ABSTRACT
In sixteenth-century England, as the Protestant Reformation harnessed print technology, a market for English printed Bibles opened up and rapidly expanded with the publication of the Geneva Bible in 1560, and in the following century of the King James Version, first printed in 1611. The reformed religion required personal, introspective reading of the scriptures to be carried out ‘euerie day, twise at the least’.1 The Geneva Bible was highly instrumental in shaping and sustaining this religious reading culture, owing to its unprecedented availability and affordability in the English Bible market. In the second half of the sixteenth century more households than not which had the resources to own and read books would have had a copy of the Geneva Bible, meaning that we can posit it as one of the most intensively read texts of a large proportion of early modern households during its publication life in England.
