‘The Great Bowyer Bible’: Robert Bowyer and the Macklin Bible1

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-80 ◽  
Author(s):  
Naomi Billingsley
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
United Kingdom ◽  
Visual Culture ◽  
Original Function ◽  
Visual Material ◽  
Illustrated Books ◽  
The Bible ◽  
King James Bible ◽  
Visual Engagement ◽  
Personal Interests

This article examines an iconic example of grangerizing: the Macklin Bible extra-illustrated in 45 volumes by London artist and bookseller Robert Bowyer (1758‐1834) in the first quarter of the nineteenth century (Bolton Libraries and Museums, Bolton, United Kingdom). The principal focus is on the Bowyer Bible as an example of an extra-illustrator’s close engagement with its source publication. The author argues that Bowyer’s practice responds not only to the Bible or the King James Bible, in general, but also to the Macklin Bible, in particular. The article discusses how the Bowyer Bible engages with the Macklin Bible specifically and how it reflects a broader range of concerns in its visual engagement with the Bible. It demonstrates that Bowyer’s curation of biblical visual material evidences both his professional interests as a connoisseur of prints and his personal interests in the visual culture of the Bible that reflect his own piety as well as contemporaneous developments in the study of the scriptures. Other matters discussed in the article are the original function of this Bible, as well as the extent to which it reflects and is distinctive from contemporaneous extra-illustrated books.

Catholics and the King James Bible: Stories from England, Ireland and America

2013 ◽  
Vol 66 (3) ◽  
pp. 253-260 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ellie Gebarowski-Shafer
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
Cultural Significance ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Counter Reformation ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
Bible Stories ◽  
Biblical Scholar ◽  
King James Bible

AbstractThe King James Bible was widely celebrated in 2011 for its literary, religious and cultural significance over the past 400 years, yet its staunch critics are important to note as well. This article draws attention to Catholic critics of the King James Bible (KJB) during its first 300 years in print. By far the most systematic and long-lived Catholic attack on the KJB is found in the argument and afterlife of a curious counter-Reformation text, Thomas Ward's Errata of the Protestant Bible. This book is not completely unknown, yet many scholars have been puzzled over exactly what to make of it and all its successor editions in the nineteenth century – at least a dozen, often in connection with an edition of the Catholic Douai-Rheims Bible (DRB). Ward's Errata, first published in 1688, was based on a 1582 book by Catholic translator and biblical scholar Gregory Martin. The book and its accompanying argument, that all Protestant English Bibles were ‘heretical’ translations, then experienced a prosperous career in nineteenth-century Ireland, employed to battle the British and Foreign Bible Society's campaign to disseminate the Protestant King James Bible as widely as possible. On the American career of the Counter-Reformation text, the article discusses early editions in Philadelphia, when the school Bible question entered the American scene. In the mid-nineteenth century, led by Bishop John Purcell in Cincinnati, Bishop Francis Patrick Kenrick in Philadelphia and Bishop John Hughes in New York City, many Catholics began opposing the use of the KJB as a school textbook and demanding use of the Douai Rheims Bible instead. With reference to Ward's Errata, they argued that the KJB was a sectarian version, reflecting Protestant theology at the expense of Catholic teachings. These protests culminated in the then world-famous Bible-burning trial of Russian Redemptorist priest, Fr Vladimir Pecherin in Dublin, in late 1855. The Catholic criticisms of the KJB contained in Ward's Errata, which was reprinted for the last time in 1903, reminded the English-speaking public that this famous and influential Protestant version was not the most perfect of versions, and that it was not and never had been THE BIBLE for everyone.

Some Scripture Is Inspired by God: Late-Nineteenth-Century Protestants and the Demise of a Common Bible

1996 ◽  
Vol 65 (4) ◽  
pp. 609-623
Author(s):  
Peter J. Thuesen
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
New Testament ◽  
Front Page ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Chicago Tribune ◽  
Fourth Estate ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
King James Bible

“A New Testament which Needs neither a Glossary nor a Commentary.” So proclaimed the New York Evening Post on 21 May 1881, in a front-page story announcing the publication of the Revised Version of the Scriptures. The first major English translation since the King James Bible, the Revised New Testament was billed as the most accurate version ever, and the Post writer did not hesitate to hyperbolize. The printing of the Revision, the reporter declared, would probably “rank among the great events of the nineteenth century.” Meanwhile, as buyers snatched up the first Testaments in New York, a bigger sensation was building in Chicago. Dubbing the new translation nothing other than “the Bible as it is,” the Chicago Tribune printedthe entire Revised New Testament—from Matthew to Revelation—in its regular Sunday edition. Although the Tribune pilfered its scriptural text from the Bible's authorized publishers, the paper lambasted the rival Chicago Times (“the fraudulent newspaper concern on Wells Street”) for printing a “forged” Testament of its own. The unsavory competition in Chicago's fourth estate did not deter an eager public, who bought 107,000 copies of theTribune'sTestament alone. Demand for bound editions of the updated Bible was no less intense, with nationwide sales figures quickly surpassing one million.

The Light of the Word

2021 ◽  
pp. 20-72
Author(s):  
Sarah C. Schaefer
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Visual Culture ◽  
Public Life ◽  
Visual Language ◽  
Book Illustration ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Religious Imagery ◽  
The Status ◽  
Nineteenth Century France

Chapter 1 introduces the context in which Doré’s biblical imagery emerged by focusing on the status of the Bible in the visual culture of nineteenth-century France, with particular emphasis on book illustration. Relying on photographic documentation of Doré’s original drawings, this chapter begins the process of articulating Doré’s visual language and its relationship to preceding attempts at comprehensive Bible illustration projects. The distinction between “biblical” and “religious” imagery is significant in setting the stage for the Doré Bible, as it was initially produced for French Catholic audiences, a contingent for whom direct engagement with the Bible was historically discouraged or even forbidden. Yet, as this chapter demonstrates, biblical illustration in the first half of the nineteenth century reveals the continued centrality of the Bible to artistic and public life in the wake of religious and intellectual upheavals.

Biblical Literacy and the English King James Liberal Bible

2014 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 197-211
Author(s):  
James Crossley
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Heritage ◽  
Test Case ◽  
Biblical Literacy ◽  
The Public ◽  
Public Arena ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Liberal Capitalism ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Popular Nationalism ◽  
King James Bible

Using the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible as a test case, this article illustrates some of the important ways in which the Bible is understood and consumed and how it has continued to survive in an age of neoliberalism and postmodernity. It is clear that instant recognition of the Bible-as-artefact, multiple repackaging and pithy biblical phrases, combined with a popular nationalism, provide distinctive strands of this understanding and survival. It is also clear that the KJV is seen as a key part of a proud English cultural heritage and tied in with traditions of democracy and tolerance, despite having next to nothing to do with either. Anything potentially problematic for Western liberal discourse (e.g. calling outsiders “dogs,” smashing babies heads against rocks, Hades-fire for the rich, killing heretics, using the Bible to convert and colonize, etc.) is effectively removed, or even encouraged to be removed, from such discussions of the KJV and the Bible in the public arena. In other words, this is a decaffeinated Bible that has been colonized by, and has adapted to, Western liberal capitalism.

Sigurðr, Þórr and Ragnarök and their Christian Counterparts

2019 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
pp. 81-104
Author(s):  
Manu Braithwaite-Westoby
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Systematic Study ◽  
Old Norse ◽  
The Bible ◽  
In Christ ◽  
Stone Sculpture ◽  
Popular Subject ◽  
New Religion

Few scholars would deny that some Old Norse myths have Christian counterparts, a phenomenon first noticed by nineteenth-century archaeologists and antiquarians in their observations of Anglo-Scandinavian stone sculpture in northern England. It is strange, therefore, that despite this long tradition, there is no systematic study on the topic. While this ambition is unfortunately outside the scope of this article, it does seek to address a number of Old Norse myths/legends and place them in conjunction with their Christian counterparts. One of the most important myths for Anglo-Scandinavian craftsmen was probably Sigurðr, who has an obvious parallel in Christ. The apocalyptic narrative in Voluspa known as Ragnarök was also a very popular subject and has a clear cognate in the apocalyptic sections of the Bible. Þórr and the Miðgarðsormr, though less appealing to artists, strongly recalls accounts of the conflict between Christ and Satan or Leviathan. This article uses a theoretical methodology called ‘figural interpretation’ to examine the Old Norse myths and explore how they reflect certain myths from the new religion. While distinctly art historical in approach, this article also invokes some Old Norse texts where relevant, which may themselves have been influenced by Christian thinking.

The Command of the Sea

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
David G. Morgan-Owen
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
United Kingdom ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
British Isles ◽  
Royal Navy ◽  
Naval Warfare ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Late Nineteenth

The Royal Navy thought about war in a particular way in the late nineteenth century. This chapter explains how the contemporary Navy understood strategy as it pertained to protecting the United Kingdom from invasion. By examining the different approaches taken to war against France and Germany between 1885 and 1900 it shows how the Admiralty understood the defence of the British Isles in this period in largely symmetrical terms. The battle fleet remained key to naval warfare and to preventing invasion, but it did not need to be shackled to the British coastline in order to prevent a hostile power from attempting to cross the Channel.

scholarly journals ‘Epidemics in a Mist’: Medical Climatology and Cholera in Victorian Visual Culture

2020 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
pp. 492-511
Author(s):  
Amanda Sciampacone
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Visual Culture ◽  
Mortality Rates ◽  
Tropical Environment ◽  
Atmospheric Conditions ◽  
Vital Force ◽  
Real Material ◽  
Climate And Health ◽  
Crucial Part ◽  
Epidemic Diseases

Abstract The article explores how Victorian visual culture was a vital force in the construction and dissemination of medical theories on the connection between climate and health. During the nineteenth century, the seemingly inexplicable and deadly nature of many epidemic diseases compelled British medics to investigate all possible reasons for their spread. Focusing on cholera, the article will examine how, in an effort to understand what was seen at the time as a mysterious disease, Victorian medics increasingly concentrated on the climate of India and unusual weather in Britain as propagators of the malady. Supplementing the dominant miasma theory, medics explained how the seemingly airborne sources of cholera resulted from a state of England’s air that resembled the tropical environment of the subcontinent. In an effort to highlight the correlation between cholera and the atmosphere, they produced medical climatology reports containing diagrams that juxtaposed the data on the disease’s mortality rates with measurements of meteorological phenomena. These images, rather than serving simply as illustrations, became a crucial part of medical arguments. As the article will demonstrate, in attempting to visualize the medical climatology of cholera, the diagrams mapped the disease to certain atmospheric conditions, suggesting that cholera could be quantified and controlled. Yet, in doing so, the images also implied that cholera had a real material presence in the air of Britain, powerfully evoking visual tropes of the disease as a substance that had the potential to contaminate the very landscape of the nation.

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