Triple-Deckers and Eagle Lecterns: Church Furniture for the Book in Late Medieval and Early Modern England

The spirit of the Lord God is upon me: because the Lord hath anointed me to preach good tidings unto the meek.’ When Jesus stood up to read these verses from Isaiah at the start of his public ministry, as he began to reveal himself as the Word in the synagogue of Nazareth, the book ‘he had opened’ at the reading desk was one of the Torah scrolls, brought out for him from the Ark of the Law, the imposing reserve which is, from age to age, the most sacred part of any synagogue. Holy Scripture has always been a public book, a treasure for each synagogue, and for the commonwealth of the Christian community sacred as text and object. But the mystical sanctity of the Bible, and holy books in general, has raised a perennial problem. Precious books have usually been hedged round by restrictions to protect them from the profane, even at the cost of obscuring the public approach which is a necessary part of assembled worship. In this episode in the life of Christ, when the listeners grew too ‘filled with wrath’ for him to continue, we meet the deep and recurrent tension between the community’s need to hear the Word, and the conflicting desire to shield its essential sanctity, which accompanied the book from Judaism in transition to the Christian Church.