The Bible And The Printed Image In Early Modern England: Little Gidding And The Pursuit Of Scriptural Harmony (Visual Culture In Early Modernity)

The first book-length study of the fifteen surviving Little Gidding bible concordances, this book examines the visual culture of print in seventeenth-century England through the lens of one extraordinary family and their hand-made biblical manuscripts. The volumes were created by the women of the Ferrar-Collet family of Little Gidding, who selected works from the family's collection of Catholic religious prints, and then cut and pasted prints and print fragments, along with verses excised from the bible, and composed them in artful arrangements on the page in the manner of collage. Gaudio shows that by cutting, recombining, and pasting multi-scaled print fragments, the Ferrar-Collet family put into practice a remarkably flexible pictorial language. The Little Gidding concordances provide an occasion to explore how the manipulation of print could be a means of thinking through some of the most pressing religious and political questions of the pre-civil war period: the coherence of print