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In 1675, Edward Bromfield, a prominent member of Boston's South Church, crossed the Atlantic from Old to New England. Though he left much behind, he chose to bring with him an exceptionally large, ornately bound, and illustrated folio Bible. Just as walking through the door of his house brought him into the presence of his family, as soon as he opened his Bible, Bromfield entered into a new spiritual space where he encountered the direct presence of God. Despite the materiality of this experience, scholars have regularly portrayed Puritans and their Congregationalist descendants as complete iconoclasts. Examining the Bible as a material object shows, however, that images could and did play a significant role in shaping the inner religious lives of Massachusetts’s colonists. Individual Bibles--owned by men and women, elites and middling sorts, ministers and laypeople--reveal that colonists across a wide spectrum of society owned Bibles that acted as doors into a sacred space. Approximately twenty-five years before Edward Bromfield embarked for New England, John White, a dissenting minister in England, wrote a book that urged Christians to think of Bible reading as enquiring “at God’s mouth” in order to “hear what he will say unto us.” White’s treatise was one of many seventeenth and eighteenth-century devotional books that instructed readers to conceive of Bible reading as an auditory experience. The authors of these spiritual guides regularly emphasized the conversational nature of reading Scripture. Profitable Bible reading meant that the reader spoke to God and, in return, heard his voice. However, only by combining these texts with the study of the Bible as object is it possible to demonstrate the full sensory nature of this practice, as well as the widespread cultural belief in it.

Stream: Books, Writing and Reading

Paper: A paper has not yet been submitted.

I received my Ph.D. in American History from Brandeis University in 2006 and am currently an Assistant Professor of History at St. Francis University in Loretto, PA. My dissertation was entitled "Mighty in the Scriptures: The Bible in Colonial Massachusetts, 1630-1776," and is an exploration of the material, cultural, educational, and political history of the Bible in colonial New England. Currently I am working on revising the mansuscript for publication. In past I have been a Fellow at the American Antiquarian Society's Summer Seminar in the History of the Book as well as a Spencer Foundation Fellow in Educational Research. My current research interests include not only the history of the book, but also early American religious and cultural history as a whole.