Houghton Library, Gospel Harmony (1630)

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In 1633, on his progress northward, King Charles spent the night in rural Huntingdonshire. There, his host told him about the nearby religious household of Little Gidding, where the extended Ferrar family had devised an ingenious method of “harmonizing” the four Gospels. Cutting apart printed copies of the books of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, they pasted the pieces back together into a single chronology divided into 150 discrete episodes. In effect, they were “translating” into English an earlier Latin harmony, Cornelius Jansen’s Concordia evangelica (1549), using scissors, knives, and paste. Intrigued by this curious practice, King Charles sent a servant to Little Gidding to borrow the book. 

Although at first reluctant, the family obeyed and handed over their carefully constructed volume. The king kept it for months, taking “such delight in it as there passed not a day but he read once a day in the book in private.”  When the Harmony was finally returned, it came with the king’s own annotations – marks that “testified . . . to the king’s diligent perusal of it,” as John Ferrar would later write. So taken was he with the volume that King Charles asked the family to make him his own Gospel harmony, thereby initiating a relationship that would, over the course of the next decade, radically transform Little Gidding’s bookwork. 

The Little Gidding Gospel harmony now at Harvard’s Houghton Library (Vault A 1275.5) is very likely the early volume that King Charles borrowed. Lost from the historical record for centuries, it was rediscovered in 1934, when Bernard George Hall noticed an odd volume advertised in an old bookseller’s catalogue. “The back is broken but the sides are in good condition,” the catalogue reported, concluding that the front and back boards “would make an excellent blotting pad.”  Hall, who was in the process of editing George Herbert’s poems, recognized that this rare book was probably the product of Herbert’s friends at Little Gidding and rescued it from the unwitting bookseller. Unfortunately, he died shortly after his remarkable discovery, and the book was sold to Harvard Library for £650. En route to Harvard’s special collections vault, though, it made one last stop: the British Pavilion at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, where it could be seen in the Royal Room alongside a copy of the Magna Carta and a 1550 Greek New Testament lavishly bound for Queen Elizabeth.

Because it is the earliest extant book made at Little Gidding, the Houghton Harmony, as it will be called here, offers critical evidence of the evolution of the household’s bookwork and devotional practices. Before royal patronage, the members of Little Gidding made books for their own edification and worship. For instance, having the Gospels in a single chronological narrative enabled the family to read aloud the story of Christ’s life in its entirety each month, from birth to resurrection. As Joyce Ransome has argued, it is also possible that the family was interested in publishing their English version of Jansen’s Latin harmony in print and developed the cut-and-paste method as a means of producing a printer’s dummy, as an unillustrated 1631 harmony now at the Bodleian Library seems to suggest. 

Neither a printer’s dummy nor a product intentionally designed for royal consumption, like the later concordances, the Houghton Harmony stands at the crossroads of Little Gidding’s private practices and its public – published – self-presentation. It is illustrated, like the later gospel harmonies, but not gloriously so; almost every image comes from the series Vita, Passio, et Resurrectio Jesu Christi (The Life and Passion of Christ), engraved and published by the Flemish printmaker Adriaen Collaert after designed by Maarten de Vos. In this edition, each pasted print has been linked to its source. Similarly, this Gospel harmony “harmonizes” the four Gospels but without any of the more complicated navigational hypertexts that become a standard feature in the later volumes. Sometimes the textual sources are labeled, but more often they are not. To facilitate study of Little Gidding’s cut-and-paste method, this edition identifies and color-codes the source of each textual fragment. Those passages that are more complexly remixed will be readily visible by the array of different colors on the page.