In this attractively produced “survey of biblical manuscripts and prints,” Eyal Poleg sets out to “explor[e] the materiality of Bibles,” and specifically single-volume Bibles, in late medieval and early modern England, generally aiming to show how, through such attention, “Bibles emerge as complex objects.” The “materiality of the Bible,” he argues, “moves us away from common narratives and teleology and into a more turbid realm of uncertainties and protracted transformation” (xxi). The book seems intended primarily for undergraduate teaching (see xvi). Two chapters take up medieval manuscript Bibles, first the thirteenth-century pandects typically called “Paris Bibles” but here called “Later Medieval Bibles” or “LMBs,” and then the Wycliffite translations produced at the end of the fourteenth century and copied throughout the fifteenth. Chapters 3 through 5 discuss printed books, focusing in turn on the Latin part Bible printed by Thomas Berthelet in 1535, the Great Bible of 1539, and the reprinting and editing of various biblical translations in the reign of Edward VI. Throughout, Poleg is generally guided by earlier scholarship, though (as his focus on Berthelet's Bible or printing under Edward may already suggest) he seeks to complicate received narratives. His claims about changing approaches to biblical reading, and changing attitudes toward vernacular scripture, are illustrated through detailed consideration of specific manuscripts and early printed books, which are reproduced throughout the volume.

In light of its title, the book's treatment of the materiality of Bibles—ink, paper stocks, bindings, the physical preparation of manuscript leaves, and so forth—is surprisingly limited. Certainly, the physical size of different manuscripts and prints is discussed on several occasions (e.g., 3–4, 48, and, most substantially, 156–66), but, much more frequently, “materiality” seems to refer to paratexts—to headers, chapter numbers, lectionary tables, manicules, title pages, decorated initials, prefaces, and the like. Why these texts are more material than the text of the Bible itself is not explained. Hence, for example, the argument of chapter 4 is summarized: “When explored in comparison with other contemporary Bibles, the Great Bible's title page, annotations, liturgical apparatus and use all reveal minute changes in emphases attuned to the religious and political transformations of the period” (117). The division and subdivision of chapters in biblical books, and the headings and marginal notes with which those divisions are signaled, constitute a major through-line in the study, appropriately flagged as such in the conclusion (184).

To be sure, there is much to be gained from focus on such paratexts, though in some ways single-volume Bibles are, on their own, less than ideal as a vehicle for such study. And this is simply because, though the Bible is certainly a lengthy compilation of texts, it was far from the most complex or challenging item that a scribe could copy or a printer print. It would therefore have been useful, for example, to look at the mise-en-page of “LMBs” alongside the scribal handling of the Lombard's Sentences, or scholastic commentaries or summae, while the printing of Latin Psalm incipits in roman type in the 1539 Great Bible, the object of considerable speculation on pages 146–150, might fruitfully have been read alongside the handling of Latin, English translation, and English exegesis in, for example, the Myroure of oure Lady, printed nine years earlier.

Poleg is at his best when discussing thirteenth-century pandects, the subject of much of his earlier work, and here there are many useful observations and clarifying examples to be had. Admittedly, the comparison of “LMBs” to the Glossa ordinaria (13–18) seems a bit beside the point if one is interested in the material history of single-volume Bibles—better to compare the scholastic pandects to the Bibbie atlantiche of the Gregorian Reform. But Poleg's account of the small pandect as a tool that could be used alongside a range of different biblical or parabiblical texts—in the liturgy, in preparing sermons, in private devotion, read alongside lemmatized biblical commentaries, and so forth—is useful indeed (17), and it points a way forward for future book-historical scholarship, which could do more to consider how different manuscripts and printed texts were meant to be read together. This point is, however, forgotten just a few pages later, when Poleg suggests that the Psalter was often omitted from “LMBs” to accommodate “readers who retained that book in their memory” (24). In light of his earlier discussion, one rather suspects that this omission reflects the abundance of single-volume psalters already in existence when these “LMBs” were copied.

Further editing would have made the book much more useful for classroom teaching. Beyond smaller infelicities found throughout, the prose is sometimes awkward and unclear in ways that hinder Poleg's argument. Such difficulties notwithstanding, there is much to be learned from the attention to biblical paratexts, and to various scribes’, editors’, translators’, and printers’ attempts to parse and package the Bible as a single-volume text. And Poleg's book may fruitfully be consulted by anyone pursuing research along these lines.