>
> Lori Anne Ferrell. The Bible and the People. New Haven Yale
> University Press, 2009. 288 pp. $32.50 (cloth), ISBN
> 978-0-300-11424-9.
>
> Reviewed by Arthur Williamson (California State University-Sacramento)
> Published on H-Albion (February, 2009)
> Commissioned by Brian S. Weiser
>
> How Do I Know? The Bible Tells Me So
>
> Lori Anne Ferrell presents a briskly written discussion of the
> Bible's shifting role and significance within major Anglophone
> cultures. Her trajectory is a long one. Beginning with the early
> Norman Gundulf Bible, she proceeds to the thirteenth-century portable
> Paris Bibles of the traveling mendicant orders, to the Wycliffe
> scriptures and the Lollards. Naturally enough, the Reformation
> figures prominently and, most centrally, the King James Version, her
> study continuing through the world of the Enlightenment, the
> Victorians, and into the present moment. The book closes with a
> discussion of the eighth-century Lindisfarne Gospels and modern
> reproductions of the manuscript, thus joining the medieval world with
> the present and reflecting with Walter Benjamin on "authenticity,"
> reproduction, and text--the central theme of the volume.
>
> The book, therefore, at once offers a history of a book as well as a
> history of what a "book" meant, an undertaking inherently involving
> scribal and print culture studies. Here surely lies a daunting
> challenge for both author and reader. Or does it? Ferrell wears her
> learning lightly. _The Bible and the People_ visibly seeks to be
> accessible, for Ferrell writes in a chatty, self-regarding style that
> many will doubtless find engaging. The formidable complexities lie
> beneath the surface awaiting for those who wish to pursue them.
>
> The thesis is straightforward: throughout its history in the West,
> the Bible has rarely appeared ever in its original languages, has
> been continuously "translated" in every sense of the word, and still
> the text has remained remarkably, even amazingly, stable over the
> centuries. Thus, the Bible has, at times, found itself transformed
> from a working book to a venerated item. It has been universalized
> through vernacular translations. It has been sliced, diced, and
> reassembled by figures as different as the pious Nicholas Ferrar and
> the Deist Thomas Jefferson. It has been gender selected and pared
> down, most notably by Elizabeth Cady Stanton. It has been inflated
> and overwhelmed with Victorian illustrations. It has been made
> available in parcels through subscription. It has appeared in
> disposable magazine form. This "impossible book"--unique in the
> Western experience--can never be gotten right, and yet has always
> contrived to be right. It has spoken in a near infinity of voices
> and yet maintained a common coherence. That, for Ferrell, is its
> mystery, its wonder.
>
> Along the way, Ferrell makes a number of interesting observations.
> As she rightly points out, the renowned King James Authorized Version
> (1611) needs to be seen as a reactionary document that sought to undo
> the radicalism of the Geneva Bible (1560). The latter's commentary,
> with its historical vision of human experience--so well suited to
> that revolutionary decade--was stripped away. The word "church"
> replaced the far less hierarchical and less clerical "congregation."
> Further, "congregation" might also carry classical political
> meanings. Scotland's revolutionary leaders in 1559-60 called
> themselves the "Lords of the Congregation," unimaginable as the Lords
> of the "Church." The King James Bible arose during a period of
> deepening conservatism in Britain and throughout Europe. Small
> wonder the Geneva Bible persisted in radical Scotland well after
> 1611. And yet the language of the King James Bible was harnessed to
> revolutionary causes right into the 1960s and beyond. Its cadences
> eventually reached so deeply into the Anglophone mind that more
> accurate renderings of the original could only seem "inauthentic,"
> not "really" the Bible. The well-known line from Isaiah 1:18
> (reputedly Lyndon Johnson's favorite) ran, "Come now, let us reason
> together." The New English Bible (1961) gave the passage, apparently
> closer to the sense of the Hebrew, as "Come now, let us argue it
> out." The accurate and the authentic palpably diverge.
>
> Ferrell's approach to the Bible and its multiple Anglophone
> incarnations is decidedly conservative, one characterized by awe,
> splendor, wonder, and reverence rather than critical distance.
> Higher criticism of the late nineteenth century barely surfaces,
> while the anticlericalism and anti-scripturalism of Anatole France,
> Robert Ingersoll, or even the Quakers run completely counter to the
> spirit of the book. Theirs is a vanished world, however much of the
> people, and out of tune with late twentieth-century sensibility.
> Ferrell notes the Tridentine prohibition of any vernacular version of
> scripture or any Latin version other than the Jerome's Vulgate. But
> she declines to consider the fraught confessional conflict about
> understanding the Bible, where skepticism emerged as the great weapon
> of the Counter-Reformation.[1] It is hard to imagine a more central
> dispute about spirituality and its connection to the sacred text.
>
> Perhaps surprising, neo-Catholic revisionism also informs _The Bible
> and the People_ in important ways. We encounter sixteenth-century
> "Reformations" rather than a single coherent Reformation. In
> contrast, the medieval world emerges as an integrated, almost organic
> structure from which heretical departure occurred only inadvertently.
> The Reformation itself was backward looking. Protestants were
> simply wrong to claim that the Middle Ages did not know the Bible;
> medieval people learned Bible stories (and messages) through plays,
> images, and clerical reading aloud.
>
> Ferrell does comment at various points that medieval literacy was
> "discouragingly low" (e.g., p. 38). But, we might well ask,
> discouraging to whom? It did not discourage the Middle Ages because
> salvation did not require scripture but a sacramental system--derived
> from scripture, to be sure, but much more as well. That, of course,
> was the reformers' point. The Reformation proposed instead a
> historical vision of salvation, founded on scriptural prophecy, that
> was altogether unprecedented and that confronted the atemporal
> symbols of the medieval period. The sacred drama, the unfolding of
> the apocalypse--the story of the rise of Antichrist--underwrote the
> Reformation and Protestant piety, working a far-reaching
> temporalization of European culture.[2] Ferrell mentions Antichrist
> and the apocalypse but neither concept informs her argument (pp. 82,
> 153). Her preoccupation with transcendent mystery, no less than her
> ambivalence about the Reformation, does not bespeak confessional
> choices, but instead suggests deep reservations about modernity. The
> book is very much a part of our increasingly sacralized post-1960s
> age.
>
> None of this can take away from the book's achievement. Whatever its
> assumptions or implications, _The Bible and the People_ succeeds in
> drawing together a vast range of material within a comfortable
> compass; in combining extraordinary learning with an almost folksy
> accessibility; and in introducing highly abstruse concepts with
> grace, wit, and often considerable charm. Such a book inherently
> required high levels of selectivity, and the selections have largely
> proven to be wise. To conclude in the style favored by the author:
> way to go Lori Anne!
>
> Notes
>
> [1]. Richard Popkin has provided the foundational discussion of the
> early modern debate about the authority and interpretation of
> scripture, in T_he History of Skepticism: From Savonarola to Bayle_
> (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).
>
> [2]. There now exists an enormous literature on this subject. For a
> recent survey, see A. H. Williamson, _Apocalypse Then: Prophecy and
> the Making of the Modern World_ (Westport: Greenwood, 2008).
>
> Citation: Arthur Williamson. Review of Ferrell, Lori Anne, _The Bible
> and the People_. H-Albion, H-Net Reviews. February, 2009.
> URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=23532
>
> This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
> Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States
> License.
19 Billion for digitizing medical records.
Maybe this is a sign that our country will become more like Western
Europe (culturally, socially developed) than China (stratification of
society, enormous military).
D'ALEMBERT: That's what it seems to
me. I have only one remaining difficulty.
DIDEROT: You're wrong. There are a
lot more difficulties.
D'ALEMBERT: But one main one. It
strikes me that we can think only about one thing at a time and in order to form
a simple proposition (since I'm not talking about those enormous chains of
reasoning which include thousands of ideas in their development) we'd say that
it's necessary to have at least two things present, the object which seems to
sit there under the eye of our understanding which at the same time is busy with
the quality which it will affirm or deny about that object.
DIDEROT: I share that concern. And
it's led me sometimes to compare our organic fibres with sensitive vibrating
strings. A sensitive vibrating string oscillates and resonates a long time after
one has plucked it. It's this oscillation, this sort of inevitable resonance,
which holds the present object, while our understanding is busy with the quality
which is appropriate to it. But vibrating strings have yet another property—it's
one that makes other strings quiver. And thus the first idea recalls a second,
and these two a third, then all three a fourth, and so it goes, without our
being able to set a limit to the ideas which are aroused and linked in a
philosopher who meditates or who listens to himself in silence and darkness.
This instrument makes astonishing leaps, and one recalled idea sometimes is
going to set in motion a harmonic at an incomprehensible interval. If the
phenomenon is perceptible between resonating strings, inert and separated, how
could it not take place between vital points linked together, between continuous
and sensitive fibres?
