Manifold Greatness: The Creation and Afterlife of the King James Bible

Manifold Greatness: The Creation and Afterlife of the King James Bible, one of the Exhibitions at the Folger opened on September 23, 2011 and closed on January 16, 2012. The exhibition is at the center of an ambitious project partnering the Folger Shakespeare Library and the Bodleian Library of the University of Oxford, which recently produced a related exhibition, Manifold Greatness: Oxford and the Making of the King James Bible. After the Folger exhibition closed in January 2012, it traveled to the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, which assisted in the production of the website.

Through materials from the year 1000 to 2011, Manifold Greatness: The Creation and Afterlife of the King James Bible offers a "biography" of one of the world's most famous books, the King James Bible of 1611, which marks its 400th anniversary in 2011.

Beginning with tenth-century Anglo-Saxon biblical poems, the exhibition moves swiftly to the dramatic story of the early English Bibles, for which translators sometimes risked and even lost their lives. Rare books, manuscripts, and portraits then tell the stories of the tense conference at which James I agreed to a new Bible, and the four dozen or more top English scholars who created it over several years.

A look at the centuries-long "afterlife" of their famous text in public life, literature, entertainment, and the arts takes up the second half of the display—including, among numerous other items, the Folger first edition of the King James Bible, seventeenth-century family Bibles and lavishly bound editions, Handel's Messiah (based largely on the King James Bible), King James Bibles owned by Frederick Douglass and Elvis Presley, and the voices of the Apollo 8 astronauts as they read verses from Genesis on Christmas Eve 1968 as they orbited the Moon.

Curation

Curators

This exhibition was co-curated by Hannibal Hamlin and Steven Galbraith.

Hannibal Hamlin Associate Professor of English at the Ohio State University, studied English at the University of Toronto and completed his doctorate in Renaissance Studies at Yale University. Renaissance literature and culture, especially Shakespeare, Donne, the Sidneys, and Milton, the Bible as/and/in literature, metrical psalms, and lyric poetry are among his scholarly interests.

His publications include Psalm Culture and Early Modern English Literature (Cambridge, 2004), The Sidney Psalter: Psalms of Philip and Mary Sidney, co-editor (Oxford World Classics, 2009), The King James Bible after 400 Years: Literary, Linguistic and Cultural Influences, co-editor (Cambridge, 2011), along with numerous journal articles, book chapters, and reviews.

A book on the Bible in Shakespeare is Hamlin’s major current project, in support of which he has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies (a Frederick Burkhardt Fellowship), and the National Humanities Center, among other grants.

He is editor of the journal Reformation and guest editor of a forthcoming forum on Poetry and Devotion for Religion and Literature. To mark the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible he is also organized an international scholarly conference at OSU in May 2011.

Steven Galbraith the Folger Shakespeare Library’s Andrew W. Mellon Curator of Rare Books (2008–2011) and now Curator of the Cary Graphic Arts Collection at Rochester Institute of Technology, is an expert on the history of the book. He came to the Folger in 2007 from the Ohio State University Library, where he was Curator of Rare Books and Manuscripts as well as a Visiting Professor of English. Prior to this he worked as a reference librarian at the University of Maine.

His publications include The Undergraduate's Companion to English Renaissance Writers and Their Web Sites (Libraries Unlimited, 2004) and articles in Reformation and Spenser Studies.

He is currently working on a critical edition of Thomas Drue’s Duchess of Suffolk, a book on Edmund Spenser’s printing history, and a textbook on rare book librarianship.

He earned his MLS from the University of Buffalo and his PhD in English Renaissance Literature from the Ohio State University.

Curators' insights

Contents of the exhibition

Manifold Greatness exhibition material

Scholars insights on Manifold Greatness

Manifold Greatness children's exhibition

Manifold Greatness family guide

Supplemental materials

Multimedia

Website

Related publications

Manifold Greatness: The Making of the King James Bible (2011), published by Bodleian Library Publishing, is a richly illustrated, accessible, and meticulous account of the creation and afterlife of the 1611 King James Bible. Edited by Helen Moore and Julian Reid, contributors include Moore and Reid, Valentine Cunningham, Steven Galbraith, Hannibal Hamlin, Diarmaid MacCulloch, Peter McCullough, Judith Maltby, Christopher Rowland, and Elizabeth Solopova.

Related programs

Traveling exhibition

A traveling panel exhibition, inspired by the Folger exhibition and produced by the Folger in partnership with the American Library Association (ALA) toured 40 sites throughout the United States from 2011 through the summer of 2013.

  • Read blog posts about the various tour locations.
  • Watch videos from host sites for the traveling exhibition including lectures by experts, events, exhibits, and more.
  • View a Flickr photostream of images from events and exhibitions from various tour locations.


This exhibition was made possible by a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this exhibition do not necessarily reflect those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.