Cotsen Children's Library, Gospel Harmony (1635)

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King Charles’ admiration the 1630 Houghton Harmony radically transformed the household’s publishing practices. Instead of compiling concordances purely for their own daily rituals, the Ferrar family now had a powerful and public audience.  Spurred on by this support, they reinvested their energies in developing their cut-and-paste method of composition as, in one Ferrar family member’s words, “a new kind of printing” – a mechanical method of reproducing multimodal machines for prayer and study. These new harmonies, many of them gospel harmonies made around 1635 and later, incorporate more images from a wider array of sources as well as more intricate collages. 

The most significant innovation is a new format for each episode, named the “Collection.” Within the “Collection,” a linear, narrative account (the “Context”) is pasted in one typeface, usually roman letter. Any superfluity or variance among evangelists is included as a “Supplement” that is pasted in a different typeface below, usually black letter and indented. Handwritten annotations at the end of some fragments tell the reader where in the harmony they might pick up reading the same gospel chapter and therefore serve as hyperlinks connecting the cut-up pieces of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Thus the “Collection” depicts the New Testament gospels simultaneously as both a compelling story, told chronologically, and a complex, even at times contradictory set of material documents. These new navigational tools do not dictate or clamp down on individual exploration but rather transform Scripture into a multidimensional labyrinth for active reading and rereading. 

It was in this context that the 1635 Gospel harmony now at the Cotsen Children’s Library, Princeton University, was made. Although its early history is obscure, the household most likely made it for the Cotton family of nearby Conington. Robert Bruce Cotton and his son Thomas were renowned book collectors in the seventeenth century, and many leading intellectuals of the day consulted their extensive library of printed books and medieval manuscripts. The Cottons seem to have treasured the harmony as a family heirloom, since it escaped the transfer of their library to the nation around 1702 and what would become the British Museum. In fact the book stayed in Conington until at least 1742, when John Cotton’s daughter Elizabeth married Thomas Bowdler and the couple moved to Bath, effectively transferring ownership of this valued volume to the Bowdler line. 

Like the Cottons (and Ferrars and Collets at Little Gidding), the Bowdlers were a remarkably literary family that treasured books and learning, especially the women. Today, their name is primarily associated with “bowdlerizing,” the editorial practice of removing offensive material from a text. The entire family produced “bowdlerized” editions, but it was The Family Shakespeare that made the family name famous. Notorious in the history of literary censorship, it prints versions of Shakespeare’s plays “unsullied by any scene, by any speech, or, if possible, by any word that can give pain to the most chaste, or offence to the most religious of his readers,” as the preface to the 1818 edition puts it. Elizabeth and Thomas’ son Thomas Bowdler is often credited as sole editor, but it was his sister Henrietta Maria, or Harriet, who originally devised and implemented the project in 1807. It is tempting to imagine that the family’s ownership of a cut-and-paste harmony made by the women of Little Gidding influenced Bowdler's use of scissors as an editorial technology.

In 1855, Thomas Bowdler the Younger – Harriet and Thomas’s nephew – passed the family’s Little Gidding harmony on to a family friend, Arthur H. D. Acland Troyte of Huntsham in Devon. He did so after a visit to the family in 1855 “as an Remembrance of his [presumably Bowdler’s] pleasure at finding the daughter of the family encouraged in the good works” of the women of Little Gidding, as a contemporaneous provenance note on the flyleaf of the harmony records. No doubt curious about this book, Arthur’s son John Acland later researched and wrote about Little Gidding and the household's remarkable cut-and-paste concordances, publishing Little Gidding and its Inmates in the Time of King Charles I in 1903.

Although not as lavish as the Gospel harmony made for King Charles, the Cotsen Harmony, as it will be called here, is a fabulous example of the household’s bookwork at the height of the family’s production. Many episodes follow the “Collection” formatting, with indented black latter fragments of scripture showing repetition or variance in wording. Handwritten letters are now used to indicate a passage’s source. Handwritten notes also link the end of excerpts to their continuation in later chapters; here, these have been turned into hyperlinks, evident where you see a black line. And while the pages maintain a certain regularity in their layout, as can be seen by scanning the navigational thumbnails in this edition, the illustrations are drawn from a wider array of print series than those in the Houghton Harmony, evident in the collection of source prints. Occasionally, the collages of prints can get quite intricate, as on cols. 73-74. In this edition, each print may be tracked back its source, when known, or readers can shift from the item page to the page on which the print is pasted.