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Overview
Early Americans claimed that they looked to "the Bible alone" for authority, but the Bible was never, ever alone. Bible Culture and Authority in the Early United States is a wide-ranging exploration of the place of the Christian Bible in America in the decades after the Revolution. Attending to both theoretical concerns about the nature of scriptures and to the precise historical circumstances of a formative period in American history, Seth Perry argues that the Bible was not a "source" of authority in early America, as is often said, but rather a site of authority: a cultural space for editors, commentators, publishers, preachers, and readers to cultivate authoritative relationships.
While paying careful attention to early national bibles as material objects, Perry shows that "the Bible" is both a text and a set of relationships sustained by a universe of cultural practices and assumptions. Moreover, he demonstrates that Bible culture underwent rapid and fundamental changes in the early nineteenth century as a result of developments in technology, politics, and religious life. At the heart of the book are typical Bible readers, otherwise unknown today, and better-known figures such as Zilpha Elaw, Joseph Smith, Denmark Vesey, and Ellen White, a group that includes men and women, enslaved and free, Baptists, Catholics, Episcopalians, Methodists, Mormons, Presbyterians, and Quakers. What they shared were practices of biblical citation in writing, speech, and the performance of their daily lives. While such citation contributed to the Bible's authority, it also meant that the meaning of the Bible constantly evolved as Americans applied it to new circumstances and identities.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781400889402 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 06/05/2018 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 216 |
| File size: | 6 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Creating the American Bible Reader, 1777–1816
[I]t is a mere bobtail thing, and its fort lies in telling "how many chapters, verses, words, syllables, and letters there are in the Bible; which is the shortest, which the longest, and which the middle chapter ... all such goodly discoveries as are fit to make Old Women & Children wonder." However, as many of our Readers are of that sort, insert it by all means.
— MASON LOCKE WEEMS TO MATHEW CAREY, SEPTEMBER 28, 1801
THE "MERE BOBTAIL THING" to which Mason Weems was referring was this chart:
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Mathew Carey, the Philadelphia printer for whom Weems peddled books in the Southeast, included "The Old and New Testament Dissected" at the foot of a page near the end of his first King James Bible, which reached consumers in 1802. Weems was a bit of a card — he was being characteristically flip when he urged Carey to use it. He was also serious: he had seen the chart in other contemporary bibles and did not want Carey's to be found wanting in any respect. "To have it said that Carey's bible contains more Curious things than were ever seen in any other bible, wou'd be a great Matter," Weems argued. He based the value of "curious things" on the nature of the readers he imagined for Carey's bibles — "old women and children." Putting aside, for the moment, the question of the appeal of "bobtail things" for any particular class of reader, Weems's blunt description of the intended or imagined readership of Carey's bibles brings into relief a crucial aspect of early national print-bible culture: that it was self-consciously oriented toward a sort of reader who was defined as somehow lesser than those variously responsible for that print. At the turn of the nineteenth century, the interests involved in the burgeoning American bible market, embedded in a broader market of bible-oriented religious print, imagined a bible reader who was in many ways the inverse of the dominant religious authority of the eighteenth century: rather than educated, upper-class, and male, some combination of marginally literate, lower-class, and often female. Different aspects of this need or deficiency were emphasized in different contexts, and this imagined reader's relationship to actual readers was uneven, but her presence in early national print-bible culture was fundamental to the era's processes of scripturalization. Print-bible culture's address to this imagined reader created space for actual readers to imagine the self-sufficient authority of their own bible reading. At the same time, because this address to readers was accomplished largely through the textual mediations of intellectual and theological elites, it encouraged novel forms of religious authority to develop along traditional lines.
The inversion of the imagined agent of religious authority (male, patrician, and educated) in the subject constituted by print-bible culture (female, common, and in need of teaching) is a key to understanding the development of bible-based authority in the early national period. The era saw a proliferation of cheap, spare bible-society bibles oriented toward those supposed to be in need. Meanwhile, more substantial "family" bibles also became familiar, uniformly addressing themselves to "common" readers, often containing illustrations oriented toward women. These bibles constituted a print-bible culture that imagined a reader both subject to the bearers of religious authority and potentially empowered by those authorities' address.
In two telling respects, though, the distinction between bible-authority and bible-user was not complete. The early national bible reader was generally imagined to be a Protestant, although a robust Catholic print-bible culture was present from the late eighteenth century. Less ambiguous is the question of race. Despite all manner of missionizing rhetoric, both the face of religious authority and that of the imagined reader of print-bible culture were emphatically white. While a large amount of pedagogical print was directed at Native and African Americans throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, bibles were not. This, I will argue, had to do with the nation-building assumptions embedded in this print-bible culture: the American bible reader was not just a Christian (real or potential), but also a citizen. This classification naturally excluded indigenous peoples and the enslaved but included white women, unable to participate fully in political culture yet rhetorically held responsible for the promulgation of American nationhood.
This chapter will trace the development of early national print-bible culture from the built-in pedagogical assumptions of scripturalization itself to its evolution in the specific history of eighteenth-century British bible culture. At their most straightforward, the pedagogical goals embedded in colonial-era print-bible culture concerned readers' understanding of the biblical text. Bibles of this era also reinscribed the Bible's privileged status — they participated actively, that is, in the processes of scripturalization. Beyond that, though, they conjured an image of the British bible-reading subject and of the relationship between the Bible and Britishness. Early national American bibles would inherit these pedagogical goals, with the significant difference that nationalist interests would necessarily be turned toward creating American bibles and readers.
In early national America, bibles were constitutive of religious subjectivities not just in the mechanics of the text's rhetorical use, but at the material level of their format and composition. Just as tropes and symbols of the biblical text made identities recognizable and performable, American bibles rhetorically constituted approaches to and regard for the Bible itself. The visceral metaphor of Weems's chart, for example — advertising the Bible dissected and inviting the reader to handle it as a palpable, limited object with countable words and a precise midpoint — did not just say something about that bible's imagined readers: it told its actual readers something about the Bible. The co-constitution of the American Bible and its readers will be the key to understanding bible-based authority in the nineteenth century.
Scripture and Pedagogy Written scripture demands authority. The Word of God, or divine truth, or transcendent wisdom may be imagined as self-authenticating and eternally changeless, but writing it down is an act of mediation that must be justified, explained, and legitimated. In the New Testament, before Luke begins his account of the gospel, he announces his qualification for writing it down: "[P]erfect understanding of all things from the very first" (1:3).
This act of mediation, moreover, is fundamentally pedagogical. Written scriptures teach. (Luke, again, says that he writes "[t]hat thou mightest know the certainty of those things, wherein thou hast been instructed" [1:4]). Various mediating voices are built into any given example of a written scripture — author, transcriber, translator, indexer, publisher — but each alike assumes the asymmetrical apportioning of relevant knowledge that defines a pedagogical relationship. Each voice found in a scripture is, at base, a voice that teaches.
This fact has been particularly salient in the history of Western Christianity. Early modern Catholicism found authority in its own body of thought and tradition as the institution founded and headed by Christ to carry out his work on earth. Reformers, on the other hand, insisted that authority for doctrine and practice rested only with scripture, that anything that was not so grounded had to be left off, and that it was the responsibility of each Christian to pursue the understanding of such distinctions through the reading of scripture. The doctrine of sola scriptura placed an extreme burden on the proper presentation and reception of the Bible at the same time that it undermined the Catholic Church as the institution presumed to be responsible for ensuring scripture's purity and correct interpretation.
While Reformation leaders insisted that the Bible be accessible to all Christians — and promoted vernacularization to this end — their connection of this access with teaching is often overlooked in favor of the suggestion that they encouraged lay freedom in the reading of scripture. Early on, Martin Luther himself moderated his rhetoric about the laity's bible reading in the face of what he considered dangerous tendencies toward misinterpretation. He was less sanguine than typically suggested with respect to lay bible reading, and even among the clergy he suggested a tiered system of authority based on humanist pedagogy. "There is a vast difference therefore between a simple preacher of the faith and a person who expounds Scripture," Luther wrote. "A simple preacher (it is true) has so many clear passages and texts available through translation that he can know and teach Christ, lead a holy life, and preach to others. But when it comes to interpreting scripture, and working with it on your own, and disputing with those who cite it incorrectly, he is unequal to the task; that cannot be done without languages."
Preaching, for all the Protestant rhetoric about the minister acting as a mere vessel for the Word, is fundamentally pedagogical. The earliest English bibles, appearing in the fifteenth century, were created specifically to facilitate preaching to a vernacular audience, and it was this attempt to teach, rather than the fact of translation itself, that caught the Catholic Church's ire. Reformers, citing both the Bible's difficulty and the radical beliefs which could be generated by what they saw as incorrect readings, were essentially as uncomfortable with laypeople reading without supervision as the Catholic Church. Vernacular bibles right away became cluttered with guidance for readers — notes and commentary in the margins; personal addresses from commentators and translators and crowned heads; charts and lists at the front, at the back, between the testaments. The first edition of Luther's own 1534 German translation has cross-references and marginal explanations, a preface, and introductions to the testaments. Scriptura was never, ever, sola.
The Protestant bible reader, then, has always been a reader who must be taught, and not only by the Spirit. The pedagogical impulse at the core of Protestant biblicism, materially embedded in a pedagogically-focused print-bible culture, identifies a reader in need. The characteristics by which this need has been defined, however, have varied according to the contexts of bible production.
The need that defined the imagined reader of the first English bibles was, as Luther indicated in his distinctions among preachers, philogical: scripture required translation. In the mid-sixteenth century, Henry VIII — who broke with Rome but remained religiously conservative — opposed the vernacular bible until persuaded that a sanctioned, regulated English Bible for which he could claim responsibility was less likely to spread heresy (and more likely to enhance his authority as head of the English Church) than the illicit translations already circulating. The title page of the Great Bible of 1539 features a looming, enthroned Henry literally handing out bibles, and a very small God peeping out above him, voicing His support. Though apparently wanting in humanistic education, the recipients of Henry's largesse are depicted as affluent and male. From these readers, vernacular scripture might spread farther, as it first issued from Henry. A royal decree of 1542 held that "[i]t shalbe lawfull to everye noble man and gentleman being a householder to reade or cause to be red by any of his famylie or servants in his house orchard or gardeyne, and to his owne famylie, any texte of the Byble or New Testament, so the same be doone quietlie and without disturbaunce of good order." Absent a nobleman's instruction on his own lands, women were prohibited from reading the Bible to others, and the lower classes were forbidden to read it at all. "[N]o woomen nor artificers prentises journeymen serving men of the degrees of yeomen or undre, husbandemen nor laborers shall reade within this Realme or in any other the Kings Domynions, the Byble or Newe Testament in Englishe, to himself or any other pryvatelie or openlie, upon paine of oone monethes imprysonement for every tyme so offending."
Education and class, with varying degrees of emphasis and differing assumptions, would continue to be the primary ways in which the imagined readers of English bibles were identified. The Geneva Bible was the work of Protestants who had fled England in the 1550s at the threat of persecution under Henry's Catholic daughter, Mary. The Geneva translators justified their work on the basis of their learning, positioning the reader according to education rather than class or status, strictly speaking. In an introductory note, the translators professed concern for "simple readers," and contended that their translation mediated not just the original languages of the Bible but the vast scholarship on interpretation and translation: "[W]e have also endeavored both by the diligent reading of the best commentaries, and also by the conference with the godly and learned brethren, to gather brief annotations upon all the hard places." The Geneva is thus explicitly pedagogical in its content and tone. Each book is headed with a summary of its "argument"; the text is supplemented by tables including chronologies of both the Old and New Testaments and an extensive index of biblical events and proper names arranged alphabetically. The presence of woodblock illustrations is explained by the translators' determination that "certeyne places in the bookes of Moses, of the Kings and Exekiel semed so darke that by no description thei colde be made easie to the simple reader." These readers, they hope, will benefit from "figures and notes for the ful declaration thereof." The Geneva's most famous feature, its marginal commentary, amounts to three hundred thousand words, by Harry Stout's count, "a self-contained theological library" that guided "common readers" through the text.
Religious partisanship was also a defining characteristic of the Geneva's imagined reader; that reader was a Protestant, and a Calvinist one. The definitive English bible translation for Catholics, the Douay-Rheims, appeared in the same era as the Geneva, its Latin imprimatur and exhaustive polemical notes constituting a Catholic reader. Partisanship likewise inflected intra-Protestant controversies over bible production. When the subject of a new state-authorized translation to replace the Geneva was raised in 1604, James I voiced his dislike of the Geneva on the grounds that he found "some notes very partial, untrue, seditious, and favoring too much of dangerous and traitorous conceits." Specifically, he thought the Geneva commentary promoted disobedience to kings, singling out a note at Exodus 1:19 which allowed that the midwives who refused to carry out Pharaoh's order to kill Israel's male babies were acting in a "lawful" manner. In commissioning a new translation, James directed that it bear no marginal commentary at all.
Rhetorically, the 1611 King James Version attended to the needs of "common readers": "[W]ithout translation into the vulgar tongue, the unlearned are but like children at Jacob's well (which was deepe) without a bucket or something to drawe with." In keeping with its official nature, though, the first editions promoted a sense of what David Norton calls "ecclesiastical splendour" through their size, quality of paper, and use of black letter type. The size suggested that these bibles were for the preaching of clergy, not the study of lay people. Its extrabiblical material was primarily of a liturgical nature: a liturgical calendar, an "Almanacke" chart giving lunar information relating to the timing of Easter, and thirty-five pages of meticulously illustrated biblical genealogies. Its margins had no commentary but did bear cross-references, potentially useful to lay readers but at this early date most commonly associated with ministers' needs in preparing sermons.
(Continues…)
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments, xi,
A Note on Capitalization, xv,
INTRODUCTION Authority, Identity, and the Bible in the Early Republic, 1,
PART I. PRINT-BIBLE CULTURE IN THE EARLY UNITED STATES, 17,
CHAPTER 1 Creating the American Bible Reader, 1777–1816, 19,
CHAPTER 2 Taking a Text: Reading and Referencing the Bible in the Early Nineteenth Century, 40,
PART II. BEYOND BIBLES, 63,
CHAPTER 3 Joshua, When the Walls Fell: Biblical Roles in Changing Times, 65,
CHAPTER 4 "Write These Things in a Book": Scripturalization and Visionary Authority, 86,
CHAPTER 5 The Many Bibles of Joseph Smith: Scripturalization in Early National America, 110,
CONCLUSION Abandoned Quarries, 129,
Notes, 137,
Bibliography, 167,
Index, 185,
What People are Saying About This
"With its focus on how the Bible was able to serve as a pivotal agent of cultural influence in the early national period, Perry’s groundbreaking study provides much-needed theoretical and methodological templates for all those interested in studying the power of sacred texts in given historical moments."—Paul Gutjahr, Indiana University"This engaging work shows how the Bible came to stand as an overarching authority in early nineteenth-century America, even as a multitude of competing interpretations and applications of scripture counted as biblical. Perry’s analysis of scripturalization in everyday life adds immensely to our understanding of how evangelical religion became a pillar of American culture."—Amanda Porterfield, author of Corporate Spirit: Religion and the Rise of the Modern Corporation"Seth Perry makes a singularly creative contribution to what others have shown about the nearly universal appeal to scripture in earlier American history. His book excels by showing that the Protestant ideal of a single authoritative Bible became a fluid reality of contingent bibles whenever women (as well as men), Catholics (as well as Protestants), blacks (as well as whites), and Mormons (as well as the conventionally Christian) quoted, printed, performed, marketed, preached, imitated, or otherwise put the sacred text to use."—Mark A. Noll, author of In the Beginning Was the Word: The Bible in American Public Life, 1492-1783"This is a smart, sophisticated, and needed book—well-conceived, strongly researched, and clearly argued and written. It brings together careful and deep archival research in the history of the bible in early America with a sharper and more self-conscious theoretical framework—about reading, interpretation, and authority—than any previous scholarship on the topic. Its fundamental idea—that biblical authority is a process produced through ‘the material, the rhetorical, and the performative'—is an important contribution to American religious history."—Matthew S. Hedstrom, University of Virginia"Perry's essential argument is elegant, compelling, and important. Early national Americans, he argues, used the Bible as an instrument of self-fashioning and for the construction of intersubjective relationships during the unstable period that followed the American Revolution. I will think about the early republic's processes of scripturalization differently and more profitably because of Perry's book. He is one of the most innovative and insightful young scholars working in the early national period today."—David Holland, Harvard Divinity School