To an excellent paper last night at the Institute for Historical Research by Lori Ann Ferrell (Claremont Graduate University, California), on “Early Modern How-To’ Books and the Early Modern English Bible”.

I’d misread the title and was expecting a spot of carpentry, a touch of animal husbandry and similar, but the “how to” actually referred to books on how to read the Bible, from Erasmus’s Paraphrases (1548), to Edmund Bunny’s The whole Summe of Christian Religion, giuen forth by two seuerall Methodes or Formes: the one higher, for the better learned, the other applyed to the capacitie of the common multitude, and meete for all, etc. (1576) and Thomas Middleton’s 1609 text about the gates of heaven.

The big idea from the talk – which I thought belongs in that all too rare “simple but brilliant” class – is that the assumption has been made that when the Bible came in English the Christian faith was immediately illuminated, opened up, made accessible. But in fact the reverse happened, for the Bible is, as a text to read, in fact extremely inaccessible, difficult, contradictory, confusing. (I was reading recently of the bit about stoning your neighbours if you see them working on the Sabbath…)

The suggestion here was instead that there was a period of rampant confusion and consequent distress. Under the old Latinite regime, Bible stories had been developed for a popular audience through Mystery plays and similar, providing a coherent, commonsense, familiar narrative, while priests pottered away comfortably in their Latin (or faked at being comfortable in Latin), doing things they had done before, as their predecessors had done before them.

Suddenly dump an English-language Bible, Henry VIII’s Great Bible of 1539 into this minimally literate, minimally educated community with no experience at all of engaging in such a complex text, and watch the confusion and discomfort. (At a time, of course, when getting it right was seen as a matter of eternal life or torture.)

So the “how to” books began with Erasmus’s Paraphrases, which tells the story in a fairly coherent form, unlike the Bible itself. Soon after come books that explain really “how to study”. How to take notes, how to summarise, how to cross-reference — things that simply hadn’t been taught, or needed, before. So the tone of these books is much like a self-help book today, much jollying along, encouragement, praise for imagined progress.

About the same time arrived the Geneva Bible, claiming to be user-friendly, with numbered verses, a big advance for the anxious students. James I brought in his version in an attempt to combat Puritanism, but many people in the 17th century worked with the two versions side by side.

The other ah-ha moment I had in the seminar was the statement about the problem with a certain scholar’s work – that it all depends on the selection of books you start off with. The details of this particular debate went right over my head, but it left me thinking about the “women’s conduct books”, with which the study of early modern women started.

The belief that women actually behaved the way they suggested has long been debunked (just the fact that all these men kept yelling at women “be quiet” makes it pretty certain the women were doing nothing of the kind). But if you also think about the books/pamphlets/broadsheets that women would have been reading as a guide to conduct, most would not have been the ones for this explicit purpose. It was in romances, in news-sheets, in popular ballads that the vast majority of women have found whatever guides to conduct they found in print.

Note: this is my summary of what I got from the paper, rather than notes on what the speaker said. So don’t take it as Gospel … 😉

“…Sometimes as I work at a series of patent and close rolls. I have a queer sensation; the dead entries begin to be alive. It is rather like the experience of sitting down in one’s chair and finding that one has sat on the cat…’ [F. M. Powicke, Ways of Medieval Life and Thought

That’s a quote often cited by the Centre for Lives and Letters, and it is a lovely metaphor for the feeling you sometimes get in historical research that, just for a second, you’ve got really close to a flesh-and-blood real, individual person – someone just like you, but long dead.

I had one of those moments today, while reading a whole series of printed wills from what were villages around London, such as Walthamstow and Woodford. (In Elizabethan Wills of South-West Essex P.G. Emmison, Kylin Press, Waddesden, 1983)

The moment came from a will proved at West Ham in 1562, of Sybil Lye, a widow who left the bulk of her estate to “to my little maid Anne Hanyson, whom I have brought up and whom I make my executrix, to be delivered to her at 16 or marriage, if she marry advisedly”.

That raises an interesting question about deliberately appointing an under-age executor, but beyond that, I just love the phrase “my little maid”. We’ve got a presumably childless widow who has informally adopted a young girl, probably I’d guess an orphan, maybe even a foundling. Sybil knows that she’s dying (that’s usually when wills were written and given the dates she probably died within days of making this one), and is doing her best to provide for the future of her adoptee.

(Sybil’s also providing reasonably for her “keeper”, the woman who had nursed her, by leaving her clothes and bed-dressings.)
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