‘the most beautifully bound book in the University Library’: The Seventeenth-Century Embroidered Wardlaw Bible in the Special Collections of the University of St Andrews

In 2001 Wardlaw family descendants gifted to the University of St Andrews a pair of embroidered seventeenth-century gauntlet gloves and an embroidered seventeenth-century Geneva Bible bound with The CL. Psalmes of David in Meeter. Family tradition purports that the bible and gloves were given by Charles I to Sir Henry and Lady Wardlaw. Although it is feasible that the gloves were gifted to the first Sir Henry by Charles I, the bible was published after 1640—its 1599 date of imprint is false—and it, therefore, cannot have been given to Sir Henry, who died in 1637. It is also questionable if Charles I would have gifted a Geneva Bible, rather than the King James Version. Following a detailed description of the binding and the conservation it has undergone, the Wardlaw family legend is re-examined through comparing the embroidered binding to others of the seventeenth century, examining the provenance within the bible, and discussing the Geneva version of the bible.

What Is ‘the Breath of Our Nostrils’? Ruach and Neshamah in John Donne’s 1622 Gunpowder Day Sermon

As King James I moved to censor Puritan opponents, he called upon John Donne to defend his policies from the pulpit. As text‚ then‚ for a sermon at St Paul’s, Donne chose Lamentations 4:20, a notorious crux. The Geneva Bible glosses ‘the anointed’ in this verse as a good king, Josiah; Calvin in his Institutes as a bad king, Zedekiah. The phrase ‘the breath of our nostrils’, an allusion to Genesis 2:7, introduces further complications. Is ‘breath’ here neshamah, nepesh, or ruach? pnoē, psychē, or pneuma? Drawing on fine distinctions between ‘breath,’ ‘soul’, and ‘spirit’ in the languages of Scripture, Donne crafts a defence of James’s ‘Directions concerning Preachers’ that is erudite, ingenious, equivocal, and disconcerting: an argument against such arguments as ‘things indifferent’ (adiaphora).

Competing Prose Psalters and Their Elizabethan Readers

Layouts and paratexts of Elizabethan prose psalters advocate two competing reading methods: reading sequentially according to the church calendar or selecting psalms by occasion. Marked psalters and bibles, however, show that Elizabethan readers often disregarded printed prescription, practicing either method, or both, as they chose. To capitalize on reader independence, printers eventually produced texts that encouraged comparative reading across multiple translations, culminating in the two-text psalter of the 1578 Geneva Bible. This episode in the history of devotional reading demonstrates the tendency of Elizabethans to slip the confessional categories into which their own texts, and later historiography, would place them.

Reformed Theology and the Humanities

The Reformed tradition has been influential in many cultures, in Europe and also in Asia and the Americas. Over the centuries it has absorbed various influences and it has engaged in criticisms of its own traditions, emphasizing some doctrines associated with it and muting or abandoning others, as religious traditions tend to do as they adapt to time and setting. This chapter will look at one place and period, the Reformation and Renaissance in England, when Reformed influence was new, its aesthetic, theological, and intellectual impact was clear, and its sources, notably the Geneva Bible and the writings of John Calvin, were available and widely read. In so doing, this chapter also fixes on ways in which assessments of the humanities and the Puritans are and are not helpful.

The Bible in Sixteenth-Century Scotland

The Geneva Bible is commonly thought of as a single version produced by the Marian exiles with marginal notes which was disliked by King James VI and superseded by the Authorized or King James Version after 1611. The chapter shows that there were three major text forms in the Geneva Bible tradition: the ‘pure’ Genevans, the Geneva Tomson version which followed Beza’s Latin New Testament, and finally the Geneva Tomson Junius version which added a very extensive commentary to the Book of Revelation. Moreover, study of the material culture of what must be understood as the Geneva Bible ‘project’ shows that different typefaces and different bundling of paratextual additions were designed to appeal to different readerships. Two distinctive Geneva Bible versions were published in Scotland (the Arbuthnot/Bassandyne text of 1579 and the Andro Hart text of 1610). It is suggested that use of the Geneva tradition flourished in Scotland until about 1640 and fostered a highly informed, argumentative sense of separate religious identity.

For the Sake of the Arguments: Reading the Headnotes to The Faerie Queene

This essay proposes taking a serious poetic and literary-historical interest in the ballad-stanza ‘Arguments’ which precede and summarize every Canto in Spenser’s Faerie Queene. Short, simple, and economical, the four-line Arguments seem at first a very different poetical space from the Spenserian stanza—but on closer reading, they demand an investment in the dimensions of printed language and the spaces and syntax of its storytelling which fits persuasively with the wider poetics of The Faerie Queene and with its narrative structures. The first section establishes the Arguments in a context of analogous early modern paratexts—in the Geneva Bible, Thomas Speght’s 1598 collected Chaucer, printed plays, and the Sternhold-Hopkins psalter. The second reads them closely as a ‘didactic technology’ which might, as well as helping us to read The Faerie Queene, help teach us how to.

The Prodigal Son and Shakespeare

In this chapter the ubiquity of references to the Prodigal Son in Shakespeare’s work is explored, leading to a discussion of Shakespeare’s use of the Bible in general and of the Geneva Bible in particular. Two plays are considered in detail: Henry IV Part 1 and King Lear. It is suggested that Shakespeare offers a creative exegesis, or midrash, of the parable in both plays. In the first, the parable is reworked in a way which leads the reader to question the motives of both Hal and the Prodigal in the original text. In the second, the complex overlay of the parable on the plot and characterization offers at least the possibility of grace and hope at the end of the play.