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

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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

On the exhibition's opening day, September 23, 2011, the Folger interviewed the curators to get their insights into the exhibition and what they hope visitors will take away from it.

Steve Galbraith: I'd like to humanize the story for visitors. These were real people making great sacrifices—William Tyndale, an earlier Bible translator, lost his life—and it also took hard labor to produce translations. We focus, for example, on John Rainolds, who worked on the King James Bible literally on his deathbed. Then you turn the corner and come to the cultural influence of the King James Bible, and that's all about people, too—the authors, the musicians. It was a challenge to represent that, though, with items from this whole universe of examples.

Hannibal Hamlin: Yes, and how to place those examples within the cases became a question for us, too. We found ourselves putting an image of Martin Luther King, Jr., and a still of Linus from A Charlie Brown Christmas in the same case, as well as a rare Folger copy of Handel's Messiah. They're all part of this larger story of the influence of the King James Bible.


Steve Galbraith: Manifold Greatness is also the first project to bring together what our Oxford colleague Helen Moore calls the "Big Three," the three major surviving manuscript records of the translation of the King James Bible.

Hannibal Hamlin: The Big Three! That's the Epistles translation from the Lambeth Palace Library; the translator John Bois's notes (or rather, a very old copy of his notes) of some of the translators' discussions; and an annotated copy of a Bishops' Bible showing the translators' changes from that text.

Steve Galbraith: The Bishops' Bible, with words crossed out and changes made—that really shows you, word by word, the painstaking process of translation that created the King James Bible, and how it all came out of the deep education and training of those translators.


Hannibal Hamlin: The idea of a King James Bible exhibition at the Folger snowballed as we began to work with the Bodleian Library at Oxford and later with the American Library Association on the traveling panel exhibit, and when we applied for the NEH grant. As the project developed, we could see the Folger exhibition would be framed differently, that it would have a longer, broader scope, including America as well as England, and coming up to the present.

Steve Galbraith: That meant we would need to borrow some materials for the later period, in addition to the earlier items that include our own rare Folger holdings. But with the prospect of the traveling panel exhibit, it was exciting to be able to share our Folger expertise and interpretation of the subject so widely. It really struck home to me today when we met with the coordinators from the 40 libraries around the United States that will be showing the traveling panel exhibit. They were just so enthusiastic; they have so many plans for the presentations where they are. I was really overwhelmed that our work in the Folger exhibition here is going to travel to that many places and people.

Hannibal Hamlin: Part of our partnership with the Bodleian included their loans of some very early materials, too. The Anglo-Saxon manuscript from about the year 1000, the Wycliffite Bible manuscript from the 1380s—I always gravitate toward those in the first case as I walk in.


Steve Galbraith: We wanted to include a nineteenth-century American family Bible and we hadn't found the right one. Then, rather hesitantly, Hannibal mentioned his own family Bible, and (Folger exhibitions manager) Caryn Lazzuri and I loved it.

Hannibal Hamlin: It feels odd, but nice, that my family Bible is in the exhibition. I've been surprised at how interested people are in that—a family Bible of one of the curators. And there's a Capitol Hill connection; my great-great-great-grandfather was Abraham Lincoln's first vice president. We're showing the page with the record of his two marriages. People in the family had looked at the front and the back pages of the Bible before and not seen much of interest. But from working on this exhibition, I knew that there are often records in the middle, between the two Testaments. And that's what I found. I was really happy to see that this existed.

Contents of the exhibition

Manifold Greatness exhibition material

Scholars insights on Manifold Greatness

Manifold Greatness children's exhibition

Manifold Greatness family guide

Manifold Greatness website

An extensive website, Manifold Greatness: The creation and afterlife of the King James Bible, jointly produced by the Folger Shakespeare Library and the Bodleian Library with assistance from the Harry Ransom Center, was created as both a lasting online resource and a companion project. It includes a variety of supplemental materials and interactive elements.

Before the King James Bible

Making the book

Later influences

Additional elements

Discover answers to Frequently Asked Questions about the King James Bible or learn what separates myth from reality.

A companion blog, which follows the exhibition from March 2011 to the final traveling tour destination, provides insight into the events, artifacts, and people involved in Manifold Greatness.

Supplemental materials

Multimedia

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

Talks and Screenings at the Folger

Folger Theatre

  • Othello, October 18 – December 14, 2011

Folger Consort

Recording of A New Song available through CD Baby

Conferences

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.

Suggestions for further reading and research

This bibliography is not meant to be comprehensive, but is meant to lead the interested reader to some of the many resources on the King James Bible.

The following finding aids were prepared by the Folger Shakespeare Library and the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, Austin, to suggest some of the rare resources at those institutions which relate to the topics included in the Manifold Greatness project. Hands-on research access to rare materials is limited. Scholars and other qualified researchers seeking the opportunity to work with these or other rare books and manuscripts should apply to the library in question.


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.