Bible Readers and Lay Writers in Early Modern England
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A01=Kate Narveson
Author_Kate Narveson
Bentley's Monument
Bentley’s Monument
Category=DSB
Category=QRA
Category=QRAX
Category=QRM
Collage Prayers
devotional
devotional manuscripts
Devotional Page
Discursive Horizon
early modern literacy
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
gendered authorship
Godly Books
Godly Reading
grace
Grace Mildmay
Humanist Curriculum
Humanist Page
Lady Grace Mildmay
Lay Men
lay religious practice
manuscript culture in seventeenth-century England
Matthew 13
mildmay
Modern Women's Manuscript
Modern Women's Manuscript Writing
Modern Women’s Manuscript
Modern Women’s Manuscript Writing
northamptonshire
office
phrase
Prayer Books
Private Prayer Books
reading
records
religious self-fashioning
Retha Warnicke
Scriptural Devotion
scriptural interpretation
Scriptural Meditations
scripture
Scripture Collation
Scripture Literacy
Scripture Phrase
Scripture Reading
Traditional Prayer Book
Women's Manuscripts
Women’s Manuscripts
writing
Product details
- ISBN 9781409441670
- Weight: 589g
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 19 Sep 2012
- Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
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Bible Readers and Lay Writers in Early Modern England studies how immersion in the Bible among layfolk gave rise to a non-professional writing culture, one of the first instances of ordinary people taking up the pen as part of their daily lives. Kate Narveson examines the development of the culture, looking at the close connection between reading and writing practices, the influence of gender, and the habit of applying Scripture to personal experience. She explores too the tensions that arose between lay and clergy as layfolk embraced not just the chance to read Scripture but the opportunity to create a written record of their ideas and experiences, acquiring a new control over their spiritual self-definition and a new mode of gaining status in domestic and communal circles. Based on a study of print and manuscript sources from 1580 to 1660, this book begins by analyzing how lay people were taught to read Scripture both through explicit clerical instruction in techniques such as note-taking and collation, and through indirect means such as exposure to sermons, and then how they adapted those techniques to create their own devotional writing. The first part of the book concludes with case studies of three ordinary lay people, Anne Venn, Nehemiah Wallington, and Richard Willis. The second half of the study turns to the question of how gender registers in this lay scripturalist writing, offering extended attention to the little-studied meditations of Grace, Lady Mildmay. Narveson concludes by arguing that by mid-century, despite clerical anxiety, writing was central to lay engagement with Scripture and had moved the center of religious experience beyond the church walls.
Kate Narveson is Associate Professor of English, Luther College, USA
