Ever since Gutenberg produced the first printed book, his 1455 Bible, there has been a close relationship between religion and print. In the wake of the Reformation, theologians and lay people have debated, argued, explained, and contested aspects of belief and worship through the agency of the printing press.
Among the early printed religious texts was the sermon, with the first sermon in English put forward in 1483. Sermons were popular reading material in the seventeenth century but their heyday was in the eighteenth century. The two volumes of sermons displayed here by Thomas Sherlock and John Bisset are more or less typical of sermon printing of the period: modest in size, small type, and produced on middling-quality paper.
Sermons “preached in paper,” so to speak, but there were other kinds of print with similar didactic aims. The volume, Religious Emblems, is a compendium of nineteenth-century American piety, presenting virtues like “Obedience and Wisdom” and vices like “The Dangers of Presumption” in brief Bible quotations, engraved images, and often lengthy prose explanations. In The Three Sisters: A Brief Sketch of the Lives and Death of Ann Eliza, Hester Jane, and Laura Washington, the young Perry sisters are represented as models of Christian devotion, with hints that they were perhaps too good for this world in their tragic and untimely deaths.
Print also served nineteenth-century social causes like the Abolition Movement and prison reform that had strong religious foundations. The Temperance Movement, for example, was rooted in the morality of Methodists, Congregationalist, Presbyterians, and other Protestant denominations. Its proponents printed and published songsters, conversion stories, and novels, poems, and plays with the evils of drink as their principal theme.
This volume resembles the popular emblem books of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe, which usually presented moral or secular concepts in a symbolic or allegorical image accompanied by a motto and text in verse or prose. Emblem books tended to evoke and exemplify rather than explain an idea, but in Holmes’ and Barber’s book the emphasis is unambiguously didactic and pious. Each motto is a Bible quotations with a verse and often a lengthy prose explanation of such “modern” ideas as “Brotherly Kindness” and “True and Falso Principles.”
Irvine’s leaflet offers a model Sunday School program for religious instruction. It includes music and lyrics for two temperance songs, “The Triumph Song” and “Prohibition Victory,” as well as a long address on the topic of prohibition and the evils of alcohol, and another on the need for a Constitutional Amendment aimed at national prohibition.
Between the mid-1890s and 1935, the year of his death, Sunday was the most famous and prominent evangelical preacher in the United States. He traveled all over the country, organizing revivals that attracted thousands. Audiences were spellbound, watching him march around the stage as he gesticulated and gyrated histrionically. His popularity gradually waned in the 1920s, but he maintained a hectic preaching schedule right up to his death in 1935.
On both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, public speaking and singing informed and helped galvanize the Temperance Movement. This book contains over 100 poems and brief vignettes meant to be delivered at public meetings of prohibition supporters.
Printing did not lower the price of books, chiefly because paper—made one sheet at a time—was quite expensive. But in 1491, Johann Froben of Basel was the first printer to put forward a small-format Bible known as “the poor man’s Bible.” Hieronymus de Paganini, printer of this leaf, likely copied Froben’s production values for his 1497 book, cutting costs and keeping the price low by using small type in double columns.
