Ferrell’s obvious acquaintance with, and affection for, these actual volumes helps animate the narrative, but her contribution is more than descriptive. Two theses in tension inform her discussion. The first is that popular biblical (or at least scriptural) literacy did not begin with the Reformation or with the translation of scriptures into the vernacular. Knowledge of and interest in the Bible is far older, even if earlier conveyed or fostered through media other than bound Bibles. The second is that the Bible remained and remains strange, or even that its strangeness is exacerbated by its coming closer to the eye and hand of an increasingly literate modern readership.

The first books discussed are manuscripts (Chs. 1–2): Gundulf, originally from the treasury of Rochester Cathedral, then ‘Paris Bibles’, the small uniform thirteenth-century versions which ushered in a new era of standardisation and accessibility for friars and students; the Ellesmere Psalter, a book of hours which placed a part of scripture in private hands. A fair copy of the Chester Mystery Cycle gives rise to reflection on how popular engagement with the Bible preceded its existence in the vernacular as book.

Ferrell’s voice gains authority and confidence as she moves into early modernity and the first English Bibles. The aims and the heritage of John Wycliffe are more complex than is often assumed. Opposition to Lollardism was mostly about Wycliffe’s theology, not the mere principle of a Bible in English. Ferrell’s claim that Wycliffe’s version presents ‘sturdily descriptive expressions’ related to the medieval vernacular is not convincing, given the fairly wooden renderings of the Vulgate (‘clearness’ for ‘claritas’, ‘dreaded with great dread’ for ‘timuerunt timore magno’) cited as examples. Nonetheless this textual conservatism underlines the fact that an English Bible need not have been radical in itself. The theologically conservative Henry VIII did provide an English Bible; and not much later, Roman Catholic exiles were keen to produce their Douay-Rheims Bible in English, partly to shore up the authority of the Vulgate on which it was based.

Other early English versions, such as Tyndale’s and later the hugely influential Geneva Bible, were viewed with suspicion by authorities, not so much for their texts but for the tendentious over-explanation sheltering in their margins. Thus, even reformers who put their own lives at risk to place the Bible directly into the hands of the people did not trust those hands or that text enough to hand it over unconditionally. The definitive ‘King James’ Bible appears political, then, in its textual austerity, signalling space for more ecclesial and conformist interpretation led by the Church.

The tendency to make more ‘reliable’ forms of interpreted scripture persisted, however, in forms such as Calvin’s and Nicholas Ferrar’s Gospel Harmonies, both slavish to letter but disruptive of narrative. The latter were literally cut-and-paste exercises, which arranged Gospel texts from earlier printings thematically and juxtaposed them with illustrations. From here it was not such a long way to Thomas Jefferson’s ethical deist Jesus, or Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s Women’s Bible, both excised from the canonical narratives.

Although the Bay Psalm Book was the first book published in North America, intriguingly the first American Bible was not a local ‘King James’ – the politics and economics of the English Bible were surprisingly difficult before the American Revolution – but one in the Algonquian language of the Massachusetts Bay natives. Ferrell notes poignantly how the Bible, and the emphasis put on reading it by the Puritans, may have been stumbling blocks to mission to those people.

In time, though, the Bible became a household commodity for Americans; having become cheap and ubiquitous, nineteenth-century salesmen needed to make it expensive and desirable again. Illustrations, bindings and other features abounded in the catalogues of travelling salesmen, those industrial-era mendicants.

One of the most intriguing books in The Bible and the People is the Huntington Library’s wildly expanded Kitto Bible, ‘extra-illustrated’ by James Gibbs with material including an original Blake watercolour. Ferrell’s discussion of this ‘bibliophilic and biblioclastic’ tendency, also known as Grangerism, where books were physically added to with drawings and objects from other sources, is a reminder that bindings and boards were quite provisional until perhaps a century ago.

Ferrell’s survey ends with the diversity of twenty-first-century Bibles, from recent Roman Catholic versions, the persistence of the KJV in some fundamentalist circles, and magazine-style versions for teens. Despite the cipher of Cleo-like glossy presentation, these last are really inheritors of the Geneva Bible, crowded by ‘wicked’ Calvinist marginal notes.

There are two kinds of loose thread hanging from Ferrell’s scholarly and readable volume. That of scope has already been mentioned; and while we should accept her self-imposed limit of the Huntington collection for what it is, that limitation clashes with a less modest argument that ‘England’s Bible made its greatest impact when it became an American Bible’. Since the book does not discuss the impact of England’s Bible anywhere else, the statement underlines the sense that the ‘people’ of the title are that mythic, and alternately admirable and worrisome (for the rest of us), ‘we, the people’.

The other loose thread stems from the more or less explicit teleology of the book that drives The Bible and the People. The end point of a single volume, held in the hands of an individual, haunts Ferrell’s treatment even of times, places and objects which did not conceive of such a thing. While she notes at times that the Bible is not really a book at all but a collection in ‘uneasy relation’, Ferrell sympathises with the myth that the Bible was a book ‘wrested’ from the hands of the Roman Catholic Church and in modernity ‘returned to ordinary believers’ – who, of course, had never actually had it before, at least as a book.

Thus Ferrell retrojects the normality of the Bible as a single book (rather than variously bound or unbound writings such as Gospel books and Psalters) back into the early medieval period. Yet the Vulgate of Jerome (who was not a North African, pace Ferrell) was itself only theoretically a standard or stable text. And the single-volume Paris Bibles of the thirteenth century did not assume, but actually created, a standard but very corrupt Vulgate and, more importantly, the norm of the Bible as a single book.

But Ferrell’s own discussions constantly bring to light physical configurations of scripture that defy the boards of the book. Most of her exemplars of ‘the Bible’ are actually not ‘Bibles’ at all, but books made out of scripture in some form: the Ellesmere Psalter, Chester Mystery plays, the Wycliffe-ite manuscripts, Tyndale’s New Testament, the Bay Psalm Book, and even the fake-cool teen glossies, all defy the idea of a single book called ‘the Bible’, but affirm the extraordinary power of scripture.