Tribble 1993

Tribble, Evelyn B. Margins and Marginality: The Printed Page in Early Modern England. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2003.

Introduction: Whose Text?

"I am concerned with books, the text embodied. More than embodied: dressed, bedecked, adorned -- with prefatory matter, illustrations, and most importantly, marginal notes."

"Modern editions which omit such accompanying matter in effect rewrite the text by effacing evidence of its collaborative nature, of the conversation between a text and its margins, of the play made possible by the space of the page." (1)

medieval period -- authority / auctor "always an other, located outside the writer and conferring authority from a historical distance" (2)

"The margins are not consistently a sit of subversion, consolidation, or containment, to invoke the rather limited possibilities offered by current historically oriented Renaissance debates. Rather, i argue that the margins and the text proper were in shifting relationships of authority; the margin might affirm, summarize, underwrite the main text block and thus tend to stabilize meaning, but it might equally assume a contestatory or parodic relation to the text by which it stood." (6)

Bible

• "tension between the desire to provide texts of the Bible and the fears engendered by the specter of its uncontrolled circulation" (7)
• "The history of the English printed Bible cannot be told apart from its margins" (7)
• marginal notes -- tried to both quiet and excite controversy

Authority, Control, Community: The English Printed Bible Page from Tyndale to the Authorized Version

Melanchton "declares a new mode of reading: 'Now away with so many frigid petty glosses, these harmonizings and "disharmonies" and other hindrances to intelligence'"

"The pure text reads itself -- or rather produces a moment of epiphany which erases the historical moment of reading. In contrast, the glossed texts becomes the site of duplicity and obstruction." (11)

12th-century, scripture swallowed up by commentary; "The Scriptures are presented not as a plain text but as literally surrounded by tradition in he form of a mass of auctoritates" (12)

Tyndale:

• commentaries disguise the bible, prevent laymen/women from seeing plain truth

More:

• responds to say that "the glosses and traditions of the church are not fragments of competing, plural authorities; instead, in representing a consensus formed over centuries, they simultaneously constituted wholeness and holiness" (15);
• "proposes to control the Bible by physically containing its circulation" (18);
• "a desire to ensure that Bible reading will be governed by vertical, hierarchical, traditional patterns of authority" (18)

Miles Coverdale, 1535 translation, less controversial;

'Matthew's Bible, 1537, given official sanction (20)

public vs. private authority in reading; glosses help distinguish true and false readers

November 16, 1538: Henry VIII forbids reading / buying divine books not sanctioned by him (23)

Coverdale revises Matthew's Bible, requested to expunge glosses (24); uses instead printer's hands (manicules) with no text, pointing to where the church has interpreted the book but denying the reader that interpretation

"Just as the translator can be accused of producing his version of the Bible, so is it possible for the reader to produce his own solipsistic internal version of the text. The pointing hands, then, signify hands off to the reader; interpretation is a privileged enterprise to be conducted by the church. At the same time, of course, the pointing hands undoubtedly served to draw attention to suspect passages." (25)

"For the English church/state at this period, the subversive potential of the Bible lay in the specter of interpretive proliferation, represented both by competing versions of the Word and by books whose margins foregrounded the controversy behind certain passages. The issue, then, is not the text itself but its frame, conceived as both the institutional frame which authorizes its publication and the material frame, the presence or absence of notes." (28)

Geneva Bible (1560)

• most popular;
• "aims to provide the clergyman with exegetical aids and to give the individual reader the resources of a congregation" (31)
• "The result is a book which provides the private reader with the guidance of a congregation. No such Bible had ever been printed in English." (32)
• "first English Bible to exploit fully sixteenth-century advances in typography and printing" (33)
• "heavily annotated" (33)
• preface "reveals how far we have come from the notion of the Scriptures as plain or self-explicating. Gone is the notion that the Bible is as plain as daylight or as clear as the sun; in its place we are reminded of the difficulties and obstructions attendant upon reading." (34)
• "very much an institutional document" (34)

Bishops' Bible (1568):

• frontispiece, Elizabeth
• "church and state officials invade the pages, weaving their portraits or their initials throughout the text" (38)
• appearance "suggests that it was designed for public rather than private reading" (38)
• "persistence of the hierarchical, vertical, deferential model of reading posited by More and the Great Bible. ... In this account, the Bible is transmitted from the voice of the reader to the ears of the hearer, and the Bible page facilitates this public reading." (41)

Rheims New Testament (1582)

• book "as a weapon in a bitterly fought theological and political battle" (43)
• "attempt to establish ownership over the reading process itself" (47) -- deliberately slow the reader down (48)

Fulke's counter-edition (1602)

• "The central impression of Fulke's volume is that of competition and contestation: competing typefaces, competing notes, competing interpretations. In this manifestation the printed page becomes a locus for a bitter struggle over possession of the text." (50)