‘Bibles in Windows’: The Problematic Materiality of the Bible in Post-Reformation England

Dr Harry Spillane (Queens’ College, University of Cambridge)

In Elizabethan England, preachers began to criticise the elaborate display of English bibles in household windows and other domestic spaces. They voiced concerns about binding, decoration, storage and treatment, with complaints directed both at extravagant embellishments and at the neglect or damage done to some copies. Although the Bible occupied a central position in Protestant religious life, Protestants nevertheless struggled to neatly distinguish appropriate respect for the Word of God from excessive veneration of the physical book, which ultimately risked becoming a new form of idolatry. Drawing on sermons, guidebooks, pamphlets, court records, diaries, plays, poetry and ballads, this paper examines how Protestants attempted to regulate the materiality of bibles in early modern England. It shows how the materiality of the Bible could not be left as a thing indifferent, but that the Protestant dictum of sola scriptura left no easy way forward. Still, when the Holy Word was everything, the material bible could not be nothing.

Dr Harry Spillane is the Anthony Whiting Scholar at Emmanuel College and Bye-Fellow in History at Queens’ College, Cambridge. He has previously been the Munby Fellow in Bibliography at Cambridge University Library. His current project explores the challenges that having multiple translations of the Bible in English circulate at once caused in early modern Britain. His first book, Selling the Word of God: The Early Commercial History of the English Bible (Bodleian Library Publishing: 2026), was released in September this year.

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