British Library, Acta Apostolorum & The Revelation of S. John the Divine (ca. 1637)

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Not all of the cut-and-paste books made at Little Gidding are Gospel harmonies. After the household's patriarch Nicholas Ferrar died in 1637, the books begin to look and operate differently, perhaps because they are more fully made under the direction of Ferrar’s niece Mary Collet. Some. are more straightforward concordances. For instance, at St. John’s College, Oxford, there is a version of the Pentateuch or the Five Books of Moses “Methodically distributed into three great classes, Morall, Ceremoniall, and Polyticall.” Each section is further subdivided into different subjects so that its recipient, Archibishop William Laud, might quickly find what is said in the Old Testament on any given topic. The Royal Library concordance, a few pages of which are included in this digital network, follows this same model. 

Other books function more like ornately illustrated versions of scripture. That is the case with a slim volume now at the British Library, the Acta Apostolorum & The Revelation of S. John the Divine, made at Little Gidding around 1637.

The first part of the book is text pasted from the Acts of the Apostles, the fifth book of the New Testament, after the four canonical Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. The women of Little Gidding have illustrated it with a series of prints designed largely after Jan van der Straet and published by the Flemish printmaker Philips Galle in 1582. Although engravings from other series are present, the book looks and operates much like a collection of prints that has been annotated with the biblical text rather than a concordance illustrated with relevant prints. Often the biblical text is spaced widely to fit the page, suggesting that the designers privileged the layout and neat, ornate appearance of the book.

The second part of the volume is text pasted from the Book of Revelation, the last book of the New Testament. Many of the prints used in this section come from the series Icones Revelationum S Ihoannes Evangeliste in Pathmo, mostly made after designs by Jan Snellinck and published at the end of the sixteenth century by Gerard de Jode. Others come from images by Pieter van der Borcht used to illustrate a 1613 New Testament. On some pages, the illustrations look more like emblematic collages, with individual items cut and pasted alongside the text in elaborate arrays. 

While this volume has none of the complex textual formatting of many of the earlier Gospel harmonies, it is still invested in Little Gidding’s cut-and-paste method of composition. This is clearly seen toward the end of the book, fol. 40r, where a disembodied hand has been pasted. It is cut from the same print of John used in the Cotsen Harmony and the King's Harmony, among others not present in this digital network. Over the writing in John’s open book, Collet has pasted printed fragments of Latin text as if movable type, rather than script, flows from his quill pen. Here, John’s hand is the women of Little Gidding’s hands, and his pensive writing reflects the meditative devotional process used to compose printed fragments, just as it does in the King’s Harmony. Thus, through visual diffraction within the space of the book and intentional resonances across other harmonies, the composers of Little Gidding affirm the accord of the Gospels across differences in their style and content, fostering reading strategies in which a variety of opinions and approaches does not weaken but strengthens the collective.