Narveson, Kate. Bible Readers and Lay Writers in Early Modern England: Gender and Self-Definition in an Emergent Writing Culture. Farnham, Surrey; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012. viii + 235 pp. ISBN: 978-1409441687. $109.00 cloth.

Molekamp, Femke. Women and the Bible in Early Modern England: Religious Reading and Writing. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. x + 266 pp. ISBN: 978-0199665402. $95.00 cloth.

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries those who had access to education learned to write by reading, copying, translating, analyzing, and imitating the Latin epistles, speeches, essays, and poems of Horace, Cicero, or Seneca. In the vernacular, too, English poets learned their craft by reading, imitating, assimilating, and adapting earlier poets: Sidney read Wyatt, Shakespeare read Sidney, Milton read Shakespeare, and so on. Such imitation was not the exclusive product of a humanist education, however. Both Bible Readers and Lay Writers in Early Modern England (Kate Narveson) and Women & the Bible in Early Modern England (Femke Molekamp) argue that there was a good deal of reading, and a surprising amount of writing, going on outside the classroom, practiced by those without access to schooling, including especially women. Narveson and Molekamp combine the fields of literary studies­­—in its ongoing turn to religion—the history of the book and its concomitant, the history of reading, and the study of early modern women to demonstrate how women’s reading was focused on the Bible, and how women’s writing in a variety of modes developed out of an engagement with Scripture. They also argue that some of these modes, such as diaries, journals, personal guides to the Bible and devotional practice, and spiritual autobiographies, have been insufficiently acknowledged as fully authored works.

Narveson’s book is organized in two sections, the first addressing the way in which reading practices led readers to become writers, and the second turning to matters of gender. She begins with the wood turner and diarist Nehemiah Wallington and with Lady Grace Mildmay, the Northamptonshire woman who bequeathed her daughter over 900 pages of devotional writing. Narveson argues that “these ordinary people embraced writing as an important part of their engagement with the world” (1). In her introduction Narveson points out that, despite many excellent studies of the history of Bible translation, far less attention has been paid to how the English Bible was actually read, even though the “lay culture of Bible-centered reading and writing was the most widespread culture of the book in early modern England” (5). For example, in the Edwardian “Homily on the Reading of Scripture” (reprinted many times over the next half century and read in countless churches), English men and women were instructed in the “continuall reading and recording of GODS word,” not only to better understand Christian doctrine, but because “In these books we may learne to know our selves” (3).

Narveson studies those of “the gentry and middling sort” (cutting across simplistic binaries of elite and popular, puritan and conformist), who did find themselves in Bible reading and in the writing they developed from it. Such devotional writing constituted “a new mode of self-expression and self-fashioning,” including techniques of writing in “Scripture phrase,”[1] whether in what Susan Felch has termed “Psalm collages”—pastiches of selected scattered psalm verses or even psalm-like phrases—or in other genres: prayers, meditations, treatises, journals, and life-writing. Indeed, Narveson argues, understanding these genres is essential to understanding devotional, biblical writing, for the modern critic as for the original early modern author.

Building on the work of Patrick Collinson, Arnold Hunt, Andrew Cambers, and others, Narveson’s first chapter describes how people read their Bibles. There was a considerable literature available for those in need of guidance, and every aspect of the physical format of the Geneva Bible itself (by far the most popular English Bible until the mid-seventeenth century) was designed to shape the reading experience. Collation was primary, comparing difficult verses with verses elsewhere that provided clarification. “[M]ark the coherence of the text,” wrote Richard Rodgers in 1603, “how it hangeth together … that thereby that which seemeth darke in one [place], is made easie in another” (23). The many cross-references in the Geneva Bible margins aided the reader, but many readers supplemented these with further marginal notes (Narveson cites William Sherman on this, 35).

As Narveson points out, however, these readers’ aids were at least partly an attempt by the anxious clergy and church authorities to control independent reading. Furthermore, she cautions against assuming that the spread of Bible reading necessarily led to independent interpretation. “Knowledge of Scripture,” writes Narveson, “is to create fixed belief not doctrinal inquiry, in the lay reader” (26). And she notes that parishioners were thoroughly indoctrinated by weekly sermons before they ever read the Bible for themselves. “Preaching and catechizing, then, created a context for Scripture reading so that interpretive pathways were laid down before a believer’s own experience of Scripture began” (41). As Hunt points out, too, individual and family Bible reading on Sundays after church was to rehearse and discuss the sermon, rereading the minister’s scriptural citations, making sure that his lessons were properly learned.[2] Further guidance in orthodox biblical exegesis was available in printed sermons, commentaries, and in the interpretive notes and introductions in the Geneva Bible.

Collation was reinforced by the practice of biblical commonplacing. Readers were encouraged to keep notebooks of important Bible verses under topical headings like “zeal,” “sensible comfort,” or even “to prove the sufficiency of the Scriptures.” Many readers further analyzed their Bible reading according to genre—gospel, epistle, history, prophesy—or rhetorical categories such as Exhortation, Reprehension, and Confutation, or by dividing passages into proofs, reasons, and applications. Classical rhetorical training was properly the preserve of Latin-educated men, but Narveson argues this knowledge trickled down to the non-Latin-literate through sermons and devotional guides. Such practices of reading, analyzing, and note-taking enabled readers to “put together their own words and ideas” (36). Indeed, Bible reading involved a good deal of writing, in margins, blank leaves, commonplace books, and notebooks, and this naturally led lay readers to compose their own commentaries, meditations, and prayers. Narveson fruitfully challenges our notions of independent, “creative” writing by posing a sliding scale from passive to active reading. When Grace Mildmay composes an epitome of stories in John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments, she asks, is she reading or writing? Surely both.

Narveson is right to urge us not to “look for the independence and creativity of lay religious writing in its heterodoxy” (42). At the same time, her emphasis on the control of reading from above, the pre-conditioning of lay readers, and the theological orthodoxy of lay writers shouldn’t obscure the genuinely independent and heterodox. Perhaps the apparatus of the Geneva Bible was an attempt to rein in independent reading, but was it entirely effective? Most everyone was listening to sermons preaching the proper interpretation of the Bible, but were some not able to read against the grain, with the texts in their own hands? Narveson cites the fascinating example of Christopher Parkes, a minister who notes of his own sermons that they can be “fitted to other texts,” demonstrating the view of the Bible’s consistency and homogeneity. Yet any skeptical reader might notice that James, in his New Testament Epistle, argues for justification by works, contradicting Paul’s more orthodox (in Protestant terms) justification by faith alone. And not all radical Bible reading sprang up in the 1640s; the roots of Familism were Elizabethan, as were those of the Brownists. The Anabaptists (with English adherents by at least the mid-sixteenth century) rejected infant baptism because they didn’t read it in their Bibles. Narveson herself acknowledges the limitations of clerical control, noting that “the tools lay people came to employ in their own writing were forged in the interaction between clerical prescription and individual experience” (50).

Chapter two traces in more detail the “emergence of lay composition,” beginning with a detailed analysis of writing “in scripture phrase.” Henry Bull, for instance, wrote a prayer in which he wove together “at least 18 phrases that echo Scripture, sharing syntax, cadence, and vocabulary” (53).[3] Sometimes such collage prayers were the result of deliberate arrangement, but not always; as Narveson notes, “biblical language was part of the cadences of daily life,” echoing through sermons, schooling, private and family devotions, and ordinary conversation, as well as reading (53-54). Narveson cites another example from a meditation by Elizabeth, Countess of Bridgewater, which sounds just as scriptural as Bull’s prayer, but in which, she suggests, the biblical phrases “seem not so much to be quotations as to be a kind of vocabulary, drawn on to develop the Countess’s ideas” (62). In any case, despite the differing degrees of authorial self-consciousness, early modern Bible readers do seem to have progressed from reading to writing, passing through stages of interpreting by collation, commonplacing key quotations, and assimilating biblical vocabulary and style, finally resulting in original composition.

Originality is a problematic concept, however, as Narveson recognizes. She acknowledges that “the line between a collection and composition may be hard to draw” (63). In the case of Richard Waste, for example, some readers may feel Narveson places too much emphasis on a single phrase in the title of his devotional manuscript: “composed and written for the use of him selfe and his Children” (69). Does the inclusion of “composed” as well as “written” really indicate a sense of original authorship on Waste’s part? On the other hand, Joseph Baildon’s Flowers Divine and Humane Serveinge To Adorne Discourse, Maintaine Argument [etc.] does seem conceived and presented as Baildon’s work, a “book” compiled and arranged in self-conscious imitation of a long tradition of scriptural commonplacers, from Peter Lombard on. Narveson is surely right that modern notions of authorship are inadequate to recognize the kind of creative work going into Baildon’s manuscript, or others by Thomas Grocer, Elizabeth Hastings, or Elizabeth Ashburnham Richardson. Such works exemplify a kind of “household publication” which produces books that are “not only a physical object, a gathering of paper, but a book as conceptual entity” (70, 71).

Narveson’s third and fourth chapters focus on that vexed area of debate among early modernists (and their medieval and modern colleagues): identity. Chapter three pursues further the question of originality in Bible reading and writing, asking how it is that “devotional engagement with texts [can] be both communal and personal” (79). Narveson argues that early modern readers could “share in communal practices” but nevertheless experience the Bible individually, personally, as an affective change of heart (79). Narveson’s argument connects to other scholars’ claims for early modern reading as being geared toward action, though the “action” in this case is not necessarily political, or even in the world, but within: spiritual self-fashioning as hermeneutic action.[4] Grace, of course, was necessary for such an interior transformation, but so too were active reading, imitation, and application.

This argument enters one of the most highly contested theological battlefields of the Reformation, and Narveson pauses at this point to engage hand-to-hand with another scholar, James Simpson, on the questions of election and justification by faith alone. Simpson has argued for a fundamental contradiction between Protestant claims that reading Scripture is necessary for salvation and that, on the contrary, no human works, including reading the Bible, can save. Such a paradox leads both to modern fundamentalism (not liberalism, Simpson’s large argument) and to an early modern anxiety about what Narveson calls the “catch-22 of election” (87). Narveson’s counterargument is not entirely convincing, resting as it does on the claim that Simpson juxtaposes “ideas that originated in disparate theological contexts as if they were part of the same expository project” (86). Perhaps so, and perhaps the majority of English Protestants were not paralyzed by anxiety over theological contradictions. But the contradiction Simpson points out remains contradictory wherever the contradictory ideas originate, and plenty of Protestants (Bunyan, most famously) did experience profound anxiety.[5]

Narveson is on more solid ground when she returns to the records of actual readers. Here she herself points to another contradiction, that while the devotional guides of the clergy stress self-control, lay readers “not only apply the texts to their own lives but respond with intense fervor” (93). This raises further questions about Narveson’s earlier claims for the orthodoxy of individual Bible reading. “Interpretive activity,” she argues here, “is experienced as the discovery of how one can bring oneself into line with what one finds, or how what one finds makes sense of one’s situation” (97). But individual situations vary, as does “what one finds” in the Bible. Narveson demonstrates the extent to which “Layfolk thought through Scripture—thought about how they approached money, child-bearing, social encounters, work demands, and moods” (98). Much of the thinking of such layfolk was no doubt roughly orthodox, depending as it did “on the conceptual frameworks they internalized from childhood,” shaped by teachers and preachers. Narveson is also right to challenge the limitations of tired binary approaches to “containment versus subversion, indoctrination versus independent thought, male versus female” (98). But this hardly means that all of these people, “self-authorized” through the “permanent affective transformation” of their Bible reading, thought along the same lines.

Chapter four continues exploring the concept of originality, rightly noting that modern notions about it fail to appreciate the extent to which early modern individuality developed through imitation. Narveson quotes Douglas Trevor’s argument about George Herbert that “it is through appropriated words that self-understanding occurs” (101). She then turns to three extended case studies of early modern Bible readers who wrote out of what they read: Richard Willis, an educated government secretary born in Gloucestershire but working in London; Nehemiah Wallington; and Anne Venn, daughter of “a middling London silk merchant” who became one of the regicides, and who died at 27. These studies make clear that “lay people appropriated Scriptural application, lifting exegesis down from the pulpit and out from the devotional guide, making it an ordinary person’s art, productive of meaning in both the household and the economic sphere” (126).

Willis seems to have shared with Bunyan (my comparison) a sense that he walked in a “world in which words are everywhere” and in which the world, words, and the Word were thoroughly intertwined (109). In Mount-Tabor. Or Private Exercises of a Penitent Sinner (1639), Willis meditates on inscriptions found in public houses, along staircases, over chimneys, and on clocktowers; Willis’s application of these texts to his own life derives from sermons and Bible reading. And in addition to the meditations on texts encountered around London, Willis includes more formal meditations on Bible texts, gathering various verses under topical heads, then explicating them and applying them to his life.

Wallington read voraciously in the Bible and religious books, and he wrote compulsively, examining his daily conduct, meditating on and applying his reading, as well as selecting and listing scriptural passages. Narveson observes that, while much of Wallington’s work involves simply gathering Bible verses, he seems to have had a strong sense of his book as his own composition and legacy, writing a “book in an established godly genre, the treatise on discerning the signs of election” (117). Venn’s A Wise Virgin’s Lamp Burning (1658) was prefaced by a note from her pastor, describing her daily Bible reading and meditation, written down both for her own devotions and to strengthen “the faith of beleevers” (121). Venn experienced the Bible in her own reading, in sermons, in correspondence with friends and family, even in verses that came to her while lying in bed (again like Bunyan, who was pursued by Bible verses down the street, or had them drop on him from the sky). Venn’s book was designed to “leave a good report of God behind me” (125).

The first chapter in Narveson’s second section, “Discursive Horizons and the Question of Gender,” leaves that question surprisingly unresolved. Narveson’s book positions itself partly in the context of other studies of early modern women, including those by Erica Longfellow, Margaret Hannay, Danielle Clarke, and Kimberly Coles. It is refreshing, however, that Narveson acknowledges some limitations of studying early modern women readers and writers primarily in terms of their gender. Both men and women, she notes, “were trained in childhood, often within a shared household context, to use the same tools to read and digest Scripture” (131). Narveson also points out that “for early modern readers, an individual prayer did not carry a clearly gendered voice,” and she critiques “the sort of essentialist thought that led scholars to look for a ‘woman’s voice’” (142, 144).

At the same time, Narveson does want to make specific claims for women’s reading and writing, and these are sometimes unconvincing. She argues, for instance, that “texts by women still tend to have a narrower discursive horizon than those by men,” but she notes (as anyone must in studying the traces of early modern reading) that the limited number of surviving miscellanies and notebooks make firm generalizations difficult. She distinguishes manuscripts written by “lay gentlemen” as more methodical than most of those written by women, but surely this is just as likely a factor of education as of gender.[6] Narveson claims that the “lack of system” often characterizes women’s manuscripts, but then she notes that this is also true of Wallington’s writing. Is this then a feature of gender or of social class and education? As Narveson goes on to acknowledge, “it would seem reasonable that when a man does not have Latin literacy, the discursive horizon that he brings to his reading and writing would resemble the discursive horizons with which most women operated” (145).

In her next chapter, Narveson applies the question of gender to the materiality of the text: “Can we,” she asks, “isolate a ‘gendered page’? (151). The answer is no, and, given that Narveson focuses her attention on the single example of Grace Mildmay, it seems that she really isn’t too interested in the question. More interesting is Narveson’s exploration of the sources for the form of Mildmay’s manuscript. Mildmay’s page is complex, as illustrated in a photograph, the verses or sentences in the main text supplemented by scriptural references in the margin, the section of the meditations and the subject indicated at the top in running heads, with catch phrases (unnecessary in a manuscript) at the bottom, all separated by border lines. Narveson observes that while the “page layout is that of the printed humanist page … the compositional principles are not” (156).

This leads to a detailed description of Elizabethan printing practices for books of private devotion, comparing printed works by Abraham Fleming, Anne Wheathill, Thomas Rogers, and others. The presence of marginal Bible references is key. Narveson shows that there is a transition in devotional printing from pages without margins, or with purely decorative margins, to books with margins full of scriptural citations, or space in which to write further notes. This reflects a difference in the conception of prayer, from a still-medieval sense of prayer as a “form of words” to an emphasis on prayer as “the product of an individual’s activity of praying” (158). The latter understanding allowed for extemporized prayer, but it also encouraged meditation on the sources of printed prayer texts—hence the scriptural references in the margins. Mildmay’s manuscript prayers, like those in the printed books that provided her model, drew attention to the process of composition out of biblical sources. Narveson makes a case for the particular influence of one book: a translation of Thomas á Kempis’s Imitation of Christ by Thomas Rogers, printed, with marginal Bible references, in 1581.

The final chapter focuses even more intensively on Grace Mildmay’s Meditations, demonstrating “the confidence of voice, method, and style made possible by Scripture reading” (177). Like many of her contemporaries, male and female, Mildmay possesses “a typological mentality that sees events in Scripture and in her own life as part of the same interpretive field” (183). She writes “in Scripture phrase,” using “characteristically Hebraic parallelism” and other recognizably biblical stylistic features (184). Mildmay “suffers none of the doubts about election that we tend to associate with English Calvinism,” which may be one source of Narveson’s earlier objection to Simpson (194). Mildmay’s writing exemplifies the “transformative power of Scripture” that is Narveson’s central argument.

Unlike some of the other subjects of Narveson’s study, Mildmay has been the focus of earlier scholarship; Narveson’s contribution to the Mildmay bibliography is in several respects sharply revisionary. Following Danielle Clarke, Narveson once again rejects essentialist arguments about women’s writing, acknowledging that gender must be considered in conjunction with class, religion, and politics, and that Mildmay’s writing is “a genuine statement of her own interest and commitments,” not just an internalizing of patriarchal religious discourse (178). Indeed, Mildmay derives from the Bible a powerful sense of authority, and “within that framework, without conscious rejection of gender norms, gender was secondary to the particular sort of authority she claimed” (180). In her meditation on Psalm 1, Mildmay shifts the Psalm’s masculine focus on the blessed “man” who “will bring forth his fruit in due season,” to the blessed woman whose body actually produces this “fruit”: “the Lord thy God will make thee plenteous in every work of thine hand, in the fruit of thy body” (186). (Narveson might also have mentioned in this context, what she no doubt knows, that early moderns, following biblical usage, commonly referred to the human foetus as the “fruit,” as in Jakob Rüff’s The Expert Midwife, which refers to a premature fetus as “untimely fruit.”[7] This seemingly poetical usage extended even to medical texts.) Yet apart from this occasional refocusing of scriptural texts, gender is not a concern for Mildmay; “she does not address her soul as female,” Narveson notes, and considers her godly status, shared with both men and women, more important than gender (195).

Femke Molekamp also recognizes the problem of “essentializing female readers,” arguing that instead her “historicizing study seeks to particularize female reading styles” (14). Like Narveson, Molekamp begins her book with chapters addressing general topics: the household reading of the Geneva Bible, modes of Bible reading, female communal reading and writing, and (female) affective reading and writing. The last two chapters focus on particular women, first Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke (and a few other Psalm translators), and then Aemelia Lanyer, Constance Aston Fowler, and Elizabeth Delaval. Molekamp’s introduction could in many ways have served to introduced Narveson’s book as well, arguing that “From the earliest stages of the publication of the English Bible in print, women have been engaged in interpretative and activist reading, as well as affective, meditative reading of the scriptures, and have manifested these modes of reading in religious writing” (3).

Molekamp’s initial examples of reading and writing women start at the pinnacle of English society, with Katherine Parr and Elizabeth I, but extend to other levels with Agnes Beaumont, a farmer’s daughter, and Anne Wheathill, about whom nothing is known but her A Handfull of Holesome (though Homelie) Hearbs (1584). One difference between Molekamp and Narveson lies in their treatment of biblical interpretation. Narveson argues that Bible readers were less heterodox than is often assumed, that sermons, commentaries, and marginal notes generally led the reader down a narrow, well-trodden path of orthodoxy. “Interpretive activity,” she claims in connection with Mildmay, Wallington, and others, “is experienced as the discovery of how one can bring oneself into line with what one finds” in Scripture (97). For Molekamp, by contrast, the “increased access to the vernacular Bible” provided women with “interpretive agency,” and she emphasizes that women Bible readers “took on positions that were often revisionist, radical, or entrenched, as women experienced the religious and political dislocations of the century” (9). It is clear, she continues, “that there was a growth of original, interpretative, female religious writing in early modern England that was specifically linked to reading cultures that had developed around the availability of the Bible in English” (9).

Chapter one tells the familiar but still essential story of the Geneva Bible, its production, format, dissemination, and reception during the century or so during which it dominated English Bible reading. Molekamp usefully distinguishes “several modes of domestic Bible reading: communal, solitary, studious, and meditative” (19). She also stresses, following William Sherman, Heidi Brayman Hackel, and others, the materiality of the Geneva Bible as a book. There are some errors in this chapter: Geneva Bibles were only printed in England until 1616, though there were continental editions as late as 1644 (21);[8] there were in fact many smaller format editions of the Bishops’ Bible, if not as many as of the Geneva Bible (22); “How to take profite in reading of the holy Scriptures” (by, it should be noted, T. Grashop) was included in many Geneva Bibles but not most; it is Laurence, not Lawrence, Tomson; the Geneva Bible was not the first English Bible with biblical cross-references, since they were used earlier in William Tyndale’s New Testament and Miles Coverdale’s Great Bible (33); and there are two different tallies of the Geneva Bibles in the British Library (36, 41).

Despite these inaccuracies, Molekamp importantly emphasizes the active reading encouraged by the format of the Geneva, with its extensive marginal cross-references and interpretive notes, Grashop’s guide to Scripture reading (in some editions), and other aids like tables, glossaries, and summaries. Narveson’s caveat that individual Bible reading was not necessarily heterodox is valuable, but Molekamp is also surely right that, at least for some readers, “hermeneutic authority is moveable, slipping back and forth between the hands of the translators and the hands of the reader” (23). Like Narveson, Molekamp stresses the importance of supplementary, manuscript Bible annotation in further developing active reading. Susanna Beckwith, an Elizabethan noblewoman, is especially active, underlining verses and writing in commentary beside them, and writing a dedication to her “deare childe” who will inherit the Bible.

This dedication uses “Scripture phrase” in the way described by Narveson, a process later described by Molekamp for the biblical commonplace book of Lady Isabella Twysden, who “knits together several different paraphrases or citations from multiple books to form her text” (62). Beckwith urges her daughter, “bee not wearie of well doing for in due season thou shalt reap if thou faint not” (adapting Galatians 6:9). “Beenot [sic] high minded,” she continues, in the words of Romans 12:16 (in the Geneva translation of Beckwith’s Bible), “but make thy selfe equale vnto them of the lower sorte” (37). In another Bible, Aude Leigh writes, “O god that art my writeousnes Lord here me when I cale,” slightly rearranging Psalm 4:1.

Women could personalize the outside as well as the inside of their Bibles, ordering (or sometimes making their own) embroidered bindings, often featuring biblical scenes and figures. Even if Molekamp’s claims for personalized binding as “self-fashioning” seem overstated, there is here an “intersection of women’s verbal and visual textualities” (in the words of Susan Frye) that can show some originality. Ann Cornwalleys’s embroidery of Adam and Eve, with apples in Adam’s hand as well as Eve’s, is a case in point.

Molekamp elaborates on the modes of women’s Bible reading in chapter two. These modes are somewhat arbitrary. Some, like annotating and commonplacing (also covered by Narveson), are methods of general intellectual organization or perhaps interpretation. “Providential reading and writing,” on the other hand, seems less a method than a theological preoccupation, while “reading and writing proverbs” seems more a genre than a mode. The final category, “contemplative reading,” seems so broad it could easily combine with any of the others.

The taxonomy may be haphazard, but the examples are often fascinating, and together they do make the case for active reading and the kinds of writing it stimulates. The commonplace books of the remarkable Lady Brilliana Harley and Lucy Hutchinson, not surprisingly, show a powerfully creative engagement with biblical texts and “spiritual, theological, and moral topics” (57). Mildmay demonstrates a similar “hermeneutic agency” in her multi-modal Bible reading, sometimes reading “across the Scriptures,” following a daily plan, and sometimes reading intra-textually, following marginal cross-references (59). This intra-textual reading often reflects a typological understanding of the Bible, in which, for instance, Old Testament verses are not simply analogous to others in the New Testament but actually prophesy or prefigure them. Molekamp notes the original typological interpretations of Anne Wheathill, for example, as when Wheathill links Adam and “the Jew who is robbed, beaten, and left by the side of the road in the Parable of the Good Samaritan” (63). This is probably not original, however, but derived from Origen and Augustine, or perhaps from Calvin’s refutation of Origen’s interpretation in his commentary on Luke.[9] If she had read Calvin, however, Wheathill was original at least in her disagreement with him. Female Bible readers also sometimes read themselves into the Bible, inserting themselves into the narrative by means of the first-person “I.” Such practices demonstrate the “fluidity of biblical personae and the self in the act of reading,” but it is not clear that they are, as Molekamp argues, typological, since that term usually applies strictly to reading the Old Testament as a prefiguring of the New.

Women of all sorts read their Bibles providentially, but this is simply a mark of a near universal belief, as described by Alexandra Walsham (cited by Molekamp, 67). English Christians believed that events happened according to a divine plan, and that the key to this plan was in Revelation and other biblical books, however difficult these might be to interpret correctly. Agnes Beaumont and Lady Anne Clifford are both interesting in the intensity of their apocalyptic interpretation of their own life and times, though they are hardly alone in this. The same can be said of the women who compile or compose proverbs in a biblical style. It is true, as Molekamp points out, that Wisdom in Proverbs 8 is represented as a woman (though so is Folly or Wickedness), but it is not clear that proverbs, biblical or non-biblical, were gendered female. It may be, though, that a certain kind of proverb was associated with motherly advice, of the sort passed on to children at home, as exemplified by Dorothy Leigh’s The Mother’s Blessing. Anne Sadleir’s proverb-like meditations do not seem notably female in this, though her application of Scripture can clearly be formidable, as when she adapts the Abraham and Isaac story to repentance from sin:

bind thy corruptions of the altar of the law, take the knife of gods word in thy hand and the throat of thy sins that they may become a sweete smelling sacrifice in gods nostrils and thou an enviable prise in his eies.                                                                                                                                             (78)

It seems unlikely that any angel will intervene to stop this sacrifice.

Women’s networks have been the focus of much recent study and, building on this scholarship (she cites Margaret Ezell, for instance, Julie Crawford, Patricia Phillippy, and Micheline White), Molekamp devotes chapter three to female religious communities. Mothers read to daughters, daughters to mothers, mistresses to servants, and women of all sorts to friends and family. Elizabeth Isham recalls her mother, while ill, being read to by her grandmother, and this puts her in mind, tellingly, “of the loue betwext Naomi and Ruth, which they would sumtimes mention” (87). Molekamp also draws attention to the role of women in educating their children, as reflected in the number of published catechisms aimed at mothers, most remarkably An Instruction for Christians, translated from French by Dorcas Martin, a “Puritan bookseller and mother of six,” subsequently included in Thomas Bentley’s massive anthology, Monument of Matrones (1582).

Molekamp presents a rich picture of the literary and devotional work of women’s domestic communities, occasionally advancing surprising and intriguing arguments, for instance, that these communities are not the preserve of Puritan women but cross over to Catholic families as well. The chapter includes stories of some remarkable women, including the prodigiously talented Cooke sisters, Anne Lock, and Elizabeth Richardson. The focus often strays from strictly biblical reading and writing, however, and a skeptical reader might ask whether communal reading and writing was an especially female mode or one shared by, and even with, men. For instance, Arnold Hunt’s The Art of Hearing, missing from Molekamp’s bibliography, suggests that on Sundays and at other times, whole households would regularly gather to discuss sermons and the biblical passages included in them. Early modern women were not interesting simply because of the important men they knew, of course, but surely Mildred Cooke Cecil, Anne Cooke Bacon, Elizabeth Cooke Russell also read and shared ideas with their husbands, William Cecil, Sir Nicholas Bacon, Sir Henry Killigrew, and John, Lord Russell (and Lady Russell’s first husband, Sir Thomas Hoby), among other men? Anne Lock was also an intimate friend of John Knox.

Molekamp’s chapter on affective religious reading and writing also strays toward an essentialism she elsewhere wants to reject. Are women really more affective than men, and don’t both men and women share similar emotional meditative and devotional practices? Molekamp acknowledges that “both sexes could, and did, engage in affective piety” (one thinks of Crashaw, an extreme but not exclusive example), but she then states that “representations abound of the inspired female devotee, in secret and mysterious union with Christ” (150). Representations of similarly inspired men are not hard to find either. Still, Molekamp introduces many fascinating women who participated in a devotional culture that encouraged strong emotion. These range from private figures like Elizabeth Hastings and Mary Rich, Countess of Warwick, reading and writing in their closets, to the Scot Elizabeth Melville, whose biblically saturated poem Ane Godlie Dreame was republished thirteen times between 1604 and 1737, and the anonymous author of Eliza’s Babes, a remarkable and underappreciated collection of devotional poems. Many of these, like the poems of George Herbert, Francis Quarles, and Henry Vaughan, are dense with biblical allusions. Molekamp quotes from “To My Sister, S.S.,” which weaves together language from the Song of Solomon, Psalm 23, and the vision of the New Jerusalem in Revelation.

Molekamp’s treatment of passion and penitence at the end of this chapter is somewhat unsteady. First, the Countess of Pembroke did not write a paraphrase of the Penitential Psalms, though the Sidney Psalter does include all seven of them (139). More importantly, penitence did not retain “sacramental status” in the English Church after the Reformation. Certainly, it was not a sacrament; whether it was considered sacramental (“rite, ceremony, or observance analogous to a sacrament, but not reckoned among the sacraments,” OED B1) is perhaps a more complicated question. Penitence, for Protestants, is more an attitude or mode or behavior than a rite or ceremony, however, and while the Communion Service in the Book of Common Prayer includes a General Confession, this is very far from the confession required in the Catholic sacrament of Penance. Scholars like Debra Shuger and James Simpson disagree on the relationship between Catholic penance and Protestant penitence, but the problem is at any rate more complex and contested than Molekamp admits (141).[10] It may also be largely irrelevant to the penitential writing Molekamp examines, including paraphrases of the Penitential Psalms, especially Anne Lock’s sonnet sequence version of Psalm 51, and Melville’s devotional adaptations of Petrarchan love poems.

Molekamp’s final chapters focus on several better-known women writers. Chapter five addresses the Sidney Psalms and the Countess of Pembroke as a Bible reader. Again there are some factual errors: Philip Sidney died in 1586, not 1583, and the publication dates of works by Jean Taffin and Jean Calvin are reversed (55); the numbering does not differ in the Geneva and the King James Bibles, or at least in only the single verse of Psalm 13:5 (159); and the 1556 Genevan Psalter referenced on 172 is misdated as 1563 on the following page. Moreover, the argument of this chapter is not wholly persuasive. That the Countess of Pembroke drew extensively on the Geneva Bible, for instance, is hardly surprising, since this was the most popular and easily available translation during her lifetime. Whether Pembroke’s Sidney and Dudley relatives provided funding for the Geneva Bible seems less relevant than that it was the best available (and most accessible) English translation from original languages, and it had the most helpful critical apparatus. It was used by everyone across the English theological and ecclesiastical spectrum.

Molekamp wants to claim a particularly reformist agenda, rooted in Geneva, for Pembroke’s Psalms, but this leads to some peculiar lines of argument. For instance, sixteenth-century English Reformers advocated a plain style of writing (Molekamp cites William Perkins, though the plain style originates many decades earlier), but since the Sidney Psalms are the most ornate ever written in English, Molekamp has to argue that Pembroke’s “more extreme instances of rhetorical innovation are nonetheless planted within a conceptual framework built with care upon the Geneva Bible” (163). Of all the Sidney Psalms, Molekamp chooses to focus on those least likely to support her argument: Pembroke’s quantitative versions of some of the gradual Psalms. Molekamp further confuses matters by suggesting that Pembroke turned to quantitative meters because this “intellectual, rather than sensual music” avoided the complex music condemned by strict Calvinists. The Sidney Psalter was never intended for use in worship, however, and the kind of “music” attributed to English quantitative verse is not music at all, or indeed even physically perceptible, but a purely graphic scheme of vowels and consonants.[11] Molekamp returns to the Geneva Bible, arguing that Pembroke incorporated details from this Bible “to hold a liturgical background in place,” but the Geneva Bible is the least liturgical of all the English Bibles and was rarely, if ever, used in public worship.[12] Molekamp turns next to the Geneva Bible paratexts. It would indeed be fascinating to see the influence of these features on Pembroke’s translations, but Molekamp relies on some tenuous readings of quite commonplace language. The chapter adds little to the scholarship on the Sidney Psalms, and, despite its focus on the Countess of Pembroke, seems to have little to do with the domestic culture of reading and writing women addressed in the rest of the book.

Molekamp’s final chapter is very much about women reading and writing. It gathers together an odd trio. Aemelia Lanyer is a remarkable poet, author of the biblical poem Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum (1611), and the other secular poems included in the volume. She was baptized in the Church of England, though her family, the Bassanos, were Jewish émigrés from Venice. Constance Aston Fowler came from a Catholic family and compiled a manuscript of poems about Christ’s Passion, one of which seems to be by a woman who may be Gertrude Thimelby, Aston Fowler’s sister. Elizabeth Delaval, a Royalist noblewoman and Jacobite agent, wrote a series of meditations on the Passion during the Restoration. Though she served for a time as maid of the privy chamber to Catherine of Braganza, Delaval was herself Anglican, though obviously of a high church persuasion.

These are certainly three intriguing women, but they make for a strange conclusion to Molekamp’s study. One of them, Aston Fowler, seems to have been a “writer” in only the weakest sense, primarily compiling poems by others. Whoever wrote the poem “On the Passion of our Lord,” it merits study and may demonstrate, as Molekamp suggests, some “cross-confessional modes of affective female piety,” though to posit a “distinctive female religious subjectivity” is once again to risk essentializing, and that on the basis of only two poets, this one and Lanyer (203). This Passion poem seems not especially anchored in actual Bible reading, however, nor do Delaval’s Meditations, whatever interesting aesthetic, affective, or theological features they demonstrate.

One shortcoming in both Narveson’s and Molekamp’s studies is that neither ultimately makes a compelling case for their focus on women. Both assert the problems with essentializing arguments that claim for women reading and writing modes and practices that differed substantially from those of their male contemporaries. Narveson goes further in acknowledging that the subjects of her study, as well as being women, were members of particular religious communities or social classes, and that these factors (and many others) may have been at least as influential in shaping their identities and behaviors. But then why still focus on women in contradistinction to men? Both women and men read Bibles, often together, and all the modes of writing discussed by Narveson and Molekamp were practiced by men as well as women. (Men were not, of course, mothers, but men did participate even in so apparently female a genre of motherly advice, compiling and publishing books for those mothers not interested in or able to write their own.)

The bibliography on early modern reading is already substantial, but there has been far too little attention paid to reading the Bible, which is the book more people read than any other, essential not only for religious devotions but for almost every other area of human activity. It might well be enough, in the end, that both Narveson and Molekamp have shed welcome light on some fascinating readers and writers of the Bible who have hitherto remained in the shadows.          

Hannibal Hamlin
The Ohio State University

Comments

• Comment deleted 1 year, 11 months ago
• Clinton Welch 1 year ago

  Thanks for sharing this interesting forum thread about women's engagement with the Bible through reading and writing in early modern England. As an essay writer, I find it particularly inspiring to learn about the ways in which women were able to develop their own literary voices at a time when access to education and publishing was often limited for them. The works of Narveson and Molekamp offer a valuable perspective on the history of women's writing, and they demonstrate how the act of reading and engaging with religious texts such as the Bible can serve as a powerful catalyst for creative expression. As someone who believes in the transformative power of writing, I am always fascinated by the ways in which people throughout history have used the written word to connect with their own beliefs and to communicate with others. Here https://essays.edubirdie.com/write-my-essay you can find some of my works. Moreover, the fact that some of these works have been insufficiently acknowledged as fully authored works is a reminder of the ongoing need to recognize and celebrate the contributions of women writers. I believe that discussions such as this one can help to raise awareness about the importance of women's voices in shaping our literary and religious traditions, and can inspire a new generation of writers to engage with these texts in their own creative work.

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• Louisville Hood Cleaning 4 months, 2 weeks ago

  Narveson herself acknowledges the limitations of clerical control, noting that “the tools lay people came to employ in their own writing were forged in the interaction between clerical prescription and individual experience

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• Fort Collins Mobile Semi Truck Repair 4 months, 2 weeks ago

  Narveson’s book is organized in two sections, the first addressing the way in which reading practices led readers to become writers, and the second turning to matters of gender.

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