According to Isaac Watts’s Discourse on the Way of Instruction by Catechisms (1730),
catechisms, were ‘the best Summaries of Religion for Children’. Simple and brief, Cotton
Mather’s The A, B, C of Religion read in its entirety:
Q. Who Made You and all the World?
A. The Great GOD made me, to serve Him.
Q. Who Saves the Children of Men from all their Miseries?
A. Jesus Christ, who is both God and Man, saves them that Look unto Him.
Q. What will become of You, when You Dye?
A. If I obey Jesus Christ, my Soul will go to the Heavenly Paradise; and He will
afterwards Raise me from the Dead. If I continue Wicked, I shall be Cast among
the Devils.
The most durable genre for children, apart from catechisms, was the Bible story
collection which had first appeared in the high middle ages when Peter Comestor
composed the Historia Scholastica (c. 1170) in Latin for students at the University of
Paris. Entering Latin grammar school curricula and adult devotional literature in the
later middle ages, the Historia Scholastica’s stories provided Europe with a common set
of Bible narratives. Most books of Bible stories were rooted in Reformation attempts to
familiarise children (and unschooled adults) with Biblical material.
Bible story collections written solely for children emerged in the mid-seventeenth
century and were the first extended prose narratives composed specifically for child
readers. They thus predated the emergence of fiction specifically intended for children by
about fifty years. Children’s Bible histories, which claimed to be true stories composed
by ‘the Holy Penman’ himself, differed from contemporaneous chapbooks, which were
written for a mixed audience and whose prose mixed ‘true reports’ of prodigious
experiences with fanciful fictions like Tom Thumb, Robin Hood and Fortunatus.
In France, Nicolas Fontaine’s L’Histoire du Vieux et du Nouveau Testament (1670 et
seq.) provided virtually the only Bible story collection for Catholic children until the
nineteenth century, when additional titles appeared. In Germany, Johann Hübner’s
Zmeymahl Zwey und funffzig Biblische Historien (1714 et seq.) dominated the eighteenth
century and was only slowly displaced by competing versions in the late eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries. In England, Bible story collections began in 1690 but proliferated
only in the mid-eighteenth century when John Newbery, and later his heirs and rival
publishers, repeatedly printed The Holy Bible Abridged (London 1757 et seq.), which was
followed in the later eighteenth century by The Bible in Miniature, A Concise History of
the Old and New Testaments, The Holy Bible Abridged, A New History of the Holy Bible,
The Children’s Bible and The History of the Holy Bible Abridged. The genre appeared in
Switzerland and the USA in the late eighteenth century, but south of the Alps and
Pyrenees only after 1945.
The principal developments in the history of Bible story collections were their shift
from negative to positive exempla at the beginning of the eighteenth century, their slow
reduction in the number of female characters in the course of the eighteenth century,
and their increasing emphasis on New Testament stories in the nineteenth century.
Eighteenth-century writers assumed that all children shared a ‘common spiritual
inheritance’, as did Isaac Watts in his Discourse on the Education of Children and Youths
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