The Godly Child's “Power and Evidence” in the Word

It has long been an uncontested and largely unqualified commonplace of historiography that the story of the Protestant Reformation is a story of reading and writing. This is a corollary of the equally unchallenged view of Christianity as a religion of the book. ¹ Not surprisingly, both opinions owe their popularization to the Protestant Reformation itself, whose controversialists and publicists routinely exploited and touted print as an evangelical instrument. Besides the blatant message of the numerous esoteric works of biblical commentary and interpretation from this period that established reading and writing as a pillar of piety and ‘true’ religion, we can find in a popular text such as John Foxe's Book of Martyrs (1563) both a documentary archive of the acts of Christian martyrs and a monument to writing itself, which was the sine qua non for the martyrs' renown. But if we look beyond the words of clerics and other learned advocates to the experience of laypersons, especially the experience of illiterate women and children, the Reformation story bears a somewhat different moral. In the practice of the less educated laity we find the persistence of a culture whose religious knowledge and authority remained rooted in speech and oral modes of communication.