Paratexts of the English Bible, 1525-1611

English bibles over the decades between the Tyndale’s New Testament of 1525 and the 1611 King James include indices, calendars, woodcuts, maps, chronologies, prefaces, prologues, prayers, epistles, philological glosses, doctrinal notes, inset historical essays, single-leaf summaries of scripture, a dialogue on predestination, a twelfth-century genealogy of Christ, a ninth-century Jewish chronicle. Their first editions, often magnificent folios, were curated by leading churchmen, who used these paratexts to speak into existence the dominant forms of post-Reformation English Christianity. Subsequent editions—smaller, more affordable, and far more numerous—were left in the hands of printers, who decided which versions to print, which paratexts to drop, add, move, or modify. The most lavish of Elizabethan bibles gets stripped almost to the bare translation; a fiercely Calvinist bible switches doctrinal sides; and a peculiar little New Testament from 1552 remains in print, with its original annotations, well into the Jacobean era. The picture of the English Reformation disclosed by these biblical paratexts differs in rather striking ways from the current one. Conformity, “things indifferent,” and the reformation of manners, for example, go virtually unmentioned. While no one archive shows “the very age and body of the time,” the cultural centrality of the bible in sixteenth-century England means that the version of things implicit in its paratexts really does challenge, or at least complicate, accounts derived principally from the controversial literature of the period.