Layouts and paratexts of Elizabethan prose psalters advocate two competing reading methods: reading sequentially according to the church calendar or selecting psalms by occasion. Marked psalters and bibles, however, show that Elizabethan readers often disregarded printed prescription, practicing either method, or both, as they chose. To capitalize on reader independence, printers eventually produced texts that encouraged comparative reading across multiple translations, culminating in the two-text psalter of the 1578 Geneva Bible. This episode in the history of devotional reading demonstrates the tendency of Elizabethans to slip the confessional categories into which their own texts, and later historiography, would place them.
Printed vernacular Bibles appeared in many European languages well before the Protestant Reformation, but in England the story is quite different. The first Catholic English New Testament was not printed until 1582, long after numerous Protestant editions had flooded the English Bible market. This article focuses on readers of this 1582 annotated Rheims New Testament, published by exiles in France and shipped surreptitiously northward for missionaries to convert, affirm, and educate British Catholics. Once in England this edition garnered an immense outpouring of printed confutations. Particularly significant was a 1589 dual printing of the Rheims text alongside the official version of the Church of England with extensive annotations by William Fulke. Reader markings in both the 1582 Rheims New Testament and its 1589 confutation, however, show early readers staking out confessional positions independent of the polemic of the printed texts, often putting these texts to purposes contrary to those intended.
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