On his way to York in 1642, Charles I paid a visit to the community of Little Gidding where he examined the harmony of the Pentateuch recently completed for the Prince of Wales by the Ferrar/Collet family. Charles’s interest in Little Gidding began in the early 1630s and he commissioned a number of biblical concordances from the community, noting, “How happy a prince were I if there were many such virgins in my kingdom that would employ themselves as these do at Gidding.” Yet these were no ordinary biblical concordances. As Michael Gaudio explains in this excellent study, they are composite or patchwork texts made up of printed religious images and biblical verses. The organization of the concordances was established by Nicholas Ferrar, while the work of selection, cutting, arranging, and pasting the pages was done by the women of the family. Gaudio shows how their work is informed by broader Caroline debates about church doctrine, word and image, the incarnation, and Mosaic law. Drawing on an impressive array of interdisciplinary scholarship and supported by beautifully reproduced plates, Gaudio makes a compelling case for the exegetical complexity and cultural richness of the Little Gidding concordances.

The first chapter considers the intersection between print culture and domestic handiwork. While the biblical texts used in the concordances were largely drawn from readily available editions of the Protestant Authorized Version, the religious images came from the Low Countries and were often Roman Catholic in doctrinal sympathy. Working with scissors and paste, the Little Gidding community deliberately created fragments of text and image in order to achieve a new, composite unity. For Gaudio, this is a means of negotiating the doctrinal differences between Protestantism and Roman Catholicism, as well as the fracture in the Caroline church between Arminianism and Calvinism. For some Puritans, Little Gidding was little more than an “Arminian Nunnery.” Yet Gaudio’s exploration of how public doctrinal dispute affects the pious work of domestic interiors moves beyond polemical labeling. He sensitively examines the broader significance of patchwork, embroidery, needlework, cutting, pasting, and seaming in the production of the concordances. This is high-quality scholarship that brings a number of disciplines into fruitful conversation with one another.

The second chapter expands on the claim that the concordances ‘‘are aids for the embodiment of scripture’’ (82). Gaudio traverses theological debates about the incarnation, the imagery of Christ’s body on the cross, the discourse of experimentation, martyrdom, and the king’s body, with great skill. The central question is whether the prints in the concordances offer the viewer a form of “virtual participation” based on a division between body and representation, or whether they are better understood as a kind of ‘‘incarnational experience’’ based on the inability of the image to ‘‘body forth real presence’’ (100). Gaudio argues that the concordances pose rather than answer this question: this is fair enough, but I would have enjoyed some further consideration of how this position is achieved rhetorically, and of the broader exegetical implications of the biblical verses that accompany the images.

The final chapter reads the concordances in relation to Caroline debates about Mosaic law. Do the New Testament Gospels render the Mosaic law largely obsolete, or does the law continue to resonate in the ceremonial practices of the church? William Laud, archbishop of Canterbury, favored the latter interpretation and his ‘‘beauty of holiness’’ agenda stressed that point even as it proved unpopular with many nonceremonialists and Puritans. Gaudio examines the Pentateuch harmony made for Laud and the discussion of Mosaic law and ecclesiology draws richly on the exegetical practice of typology, arguing that the printed image occupies the ‘‘questionable space between the law and the gospel’’ (161). This chapter would have benefited from some discussion of the rhetoric of moderation, which, as Peter Lake, Alexandra Walsham, and Ethan Shagan have shown, is central to debates around theology and ecclesiology alike. A couple of other quibbles might also be mentioned here. The claim that ‘‘few English Bibles contained illustrations’’ (19) is a dubious one. Important printings of the Great, Tyndale, Coverdale, Bishops’, and Geneva Bibles contain religious illustrations, sometimes copiously so (see also the title page to the Old and New Testaments in the Authorized Version of 1613). And the idea that Charles I was a pacifist (168) glosses over the very martial first years of his reign as well as his battlefield activities during the Civil Wars. None of this detracts, however, from a fluent, original, and thought-provoking book that will be of interest to a wide range of early modern scholars.