The Bible and the People [Hardcover]

Prof. Lori Anne Ferrell (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 15, 2008

In the eleventh century, the Bible was available only in expensive and rare hand-copied manuscripts. Today, millions of people from all walks of life seek guidance, inspiration, entertainment, and answers from their own editions of the Bible. This illustrated book tells the story of what happened to the ancient set of writings we call the Bible during those thousand years. Anchoring the story in material evidence—hundreds of different translations and versions of the Bible—Lori Anne Ferrell discusses how the Bible has been endlessly retailored to meet the changing needs of religion, politics, and the reading public while retaining its special status as a sacred text.

 

Focusing on the English-speaking world, The Bible and the People charts the extraordinary voyage of the Bible from manuscript Bibles to the Gutenberg volumes, Bibles commissioned by kings and queens, the Eliot Indian Bible, salesmen’s door-to-door Bibles, children’s Bibles, Gideon Bibles, teen magazine Bibles, and more. Ferrell discusses the Bible’s profound impact on readers over the centuries, and, in turn, the mark those readers made upon it. Enjoyable and informative, this book takes a fresh look at the fascinating and little-recognized connections among Christian, political, and book history.

(20081215)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In this slow-to-get-going but ultimately engaging text, Ferrell, a professor of early modern history and literature at Claremont Graduate University in California, tours the history of the Bible as it has been copied, translated, annotated, dressed up and every which way adapted to changing times for English-speaking readers. From the Latin Vulgate Bible to the contemporary Revolve and Refuel Bible-zines for teens, the Bible has remained an object of central importance and more, or less, availability to Christians. Bible translation into the vernacular, whatever the vernacular, has been a way of establishing authority. Ferrell rightly recognizes this text's crucial place in the evolution of Anglo-American Christianity and in the hearts of Christians. (Dec.)
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From Booklist

*Starred Review* In the predictable presence of the Bible in every hotel room, Ferrell discerns but one telling manifestation of the cultural dynamics that have established this book as an anchor of religious stability in a ceaseless storm of social change. Investigating the evolution of these cultural dynamics, Ferrell uncovers some surprises. She finds, for instance, that laypeople enjoyed considerable access to scripture long before the Reformation and the printing press, thanks to traveling monks and biblical mystery plays. Later, the very Protestant leaders who championed the translation and publication of scripture for everyone exerted surprisingly strong ecclesiastical control over how people actually read their Bibles. Perhaps most astounding, however, has been the transformation of the Bible itself to serve decidedly terrestrial agendas. Thus, in the seventeenth century, James I commissioned a mellifluous new translation of the Bible to quash upstart Puritans using a more prosaic version, while nineteenth-century publishers sumptuously gilded, bound, and supplemented the holy book to maximize profits. Deists and feminists have taken turns editing and glossing the text to fit their credos. Canny twenty-first-century evangelists have even turned the New Testament into a hip magazine to capture teen readers. Impressive scholarship illuminates the interplay between the divine Word and its diversely human readers. --Bryce Christensen

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Yale University Press (December 15, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0300114249
• ISBN-13: 978-0300114249
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.2 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #146,991 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars divine book as human artefact, April 14, 2009

By 

Daniel B. Clendenin (www.journeywithjesus.net) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Bible and the People (Hardcover)

In 2004 Lori Anne Ferrell was the guest curator for a Huntington Library exhibit called "The Bible and the People." This book is a spin-off of her research, which was also the subject of a 2007 PBS documentary. Ferrell has written what she calls a "cultural biography" of the "restless, peripatetic text that is the Christian Bible." She treats the Bible as a material artifact, and limits herself primarily to English Bibles of the last thousand years. Her book includes 55 black and white illustrations of various Bibles that she examines.

Ferrell begins with the two-volume Gundulf Bible, an illuminated manuscript from the 11th century, and eight chapters later concludes with teen-magazine format Bibles of the 20th-century like Revolve and Refuel. In between she moves the reader from single, hand-copied Bibles to mass produced "Paris Bibles" (1200-1500) that were both standardized and portable, and to lay Bibles, "Psalters," and Victorian family Bibles intended for private devotion. Chapter divisions and verse numbers entered in the sixteenth century, as did the intense and divisive "politics of translation" with the rise of the Protestant movement. When she moves to America, we learn that our first Bibles were in Spanish, German, and Algonquian (p. 119). In her earlier chapters Ferrell argues that widespread illiteracy did not necessarily mean Biblical ignorance, while in later chapters she observes that Bibles newly translated into the vernacular of common people did not guarantee understanding.

The many iterations of this singular book are fascinating. From from being modern conventions, many centuries ago all sorts of study aids were included in Bibles--pronunciation guides, foldout maps, footnotes, charts, graphs, glosses, illustrations, marginalia, and annotations. The Kitto Bible of 1836, for example, comes in 66 volumes and includes over 30,000 prints and illustrations. Economic market forces of production and distribution, cultural changes, political upheaval, advances in textual criticism, artistic devotion, religious partisanships of all sorts, liturgical innovations, all of these and more, Ferrell shows, are part of the Bible's very human biography.