'Gold Tried in the Fire'. The Prophet TheaurauJohn Tany and the English Revolution by Ariel Hessayon

Author:Ariel Hessayon [Hessayon, Ariel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781351932622
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2016-12-05T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 10

Canonical and extra-canonical sources

Canon and Apocrypha

It has been estimated that 322 editions and 83 variant editions of the Bible in English were published between 1525 and 1659, and that during the same period 190 editions and 22 variant editions of the New Testament in English were issued. Both Bibles and New Testaments were exempt from the Stationers’ Company limit on the print run of an edition, and it appears that by 1660 perhaps as many as 850,000 copies of the Bible in English and 450,000 copies of the New Testament in English had been printed. Even allowing for wear and tear these figures suggest that many households possessed either an English Bible or New Testament. Produced by English exiles in the heartland of Calvinism and first issued in 1560, the Geneva version of the English Bible was the first to be printed in roman type and the first to divide the text into chapters and verses. Though popular among Protestants for many years the pocketable Geneva Bible with its helpful if sometimes provocative marginalia was eventually supplanted by the so-called Authorized Version of 1611. Derived largely from the translation of William Tyndale (d.1536) and stripped of marginal notes, the Authorized Version was issued in a number of different editions – some with a series of genealogies and a map of the Holy Land appended. Few editions, however, with the notable exception of those printed at Cambridge University from 1629, could claim to be an accurate text.

In an anonymous attack on monopolies addressed to Parliament entitled Scintilla, or a Light Broken into darke Warehouses (1641), the London bookseller Michael Sparke (c.1586–1653) complained of the inflated prices charged for Latin and English Bibles. According to Sparke copies of an unbound quarto edition of the Authorized Version printed at Cambridge in roman type were being sold together with the Psalms at 10s., while the same edition printed in black-letter fetched 8s. 4d.1 On 19 August 1644 the Stationers’ Company drew up a petition to the House of Commons protesting at the monopolies held by royal patent to print English Bibles and ‘sundry Bookes of generall use’.2 Yet even after May 1645, when responsibility for printing the Bible was transferred to a trading partnership within the Stationers’ Company known as the English Stock, prices remained artificially high. The English Stock had purchased this privilege and was determined to protect its interests despite calls to make Bibles affordable to ‘poore servants, and others of meane condition’.3 Indeed, the continued value of the Bible as a commodity is evident in the number of testators who were at pains to specify it among the possessions bequeathed to their heirs.

Tany’s ownership of an English Bible for much of his adult life seems likely. His works suggest that he had read it avidly, that he had, as he admitted, once been a ‘great’ ‘Zelot’ for ‘the written word of God.4 Like Jacob Bothumley, Lawrence Clarkson, Abiezer Coppe, Richard Coppin, Roger Crab, George Foster, Joseph Salmon, Gerrard Winstanley, Andrew

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