Sequential Bible Reading in Early Modern England

In an article entitled 'Books and Scrolls: Navigating the Bible', published in 2002, Peter Stallybrass argues diat what he calls 'discontinuous reading' has been central to Christianity ever since it adopted the codex in preference to the scroll. He points to the ways in which Renaissance Bibles were designed to facilitate easy reference backwards and forwards within the text by being divided into chapters and furnished with finding aids such as tables of contents, running heads, consistent pagination and indexes, arguing that 'navigational aids' such as these encouraged discontinuous reading practices. Stallybrass indeed regards the habit of sequential reading, by which he means reading forward through a book in a continuous fashion, as a 'radically reactionary' practice. He describes it as 'scroll reading', a practice which has only come to seem natural to us because of the influence of the novel, where 'the teleological drive' to keep turning the pages discourages dipping about or turning back in the text.1Stallybrass is, in part, responding to an earlier article by Patrick Collinson, in which Collinson had argued that one of the ways in which Protestantism had broken with Catholicism was the new stress it placed on reading the Bible in sequential fashion, from beginning to end. Collinson quotes a famous passage from John Foxe, describing some weavers in the Suffolk town of Hadleigh in the reign of Henry VIII, who had become 'exceeding well learned in the holy scriptures, as well women as men: so that a man might have found among them many that had often read the whole Bible through, and that could have said a great part of Saint Paul's epistles by heart'.2 As Collinson says, this passage tells us much about Protestant Bible reading practices in the sixteenth century, including the remarkable fact that many ordinary men and women had 'often read the whole Bible through'.In arguing against Collinson' s view that Protestantism was characterised by a new respect for 'the coherence of the text', Stallybrass begins with a striking piece of evidence that would seem to contradict his own argument. He quotes from the opening of the autobiography of Lady Grace Mildmay, begun in 1617, where she says that she has found by experience that the best way to read the Bible is to begin reading every day and continue 'until we have gone through the whole book of God from the first of Genesis unto the last of the Revelation and then begin again and so over and over without weariness'.3 Stallybrass comments that 'This would appear at first sight to be a recommendation to read the bible as we would read a novel', the only difference being the idea of immediately starting reading all over again. The thrust of his article, however, is to argue that the 'navigational aids' included in Renaissance Bibles 'showed one how to read the bible other than as a continuous narrative', and in his view the presence of such aids would have made it difficult for Lady Mildmay to read in the sequential way she seems to describe here. He takes as his central example a copy of the 1580 quarto edition of the Geneva Bible now in the Folger Shakespeare Library. This is a compilation volume, including not only the text of the Bible itself, but the Book of Common Prayer, and a set of two concordances which, Stallybrass says, 'suggest nonlinear readings of the text, in which one can detach a word from its narrative context and/or reattach a word to other seemingly disconnected passages in which the same word occurs'. His conclusion is that this particular Bible 'suggests a wide range of ways to read the scriptures, none of them continuous', and he returns to Lady Mildmay to show that we would be mistaken in thinking on the basis of the earlier quotation that she was 'extolling a reading of the bible as continuous narrative'.4 In fact, as becomes evident later on in her autobiography, in referring to reading right through the Bible she meant reading it according to the sequence of readings as set out in the Book of Common Prayer:every day [. …