A curious hieroglyphick Bible: or select Passages in the Old and New Testaments
represented with Emblematical Figures for the Amusement of Youth Designed chiefly
to familiarize tender Age in a pleasing and diverting Manner, with early Ideas of the
Holy Scripture to which are subjoined, a short account of the Lives of the Evangelists,
and other pieces.Coles united hieroglyphics to Latin instruction in his 1675 book (published in London)
with the forbidding title, Nolens Volens; or, You shall make Latin whether you will or no...
Together with the youth’s visible Bible.
In some Latin schools, boys encountered Sebastian Châteillon’s Dialogorum Sacrorum
libri quattuor (London 1577), which reformulated those parts of the Bible that lent
themselves to dialogic presentation. Thus Châteillon’s dialogues began not with
Creation, but with the serpent’s conversation with Eve, while Sodom included Lot’s
altercation with the lowering mob, though it excised his daughters’ discussion of
inebriating him in order to become pregnant by him.
Scripture catechisms inculcated a knowledge of Bible content, in two modes.
Protestants favoured prescribed responses, while Catholics tended to allow content
summaries. One of the earliest Protestant scripture catechisms was Eusebius Pagit’s
Historie of the Bible briefly collected by way of question and answer (London 1613). It
had grown out of Pagit’s nightly practice for twenty-six years of reading Scripture to his
assembled servants and family, making ‘such observations as [he] thought fit for their
capacities and understanding’, and questioning them ‘daily [to take] an account how
they understood and retained [Bible content] in memorie’. Bible catechisms continued
into the eighteenth century, for example with Ambrose Rigge’s Scripture Catechism for
Children. Collected out of the whole Body of the Scriptures, for the instructing of Youth
with the Word of the Lord in the Beginning... that they might be taught our children, and
Children’s children... Presented to Fathers of Families, and Masters of Schools, to train up
their Children and Scholars, in the Knowledge of God and the Scriptures (London 1702).
Historical catechisms, like some Bible story collections, could on occasion be
interconfessional, as when the English Protestant publisher T.Cooper adapted the Jesuit
Abbé Claude Fleury’s Catechisme Historique for Anglican children. The genre survived
into the nineteenth century with A Brief Historical Catechism of the Holy Scriptures,
designed for the Use of Children and Young Persons (York 1815), which its author William
Alexander proudly announced had small format and clear facts, so that even the poorest
classes might buy, and understand, it.
Bible subjects also made their way into English chapbooks like those printed and
distributed by the English firm of Dicey. Individual stories, like Joseph and Potiphar’s
wife sold well, while cheap reference works like A Family Index to the Bible (Northampton
1739) entered modest households at small cost (two pence apiece or one shilling and six
pence per dozen).
English publishers supplied American printers in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, a situation confirmed by the title of Cotton Mather’s catechism, Spiritual Milk
for Boston Babes in either England (1662; first British edition 1646). Mather’s Spiritual
Milk lived on in the eighteenth century in editions of the enormously influential New-
England Primer (c. 1686 et seq.) assembled by the transplanted London printer,
268 TYPES AND GENRES