Renske Hoff

Transformative actions: the fluidity of materiality and meaning in sixteenth-

century Dutch Bibles

Abstract

As early modern Dutch Bibles moved into the realm of reading and use, they became
susceptible to transformative actions by their readers. This article demonstrates three ways in
which early modern readers consciously impacted the textual, paratextual, and visual elements
of their books: through the addition of material to the book, through the transformation and
adaptation of text and paratext, and by changing the book’s visual appearance. The study is
based on a corpus of 150 surviving Bible copies, printed by Jacob van Liesvelt and Henrick
Peetersen van Middelburch between 1522 and 1546. The examples presented here show that
the early modern material Bible was a dynamic and fluid entity that could be adjusted and
transformed to follow the preferences of its readers. The early modern reader was actively
involved in the formation and shaping of their own Bible copy and could appropriate a ‘lectoral
agency’ that moved beyond the printer-publisher’s influence. Furthermore, the transformative
actions of readers to their books impacted the reading behaviour, perception, and interpretation
of the book by future readers. The books they encountered were no longer just the products of
printer-publishers, but had become interactive, unique, and polyphonic entities.

Keywords: vernacular Bibles, history of reading, reader traces, lectoral agency, materiality,
Jacob van Liesvelt, Henrick Peetersen van Middelburch

Introduction

In a copy of Jacob van Liesvelt’s New Testament of 1534 (Royal Library Brussels, L.P.586.A),
a reader called ‘Sister Catharina’, as her partially readable ownership mark on the title page
indicates, meticulously changed the liturgical reading schedule in the back of her book. She
pasted in forty little slips of paper with handwritten references to specific Bible parts. The paper
slips are glued onto the page to cover the printed text and, hence, change the pericopes that
were to be read on certain days. Sister Catharina’s handwritten alterations, for instance, call for

1
the reading of Matthew 11 on the second Sunday of Advent, whereas the printed schedule
originally proposed the lecture of Luke 21.

Figure 1: handwritten alterations in the liturgical reading schedule (Royal Library Brussels, L.P.586.A)

The adjustments Catharina made are in accordance with the Missale Romanum and its proper
liturgical reading schedule that was promulgated by Pius V’s papal bull Quo primum of 1570.
The Roman Missal was developed in the wake of the Council of Trent (1545-1563), with the
aim of replacing local missals with “unum missae celebrandae ritum”: a single rite for
celebrating Mass.1 As Antwerp belonged to the diocese of Cambrai, the reading schedule in
Van Liesvelt’s New Testament of 1534 follows the missal of Cambrai and the reading schedule
it includes. This schedule differs from the Roman Missal in exactly those places marked by
Catharina’s adjustments. These alterations to the reading schedule were not coincidental marks
left in a mindless reading practice. Rather, by modifying the references in the reading schedule
in the ways that she did, Catharina consciously transformed the navigational routes she and
future readers could undertake in their engagement with the book.
Sister Catharina’s cut-and-paste interferences in the navigational reading structure of
her New Testament create a unique book. Although the development of the printing press has
long been considered particularly influential for its standardizing and consolidating impact on

1
See: Nathan D. Mitchell, “Reforms, Protestant and Catholic,” in The Oxford History of Christian Worship, ed.
Geoffrey Wainwright and Karen B. Westerfield (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 337.

2
texts,2 the printed book as an object still remained “as singular as the phoenix.”3 As it moved
through time and space and interacted with various readers and users, the early modern book
was a receptive thing.4 It could accumulate a wide range of unique characteristics that set it
apart from other books of the same edition. In studying the surviving copies of early modern,
vernacular Bibles, this singularity is prevalent. Each individual book contains a combination of
unique features that range from unintentionally left traces, such as the stains of an overturned
inkpot, dried plant leaves and feathers, or rusty prints of objects once left between the pages,5
to extensive, consciously included annotations or thoroughly customized contents.6
Most previous studies focussing on early modern reading traces have understood these
predominantly as providers of historic evidence. By analysing the content of markings and

2
See, for instance, Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1980), 71-88; 113-26.
3
Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading (New York/London: Penguin Books, 1996), 16. See also: Bettina
Wagner, “Introduction,” in Early Printed Books as Material Objects, ed. Bettina Wagner and Marcia Reed
(Berlin/New York: De Gruyter, 2010), 1.
4
See also: Leah Clark, “Dispersal, Exchange and the Culture of Things in Fifteenth-Century Italy”, in: The Agency
of Things in Medieval and Early Modern Art: Materials, Power and Manipulation, ed. Grayna Jurkowlaniec, Ika
Matyjaszkiewicz, and Zuzanna Sarnecka (New York: Routledge, 2018), 99.
5
An inkpot was knocked over in the 1541 Peetersen van Middelburch Bible of the Maurits Sabbe Library
(P22.005.1/Fo BIJB 1541), a plant leaf is pressed between the pages of a 1542a Van Liesvelt Bible of Utrecht
University (THO RIJS 001-067), the feathers were left in a Peetersen van Middelburch Bible of 1535 of the British
Library London (3061.i.12), and the rusty stain of a key can be found in a 1542 Van Liesvelt Bible of the Royal
Library of The Hague (KW 1708 A 11).
6
Sherman (2008) has noted that the frequency of marginalia in Bibles is much higher than is often presumed. The
assumption that “in front of this sacred textual space even the most active readers … would have set down their
pens and pressed their palms together in a posture of quiet (if not altogether passive) veneration” (72-73) proves
to be far from true. See: William H. Sherman, Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008). The early modern Bibles of Van Liesvelt and Peetersen
van Middelburch contain a broad variety of ownership marks (e.g., names or ex libri), markings (e.g., underscoring
or rubrication), annotations (e.g., theological reflections or corrections of text or paratext), customized contents
(e.g., the addition of material), and unintended traces (e.g., object traces or ink stains). The richness of traces in
early modern Bibles is confirmed by other studies, such as: Kate Narveson, Bible Readers and Lay Writers in
Early Modern England: Gender and Self-Definition in an Emergent Writing Culture (Farnham: Ashgate
Publishing Company, 2012); Femke Molekamp, Women and the Bible in Early Modern England: Religious
Reading and Writing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). The presence of reader traces in premodern Dutch
Bibles has previously been studied, in particular within the research project Holy Writ and Lay Readers: A Social
History of Vernacular Bible Translation in the Late Middle Ages (2009-2013), conducted at the University of
Groningen by Sabrina Corbellini, Margriet Hoogvliet, Mart van Duijn, and Suzan Folkerts. Relevant publications
include: Suzan Folkerts, ‘The Cloister or the City? The Appropriation of the New Testament by Lay Readers in
an Urban Setting,’ in Cultures of Religious Reading in the Late Middle Ages, ed. Sabrina Corbellini (Turnhout:
Brepols, 2013), 175-200; Mart van Duijn, De Delfste Bijbel: Een sociale geschiedenis, 1477 - circa 1550 (Zutphen:
Walburg Pers, 2017). It is also important to note that the majority of surviving copies of Van Liesvelt’s and
Peetersen van Middelburch’s Bibles are not heavily annotated. Furthermore, although reader traces can provide
insight into the interaction between a book and its reader, it should not be assumed that an absence of traces
corresponds to an absence of reading. In other words, the history of reading does not equal the history of
marginalia, nor the other way around. See also: Adam Smyth, ‘Book Marks: Object Traces in Early Modern
Books,’ in Early Modern English Marginalia, ed. Katherine Acheson (New York: Routledge, 2019), 66; Stephen
Dobranski, ‘Reading Strategies,’ in Cheap Print in Britain and Ireland to 1660, ed. Joad Raymond (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2011), 109-10; Helen Smith, ‘Grossly Material Things’; Women and Book Production
in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 179.

3
annotations, identities and reading behaviours of certain annotating readers may be
reconstructed.7 However, reading traces are much more than the relics of a single interaction
between a reader and his or her book. The example of Sister Catharina’s alterations
demonstrates the role of ‘lectoral agency’ in the formation of the navigational and interpretative
structures in the early modern book. As explained by Slights (2001), this agency meant that
readers, similarly to authors, editors, and censors, had “a chance to alter the physical look of a
text in matters of emphasis and organization,” giving them “tremendous power over how that
text will be received and understood.”8 Through transformative actions that changed the
contents and forms of the texts and the book, readers were actively involved in shaping the
object for themselves and for later readers. They engaged with books as fluid objects that were
shaped and would continue to be shaped by their past, present, and future users.9 Books would,
in the words of Michael Durrant (2020), get “mixed up with the lives and preoccupations of
people who set out to give their old books new beginnings, facilitating their survival on
meandering journeys.”10 Furthermore, as readers’ actions became part of the materiality of the
object, these would remain present in the experiences and perceptions of subsequent readers,
allowing them to interact not only with the printed ‘original’, but with the book in its malleable
entirety.
The aim of this article is to gain insight into the transformative actions of early modern
Bible readers and how these shaped the material book and the meanings it conveyed. The
examples presented here are part of a research corpus of 150 surviving copies of Bibles
(including complete editions, New Testaments, and Epistles and Gospels) printed by the
Antwerp printers Jacob van Liesvelt and Henrick Peetersen van Middelburch between 1522 and
1546.11 The copies under scrutiny display a wide array of traces of reading and use, including

7
See, for instance: Lisa Jardine and Anthony Grafton, “‘Studied for Action’: How Gabriel Harvey Read His Livy,”
in Past & Present 129 (1990): 30-78; William Sherman, John Dee: The Politics of Reading and Writing in the
English Renaissance (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995); Stephen Orgel, The Reader in the Book:
A Study of Spaces and Traces (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2015).
8
William Slights, Managing Readers: Printed Marginalia in English Renaissance Books (Ann Arbor: The
University of Michigan Press, 2001), 89.
9
See also: Jeffrey Todd Knight, Bound to Read: Compilations, Collections, and the Making of Renaissance
Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 4-11.
10
Michael Durrant, “Old Books, New Beginnings: Recovering Lost Pages,” Inscription 1 (2020),
https://inscriptionjournal.com/2020/06/25/old-books-new-beginnings-recovering-lost-pages/.
11
The present paper has been developed within the interdisciplinary research project In Readers’ Hands: Early
Modern Dutch Bibles from a User’s Perspective, supervised by Professors Sabrina Corbellini and Wim François,
and carried out at the University of Groningen (the Netherlands) and the KU Leuven (Belgium). The corpus
consists of surviving copies kept in various university and public libraries in the Netherlands, Belgium, the United
Kingdom, the United States, and several other countries across Europe. In addition, multiple private Bible
collectors in the Netherlands and Belgium have provided access to their collections.

4
ownership inscriptions, annotations, underscoring, marks, and unintentional traces.12 Although
these types of traces can all shine a certain light on aspects of early modern reading culture, the
current article focusses on traces and adaptations that can be understood as the results of
transformative actions: conscious acts undertaken by book owners, users, or readers to impact
and shape the material and meaning of the book in the present and future.

The early modern Bible as an open-ended object

Juliet Fleming (2018) has stated that “the book is a thing that differs from itself, at all the
moments of its production, and at all the moments of its consumption.” 13 The early modern
book was indeed in constant flux. At any state of its existence, the book was subject to additions,
eliminations, and modifications that were motivated or executed by readers. When approaching
early modern books with a focus on reading and use, the traditional perspective on printed books
as ‘closed’, static texts, contrasting with the ‘open’ and dynamic manuscript tradition, needs to
be redefined.14 As already emphasized by Knight (2013) in his analysis of (predominantly)
English early modern books, book consumers had “tremendous agency in determining the
physicality of texts,” both through “perceived measures of popularity” and by their active
involvement in the assembly of books.15
This is also the case with Dutch Bibles. Firstly, sixteenth-century printer-publishers in
the Low Countries prove to have been acutely aware of the preferences of their reading public.

12
As the Bibles of Van Liesvelt and Peetersen van Middelburch were often passed down from one owner to
another, for instance through inheritance or sale, they regularly contain traces spanning centuries. Many feature
traces that date up to the modern age, such as library stamps and restoration notes. However, the traces that form
the basis of this article can all be dated to within the 16th and 17th centuries and can hence be connected to practices
of reading in the early modern period.
13
Juliet Fleming, “Afterword,” Huntington Library Quarterly 73, no. 3 (2010): 552. On the individuality of books,
see also: Bettina Wagner, “Introduction,” in Early Printed Books as Material Objects, ed. Bettina Wagner and
Marcia Reed (Berlin/New York: De Gruyter, 2010), 1. Wagner also explains that using the concept of the ‘edition’
is not self-evident. An ‘edition’ is “a rather abstract entity derived from the concept of the ‘ideal copy’, which
largely ignores the individual features of the ‘copy in hand’” (3). As every copy possesses unique features,
attributable to both mistakes or irregularities in the printing process and the intervention of readers and users, it is
difficult (if not impossible) to determine what exactly the edition would encompass. However, the word ‘edition’
is used in the current paper to conceptualize the difference between a copy-based study of early modern Bibles
and the (more traditional) approach towards Bibles as immaterial carriers of text.
14
An example of this opposition is demonstrated by Bruns (1980), who distinguishes between the “closed matter”
of printing, and the dynamic, transformable matter of manuscript text. From his perspective, “what is printed
cannot be altered.” See Bruns, “The Originality of Texts,” 113. The view on print culture as a process of
standardization and fixity also lies at the basis of the idea of a ‘print revolution’, developed in particular by
Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural
Transformations in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).
15
Knight, Bound to Read, 4.

5
Between subsequent editions, Van Liesvelt and Peetersen van Middelburch16 regularly adjusted
specifics of the Bible translation and paratext in response to popular developments in Bible
production in surrounding countries and novelties introduced by their fellow printers.17 The
alterations made between subsequent editions were usually presented to the reader on the title
page. Paratextual additions in particular were ‘sold’ to potentially interested readers by
appealing announcements of their novel and beneficial character on the Bible’s front page.18
In addition, buyers and readers of these Bibles had a rather direct say in the creation of
the book in processes of binding and, optionally, rubrication and colouring. As many early
printed books, Bibles by Van Liesvelt and Peetersen van Middelburch were - most likely - sold
from the publishing house or bookshop to readers as unbound sheets.19 Future book owners
would usually decide about the binding of the book as they bought it, choosing the material of
the binding and stamped decoration. They could also choose to incorporate other texts, creating
sammelbänden or textual compilations, or to not even bind the book at all.20 Furthermore, a

16
Peetersen van Middelburch strongly based his Bible editions upon earlier Bibles by his fellow printers Jacob
van Liesvelt and Henrick Peetersen van Middelburch. Although his editions are not exact reprints, the choices he
makes regarding text, paratext, and layout firmly rely upon Van Liesvelt’s and Vorsterman’s Bibles.
17
An example is the inclusion of the topical reading register. This paratextual element, which alphabetically lists
various thematical entries to the Bible, was first introduced in Dutch Bibles by Willem Vorsterman in his 1533-
1534 complete Bible edition, and immediately adopted by Jacob van Liesvelt and Henrick Peetersen van
Middelburch. A similar list of alphabetically ordered topics, persons, and events had been printed before in the
German Zurich Bible of 1531, and connects to a broader development of the increasing inclusion of extensive
alphabetic indexes in books. Although the Dutch printers do not follow the Zurich version exactly in its choice of
topics, persons, and events, they were undoubtedly aware of these developments in international Bible production.
See also: Wim François and Sabrina Corbellini, “Shaping Religious Reading Cultures in the Early Modern
Netherlands: The ‘Glossed Bibles’ of Jacob van Liesvelt and Willem Vorsterman (1532-1534ff.),” Journal of
Early Modern Christianity 6, no. 2 (2019): 178-79. On the development of alphabetical indexes in early modern
books, see also: Ann Blair, Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information Before the Modern Age (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 117-69.
18
In the time period in which these Bibles were published, the addition of paratextual elements such as prologues
and glosses was disputed by the authorities, as they feared that it would strengthen Reformation-minded ideas.
The announcement of these elements on title pages made the editions vulnerable to criticism, and some of them
were eventually included in the Louvain Index of forbidden books of 1546. See: August den Hollander, Verboden
Bijbels: Bijbelcensuur in de Nederlanden in de eerste helft van de zestiende eeuw (Amsterdam: Vossiuspers
Universiteit van Amsterdam, 2003), 10-18.
19
There is no clear-cut evidence of the selling and buying practice of Van Liesvelt’s and Peetersen van
Middelburch’s Bibles. However, based on data from contemporary printers such as Cornelis Claesz and Plantin,
it is plausible that the majority of Bibles would have been sold from the publisher’s bookshop to the buyer in
separate sheets (in albis). See: August den Hollander, “Assortiment (genre/taal) en vorm van het verhandelde
boek,” in Bibliopolis: Geschiedenis van het gedrukte boek, ed. Marieke van Delft and Clemens de Wolf (Zwolle:
Waanders Uitgeverij, 2003), 42-43.
20
Although examples of unbound books rarely survive (for obvious reasons), a copy of Van Liesvelt’s 1527 edition
of the Wisdom of Solomon (University of Amsterdam, Ned. Inc. 511) has not been perforated in the spine at all.
The copy currently consists of separate sheets, but three widely placed, double perforations at the top of the page
suggest that the book has previously been fastened to something. The absence of perforation and needle marks in
the spine of the quires, however, rules out that the book has been bound in more common ways. For an extensive
study of practices of textual compilation within bindings in the early modern period, see: Jeffrey Todd Knight,
Bound to Read: Compilations, Collections, and the Making of Renaissance Literature (Philadelphia: University
of Pennsylvania Press, 2013. See also: Jason Scott-Warren, “Ligatures of the Early Modern Book,” Book 2.0 7,
no. 1 (2017): 35-36.

6
large number of surviving Bible copies prove to have been rebound at least once. It is likely
that in various instances, intensive use of the book could have worn out the original binding. In
addition, readers could also rebind the book in order to personalize the copy or to be able to
include new texts, paratexts, or images in the binding.21
Practices of rebinding show that readers and users continued to play a crucial role in
constructing and reshaping the book well beyond the first instances of book production. With
the binding disclosed, the open-ended characteristics of the book would have become
indisputable.22 One of the ways in which readers of Van Liesvelt’s and Peetersen van
Middelburch’s Bibles interacted with this openness was through the inclusion of prologues,
handwritten material, informative charts, and geographic maps within the book binding.23 A
striking example is the Jacob van Liesvelt Bible of 1534 in the British Bible Society collection
in Cambridge University Library (BSS.223.B34). In this copy, four meticulously coloured
woodcut maps and four informative charts have been bound between the pages. The maps
inserted before Numbers 23, Joshua 15, Matthew 1, and Acts 1, depict the Israelites’ wanderings
from Egypt to Canaan, the division of Israel, the Holy Land at the time of the Gospels, and the

21
Rebinding practices not only benefitted certain forms of reader-book interaction, but have also been an important
cause for the loss of many reader traces. Rebinding would often include replacing pastedowns and flyleaves as
well, elements regularly used for annotation and ownership notes. Therefore, rebinding would allow later book
users to discard the traces of previous readers. Furthermore, crucial agents in these processes have been modern
librarians, in particular those of the nineteenth century, who viewed— as Saenger and Heinlen (1991) have —“the
printed page as sacrosanct and consequently all handwritten additions to the printed page as … detrimental” (see
Saenger and Heinlen, “Incunable Description,” 254). This destructive perspective on annotations and reading
traces led to the washing and bleaching of pages and the extreme cropping of edges in processes of rebinding. See
also: Monique Hulvey, “Not So Marginal: Manuscript Annotations in the Folger Incunabula,” PBSA 92, no. 2
(1998): 161.
22
See also: Anna Reynolds, “‘Such dispersive scattredness’: Early Modern Encounters with Binding Waste,”
Journal of the Northern Renaissance 8 (2017): 24, http://www.northernrenaissance.org/such-dispersive-
scattredness-early-modern-encounters-with-binding-waste/.
23
A non-original prologue has been added to the 1535 Van Liesvelt Bible of University of Tilburg (TF PRE 10).
In a 1541 Peetersen van Middelburch Bible of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (XC 05044), the first fifteen
chapters of Genesis are missing from the printed texts; these have been added in 18th-century handwriting and
bound in with the rest of the book. Charts and/or maps have been included in the following seven copies: 1534
Van Liesvelt Bible of Cambridge University Library (BSS.223.B34); 1542a Van Liesvelt Bible of Tresoar Library
Leeuwarden (Gg 80); 1542a Van Liesvelt Bible of University of Tilburg Library (TFH-D 303); 1542a Van Liesvelt
Bible of University of Amsterdam Library (OG 65-33); 1541 Peetersen van Middelburch Bible of the Maurits
Sabbe Library Leuven (3205 G 7); 1541 Peetersen van Middelburch Bible of the University of Groningen Library
(A g-3); and 1541 Peetersen van Middelburch Bible of Nederlandse Bijbelgenootschap Haarlem (1 A 2).

7
geographic places mentioned in the Acts of the Apostles, respectively.

Figure 2: Map of the Israelites’ wanderings, inserted in a 1534 Van Liesvelt Bible (Cambridge University Library, BSS.223.B34)

The four informative charts are placed in the Bible at the beginning of 1 Maccabees, twice
before Matthew 1 (together with a map), and after John 18. They contain, in order of
appearance, overviews of the history of the Greek and Jewish states, of the history of the Roman
state, of the genealogy of Christ, and of the events and days related to the Passion.
Most maps and charts are accompanied by an explanatory text, defining at the top where
the map should be placed within the Bible and what topics it covers. For instance, the
description of the map of the Israelites’ wanderings begins as follows:

This map (which is supposed to be inserted before the 23rd Chapter of the Book of
Numbers) shows us the way which the people wandered for forty continuous years,
departing from the Land of Egypt … which can also be read in the Books Exodus,
Numbers, and Deuteronomy.24

The reference to the place of insertion underlines that, although these maps and charts were not
originally part of the Van Liesvelt Bible, they were meant to be added to Dutch Bible editions.

24
Dese Caerte (de welcke behoort ingeuoecht te worden voor het xxiij. Capittel des Boecx Numeri) teeckent ons
den wech, die het volck xl. gheduerige Jaren ghewandelt heft, van het Landt Egypti aen … alsoo tselue in de
Boecken Exodi, Numeri, ende Deuteronomy te lesen is.

8
Maps and charts like these circulated in various forms during the early modern period, both as
cut-outs from other editions as well as in separately printed sheets and in manuscript. 25 The
maps bound in with the Cambridge copy were first printed as part of the French Geneva Bible
by Nicolas Barbier and Thomas Courteau in 1559, together with other ‘cartes’: registers and
charts of dates, rulers, and events. The maps and charts were added to help readers deepen their
knowledge of the geographical and chronological dimensions of the biblical text.26 Following
this French example, the Dordrecht printer Jan Canin included both the five geographic maps
and similar informative charts in his Deux-Aes Bible of 1580.27 The maps and charts in the Van
Liesvelt Bible described here are identical to the ones included by Jan Canin in the Deux-Aes
Bible and were thus most likely added to the Bible at the end of the sixteenth century.28
By including these maps and charts within the binding of the 1534 Van Liesvelt Bible,
the reader opens up new possibilities for him- or herself as well as for future readers to engage
with the biblical text. The maps would provide readers with the opportunity to immerse
themselves in the Biblical stories on a contextualizing, visual, and experience-oriented level.
The maps are less concerned with a precise geographic presentation of specific places than with
the religious and devotional significance of the routes and locations in the Bible. In the map of
the Israelites’ forty-year wanderings, not the small place names but the detailed depictions of
principal events, such as Moses receiving the Commandments, grab a reader’s and viewer’s
attention.29 Looking at the map becomes, in the words of Zur Shalev (2015), “an exegetical and
interpretative act,” inherently connected with the biblical narrative.30 This becomes clear from

25
See also: August den Hollander, “Biblical Geography: Maps in Sixteenth-Century Printed Bibles from the Low
Countries,” Church History and Religious Culture 99 (2019): 137. Overviews of Biblical maps in the sixteenth
century can be found in: Wilco C. Poortman and Joost Augusteijn, Kaarten in Bijbels (16e-18e eeuw) (Zoetermeer:
Boekencentrum, 1995); Catherine Delano-Smith and Elizabeth Morley Ingram, Maps in Bibles 1500-1600
(Genève: Libraire Droz, 1991).
26
The maps continued to be included in vernacular Genevan Bibles during the second half of the sixteenth century.
From 1560 onwards, the four maps were usually published alongside another map, depicting the location of
Paradise. The combination of maps was adopted by publishers in the Netherlands, England, and Scotland. See:
Elizabeth Ingram, “Maps as Readers’ Aids: Maps and Plans in Geneva Bibles,” Imago Mundi 45 (1993): 30-31.
27
Various surviving copies of this Bible edition lack some of the maps. For instance, only four out of five maps
have survived in the copies of the Groningen University Library (uklu AG-27) and the Royal Library The Hague
(1702 B 8). For an overview of the history and circulation of the Dutch Deux Aes Bible, see: August den Hollander,
“The Edition History of the Deux Aes Bible”, in: Religious Minorities and Cultural Diversity in the Dutch
Republic. Studies presented to Piet Visser on the Occasion of his 65 th Birthday, ed. August den Hollander, Mirjam
van Veen, Anna Voolstra, and Alex Noord (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2014), 41-72.
28
The map of Paradise and the charts before Genesis and before Ezra that are part of Jan Canin’s Deux Aes Bible
have not been included in the Van Liesvelt copy of Cambridge University.
29
Ingram, “Maps as Readers’ Aids,” 30.
30
Zur Shalev, “Early Modern Geographia Sacra in the Context of Early Modern Scholarship,” in The Oxford
Handbook of the Bible in Early Modern England, c. 1530-1700, ed. Kevin Killeen, Helen Smith, and Rachel Willie
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 197. On biblical maps as exegetical tools, see also: Pauline Moffitt
Watts, “The European Religious Worldview and Its Influence on Mapping”, in: The History of Cartography,

9
the description placed next to the map of the Israelites’ wanderings in the Liesvelt Bible: “The
reader himself should read the aforementioned Chapter 33 of Numbers, where he will find the
names of the same encampments [that are visualized in the map], with all that it implies.”31
When observing the numbered encampments of the Exodus in connection with the Bible text,
the reader becomes, as it were, an eyewitness to the situation. He or she can visually and
religiously participate in the experiences of the various landscapes, towns, and chains of events
which the Israelites would have encountered on their journey.32 The addition of colour in the
maps in the Van Liesvelt Bible could further reinforce the readers’ visual experience of the
biblical events depicted.
In accordance with the maps, the inclusion of informative charts testifies to
developments in the field of biblical antiquarianism and sacred geography in the second half of
the sixteenth century. The growing interest in the application of historical and geographical
contexts to biblical history resulted in an increasing amount of contextualising information,
such as glosses, graphs, and maps, in printed Bible editions.33 As the inclusion of charts in the
Van Liesvelt Bible shows, a late sixteenth-century reader could transfer these interests to older
Bibles, creating new opportunities for the reader’s intellectual understanding of chronology,
history, and biblical politics. Their presence underlines the ‘encyclopaedic’ character of the
book as a ‘knowledge aggregator’. Any reader of the book is invited to actively engage with
various informative elements - textual, paratextual, and visual - simultaneously, in order to gain
a thorough understanding of the Bible text and create new and deepened perspectives on the
connections between the biblical narratives and the historical, geographic, and chronological

Volume Three: Cartography in the European Renaissance, ed. David Woodward (Chicago/London: University of
Chicago Press, 2007), 387.
31
De Leser mach selue het gheseyde xxxiij capittel numeri lesen, alwaer hij de namen der selver legheringhen
gespecificieert vinden sal, met het vervoluch van dien.
32
See also: Walter Melion, “Scripture for the Eyes: Bible Illustration in the Sixteenth-Century Low Countries,” in
Scripture for the Eyes: Bible Illustration in Netherlandish Prints of the Sixteenth Century, ed. James Clifton and
Walter Melion (New York/London: Museum of Biblical Art/D Giles Limited, 2009), 42.
33
The interest in biblical geography is reflected in the presence of a Cranach-based map that is included by the
printer-publishers Van Liesvelt and Peetersen van Middelburch in each of their complete Bible editions, placed at
the beginning of Exodus and depicting the travels of the people of Israel towards the Promised Land. The fact that
the Exodus map is absent from many surviving copies has raised the idea that the inclusion of this map might have
been optional. However, as has been discussed by Den Hollander (2019), Van Liesvelt undoubtedly meant to
include the map in his complete Bible editions from 1526 onwards. At the end of the quire before the start of
Exodus, the words “Hier na volcht die Caerte” (“The map follows hereafter”) are placed, and in the binding register
in the front of the Bible edition of 1526, clear instructions to the binder prove that the map was meant to be included
between quires F and H. See: August den Hollander, “Biblical Geography: Maps in Sixteenth-Century Printed
Bibles from the Low Countries,” Church History and Religious Culture 99 (2019): 142. For a detailed description
of the Cranach map upon which the map included in Van Liesvelt’s and Peetersen van Middelburch’s Bibles has
been based, see: Armin Kuntz, “Cranach as Cartographer: The Rediscovered Map of the Holy Land,” Print
Quarterly 12, no. 2 (1995): 123-44.

10
worlds beyond.34 The included charts become part of the aids to which any future reader could
turn in their reading of the book.
The added maps and charts in the 1534 Van Liesvelt Bible in Cambridge are an example
of the ways in which Bible owners consciously included new material in their Bibles. Van
Liesvelt and Peetersen van Middelburch Bibles functioned as open-ended, creative spaces that
allowed readers to adjust their contents based on personal interests or the popularity of certain
types of paratextual material, as is the case with the maps and charts discussed here. The fact
that remarkably similar maps and charts have been included in at least seven surviving Van
Liesvelt and Peetersen van Middelburch Bibles35 underlines not only that these reading aids
were popular in the late sixteenth-century Bible-reading culture, but also that it was not unusual
to include these elements in decades-old Bibles in order to bring new reading opportunities to
older editions. As early modern Bibles were often read and used throughout decades (and even
centuries), the addition of material could be a way of ‘modernizing’ the book and ensuring its
enduring relevance and attraction. Furthermore, although the additions of these elements might
have been motivated by the choices of a single reader, their impact would extend far beyond
him or her. The results of the interactions with a previous reader, in this case the inclusion of
maps and charts, would become part of the material book and would, as long as they remained,
continue to provide a focus on a visual, geographical, and historical understanding of biblical
narratives.

Transforming text and paratext

The fluidity of the early modern Dutch Bible was not restricted to the addition of elements to
the contents of the book. The text and paratext of the book as they were printed and published
were also subject to adaptation and transformation by opinionated, active readers. As the
example of the adapted liturgical reading schedule discussed in the introduction underlines, the
early modern Bible reader could interfere with the confessional characteristics of the text and
paratext of their Bible copy. By doing so, readers not only impacted their personal use of the
book, but also transformed the transmission of the text for future readers. 36 Through their

34
See also: Wim François and Sabrina Corbellini, “Shaping Religious Reading Cultures in the Early Modern
Netherlands: The “Glossed Bibles” of Jacob van Liesvelt and Willem Vorsterman (1532-1534ff.),” Journal of
Early Modern Christianity 6, no. 2 (2019): 156.
35
See note 23.
36
See: Ann Blair, “Errata Lists and the Reader as Corrector,” in Agent of Change: Print Culture Studies After
Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, ed. Sabrina Alcorn Baron, Eric N. Lindquist, and Eleanor F. Shevlin (Amherst: University
of Massachusetts Press, 2007), 40.

11
adaptations and corrections, readers took part in the completion of text production and
appropriated agency in the creation of ‘proper’ text and paratext that went beyond the control
of the printer-publisher.37
Readers interfered with the text and paratext of their Bibles in various ways. Firstly, the
readers of Van Liesvelt and Peetersen van Middelburch’s Bibles regularly corrected misprints
and typographical errors, including in the numbering of Bible books and in the running titles at
the tops of the pages.38 These corrections often concern paratextual elements. As errata lists
were not included, readers apparently carefully included the paratext in their reading and valued
trustworthy and faultless reading aids. In addition to correcting misprints and typographical
faults, however, readers made meaningful and conscious adjustments to the text and paratext
on the basis of certain religious and confessional preferences. The Bible translations of Van
Liesvelt’s Bibles as well as of Peetersen van Middelburch’s 1535 edition contain various
Reformation-minded features, including the use of words such as ‘congregation’ (rather than
‘church’) and ‘elders’ (instead of ‘priests’).39 In addition, verses that lay at the core of the seven
sacraments sometimes appear in a non-traditional translation. An example is the verse Matthew
4:17 in Van Liesvelt’s Bible edition of 1532: “Mend thy ways, for the kingdom of heaven has
come near.”40 Traditional translations would have “do penance” instead, as the verse served as
an important support for the penitential system of the Church, especially the sacrament of
confession. Surviving copies of Van Liesvelt’s and Peetersen van Middelburch’s Bibles
regularly feature adaptations and corrections that prove readers’ awareness of the significance
of certain translations and their sensibility to its confessional colour, as well as— in some
cases—their willingness to actively adapt these characteristics in order to accommodate their
preferred understanding of the text.

37
Ibid., 37. On practices of errata lists and corrections in the early modern period, see also: Seth Lerer, “Errata:
Print, Politics and Poetry in Early Modern England,” in Reading, Society, and Politics in Early Modern England,
ed. Kevin Sharpe and Steven N. Zwicker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 41-71; David
McKitterick, Print, Manuscript and the Search for Order, 1450-1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2003), 97-138 (Chapter 4).
38
In the Hansken van Liesvelt Bible (1538) of the Leerdam Statenbijbelmuseum, for instance, a reader corrected
the error in the running title (with the Bible book and chapter number) at Isaiah 54 by changing the incorrect “Die
Propheet Hieremia” to “Die Propheet Jesaia”.
39
Jacob van Liesvelt based his translations on Luther’s German Bible translations, for those parts that were
available at the time of printing. In addition to original translations from Luther’s text, Van Liesvelt used
translations that were published in previous German Bible editions (e.g., the 1531 Zürich Bible for the apocryphal
part of the Book of Esther in the Van Liesvelt Bible of 1532) and New Testament editions of, amongst others, the
printer-publishers Hans (I) van Ruremund and Christoffel van Ruremund. The translation Jacob van Liesvelt used
for the New Testament in his editions in 1534-1535 had first been published by Doen Pietersoen in his New
Testament of 1523. In this translation, Pietersoen relied strongly on Luther’s German Bible. Henrick Peetersen
van Middelburch based his 1535 Bible edition on Liesvelt’s translation, but his 1541 edition was predominantly
reliant on Willem Vorsterman’s ‘catholicizing’ editions.
40
Van Liesvelt Bible 1532, Matthew 4:17: Betert u, dat rijc der hemelen is na bi gecomen.

12
 Changing the confessional colour of text or paratext could be accomplished simply by
crossing out a word and replacing it with a handwritten addition. This has been done, for
instance, in the Hansken van Liesvelt Bible (1538) of the Statenbijbelmuseum Leerdam, where
the words “elders of the congregation”, in James 5:14, have been crossed out and replaced by
the handwritten, catholicized version “priests of the church” in the margin.41 Another way in
which early modern readers interfered with the text of their Bibles was by pasting slips of paper
containing a different text onto the page, as has been done in the adapted liturgical reading
schedule already described. Another example of this practice can be found in a Van Liesvelt
Bible (1535) of the Faculty of Theology of Tilburg University (TF PRE 10), where the
Reformation-minded translation was adjusted by a user who glued slips of paper with a
catholicizing (printed) translation across the original text in at least ten instances. 42 Examples
are the adjustment in Ephesians 5:32, where the user changed the word “mystery” to
“sacrament” and “congregation” to “church”, and the change from “elders of the congregation”
to “priests of the church” in James 5:14.43

Figure 3: Paper slips glued onto Ephesians 5:32 (Faculty of Theology of Tilburg University, TF PRE 10)

41
Hansken van Liesvelt’s complete Bible of 1538, copy Statenbijbelmuseum Leerdam (no signature), in margin
of 5:14: priesters der kercken. Crossed out: die oudste vander vergaderingen. The word priesters has also been
written between the lines, just above the removed oudste.
42
Glued-on paper fragments or the remains of glue can be found in Genesis 48:16, Matthew 16:18, Matthew 18:17
(twice), Acts 15:41, 1 Corinthians 11:23, Ephesians 5:32, 1 Timothy 4:14, 2 Peter 1:11, and James 5:14. There
could potentially have been more adaptations that have been lost over time.
43
A similar case is the 1534 Van Liesvelt Bible of the Cambridge University Library (BSS 223.B.34). As in the
Tilburg copy, a paper slip with the text “Priest of the Church” has been glued onto the printed text. Two other
phrases have also been adjusted in this manner, namely Matthew 16:18 and Matthew 18:17. These manipulations
are both in accordance with the Tilburg copy as well.

13
 The texts on the paper slips reveal that they were taken from a copy of the so-called
Louvain Bible, a Catholic Bible that was translated by the Augustinian canon regular Nicolaus
van Winghe and first published in 1548 by Bartholomeus van Grave. The publication of this
Bible was requested and supervised by the Faculty of Theology of the University of Louvain
with the aim of providing a trustworthy, Vulgate-based translation.44 The prologue of this
edition, in which the translator elaborates upon his aim to stay as true to the Latin Vulgate as
possible, has also been inserted in the Tilburg Liesvelt Bible, bound in alongside the already
present prefatory paratextual material, which includes Van Liesvelt’s Lutheran prologue.45 It
remains unclear whether the reader had access to a complete Louvain Bible or only part of it,
and why exactly it was considered necessary to take out these paratextual and textual fragments,
and to carefully insert them into the Van Liesvelt Bible. Perhaps both books contained elements
that were of interest, either in their translation or their paratextual material. Either way, the
reader apparently assumed that including these elements in the Van Liesvelt Bible, thus
changing the confessional colouring of parts of the book, would be a valuable undertaking.
These adaptations, furthermore, remained present in the physical book, and created an object
with a rather eclectic religious colour, in which traditional and Reformation-minded translations
and paratextual elements existed side by side.
A third way to change the printed text was
by scraping off unwanted words from the
page. In a 1535 Van Liesvelt Bible in the
Maurits Sabbe Library Leuven
(P22.005.1/Fo BIJB 1535), a user has
meticulously scraped off the word ‘alone’
in Romans 3:28. In accordance with
Luther’s German Bible translation, the
translation of the verse in various Van
Liesvelt editions and the Peetersen van
Figure 4: Scraped off ‘alone’ in Romans 3:28 (Maurits Sabbe
Library Leuven, P22.005.1/Fo BIJB 1535) Middelburch 1535 edition is: “… that a

44
On the history and characteristics of the Louvain Bible, see: Wim François, “Solomon Writing and Resting:
Tradition, Words and Images in the 1548 Dutch “Louvain Bible”,” in The Authority of the Word: Reflecting on
Image and Text in Northern Europe, 1400-1700, ed. Celeste Brusati, Karl A. E. Enenkel, and Walter Melion
(Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2011), 181-213; Wim François, “De Leuvense Bijbel (1548) en de katholieke
bijbelvertalingen van de tweede helft van de zestiende eeuw,” in De Bijbel in de Lage Landen: Elf eeuwen van
vertalen, ed. Paul Gillaerts (Heerenveen: Royal Jongbloed, 2015), 276-94.
45
On the paratextual elements in Van Liesvelt’s Bibles, amongst which this prologue, and their impact on reading
behaviour, see: Renske A. Hoff, “Framing Biblical Reading Practices: The Impact of the Paratext of Jacob van
Liesvelt’s Bibles (1522-1545),” Journal of Early Modern Christianity 6, no. 2 (2019): 223-50.

14
man is justified without the works of the law, by faith alone.”46 The word ‘alone’ is not present
in the Greek source text, but was added by Luther in accordance with his sola fide theology.47
However, the addition was highly contentious, and the reader of this 1535 Bible appears to have
been aware of that. Moreover, he or she has devoted particular attention to a careful and discrete
elimination of the word. The procedure has barely damaged the paper. The scraping left an open
space that does not attract much attention and that would, at first glance, be perceived as a
slightly strangely placed indentation, rather than as a manipulation of the printed text.
Although scraping was an effective, relatively simple, and common way to remove ink
from animal-based writing material such as parchment or vellum, the vulnerable, easily torn
paper fibres were much less suitable for this treatment.48 In paper books, readers would thus
almost always choose to cover up the text, for instance with ink blobs or glued-on paper slips,
rather than removing the ink from the page.49 Nevertheless, the reader of this Van Liesvelt Bible
chose the latter. As the scraping procedure was considerably more difficult and time-consuming
than simply covering up the text, it can be assumed that the reader who made the confessionally
motivated manipulation consciously chose a way to almost seamlessly integrate his or her
adaptation into the material book. Future readers of the book would encounter a morphed entity
of the printed original and the manipulation. This closeness between the printed book and the
reader’s transformative action demonstrates that the accumulative structure of the material book
would not always be self-evident to future readers.50 The transformative actions that found their
way into the book could sometimes hide in plain sight, and it would not necessarily be clear
where the printed, ‘original’ material stopped and the interferences of previous readers began.
What the various ways of manipulating the text and paratext - either by crossing out,
pasting over, or scraping off the printed words - all have in common is that they were
transformative actions readers consciously undertook to change elements of the book, either

46
Van Liesvelt 1535, Romans 3:28: … dat die mensche gerechtuaerdicht wort sonder toe doen die wercken des
wets / alleene door tgeloue.
47
On the connections between Luther’s theology and his Bible translations, see: Wim François, “The Early Modern
Bible between Material Book and Immaterial Word,” in The Agency of Things in Medieval and Early Modern Art:
Materials, Power and Manipulation, ed. Grażyna Jurkowlaniec, Ika Matyjaszkiewicz, and Zuzanna Sarnecka
(New York: Routledge, 2018), 129-30; Wim François, Bijbelvertalingen in de lage landen (1477-1553): Een
kerkhistorische en theologische benadering (Leuven: Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, 2004), 234-48.
48
See: Joshua Calhoun, The Nature of the Page: Poetry, Papermaking, and the Ecology of Texts in Renaissance
England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020), 82.
49
Surviving examples of scraping practices on early modern paper are rare, but not entirely absent. See: Nicole
Flibbert, “The ‘Art of Scraping’: Knife Erasures in Seventeenth Century English Manuscript Plays,” Journal of
the Penn Manuscript Collective 1, no. 1 (2017),
https://repository.upenn.edu/manuscript_collective_journal/vol1/iss1/3/.
50
Michael Durrant (2020) uses the term ‘accumulative form’ to describe the openness of books to material change.
Durrant, “Old Books, New Beginnings,” 1.

15
because they deemed them errors or to impact confessionally coloured characteristics. The
adaptations of the latter category show that early modern readers viewed their Van Liesvelt and
Peetersen van Middelburch Bibles as part of a broader context of different Bible editions. They
were aware of the subjectivity of translation, the confessional meaning of certain specifics in
phrasing, wording, or referencing, and the developments of these elements over time.
Furthermore, examples such as the paper slips from the Louvain Bible in the Tilburg Van
Liesvelt Bible show that some readers had access to multiple editions simultaneously. Hence,
when speaking about the readers of Van Liesvelt and Peetersen van Middelburch Bibles, it
should be taken into account that they could have encountered different Bible translations on a
regular basis, for instance because they also read other Bible editions; came across Bible
quotations in religious books and prints, or as inscriptions on walls or objects; or heard them
spoken during sermons.51 This intertextual and ‘interconfessional’ context is reflected in, and
may have inspired, the transformative actions of Bible readers.
Moreover, as these transformations became part of the material entity of the book, later
readers would have been confronted with a dynamic combination of translations, confessional
colours, and contemporary theological debates in both printed and handwritten texts. The book
they read would contain a wide diversity of voices—a ‘polyphony’ of the confessional debates
of the past—solidified on the pages. Rather than only passively listening to this multi-voiced
debate, subsequent readers could, if they wished, appropriate the agency to become involved in
it, either in thought alone or by their own transformative actions. When doing so, the lectoral
agency of a reader would not only have concerned their ability to impact the printed text, but
also to respond to or adapt the modulations made by previous readers. In theory, every marginal
correction of a crossed-out section could be crossed out itself, pasted paper slips could be peeled
off, and empty spaces could be refilled. Although it would, in most cases, have been virtually
impossible to return the book to a pristine state, the debate between the book and reader was
not settled after the interferences of a single reader, but could continue in subsequent
interactions.

Influencing appearance and pulling the reader’s gaze

The previous two categories of transformative actions concerned the addition or adaptation of
textual and paratextual elements of the early modern Bible. A book, however, is more than the

51
See also: Tara Hamling, “Living with the Bible in Post-Reformation England: The Materiality of Text, Image
and Object in Domestic Life,” Studies in Church History 50 (2014): 219-22.

16
words on its pages. The idea that not only the contents, but also the appearance of a book
impacts the meaning it conveys and the perception readers gain of it, has become largely
accepted in studies on the history of the book and reading. Visual prompts, such as typography,
rubrication, colour, blank space, and images, played an instrumental role in constructing how
readers perceived the book and the text.52 Early modern translators and printer-publishers of
Bibles were undoubtedly aware of the relevance of these elements. For instance, in his German
New Testament of 1522, Martin Luther regularly used visual separation to underline his
perspectives on the Bible text. He stressed the hierarchy of the New Testament books by setting
off the four books he considered of secondary canonical status from the list of contents by a
large blank space,53 and adjusted the traditional division of pericopes in order to place crucial
sentences, such as Romans 3:28 (“through faith alone”), at the beginning of a paragraph.54 In a
less direct way, choices with regard to typeface,55 printing technique, and the quality of paper
or printing ink would also provide the reader with visual signs that conveyed a sense of the
character and type of book.
The readers of Van Liesvelt or Peetersen van Middelburch Bibles could perform various
actions to influence visual elements of the book. In some cases, this influence could have been
the result of an action taken with other purposes in mind. The addition of marginal annotations,

52
On the relevance of typography and book design in mediating a text, see for instance: Goran Proot, “Designing
the Word of God: Layout and Typography of Flemish 16th-Century Folio Bibles Published in the Vernacular,” De
gulden passer 90, no. 2 (2012): 143-79; Goran Proot, “Converging Design Paradigms: Long-Term Evolutions in
the Layout of Title Pages of Latin and Vernacular Editions Published in the Southern Netherlands, 1541-1660,”
The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 108, no. 3 (2014): 269-305; Nikola von Merveldt, “Vom
Geist im Buchstaben: Georg Rörers reformatorische Typographie der Heiligen Schrift,” in Die Pluralisierung des
Paratextes in der Frühen Neuzeit: Theorie, Formen, Functionen, ed. Frieder von Ammon and Herfried Vögel
(Münster: LIT, 2010), 187-223; Frans Janssen, “The Rise of the Typographical Paragraph,” in Cognition and the
Book: Typologies of Formal Organisation of Knowledge in the Printed Book of the Early Modern Period, ed. Karl
A. E. Enenkel and Wolfgang Neuber (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2004), 9-32; David McKitterick, “How Can We Tell
if People Noticed Changes in Book Design? Early Editions of the Imitatio Christi,” Jaarboek voor Nederlandse
Boekgeschiedenis 19 (2012): 11-31; Claire Bourne, Typographies of Performance in Early Modern England
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020). The theme has also been covered in Laurie Maguire’s Panizzi Lectures
of 2018, titled: “The Rhetoric of the Page”. See: https://www.bl.uk/events/the-rhetoric-of-the-page-reading-blank-
space. The lectures are digitally available at https://soundcloud.com/search?q=laurie%20maguire.
53
See: Mark U. Edwards, Printing, Propaganda, and Martin Luther (Berkeley/Los Angeles/Oxford: University
of California Press, 1994), 112-4. See also: François, “The Early Modern Bible,” 130.
54
Edwards, Printing, Propaganda, and Martin Luther, 122-23. Also discussed by August den Hollander, Verboden
Bijbels: Bijbelcensuur in de Nederlanden in de eerste helft van de zestiende eeuw (Amsterdam: Vossiuspers
Universiteit van Amsterdam, 2003), 23; François, Bijbelvertalingen, 232; François, “The Early Modern,” 130-31.
55
As Molekamp (2013) has argued with regard to typefaces in the Geneva Bible, the choice between the traditional
black letter or ‘humanistic’ roman type was often connected to the reading public and reading behaviour the printer
envisioned and to the presence of certain paratextual elements. See: Femke Molekamp, Women and the Bible in
Early Modern England: Religious Reading and Writing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 28-30. The use
of black letter remained predominant in the Low Countries until the late 1660s, although Latin publications were
usually printed in roman type from the 1540s onwards. See: James Raven and Goran Proot, “Renaissance and
Reformation,” in The Oxford Illustrated History of the Book, ed. James Raven (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2020), 140. Van Liesvelt’s and Peetersen van Middelburch’s Bibles are printed in black letter.

17
for instance, may have been motivated by a wish to include additional theological, historical,
or linguistic context to a certain textual passage. Nevertheless, regardless of their contents, their
presence would impact the page design. Marginalia, either printed or handwritten, would shape
the flow of reading, as they diverted readers’ eyes to the margins and created new movements
across the page.56 In addition to marginalia, previous readers’ markings, underlinings, or the
otherwise ‘setting apart’ of certain textual passages would impact a person’s perception of the
page by ‘pulling’ him or her to certain places. As eye-tracking research has indeed
demonstrated, readers are likely to focus on marked or highlighted parts of a text. Not only do
readers’ eye movements show that they will go towards highlighted areas almost immediately
after starting their reading, but also that they will regularly come back and fixate on these areas
during their reading practice.57

This impact on ‘pulling and pushing’ the eye of the reader— either the person who left the
markings or any future reader— is also in effect in the hand-added application of colour in
approximately a fifth of the surviving Van Liesvelt’s and Peetersen van Middelburch’s Bibles.58
Although two-tone printing (with red and black ink) was possible, and is displayed by Van
Liesvelt and Peetersen van Middelburch on the title pages of their Bible editions, the practice
was time consuming and expensive, because it involved double printing of every sheet, adding
the two ink colours separately.59 The woodcuts, which are included in large numbers in the
various Bible editions of both printers, are thus printed only with black ink.60 The
implementation of rubrication and colour in these Bibles almost always belonged to the realm

56
See also: Robert Clark and Pamela Sheingorn, “Encountering a Dream-Vision: Visual and Verbal Glosses to
Guillaume de Digulleville’s Pelerinage Jhesuchrist,” in Push Me, Pull You: Imaginative, Emotional, Physical, and
Spatial Interaction in Late Medieval and Renaissance Art: 1, ed. Sarah Blick and Laura Gelfand (Leiden/Boston:
Brill, 2011), 29-37; Wim François and Sabrina Corbellini, “Shaping Religious Reading Cultures in the Early
Modern Netherlands: The ‘Glossed Bibles’ of Jacob van Liesvelt and Willem Vorsterman (1532-1534ff.),”
Journal of Early Modern Christianity 6, no. 2 (2019): 156-57.
57
See: Ed Chi, Michelle Gumbrecht, and Lichan Hong, “Visual Foraging of Highlighted Text: An Eye-Tracking
Study,” in Human-Computer Interaction, part III (Berlin/Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag, 2007), 596-97.
58
Thirty-one Bibles with hand-added rubrication or colouring of a total of 150 studied copies.
59
See: Ann Blair, “Managing Information,” in The Oxford Illustrated History of the Book, ed. James Raven
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 179. For an overview of colour printing before 1700, see: Ad Stijnman
and Elizabeth Savage, Printing Colour 1400-1700: History, Techniques, Functions and Receptions
(Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2015), 1-10.
60
For descriptions and discussions of the illustrations in Van Liesvelt’s, Peetersen van Middelburch’s, and fellow
Antwerp printer Vorsterman’s Bibles, see: François, “The Early Modern Bible,” 129-43; Walter S. Melion, “Bible
Illustration in the Sixteenth-Century Low Countries,” in Scripture for the Eyes: Bible Illustration in Netherlandish
Prints of the Sixteenth Century (London/New York: Museum of Biblical Art and D. Giles Ltd, 2009), 14-106; Bart
Alexander Rosier, De Nederlandse bijbelillustratie in de zestiende eeuw (Amsterdam: Centrale Huisdrukkerij
Vrije Universiteit, 1992); Wim François, “Typology - Back with a Vengeance! Text, Images, and Marginal Glosses
in Vorsterman’s 1534 Dutch Bible,” in Imago Exegetica: Visual Images as Exegetical Instruments, 1400-1700,
ed. Walter Melion, James Clifton, and Michel Weemans (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2014), 89-136.

18
 (and financing) of individual readers, put
into practice either at the moment of
buying the book or at a later stage.
The addition of rubrication or
colouring to the book was multifunctional:
it could emphasize the navigational
structure of the page, amplify the devout
qualities of the illustrations, clarify
complex elements, add to the (perceived)
value of the book,61 or enhance the
connection with a specific textual or visual
heritage, such as the medieval manuscript
tradition.62 The latter can be recognized in
a copy of the Epistles of St Paul and the
Apostles, printed by Jacob van Liesvelt in
1523 and kept in the Royal Library of The
Figure 5: Decorated beginning of the Epistles of St Paul (Royal
Library The Hague, KW 230 G 30) Hague (KW 230 G 30). It is lavishly
illuminated, featuring rubrication, coloured woodcuts, gold leaf, coloured initials, and multi-
coloured penwork at the beginning of each chapter. Folkerts and Oostindiër (2017) have argued
that this book and a decorated Bible manuscript from 1519 were likely illuminated at the same
place—possibly the convent of the Tertiaries of Galilea in The Hague, on the basis of its
resemblance in the decoration and penwork, to a breviary by the same (female) scribe— in the
1520s, and could possibly have belonged to the same owner from that moment onwards.63 The

61
As archival research has concluded, the addition of colour to woodcuts generally increased the economic value
of the print or book. See: Jan Van der Stock, Printing Images in Antwerp: The Introduction of Printmaking in a
City, Fifteenth Century to 1585 (Rotterdam: Sound & Vision Interactive, 1998), 207 n. 10; 228 n. 47. However,
the availability and use of coloured woodcuts was not restricted to luxurious books, as hand-coloured prints also
circulated widely as pilgrimage souvenirs and for personal devotion. See: Susan Dackerman, Painted Prints: The
Revelation of Color (Baltimore: Baltimore Museum of Art/Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002), 9-47; 27-
28.
62
See: Truusje Goedings, ‘Afsetters en meester-afsetters’: De kunst van het kleuren 1480-1720 (Nijmegen:
Uitgeverij Vantilt, 2015), 57-58.
63
Suzan Folkerts and Arend Elias Oostindiër, “New Bibles and Old Reading Habits Around 1522: The Position
of the New Testament Translation of the Devotio Moderna among Dutch Printed Bibles,” Quaerendo 47 (2017):
188-89. The decoration in the Van Liesvelt Epistles and the close connection between the printed copy and
manuscripts from roughly the same period affirm that developments in the mechanical production of the book did
not lead to sudden changes in readers’ and users’ ideas concerning the visual features of a book, continuing also
beyond the (rather arbitrary) date of 1 January 1501. Although the majority of books printed after 1500 did not
necessarily need colouring for completion—in contrast to many incunabula, where, for instance, the place of the
initial was left blank during the printing process as it would be included later by hand (see also Raven and Proot,
“Renaissance and Reformation,” 165), this did not necessarily mean that rubrication, illumination, and colouring

19
application of decoration not only increased the resemblance between the printed book and the
late medieval manuscript, but the application of red ink to and penwork to the beginning of each
chapter, and more extensive decoration to the start of each Bible book, foregrounds the structure
of the Bible text and would hence ease navigation through the book.
However, consistent application of colour, as in the Epistles copy, is relatively rare
within the studied corpus of Van Liesvelt and Peetersen van Middelburch Bibles. In many cases,
colour is only applied to several of the woodcuts in the book. A recurrent pattern is that of
colouring that becomes increasingly imprecise and irregular throughout the book. For instance,
in a 1541 Peetersen van Middelburch Bible of the Cambridge University Library (Syn.3.54.3),
the woodcuts and initials in Genesis are fully coloured, but in the book of Exodus the colourist
started to leave some initials and certain elements of the woodcuts blank and reduced the variety
of colours used to mainly red, blue, and yellow. From the book of Joshua towards the end of
the book, an increasing number of woodcuts remain entirely blank. Irregular colouring practices
like these may demonstrate that, as Dackerman (2002) stated, “the appearance of the color itself
was valued over the meticulousness of its application.”64
In other cases, readers appear to have made deliberate choices about the application of
colour in specific woodcuts, although their
motivations are not always easily
reconstructed. An example is the colouring in
a privately-owned New Testament by
Peetersen van Middelburch, an as-yet-
unknown edition that was probably
published around 1542.65 The edition is
illustrated with a total of 103 woodcuts, of
which only four, all in the Gospel of John,
have been carefully coloured. The brightly
coloured woodcuts depict Christ walking on
Figure 6: Coloured woodcut of the Christ healing the man who
the lake of Galilee (John 6:19), Christ writing was born blind in John 9 (Private collection)

was omitted completely. On the decoration in the The Hague Epistles copy, see also: Anna de Bruyn and Renske
Hoff, “Decoratie in Druk”, in Madoc: Tijdschrift over de Middeleeuwen 34, no. 4 (2021).
64
Dackerman, Painted Prints, 9.
65
This is based on the fact that the almanac in the front of the book covers the years 1542 to 1564. The starting
year of the almanac is often close, but not always exactly in accordance with, the year of printing. Peetersen van
Middelburch’s New Testaments of 1540, 1541a, and 1543 all include an almanac that starts in 1539; his New
Testament of 1541b features an almanac starting in 1540; and the almanac in his New Testament of 1546 starts in
1543. The privately-owned New Testament copy under scrutiny here does not include a colophon.

20
in the sand at the scene with the woman caught in adultery (John 8:7-8), Christ healing the man
who was born blind (John 9:1-12), and the washing of the feet (John 13:14-17). The question
arises as to what would have motivated the choice for the woodcuts, but there seems no apparent
reason for the colouring of these four, as they are not connected thematically or by the types of
stories depicted. Nonetheless, the addition of colour would allow the woodcuts and the
pericopes they accompany to immediately stand out to any person leafing through the book. By
doing so, the reader who prompted the transformative action of colouring these four woodcuts
created an easy way for him- or herself to return to the images and the biblical stories they
depict, and to centralize them in his or her reading. When the book moved into the hands of
future readers, moreover, the ‘pulling’ effect of the colouring would have remained present.
The contrasting appearance of the four woodcuts in John’s Gospel— a Bible book that is
represented noticeably less than the Gospels of Matthew and Luke in contemporary
lectionaries— sets them apart from other images and stories, creating a form of internal
hierarchy in which the depictions in John 6, John 8, John 9, and John 13 should, and would,
receive more attention than others. The change in the visual appearance of these pages, in other
words, would pull the gaze of any future reader to these woodcuts and these biblical passages,
stimulating him or her to at least linger upon them for a moment and take the pericopes they
depict into account.

Conclusion

The early modern Bible was a fluid, malleable, and accumulative thing. As the printed copies
moved into the realm of readers, Van Liesvelt’s and Peetersen van Middelburch’s Bibles served
as open-ended, creative spaces for the transformative actions of readers. As has been shown in
this article, the early modern readers of these Bibles appropriated a lectoral agency that enabled
them to act beyond the ideas and control of the printer-publishers and to play a crucial role in
shaping the book and reading behaviour, both for themselves and for future readers. As the
book was passed on from hand to hand, its contents, texts, paratexts, and visual appearance
were regularly adapted in accordance with the preferences and customs of the readers that
encountered it. Furthermore, this ability of the material book to change and develop ensured its
durability through time and space.66 Examples such as the inclusion of late sixteenth-century
maps show not only that Van Liesvelt’s and Peetersen van Middelburch’s Bibles were read for

66
See also Durrant, “Old Books, New Beginnings.”.

21
multiple decades after their printing date, but also that readers embraced the possibility of
‘modernizing’ and tailoring their Bibles in order to make them more suitable to contemporary
reading practices. In a similar way, the manipulation of confessionally coloured characteristics
could ensure the functionality, ‘readability’, and attraction of the book among various religious
communities.
Later readers of these manipulated copies encountered books that contained an
“intertextual layering of voices.”67 As they read the book, readers engaged not only with the
work of the printer-publishers, but with the morphed, material entity of the printed original and
the transformative actions of prior users. As demonstrated by the examples presented in this
article, the adjustments could impact the reading experience of future readers in various ways:
by influencing the ways they navigated the book, by providing them with additional
chronological, historical, or geographical knowledge, by shaping their understanding of the
confessional colour of the text or paratext, or simply by prompting them to turn their attention
to certain textual, paratextual, or visual elements of the book. In doing so, the voices of previous
interactions would have sounded alongside and simultaneously with those of the printed
‘original’. In some cases, it might have even been complex to distinguish between the two, as
the various elements of the book merged together into a new, unique, and polyphonic entity.
The early modern Bible was not a two-dimensional, static carrier of text.68 It was a book that
was moved and moveable, adapted and adaptable, transformed and transformable. The readers
of Van Liesvelt’s and Peetersen van Middelburch Bibles eagerly joined that creative journey.

67
Clark and Sheingorn, “Encountering a Dream-Vision,” 19.
68
See also Reynolds, “‘Such dispersive scattredness’.”

22
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