Scripture and Power: Four Anecdotes from Early Seventeenth-Century England

Abstract

This article examines conceptions of the Bible in early seventeenth-century England by discussing four instances of antagonism toward the Bible. In 1601/2, a group of papists rent and scattered the Bible and the prayer book in their parish church. In 1602, Katherine Brettergh suffered from a crisis of faith, during which she repeatedly threw her Bible away. Also in 1602, the young boy Thomas Harrison, possessed by the devil, snatched books of the Bible from anyone around him and tore them apart. Around the same time, in Christopher Marlowe’s play about Faustus, Doctor Faustus vowed to burn Scripture. In all four cases, views and emotions regarding the Bible were expressed by violent gestures. What is common to these unrelated episodes is an assumption that the Bible was somehow powerful; that the Bible was not simply Holy Scripture but rather a forceful and efficacious book. In the article I analyse this sense of forcefulness in the Bible. Historians are now paying more attention to the Protestant material Bible and the ways the book was employed as quasi-magical object. The article extends this focus on Bible and power to new directions. I examine notions of power in the Bible, expressed by people on the religious margins – some Catholics, a few Godly, one sorcerer – and I examine the attribution of power to Scripture without clearly distinguishing between textual (referential) and material (magical) uses.