ABSTRACT
In 1620, in rural Northamptonshire, Lady Grace Mildmay left a manuscript containing over 900 pages of devotional meditations as her most precious bequest to her daughter. And that remarkable output is surpassed in bulk by the obsessive writings of a London commoner, Nehemiah Wallington, who by mid-century had filled over 50 notebooks with a wide variety of devotional writings. Before the rise of the blog, even before the epistolary outpouring of the eighteenth century, there developed in England a lively culture of lay people's writing "in divinity". They wrote not for professional ends, not for print, but because writing was a key part of the way they had been taught to digest the Bible and apply it to their own lives. This chapter explores what it meant for ordinary lay folk to read the Bible. The story of the translation of the Bible into the vernacular is well known and has received a number of recent re-tellings.
