The King James Bible: a reading sensation

The publication of the King James Bible was not only a watershed moment in the history of publishing; it also had a decisive impact on the history of reading.

In 1611, the Bible was already the exemplary book. It was not only the source of authoritative content; it was the model for how to read other books. The apparatus that makes it possible to divide a written text into its constituent elements and examine them separately – chapter and section headings, footnotes and cross-references, and so on – originates with Biblical scholarship, and the King James Bible made these tools available to a mass audience for the first time. Subsequent theories of interpretation in general and of translation in particular both derive from the tradition of biblical exegesis, as does the concept of literary criticism; but since the rise of the novel in the nineteenth century, the sacred origins of literary culture have been forgotten.