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Living with the Bible in post-Reformation England: the Materiality of Text, Image and Object in Domestic Life*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2016

Tara Hamling
Tara Hamling*
Affiliation:
University of Birmingham
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Extract

What did it mean to live with the Bible in post-Reformation England? The increased availability from 1560 of printed vernacular Bibles to own and keep in the home marked a profound change in where and how people experienced Scripture. Most authors have concentrated on the impact of this cultural shift on the textual practices of household religion, especially Bible reading or study in the context of daily prayers and associated instruction. More recent research has examined interactions with the Bible as object, especially the common practice of annotating specific passages, recording information or otherwise marking the pages. A turn in humanities disciplines over the past decade towards visual and material culture has emphasized the connotative role of Bibles as signifiers, with important studies of their display function within female piety, as part of the conventional vocabulary of provincial portraits or as staged properties in Renaissance drama. Yet despite these contributions there is still an overwhelming focus in the existing literature on the use of religious books in relation to the textual and oral practices of domestic devotion - on readers and reading practices – and a good deal of generalization about the locations for such practices, derived from a particular conceptual model of the country house with clearly defined internal arrangements and designated room functions.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 50: Religion and the Household , 2014 , pp. 210 - 239
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2014

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Footnotes

*

I would like to thank Alexandra Walsham as President of the EHS for the invitation to speak at the 2013 Winter Meeting and for helpful advice and encouragement. I gratefully acknowledge the generous research support provided by a Phillip Leverhulme Prize, which has allowed me to progress the wider project that informs this essay. I am greatly indebted to my research partner for this project, Catherine Richardson, for sharing the fruits of her exhaustive primary research and for informing my thinking.

References

1 Since Hill’s, Christopher wide-ranging account of the ‘spiritualization of the household’ in Society and Puritanism in Pre-Rcvolutionary England (London, 1964)Google Scholar, most work has focused on the educational and disciplinary responsibilities of heads of households, with a separate trajectory focusing on the respective duties of women. An emerging interest in the wider practices, patterns and spaces of household religious observance is reflected in recent publications, including Martin, Jessica and Ryrie, Alec, eds, Private and Domestic Devotion in Early Modern Britain (Farnham, 2012)Google Scholar; Cambers, Andrew, Godly Reading: Print, Manuscript and Puritanism in England, 1580-1720 (Cambridge, 2011)Google Scholar.

2 Notably Molekamp, William H. Sherman, , Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England (Philadelphia, PA, 2008)Google Scholar, ch. 4; and , Femke, ‘“Of the Incomparable treasure of the Holy Scriptures”: The Geneva Bible in the Early Modern Household’, in Dimmock, Matthew and Hadfield, Andrew, eds, Literature and Popular Culture in Early Modern England (Farnham, 2009), 121–35 Google Scholar, which includes a useful though very brief discussion of ‘The Bible as Domestic Object’.

3 Walsham, Alexandra, ‘Jewels for Gentlewomen: Religious Books as Artefacts in Late Medieval and Early Modern England’, in Swanson, R. N., ed., The Church and the Book, SCH 38 (Woodbridge, 2004), 123–42 Google Scholar; Titter, Robert, Portraits, Painters and Publics in Provincial England, 1540-1640 (Oxford, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, ch. 7; Williamson, Elizabeth, The Materiality of Religion in Early Modern English Drama (Farnham, 2009)Google Scholar, ch. 4.

4 An assumption reinforced by Collinson’s, Patrick influential article ‘From Iconoclasm to Iconophobia: The Cultural Impact of the Second English Reformation’, first published as The Stenton Lecture (Reading, 1985), repr. in Marshall, Peter, ed., The impact of the English Reformation 1500-1640 (London, 1997), 279–308, at 297Google Scholar.

5 Discussed in detail in Hamling, Tara, Decorating the Godly Household: Religious Art in Post-Reformation England (New Haven, CT, and London, 2010)Google Scholar; eadem, ‘Old Robert’s Girdle: Visual and Material Props for Protestant Piety in Post-Reformation England’, in Martin and Ryrie, eds, Private and Domestic Devotion, 135-64.

6 This interest stems from collaborative research towards a book, authored jointly with Richardson, Catherine: A Day at Home in Early Modem England: The Materiality of Domestic Life (New Haven, CT, forthcoming 2016)Google Scholar.

7 As, for example, with the printed frontispiece showing Elizabeth I at prayer in Day, Richard, A Booke of Christian Prayers (London, 1578)Google Scholar, and the woodcut of a pious man at prayer in Hayward, John, The sanctuarie of a troubled soule (London, 1602)Google Scholar.

8 Stewart, Alan, ‘The Early Modern Closet Discovered’, Representations, no. 50 (Spring 1995), 76–100.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

9 Cowen Orlin, Lena, Locating Privacy in Tudor London (Oxford, 2007), 301 Google Scholar. The choice of subheadings for the two sections of this essay acknowledges an intellectual debt to this book.

10 Ibid. 311.

11 Ibid. 325.

12 Moreover, it seems that these relatively flimsy partitions would afford little sense of seclusion from the hubbub of domestic life; this aural porosity lends a particular perspective to accounts of ‘private’ prayer being heard outside the closet in some ‘godly lives’, e.g. the biography of John Carter (d. 1635) who, his son reports, ‘prayed constantly in his Closet, whensoever he went into his study … Hee prayed very loud, and mostly very long. For the extension of his voice (I conjecture) he had a double reason; one that by his earnest speech he might quicken up his owne heart and devotion: the other, that he might be a pattern of secret prayer to his Children and Servants’: Carter, John, The tomb-stone, and A rare sight (London, 1653), 12 Google Scholar. This account indicates that sense of performance and outreach in the practice of supposedly ‘secret’ prayer.

13 Marsden, Jonathan, ‘The Chastleton Inventory of 1633’, Furniture History 36 (2000), 23–42 Google Scholar. The secret closet is identified as ‘the Chamber adjoyneinge’ the ‘chamber over the Parlour’.

14 Booy, David, ed., The Notebooks of Nehemiah Wallington 1618-1654: A Selection (Aldershot, 2007), 33–4 Google Scholar.

15 This is about Co change with monographs appearing which focus attention on the lived experience of religion, esp. Ryrie, Alec, Being Protestant in Reformation Britain (Oxford, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16 ‘Pray continually’ in the Geneva Bible; ‘pray without ceasing’ in the AV.

14 Booy, David, ed., The Notebooks of Nehemiah Wallington 1618-1654: A Selection (Aldershot, 2007), 33–4 Google Scholar.

15 This is about Co change with monographs appearing which focus attention on the lived experience of religion, esp. Ryrie, Alec, Being Protestant in Reformation Britain (Oxford, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16 ‘Pray continually’ in the Geneva Bible; ‘pray without ceasing’ in the AV.

17 See, in this volume, Ashby, Michael, ‘“My house shall be called the house of prayer”: Religion and the Material Culture of the Episcopal Household, c.1500 to c.1800’, 294–306.Google Scholar

18 Day, Richard, Christian Prayers and Meditations (London, 1569)Google Scholar; revised version, A Bookc of Christian Prayers (London, 1578)Google ScholarPubMed.

19 Bentley, Thomas, The Monument of Matrons (London, 1582), 363–5 Google Scholar.

20 Bayly, Lewis, The Practice of pietle (London, 1613), 154 Google Scholar.

21 Jocelin, Elizabeth, The Mother’s Legacy to her Unborn Child (London, 1624), 29 Google Scholar.

22 Stubbes, Philip, A Perfect pathway to felicitie conteining godly meditations and prniers (London, 1592)Google Scholar, sig. B6.

23 Bentley, Monument, 369-71.

24 Bayly, Practice of pietie, 156, 161.

25 Edwin and George, Stella, Bristol Probate Inventories, Part 1: 1542-1650, Bristol Record Society 54 (Bristol, 2002), 58 Google Scholar.

26 See also Ryrie, Alec, ‘Sleeping, Waking and Dreaming in Protestant Piety’, in Martin, and Ryrie, , eds, Private and Domestic Devotion, 73–92 Google Scholar, for examples of family members participating in ‘private’ prayer to accompany waking (esp. 86).

27 Leeds, E. T., ‘A Second Elizabethan Mural Painting at No. 3 Cornmarket Street, Oxford’, Oxoniensia 1 (1936), 144–50 Google Scholar.

28 Austin, Rupert and Sweetinburgh, Sheila, ‘“My Painted Chamber” and Other Rooms: Stephen Hulkes and the History of Calico House, Newnham’, Archaeologia cantiana 130 (2010), 105–44 Google Scholar.

29 Davies, Kathryn, Artisan Art: Vernacular Wall Paintings in the Welsh Marches, 1550-1650 (Almeley, 2008), 200 Google Scholar.

30 Day, Booke of Christian Prayers, sigs B.iiiv–B.iiiiv.

31 Discussed in more detail in Hamling, Tara, ‘Guides to Godliness: From Print to Plaster’, in Hunter, Michael, ed., British Printed Images: Essays in Interpretation (Aldershot, 2010), 65–85.Google Scholar

32 The chest is now on display at Warwick Castle.

33 Stubbes, A perfect patliway to felicitie, sig. F3r–F3V.

34 sig. F3r-v.

35 The wall paintings at Pirton and Kimpton are illustrated in Fleming, Juliet, Graffiti and the Writing Arts of Early Modern England (London, 2001), 30–1 Google Scholar (figs 6-7). As Fleming points out, the texts are also found in Tusser, Thomas, A hundreth good pointes of husbandry (London, 1557 and subsequent edns).Google Scholar

36 Johnston, Philip Mainwaring, ‘Mural Paintings in Houses: With Special Reference to Recent Discoveries at Stratford-upon-Avon and Oxford’, Journal of the British Archaeological Association 37 (1931), 75–100, at 82.Google Scholar

37 Rouse, E. Clive, ‘Domestic Wall Painting at Chalfont St. Peter, Great Pednor and Elsewhere’, Records of Buckinghamshire 15/2 (1949), 87–96.Google Scholar On domestic psalm singing, see Austern, Linda Phyllis, ‘“For Musicke is the Handmaid of the Lord”: Women, Psalms, and Domestic Music-Making in Early Modern England’, in Austen, Linda Phyllis, McBridge, Kari Bohy and Orvis, David L., eds, Psalms in the Early Modern World (Aldershot, 2011), 77–114.Google Scholar

38 The paintings were described by Reader, Francis, ‘A classification of Tudor Domestic Wall Paintings, Archaeological Journal 98 (1942), 181–211, at 197–8.CrossRefGoogle Scholar They featured in a Country Life blog dated 14 September 2009, online at: http://www.countrylife.co.uk/news/article/397066/Sleep-in-a-Tudor-room-dedicated-to-a-king.html, accessed 8 February 2013.

39 Rouse, , ‘Chalfont St. Peter’, 89 Google Scholar. As these texts follow the AV they must post-date 1611.

40 Photographs held in the Royal Albert Memorial Museum, Exeter.

41 Molekamp, Femke, ‘Using a Collection to Discover Reading Practices: The British Library Geneva Bibles and a History of their Early Modern Readers’, Electronic British Library Journal (2006), Article 10, 1–13, online at: http://www.bl.uk/eblj/2006articles/article10.html.Google Scholar

42 Sherman, , Used Books, 77.Google Scholar

43 Ibid. 76.

44 Molekamp, , ‘Using a Collection’, 3.Google Scholar

45 There is no space here to explore the talismanic function of Bibles and associated inscriptions in the home, but interesting connections can be drawn between the use of biblical texts in wall painting and the ritual marking of domestic buildings with crudely incised religious symbols, usually on doors and chimney or window mantels. These marks are generally interpreted as attempts to protect the household from physical or spiritual harm.

46 Downame, John, A guide to godlynesse or a Treatise of a Christian life (London, 1622), 279.Google Scholar

47 The property is owned by the Landmark Trust.

48 Johnston, Mainwaring, ‘Mural Paintings in Houses’, 84.Google Scholar

49 Discussed and illustrated in Hamling, Decorating the Godly Household, 132-3.

50 Ibid. 156-7.

51 London, Museum of London, accession no. 6333.

52 Illustrated in Reader, Francis, ‘Tudor Domestic Wall Paintings, Part II, Archaeo-logical Journal 93 (1936), 220–62, facing 251 (plate 24).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

53 The jug is discussed by Jackson, Victoria, ‘Shakespeare’s World in 100 Objects’, online at: http://findingshakespeare.co.uk/shakespeares-world-in-100-objects-number-5-german-panel-jug Google Scholar, accessed 7 February 2013.

54 Museum of London, accession no. A4481.

55 Burton, William, A History and Description of English Earthenware and Stoneware (London, 1904), between pages 30 and 31 (Fig. 5).Google Scholar

56 London, British Museum, Registration no. 1887, 0307, D.21.

57 Booy, , ed., Nehemiah Wallington, 327.Google Scholar

58 Ibid. 328.

59 Ibid. 330.

60 Ibid. 332.

61 Orlin, Lena Cowen, ‘Fictions of the Early Modern English Probate Inventory’, in Turner, Henry S., ed., The Culture of Capital: Properties, Cities, and Knowledge in Early Modern England (New York and London, 2002), 51–84.Google Scholar

62 Jones, Jeanne, Stratford-upon-Avon Inventories 1538-1699, 2 vols, Dugdale Society 39, 40 (Stratford-upon-Avon, 2002–3), 1: 319.Google Scholar

63 I have utilized published transcriptions of a complete set of inventories for Stratford-upon-Avon in Warwickshire and selected inventories from the city of Bristol, along with the extensive database of Kentish probate materials for the period 1560-1600 created by Catherine Richardson.

64 Hinde, William, A faithfull remonstrance of the holy life and happy death of John Bruen of Bruen-Stapleford, in the county of Chester, Esquire (London, 1641), 123.Google Scholar

65 Canterbury, Cathedral Archives and Library, Probate Records [of the Prerogative Court of] Canterbury [hereafter: PRC], Inventory Registers listed by volume: PRC 10.5.39, Inventory of Thomas Post, draper of Faversham, dated 26 April 1569; PRC 10.7.25, Inventory of Richard Lawrence of Faversham, 2 March 1572.

66 PRC 10.16.264, Inventory of John Iden of Sandwich, 5 January 1586.

67 PRC 10.14.152v, Inventory of John Semark, 3 February 1585.

68 George, and George, , Bristol Probate Inventories, 23–4.Google Scholar

69 Ibid. 41-3.

70 Jones, , Stratford-upon-Avon Inventories, 2: 72.Google Scholar

71 The contents of ‘ye parlour’ are listed as: ‘one half-headed bedsteed, two tables, one foarme, one chaire, one stoole, one bible, a paire of handirons, one fire shoole, a paire of bellis with linckes & tongs’. In ‘ye joyne chamber’ was ‘one table board & frame, two foarmes, one chaire, two stooles, one joyne bedsteed, one court cupboard, one chest & one coffer, one carpet, one cubberd cloth & cushion, sixe other cushions’. It is possible that other items were present but unrecorded, if claimed by kin.