The Bible and the People

By Lori Anne Ferrell

Book Overview

Since its first translation from the Latin, the Bible has become more and more accessible--and more and more influential

In the eleventh century, the Bible was available only in expensive and rare hand-copied manuscripts. Today, millions of people from all walks of life seek guidance, inspiration, entertainment, and answers from their own editions of the Bible. This illustrated book tells the story of what happened to the ancient set of writings we call the Bible during those thousand years. Anchoring the story in material evidence--hundreds of different translations and versions of the Bible--Lori Anne Ferrell discusses how the Bible has been endlessly retailored to meet the changing needs of religion, politics, and the reading public while retaining its special status as a sacred text.

Focusing on the English-speaking world, The Bible and the People charts the extraordinary voyage of the Bible from manuscript Bibles to the Gutenberg volumes, Bibles commissioned by kings and queens, the Eliot Indian Bible, salesmen's door-to-door Bibles, children's Bibles, Gideon Bibles, teen magazine Bibles, and more. Ferrell discusses the Bible's profound impact on readers over the centuries, and, in turn, the mark those readers made upon it. Enjoyable and informative, this book takes a fresh look at the fascinating and little-recognized connections among Christian, political, and book history.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0300114249
• ISBN13: 9780300114249
• Release Date: December 2008
• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 1.26 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.5" x 9.4"

Customer Reviews

divine book as human artefact

In 2004 Lori Anne Ferrell was the guest curator for a Huntington Library exhibit called "The Bible and the People." This book is a spin-off of her research, which was also the subject of a 2007 PBS documentary. Ferrell has written what she calls a "cultural biography" of the "restless, peripatetic text that is the Christian Bible." She treats the Bible as a material artifact, and limits herself primarily to English Bibles of the last thousand years. Her book includes 55 black and white illustrations of various Bibles that she examines. Ferrell begins with the two-volume Gundulf Bible, an illuminated manuscript from the 11th century, and eight chapters later concludes with teen-magazine format Bibles of the 20th-century like Revolve and Refuel. In between she moves the reader from single, hand-copied Bibles to mass produced "Paris Bibles" (1200-1500) that were both standardized and portable, and to lay Bibles, "Psalters," and Victorian family Bibles intended for private devotion. Chapter divisions and verse numbers entered in the sixteenth century, as did the intense and divisive "politics of translation" with the rise of the Protestant movement. When she moves to America, we learn that our first Bibles were in Spanish, German, and Algonquian (p. 119). In her earlier chapters Ferrell argues that widespread illiteracy did not necessarily mean Biblical ignorance, while in later chapters she observes that Bibles newly translated into the vernacular of common people did not guarantee understanding. The many iterations of this singular book are fascinating. From from being modern conventions, many centuries ago all sorts of study aids were included in Bibles--pronunciation guides, foldout maps, footnotes, charts, graphs, glosses, illustrations, marginalia, and annotations. The Kitto Bible of 1836, for example, comes in 66 volumes and includes over 30,000 prints and illustrations. Economic market forces of production and distribution, cultural changes, political upheaval, advances in textual criticism, artistic devotion, religious partisanships of all sorts, liturgical innovations, all of these and more, Ferrell shows, are part of the Bible's very human biography.