The Bible and Holy Scriptures conteyned in the Olde and Newe Testament (Geneva: Rowland
Hall, 1560)
HB4/6.a.4.17
“seditious and savouring too much of dangerous and traitorous conceits
Reprinted in over 150 editions until the 1640s, the Geneva Bible is believed to be the most widely distributed book in Renaissance England
When the Catholic Mary became Queen of England in 1553, thousands of Protestants fled the country. Many English refugees settled in Geneva, ‘a thriving centre of Protestant Christian humanistic scholarship, [and] home to many projects of biblical translations in a rich array of different vernacular languages’ (Molekamp, p. 40). Templates, know-how, and means were already in place by the time the English planned their Bible translation project. The Geneva Bible was comparatively small and cheap (Molekamp, p. 41; Furniss, p. 5), but its true novelty lay in the incorporation of paratexts (notes, summaries, diagrams, maps, and twenty-six woodcuts), which the editors said would ‘serve simply to
explain and interpret the [Bible] text’ (Furniss, p. 5). The model for this layout was the French Geneva Bible, from which many paratexts were directly translated into English (Molekamp, p. 42). Interestingly from an Oxford perspective, John Bodley (c. 1520-1591) was a key financial backer of the Geneva Bible (Littleton). His son Thomas Bodley (1545-1613), who received his early education during the Marian Geneva exile, later refounded Oxford’s university library, today’s Bodleian Libraries.
The English Geneva Bible is traditionally viewed as the Bible of choice for a ‘radicalized “Puritan” readership’, even though there is ‘no solid evidence for opposition to the Geneva Bible before James [I]’ but instead evidence that it was ‘preferred indiscriminately by the English public’ (Fulton, pp. 488-9). Even Archbishop William Laud, no friend of radical Protestantism, used the Geneva Bible up to 1624 (Molekamp, p. 51).
It is not clear how St John’s College received this first edition of the Geneva Bible. It appears to have been in the family of the St John’s alumnus Philip Bliss (1787-1857), antiquarian, book collector, and librarian, for a long time. There is no ex dono inscription and it may perhaps have been purchased when Bliss’s library was sold 1858.