ABSTRACT
When John Osgood of Andover, Massachusetts, made his will on 12 April 1650, he assigned eighteen shillings to the meeting house of Newbury "to buy a cushion for the minister to lay his book upon.'" This provision of a luxurious material, a soft padding for the heavy word of God, reminds us of the extraordinary reverence with which the Bible was treated in the seventeenth century. Valued for its content, as Holy Scripture, the book was also venerated as a sacred artefact, as a Puritan totem, and as the touchstone of the Protestant Reformation. Even in austere New England, in a religious culture set firm against superstition, the physical bound volume possessed some of the attributes of a religious icon or talisman. John Osgood's will, providing an eighteenshilling cushion for a five-shilling book, reminds us that the Bible was worthy of unusual handling, devout care, and special public presentation. The Bible cushion was, perhaps, the Puritan successor to the elaborately embellished lectern of Old World religion.
