For though reading seems so simple – a mere matter of knowing the alphabet – it is indeed so difficult that it is doubtful whether anybody knows anything about it.
Virginia Woolf, How Should One Read a Book1
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Recent years have seen an increasing popularity of the practice of ‘Bible journaling’.2 Bible journaling is the act of embellishing a Bible with illustrations, decorations, quotations, and objects, such as beads or dried flowers. ‘Journaling Bibles’ or ‘writing Bibles’, such as the Schrijfbijbel published by the Dutch-Flemish Bible Society (Nederlands-Vlaams Bijbelgenootschap), facilitate the practice materially and paratextually: they are printed on heavier paper, contain additional lined pages, and have wide margins that invite the reader to make extensive notes or illustrations. In Bible journaling handbooks and on social media, the practice is encouraged as a way to creatively internalise Scripture.3 As readers engage with the textual, material, and paratextual possibilities of the book by crowding lined pages with extensive notes, summarising particular verses in the wide margins, adding tabs to highlight the beginnings of Bible books, or connecting the biblical text to contemporary themes in their illustrations, they are appropriating and personalising the Word of God. The modern practice of Bible journaling echoes the main conclusion of this study: in early modern Bible reading, the textual, conceptual, material, and personal became woven together in a colourful, dynamic fabric of interactivity and involvement.
The aim of this volume has been to reconstruct the multitude of interactions between early modern Dutch Bibles printed and published by Jacob van Liesvelt and Henrick Peetersen van Middelburch, and their readers. In order to grasp the reciprocity and dynamicity between both actors, two perspectives have been placed alongside each other: the impact of the book and its paratextual programme on the envisioned reader and the impact of the historic reader on the book. By centralising the paratext and material evidence in early modern Bibles, this study has explored these books as more than mere transmitters of the translated Bible text. Rather, these early modern Bibles functioned as spaces of debate and mutual impact, as knowledge aggregators, as personalised objects of faith and identity, and as inherently material things. In these dynamic spaces, readers were simultaneously directed by, demanding of, and independent from the paratextual framework offered to them.
The paratexts in Liesvelt’s and Peetersen van Middelburch’s Bibles connect to various needs of the printer-publishers as well as of the reading public: a need for effective marketing strategies for the book, a need for Bibles that suited certain confessional convictions, a need for interpretational devices that satisfied growing interests in humanistic and scholarly approaches to the biblical text, and a need for navigational, paratextual aids that allowed diverse non-linear uses of the book. Through the inclusion of paratext, Liesvelt and Peetersen van Middelburch created a ‘horizon of expectations’ for the reader entering the book. This horizon would have shaped their sense of genre and reading approaches, and positioned the Bible in a broader textual, scholarly, and religious context. Moreover, the paratextual programmes in the Bible editions ensured that these books were not simply storage places of Scripture, but spaces of knowledge and interpretation, inherently connected to worlds beyond the biblical text – from scholarly fields of geology and history to the movements of celestial bodies and the tides. Simultaneously, these paratexts allowed readers to gain a certain level of independence in composing their discontinuous movements through the book, whilst being guided and facilitated by paratexts.
The printer-publishers generated paratextual programmes that ensured extensive, detailed, and highly structured groundworks for reading. They provided the users of the book with restrictions and possibilities, spaces of guidance and negotiation, incentives to either linger on a certain element or to efficiently move to another. Many paratextual elements interconnect and mobilise each other like rotating gearwheels. Paratexts such as calendars, liturgical reading schedules, running titles, and finding letters cling to each other to create a streamlined system of reading and navigation. The functionality of these complex paratextual systems, however, ultimately relied upon the reader. Only in their hands and through their activities could the paratextual system be enabled and enable them in their reading. Readers’ capabilities to navigate through the book, to combine various elements, to select and to understand the references given, to deploy the necessary techniques, and – most essentially – their willingness to interact with the paratextual apparatus, are the incentives that create motion in the fabric of possibilities.
In general, readers prove to have cherished trustworthy and effective paratexts to structure their reading, which motivated them to correct or adapt the printed navigational aids when they did not meet their expectations or preferences. Moreover, the historic reader-users of Liesvelt’s and Peetersen van Middelburch’s Bibles approached their books in ways that coincide with the incentives and reading profiles presented in the paratextual programmes. Their responses and adaptations confirm their interest in using the book as a space of scholarly and theological knowledge, as well as an object for liturgical preparation and reflection. Printed paratextual elements such as cross-references, summaries, glosses, and manicules were also regularly supplemented with handwritten equivalents. Furthermore, the differences between the paratextual programmes of the New Testaments and those of the complete Bible editions are reflected in the material evidence: whereas the surviving copies of the first type host many colourings, rubrications, and liturgical annotations, traces such as theological annotations and inclusions of geographical elements are found almost exclusively in the folio-sized complete Bible editions. The parallels between paratexts and reader traces confirm that the paratextual programme was made with great awareness of the preferences and reading habits of contemporary readers. Moreover, it suggests that readers might have felt stimulated to actively embrace the practices of marking and interpretation as presented to them in the printed paratext.
Nevertheless, despite the wide range of reading possibilities facilitated by the paratextual programme in Liesvelt’s and Peetersen van Middelburch’s Bibles, the printed material ultimately provided the reader with a fixed combination of opportunities, a static entity of text and paratext that was implied to function independently from the flux of time and space. When these Bibles entered the realm of readers, however, this fixity diffused. Early modern readers and users approached their books as malleable spaces that allowed room for them to wander and create. They used their books not only as carriers of text, but also as inherently material things that lent themselves to various ways of book use beyond reading. This also means that a narrow view upon Bible reading as a predominantly silent, scholarly practice is not only ahistorical but might also categorically underestimate the possible involvement of women, children, and less literate people in the interaction with early modern Bibles.
Furthermore, these readers appropriated a level of lectoral agency that greatly surpassed the activity of the reader as invited and facilitated by the paratextual elements in their books. In their interaction and involvement with the book, readers became part of bookmaking processes, transforming the contents and transmission of the book and making every book in every moment and every space different from its previous and future forms and meanings; different from itself.
Whereas the almanacs that Liesvelt and Peetersen van Middelburch included in their (New Testament) editions usually cover a mere twenty years from the printing date onwards, the ownership inscriptions, annotations, and other traces of reading and use in the surviving copies confirm that these books were regularly used for decades and even centuries beyond this foreseen period, as already illustrated by the book ownership of Bertheltje Jansdochter presented in the opening sentences of the introduction to this study. Through readers’ additions and adaptations, contemporary debates and transitions were brought into the book. The inclusion of verse numbering in Dutch Bibles from 1560 onwards, for instance, prompted the handwritten addition of this tool of navigation and reference in older Bibles. The growing popularity and production of biblical geography resulted in late sixteenth-century maps being bound in. Newly developing confessional sensitivities concerning the translations of certain Bible were transported to the text of Liesvelt’s and Peetersen van Middelburch’s Bibles through pen, paper, scissors, and ink. Layers of traces, constructions, and deconstructions thus accumulated within the physical book, shaping an object that was in constant flux.
Paradoxically, however, the fact that these Bibles survived through centuries of use also marks how these books, as material objects, could serve as paper anchor points through the elusiveness of time. These non-mutually exclusive characteristics of changeability and stability form the very premise of the numerous genealogical annotations found in the Bibles under scrutiny in this study: the additions issued by one reader in the safekeeping surroundings of the material book allowed them to connect with and impact future generations.
Although the analysis of paratext could provide insight into certain aspects of book use and reading – the possibilities of liturgical and studious reading, the availability of contextualising tools, the Bible as knowledge aggregator, the possibility of discontinuous movements through the book – it could not disclose the fundamental malleability and temporality of the book as object. At the same time, the focus on readers’ traces only accounts for the types of interactions between the reader and the book that left detectable traces, interactions in which adaptations were made, a pen was used, or dirty fingertips stained the page. The possibility of ‘traceless’ reading practices – of carefully leafing through the book, navigating its pages, interpreting the meaning of biblical verses – remains largely elusive in the study of material evidence. Hence, bringing together both perspectives in an attempt to illustrate the extensive and dynamic range of interactions, uses, and reading practices has proven particularly useful.
This study contributes in the first place to the field of research that investigates the transmission of Scripture in the early modern Low Countries. In the historiography on early modern Dutch Bibles, the issue of readership has generally remained underexposed. Early modern Bibles have primarily been studied as the makings of printer-publishers with specific confessional and commercial concerns, rather than as cultural-historical objects that were continuously constructed and reconstructed by their social, religious, personal, and material surroundings. With this book, I hope to have shown that understanding the early printed Bible as a static, purely textual thing bears little relation to reality. As these books left the print shops and entered the tumultuous world outside, they became fluid spaces in which the universal and the personal, fixity and changeability, guidance and creativity intertwined. Situated in the very centre of these dynamics was a diverse group of readers, who used, shaped, owned, collected, bought, borrowed, cherished, or tarnished their Bibles throughout the centuries.
Secondly, I have attempted to enhance book- and cultural-historical insights into lectoral agency, the connections between paratext and actual reading behaviour, and the adaptability of the printed book in the early modern period. The approach developed here may not solely serve as an analytic device for the study of early modern Bibles and their readers, but could similarly be applied to books (or even other material objects) in different languages, different time periods, and different genres. A pressing issue, one that unfortunately remained beyond the scope of the current study, is to what extent and in which ways early modern Bible reading – and Bible readers’ responses to paratextual devices – differ from readers’ interactions with other religious books. For instance, Van der Laan’s recent study of Middle Dutch devotional texts around the turn of the fifteenth century reveals that these generally contain very few annotations and ownership inscriptions, but were often ‘traced’ through the addition of red to woodcuts.4 Early printed Dutch psalm books contain fewer annotations and markings than the Bibles studied here, but are more often combined with supplementary manuscript or print materials, surviving in (hybrid) Sammelbände.5 A comprehensive study of paratext and user traces throughout multiple religious genres – such as early printed prayer books, books of hours, psalm books, song books, devotional texts, religious treatises, and, of course, Bibles – would provide further insight into the functionality and use of various religious texts in the early modern home, convent, or congregation.
In his speech ‘The American Scholar’, delivered on 31 August 1837, essayist and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson stated that ‘one must be an inventor to read well. … There is then creative reading as well as creative writing.’6 Jacob van Liesvelt’s and Henrick Peetersen van Middelburch’s Bibles indeed functioned as facilitators and subjects of a certain creative reading. Creativity should not be understood in this sense as being synonymous with originality or genius, but rather as the act of creating; of making space, object, and meaning; of appropriating agency in a dialogue between reader and book; of engaging with the possibility to make each instance of reading different from the previous and the next. Readers of these Bibles were actors that would put paratextual structures in motion. They engaged with complex systems of reference and knowledge, responded to confessional developments in the early modern Low Countries, and embraced the malleability and temporality of the book. As the paratextual analysis and the investigation of material evidence have shown, the interactions between reader and book covered multiple levels: textual, paratextual, visual, material, and conceptual. On each of these, the relationship between reader and book was a reciprocal one, shaped as much by the directions that were established by the printer-publisher, as they were by the transformability that opened up when the book entered into the world of readers.
Virigina Woolf, ‘How Should One Read a Book?’, The Yale Review, 89:1 (1926) (edition: 2001), pp. 41–52, p. 43.
On the practice of Bible journaling, its purposes, and its effects, see: Amanda Dillon, ‘Be Your Own Scribe: Bible Journalling and the New Illuminators of the Densely-Printed Page’, in Bradford A. Anderson (ed.), From Scrolls to Scrolling: Sacred Texts, Materiality, and Dynamic Media Cultures (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2021), pp. 153–178.
See: Dillon, ‘Be Your Own Scribe’, p. 153.
See the appendix in Van der Laan’s dissertation: Joanka van der Laan, Enacting Devotion: Performative Religious Reading in the Low Countries (ca. 1470–1550) (Groningen: University of Groningen, 2020), pp. 283–331.
See: Renske A. Hoff, ‘To shape one’s own reading practice: Lectoral agency in printed Devotio moderna psalters (1480–1500)’, Jaarboek voor Nederlandse Boekgeschiedenis, 30 (2023), pp. 4–30; p. 15.
Ronald A. Bosco and Joel Myerson (eds.), Ralph Waldo Emerson: The Major Prose (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2015), p. 97.