensive understanding of lay Scripture engagement than might have been achieved. That ‘Little had changed in the first years of Edward's reign. The first Edwardian Bibles were three folio Bibles, all printed in 1549’ (p. 157) cannot be disputed under the remit of Poleg's project. However, the earlier production of diglot quarto New Testaments and the diversification of formats used in early and mid-Edwardian New Testaments are all part of this same movement. Poleg's research and conclusions in this chapter remain on sound footing and would only have been strengthened by including evidence from the many New Testament publications produced between 1547 and 1553.

As a cohesive whole, Poleg's work sheds light upon a long period of the Bible in England. Elevated by interesting case studies and contributions to our understanding of lesser-studied Bibles, this work achieves its ambition to address the transformation and gradual dissemination of the English Bible. This enlightening work will appeal to many by making a complex field of research accessible and engaging. It covers a broad chronological period with surety and will find a keen readership amongst historians of English print culture, medievalists and early modernists.