King's Harmony, cols. 37-40

After King Charles borrowed the Houghton Harmony, the family transformed their method into what John Ferrar later described as a “new kind of printing.” As this website and the accompanying book argue, this “new kind of printing” might be seen as a technological innovation: that is, by applying feminized skills and technologies to the process of composing, imposing, and binding a printed book, the women of Little Gidding “hack” (cut, chop) the printed codex, transforming its prismatic sequence of folds and juxtapositions into a protofeminist technology capable of synthesizing religious dissonance and resolving interpersonal tensions. The evolution of this technology can be seen in the more visually and navigationally elaborate 1635 Cotsen Gospel harmony, as well as the illustrated Pentateuch concordance made for Charles’ son Prince Charles, later King Charles II, both of which are available in full or in part on this site for comparison.

There is no doubt, though, that Little Gidding’s new compositional techniques produce their most magnificent results in, appropriately, the gospel harmony made for King Charles, now known as the King’s Harmony (British Library, C.23.e.4). Among the gospel harmonies, it is the most elaborate in both its use of images and its innovative textual layouts.

Paul Dyck and his collaborators have already produced an electronic edition of this book, significant as both a resource and for what it contributes to the conversation about digitally editing complex material documents. It links facsimile images of digitized microfilm photographs to TEI-encoded text, thereby capturing the source texts, source prints, and the complexity of Little Gidding’s textual design in its information architecture and model. Readers are encouraged to engage with it.

Because Dyck’s edition beautifully satisfies many of the goals of this website, we have opted against replicating that work here and instead provide three representative page openings, in full color and with annotations. The first shares the beginning pages of the text itself and shows how Little Gidding repurposes engravings to grand effect, here and in other gospel harmonies, where the same prints appear. The second demonstrates how Little Gidding assembles images at an important pivot point in the narrative, the transition from Christ’s private to his public ministry. The third showcases the three reading methods used in many chapters: the Comparison, the Composition, and the Collection. It is our hope that, when explored alongside Dyck’s edition and in the context of this entire network, these excerpts evince the grandiosity of this remarkable book, and provide some sense for how its innovations trickle into the other gospel harmonies and concordances made at Little Gidding after 1635.