Modes of Bible reading in early modern England

In an article entitled ‘Books and scrolls: navigating the Bible’ (2002), Peter Stallybrass argues that what he calls ‘discontinuous reading’ has been central to Christianity ever since it adopted the codex in preference to the scroll. He points to the ways in which Renaissance bibles were designed to facilitate easy reference backwards and forwards within the text by being divided into chapters and furnished with finding aids such as tables of contents, running heads, consistent pagination and indexes, arguing that ‘navigational aids’ such as these encouraged discontinuous reading practices. Stallybrass indeed regards the habit of sequential reading, or reading forward through a book in a continuous fashion, as a ‘radically reactionary’ practice, describing it as ‘scroll reading’, a practice which has only come to seem natural to us because of the influence of the novel, where ‘the teleological drive’ to keep turning the pages discourages dipping about or turning back in the text.1