By Rebecca Onion -
Posted Monday, April 1,
2013 - The Vault
These pages are from a Little Gidding Harmony, an unusual version of the
Gospels made in 1630 by cutting and pasting bits of text and illustrations. The
Ferrar family, Anglicans who lived in a small religious community called Little
Gidding in Huntingdonshire, UK, made these Harmonies as part of their devotional
practice. This particular Harmony is held at Harvard’s Houghton
Library, and was recently digitized and made publicly
available.
Cutting apart printed Bibles with painstaking care, the Ferrar family and
their co-religionists selected parts of the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and
John, each of which talk about Christ’s life from different perspectives. Pasted
together in chronological order, the bits made a “Harmony”—a complete story,
split into 150 chapters. The pages also contain illustrations, taken from books
of Flemish/Netherlandish engravings, or English copies thereof.
Whitney Trettien, a
graduate student at Duke who’s writing her dissertation on the Harmonies, says
that in later editions of their Harmony, the Little Gidding group evolved a
method of marking discrepancies in the Gospels’ accounts of Jesus’ life through
the use of different typefaces and colored inks.
Others had published
edited versions of the Bible before this community produced theirs (and
others would apply scissors and paste to Bibles in the years to come, including,
most famously, Thomas
Jefferson). But the Little Gidding version became famous when one of the
community’s neighbors lent this particular copy of the Harmony to King Charles
I. The king liked the reading experience so much that he commissioned his own
Harmony (now at the British
Library), and acted as a patron to the community for years
afterwards.
The annotation on the second image below records Charles’ disagreement with
the way that the Little Gidding group had arranged the text of the Sermon of the
Mount. In the third image, Charles points out another error, and then crosses
out his annotation, writing “I confess that I was too hastie / for it is verrie
well, but two / littell omissions that I haue marked.”
Thanks to Whitney
Trettien, whose blog
post on the Harmonies offers much more information on the text; to
John Overholt
of Harvard’s Houghton Library (blog; Twitter); and to the
Episcopal
Women’s History Society, which underwrote the digitization of
Houghton’s Harmony.
Harvard University - Houghton Library/Bible. N.T. Gospels. English.
Authorized. 1630. (Little Gidding concordance] [Little Gidding, 1630.] Vault A
1275.5. Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge,
Mass.
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