Abstracts
Abstract
This article addresses two questions: “When did the King James Bible gain a foothold of popularity among the English people?” and “How did the Geneva Bible lose its popularity to the King James Bible?” By reviewing the post-1611 printing of these two versions of the Bible and examining the texts of the Paul’s Cross sermons and the parliamentary sermons between 1612 and 1643, I find that the King James Bible was already more popular than the Geneva Bible by 1620, and that the rising trend of the popularity of the King James Bible had become irreversible by 1630. By 1640, the battle of the two Bibles was long over. I also refute the assumption that the political authorities’ suppression of the Geneva Bible caused its defeat. Rather, I argue that the decrease in consumer demand for exegetical notes led to the demise of the Geneva Bible.
Résumé
Cet article répond à deux questions : quand la Bible du roi Jacques a-t-elle gagné en popularité parmi les Anglais et comment la Bible de Genève a-t-elle perdu sa popularité au profit de la Bible du roi Jacques ? En passant en revue les éditions de ces deux versions de la Bible postérieures à 1611 et en examinant les textes de la prédication de la Croix de saint Paul et les sermons parlementaires de 1612 à 1643, nous constatons que la Bible du roi Jacques était déjà plus en vogue que la Bible de Genève en 1620, et que la montée en popularité de la Bible du roi Jacques était devenue irréversible en 1630. En 1640, la bataille des deux Bibles était terminée depuis longtemps. Nous réfutons également l’hypothèse selon laquelle l’interdiction de la Bible de Genève par les autorités politiques aurait entraîné sa chute. Nous soutenons plutôt que la diminution de la demande des consommateurs pour les notes exégétiques a conduit à la disparition de la Bible de Genève.
Download the article in PDF to read it.
Download
Appendices
Bibliography
- Annotations upon All the Books of the Old and New Testament. London, 1645. Wing D2062.
- Barlow, William. The Sum and Substance of the Conference […] at Hampton Court. London, 1604. STC 14565.
- Bradford, William. History of Plymouth Plantation. Boston, 1856.
- Calendar of State Papers Domestic: Charles I, 1629–31. Edited by John Bruce. London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1860.
- Calendar of State Papers Domestic: Charles I, 1637–8. Edited by John Bruce. London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1869.
- Calendar of State Papers Domestic: Charles II, 1673–5. Edited by F. H. Blackburne Daniell. London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1904.
- Church of England. Injunctions for the Clergy. [London], 1538. STC 10087.
- Cotton, Clement. A Complete Concordance to the Bible of the Last Translation. London, 1630. STC 5844.
- A Decree of Star-Chamber concerning Printing. London, 1637. STC 7757.
- Fuller, Thomas. The Church-History of Britain. London, 1655. Wing F2416.
- Laud, William. The History of the Troubles and Trial. London, 1695. Wing L586.
- Prynne, William. Canterbury’s Doom. London, 1646. Wing P3917.
- Reports of Cases in the Courts of Star Chamber and High Commission. Edited by Samuel Rawson Gardiner. London: Camden Society, 1886.
- Spark, Michael. Scintilla, or a Light Broken into Dark Warehouses. London, 1641, Wing S4818B.
- Spotswood, John. The History of the Church of Scotland. London, 1655. Wing S5022.
- Berry, Lloyd E. Introduction to The Geneva Bible: A Facsimile of the 1560 Edition, 1–28. Edited by Lloyd E. Berry. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969.
- Betteridge, Maurice S. “The Bitter Notes: The Geneva Bible and Its Annotations.” The Sixteenth Century Journal 14, no. 1 (Spring 1983): 41–62. https://doi.org/10.2307/2540166.
- Butterworth, Charles C. The Literary Lineage of the King James Bible, 1340–1611. New York: Octagon Books, 1971.
- Campbell, Gordon. Bible: The Story of the King James Version, 1611–2011. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.
- Chao, Hsing-hao. “ ‘To Make a Good One Better’: The Most Immediate Predecessor of the King James Bible.” Lingual, Literary, and Cultural Translation 13 (2016): 175–203.
- Collinson, Patrick. The Birthpangs of Protestant England: Religious and Cultural Change in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. London: Macmillan, 1988. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-19584-8.
- Daniell, David. The Bible in English: Its History and Influence. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1dszxtb.
- Daniell, David. Introduction to Tyndale’s Old Testament: Being the Pentateuch of 1530, Joshua to 2 Chronicles of 1537, and Jonah, ix–xxix. Edited by David Daniell. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992. https://doi.org/10.1163/156851593X00133.
- Danner, Dan G. “The Later English Calvinists and the Geneva Bible.” In Later Calvinism: International Perspectives, edited by W. Fred Graham, 489–504. Kirksville, MO: Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers, 1994.
- Davidson, Randall T. “The Authorisation of the English Bible.” Macmillan’s Magazine 44 (1881): 436–44.
- De Jong, Chris. “John Forbes (c. 1568–1634), Scottish Minister and Exile in the Netherlands.” Dutch Review of Christian History 69, no. 1 (1989): 17–53. https://www.jstor.org/stable/24009193.
- Dinsmore, Charles Allen. The English Bible as Literature. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1931.
- Feingold, Mordechai. “Birth and Early Reception of a Masterpiece: Some Loose Ends and Common Misconceptions.” In Labourers in the Vineyard of the Lord: Scholarship and the Making of the King James Version of the Bible, edited by Mordechai Feingold, 1–29. Leiden: Brill, 2018. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004359055.
- Fenn, William Wallace. “John Robinson’s Farewell Address.” The Harvard Theological Review 13, no. 3 (July 1920): 236–51. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1507747.
- Fincham, Kenneth. “The King James Bible: Crown, Church and People.” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 71, no. 1 (January 2020): 77–97. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022046918001318.
- Green, Ian. Print and Protestantism in Early Modern England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198208600.001.0001.
- Greenslade, S. L. “English Versions of the Bible, 1525–1611.” In The West from the Reformation to the Present Day, edited by S. L. Greenslade, 141–74. Vol. 3 of The Cambridge History of the Bible. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963.
- Gribben, Crawford. “Deconstructing the Geneva Bible: The Search for a Puritan Poetic.” Literature and Theology 14, no. 1 (March 2000): 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1093/litthe/14.1.1.
- Hamlin, Hannibal, and Norman W. Jones. Introduction to The King James Bible after 400 Years: Literary, Linguistic, and Cultural Influences, 1–24. Edited by Hannibal Hamlin and Norman W. Jones. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511779800.
- Hammond, Gerald. The Making of the English Bible. Manchester: Carcanet, 1982.
- Herbert, A. S. Historical Catalogue of the Printed Editions of the English Bible, 1525–1961. London: British and Foreign Bible Society, 1968. Revised and expanded from the edition of Thomas H. Darlow and Horace F. Moule, 1903.
- Hill, Christopher. The English Bible and the Seventeenth-Century Revolution. London: Penguin, 1994.
- Johnson, A. F. “J. F. Stam, Amsterdam, and English Bibles.” The Library s5-IX, no. 3 (September 1954): 185–93. https://doi.org/10.1093/library/s5-IX.3. 185.
- King, John N., and Aaron T. Pratt. “The Materiality of English Printed Bibles from the Tyndale New Testament to the King James Bible.” In The King James Bible after 400 Years: Literary, Linguistic, and Cultural Influences, edited by Hannibal Hamlin and Norman W. Jones, 61–99. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511779800.006.
- Kirby, Torrance. “The Public Sermon: Paul’s Cross and the Culture of Persuasion in England, 1534–1570.” Renaissance and Reformation 31, no. 1 (Winter 2008): 3–29. https://doi.org/10.33137/rr.v31i1.9544.
- Knight, Alison. “The ‘Very, Very Words’: (Mis)quoting Scripture in Lancelot Andrewes’s and John Donne’s Sermons on Job 19:23–27.” Studies in Philology 111, no. 3 (Summer 2014): 442–69. https://doi.org/10.1353/sip.2014.0020.
- Lampros, Dean George. “A New Set of Spectacles: The Assembly’s Annotations, 1645–1657.” Renaissance and Reformation 19, no. 4 (1995): 33–46. https://doi.org/10.33137/rr.v31i4.11705.
- MacLure, Millar. Register of Sermons Preached at Paul’s Cross, 1534–1642. Revised and augmented by Jackson Campbell Boswell and Peter Pauls. Ottawa: Dovehouse Editions, 1989.
- McCullough, Peter E. Sermons at Court: Politics and Religion in Elizabethan and Jacobean Preaching. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
- McGrath, Alister. In the Beginning: The Story of the King James Bible and How It Changed a Nation, a Language, and a Culture. New York: Doubleday, 2001.
- Mencken, H. L. Treatise on the Gods. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1930.
- Molekamp, Femke. “The Geneva and the King James Bibles: Legacies of Reading Practices.” Bunyan Studies 15 (2011): 11–25.
- Morrissey, Mary. Politics and the Paul’s Cross Sermons, 1558–1642. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199571765.001.0001.
- Nicolson, Adam. God’s Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible. New York: HarperCollins, 2003.
- Norton, David. A History of the English Bible as Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511612251.
- Phelps, William Lyon. Human Nature in the Bible. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1922.
- Pollard, Alfred W., ed. Records of the English Bible: The Documents Relating to the Translation and Publication of the Bible in English, 1525–1611. London: Oxford University Press, 1911.
- Quiller-Couch, Arthur. On the Art of Reading. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1920.
- Rees, Graham. “The King’s Printers’ Bible Monopoly in the Reign of James I.” In Negotiating the Jacobean Printed Books, edited by Pete Langman, 15–28. Surrey: Ashgate, 2011. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315248226.
- Ryken, Leland. The Word of God in English: Criteria for Excellence in Bible Translation. Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2002.
- Shaheen, Naseeb. Biblical References in Shakespeare’s Plays. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2011.
- Shea, John Gilmary. “The Bible in American History.” The American Catholic Quarterly Review 3 (1878): 131–50.
- Simms, Paris Marion. The Bible in America: Versions That Have Played Their Part in the Making of the Republic. New York: Wilson-Erickson, 1936.
- Sprunger, Keith L. Dutch Puritanism: A History of English and Scottish Churches of the Netherlands in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2016. First published 1982 by Brill (Leiden).
- Stout, Harry S. “Word and Order in Colonial New England.” In The Bible in America: Essays in Cultural History, edited by Nathan O. Hatch and Mark A. Noll, 19–38. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982.
- Thomas, Alan G. Great Books and Book Collectors. London: Spring Books, 1988.
- Tyacke, Nicholas. Anti-Calvinists: The Rise of English Arminianism, c. 1590–1640. New York: Clarendon, 1987.
- Wall, John N. “Virtual Paul’s Cross: The Experience of Public Preaching after the Reformation.” In Paul’s Cross and the Culture of Persuasion in England, 1520–1640, edited by Torrance Kirby and P. G. Stanwood, 61–92. Leiden: Brill, 2014. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004262812.
- Westcott, Brooke Foss. A General View of the History of the English Bible. New York: Macmillan, 1916.
- Wilson, Brian C. “KJV in the USA: The Impact of the King James Bible in America.” In The Critique of Religion and Religion’s Critique: On Dialectical Religiology, edited by Dustin J. Byrd, 261–78. Leiden: Brill, 2000. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004419049.
- Wilson, John F. Pulpit in Parliament: Puritanism during the English Civil Wars, 1640–1648. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400878710.