Avni Chag, The Relic in the Glass Cabinet

Avni Chag, The Relic in the Glass Cabinet: A History of the Śikṣāpatrī with New Translation and Notes, AAR's Religion in Translation series, Oxford University Press, 2026.

The publisher's blurb notes that this new book "Offers an original perspective on the ritualization and institutionalization of texts as relics, and how such materialities shape perceptions of authority

"The Shikshapatri (1826) is a scripture presented as a letter to devotees from Swaminarayan (1781-1830), the founder and principal deity of the eponymous Swaminarayan tradition. Designated by millions as a revelatory scripture down to the belief of its divine authorship, the text is treated as a succinct and authoritative index of Swaminarayan beliefs and practices. Early manuscripts of the text are so cherished that some, like the one enclosed in a glass cabinet in the Oxford Bodleian libraries, are treated as relics. ...

"The Relic in the Glass Cabinet submits the text's authorship, intent, and historical development to critical scrutiny. Based on a comparative study of two Shikshapatri recensions, Chag demonstrates that the text did not originally align with the specific Vaisnava theological identity it now claims. Instead, doctrinal commitments were added after Swaminarayan's passing, fundamentally reshaping how the text, its author, and his tradition have been understood.

"The Relic in the Glass Cabinet ... tells an untold story of the complex histories of textual production, exploring the interplay between historically contingent circumstances and inherited, albeit negotiated, religious ideas and practices, all at the formative moment of a tradition's inception in early nineteenth-century western India, present day Gujarat." 

The Accessorized Bible, by David Dault

 

David Dault has published The Accessorized Bible (Yale University Press, 2026). The book charts Dault's intellectual journey with bibles that has included long involvement with Scriptural Reasoning and with SCRIPT, which he now serves as President. The book pleas with readers to approach the bible from a stance of moral seriousness by misreading bibles for the sake of a life-giving, catastrophic love. Highly recommended!

 

Drawn to the Word: The Bible and Graphic Design, by Amanda Dillon

 

 

Drawn to the Word: The Bible and Graphic Design, by Amanda Dillon, has been published by SBL Press (2021), which describes it this way:

A unique study of lectionaries and graphic design as a site of biblical reception

How artists portrayed the Bible in large canvas paintings is frequently the subject of scholarly exploration, yet the presentation of biblical texts in contemporary graphic designs has been largely ignored. In this book Amanda Dillon engages multimodal analysis, a method of semiotic discourse, to explore how visual composition, texture, color, directionality, framing, angle, representations, and interactions produce potential meanings for biblical graphic designs.  Dillon focuses on the artworks of two American graphic designers—the woodcuts designed by Meinrad Craighead for the Roman Catholic Sunday Missal and Nicholas Markell’s illustrations for the worship books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America—to present the merits of multimodal analysis for biblical reception history.

Qur'anic Matters by Natalia Suit

New book by Natalia Suit, Qur'anic Matters: Material Mediations and Religious Practice in Egypt (Bloomsbury, 2020).

The publisher's description: In Qur'anic Matters, Natalia Suit explores the materiality of books, focusing on the mushaf. With its paper, binding, ink, and script, the mushaf is not simply a carrier of the Qur'anic text but, by the virtue of its material body, it also has the ability to engender reformulations of religious knowledge and practice. Reading the Qur'an on a screen of a phone, for example, does not require the same forms of ritual ablutions as reading a printed text. The rules of purity limiting the access to the Qur'anic text for menstruating woman change when the Qur'anic text is mediated by digital bytes instead of paper.

Qur'anic Matters spans the time between two important technological shifts-the introduction of printed Qur'anic books in Egypt in the early nineteenth century and the digitization of the Qur'an almost two centuries later. Throughout, Natalia Suit weaves together the theological, legal, economic, and social “presences” of the Qur'anic books into a single account. She argues that the message and the materiality of the object are not separate from each other, nor are they separate from the human bodies with which they come in contact.

Contents:
Preface
Introduction
Part I: The Makers
1. The Beginning(s)
2. Pens, Letters, and the Politics of Correctness
3. Qur'anic Icons
Part II: The Custodians
4. Debating Defects
5. The (Ortho)Graphic Blueprint
6. What the Eyes Can't See but the Hands Can Touch: Mushaf in Braille
Part III: The Users
7. How Printing Created Manuscripts
8. Uses and Abuses
9. Enacting the Electronic Qur'an
Conclusion

Miniature Books

Miniature Books: The Format and Function of Tiny Religious Texts, edited by Kristina Myrvold and Dorina Miller Parmenter, has now been published by Equinox. 

Miniature books, handwritten or printed books in the smallest format, have fascinated religious people, printers, publishers, collectors, and others through the centuries because of their unique physical features, and continue to captivate people today. The small lettering and the delicate pages, binding, and covers highlight the material form of texts and invite sensory engagement and appreciation. This volume addresses miniature books with a special focus on religious books in Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Hindu and Buddhist traditions. The book presents various empirical contexts for how the smallest books have been produced, distributed, and used in different times and cultures and also provides theoretical re ections and comments that discuss the divergent formats and functions of books.

Contents
Religious Miniature Books: Introduction and Overview
– Kristina Myrvold, Dorina Miller Parmenter
1. Ritualizing the Size of Books – James W. Watts
2. On the Functions of Miniaturizing Books in Jewish Religion
– Marianne Schleicher
3. Words in a Nutshell: Miniaturizing Texts in Early Modern England
– Lucy Razzall
4. Small Things of Greatest Consequence: Miniature Bibles in America
– Dorina Miller Parmenter
5. Diminutive Divination and the Implications of Scale: A Miniature Quranic Falnama
of the Safavid Period – Heather Coffey
6. Mite Qurans for Indian Markets: David Bryce in the Late Nineteenth and Early
Twentieth Century – Kristina Myrvold
7. Miniature Qurans in the First World War: Religious Comforts for Indian Muslim
Soldiers – Kristina Myrvold, Andreas Johansson
8. Size Matters! Miniature Mushafs and the Landscape of Affordances
– Jonas Svensson
9. Gitamahatmya! Paratexts in Miniature Bhagavad Gitas with Special Reference to
Pictures and Gender – Jon Skarpeid
10. Sutras Working in Buddha’s Belly and Buddhists’ Pockets: Miniature Sutras in
Korean Buddhism – Yohan Yoo, Woncheol Yun
Index

Clothing Sacred Scriptures

New book:
Clothing Sacred Scriptures: Book Art and Book Religion in Christian, Islamic, and Jewish Cultures, edited by David Ganz and Barbara Schellewald, Berlin: De Gruyter, 2019.

Iconic Books & Texts in Paperback!

Iconic Books and Texts will be available in paperback in August. It can be ordered from the publisher, Equinox, or from the north American distributor, ISD, which lists it on sale for $24.

Call for Journal Articles on "Religion and the Book"

The online journal, Mémoires du livre  / Studies in Book Culture, has issued a call for articles on the theme, "religion and the book." (This same theme is being used by the SHARP Annual Meeting in Antwerp this coming September.) Scott McLaren, the editor of this special issue of the Open Access peer-reviewed journal, "invites submissions in English or French that explore the relationship between religion and the book, broadly defined, in either historical or contemporary settings and from a variety of disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives. Articles concerned with print culture and Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, as well as Asian and African religions are most welcome."

Iconic Books and Texts has been published!

Iconic Books and Texts has been published! This volume contains nineteen essays from the Iconic Books Symposia of 2007, 2009 and 2010, and three from my Idea of Scripture seminar in 2005. They were previously published in Postscripts 2 (2006/2008) and 6 (2010/2012) and appear here together in one volume from Equinox. Click here for the flyer with full Table of Contents and an offer of a 25% discount on orders.

Symposium papers published

I'm delighted to announce that the papers from the Iconic Books Symposia have now been published in a thematic triple issue of Postscripts. Here's the table of contents:

James W. Watts, Introduction, 1-6

William A. Graham, “Winged Words”: Scriptures and Classics as Iconic Texts, 7-22

Deirdre C. Stam, Talking about “Iconic Books” in the Terminology of Book History,23-38

Michelle P. Brown, Images to be Read and Words to be Seen: The Iconic Role of the Early Medieval Book, 39-66

S. Brent Plate, Looking at Words: The Iconicity of the Page, 67-82

Zeev Elitzur, Between the Textual and the Visual: Borderlines of Late Antique Book Iconicity, 83-99

Jacob Kinnard, It Is What It Is (Or Is It?): Further Reflections on the Buddhist Representation of Manuscripts, 101-116

M. Patrick Graham, The Tell-Tale Iconic Book,117-141

Natalia K. Suit, Muṣḥaf and the Material Boundaries of the Qur’an, 143-163

Timothy Beal, The End of the Word as We Know It: The Cultural Iconicity of the Bible in the Twilight of Print Culture, 165-184

Dorina Miller Parmenter, Iconic Books from Below: The Christian Bible and the Discourse of Duct Tape, 185-200

Kristina Myrvold, Engaging with the Guru: Sikh Beliefs and Practices of Guru Granth Sahib, 201-224

Joanne Punzo Waghorne, A Birthday Party for a Sacred Text: The Gita Jayanti and the Embodiment of God as the Book and the Book as God, 225-242

Yohan Yoo, Possession and Repetition: Ways in which Korean Lay Buddhists Appropriate Scriptures, 243-259

Karl Ivan Solibakke, The Pride and Prejudice of the Western World: Canonic Memory, Great Books and Archive Fever, 261-275

Philip P. Arnold, Indigenous “Texts” of Inhabiting the Land: George Washington’s Wampum Belt and the Canandaigua Treaty, 277-289

Jason T. Larson, The Gospels as Imperialized Sites of Memory in Late Ancient Christianity, 291-307

Claudia V. Camp, Possessing the Iconic Book: Ben Sira as Case Study, 309-329

James W. Watts, Ancient Iconic Texts and Scholarly Expertise, 331-334

Imitation Bible

The Good Book: A Secular Bible by British philosopher A. C. Grayling offers alternative content to the Christian Bible, but imitates its form, including two columns of text on each page, King James-sounding English, and familiar section titles, such as "Genesis," "Parables," and "Epistles." The collector of the volume explained the format to an audience in Virginia, reported The Christian Post: "Part of the success of the religious Bible is the function of the way it's organized, the way it presents itself," said the professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London. "When you print something double column, chapter and verse, it's a very accessible, very inviting format." (The publishers, however, do not seem to have gotten on board: the book does not look very Bible-like.)

Reviews of the format have been decidedly mixed. The Telegraph called it "cheeky," while the New York Times review complains about Grayling's failure to cite the sources of his material and wonders, "Is this book an odd joke? A parody of the Bible?" The Guardian offers a more flattering account by focusing largely on Grayling rather than his book.

I haven't seen a copy of The Good Book yet, but it sounds as if Grayling has attempting to preserve the Bible's iconic form while replacing its semantic content. His mistake, I think, lies in failing to realize that the social power of scriptures is generated by being ritualized in semantic, iconic and performative dimensions. A Bible without a network of congregations to ritualize it is no Bible at all.

Shea's The Phone Book

Penguin has published Ammon Shea's The Phone Book: The Curious History of the Book That Everyone Uses But No One Reads. I will be interested to read it, since I have often used the phone book as my best example of a completely un-iconic book: it is ritualized neither in the semantic dimension (the point of Shea's subtitle) nor in the iconic or performative dimensions. Despite being an instantly recognizable feature of 20th century culture (and so "iconic" in the popular sense of the term), the phone book's lack of ritualization makes it vulnerable to electronic replacement.

(h/t Rebecca Rego Barry on Fine Books & Collections)

New International Version to be Updated

Biblica announced today that it is preparing an "update" of "the world's most popular Bible." The press release accompanying the announcement presents an array of points worth considering in the transmission of an iconic text, including the positioning of the new NIV in the tradition (and on the 400th anniversary) of the KJV, the expressed goals of the new translation, and the claim to the authority to make the translation:

"We want to reach English speakers across the globe with a Bible that is accurate, accessible and that speaks to its readers in a language they can understand," said Keith Danby, Global President and CEO of Biblica. "This is why we are recommitting ourselves today to the original NIV charter, complete with its charge to monitor and reflect developments in English usage and Biblical scholarship by regularly updating the NIV Bible text.

"As time passes and English changes, the NIV we have at present is becoming increasingly dated. If we want a Bible that English speakers around the world can understand, we have to listen to, and respect, the vocabulary they are using today."

The CBT [Committee on Bible Translation] represents the very best in evangelical biblical scholarship and its members are drawn from denominations across the world. As an independent body, it alone has the authority to revise and update the text of the NIV Bible.

"The committee exists to ensure that the NIV continues to articulate the words of God, as we find them recorded in the original languages, in a form of English that is comprehensible to the broadest possible audience," said CBT Chairman, Professor Douglas Moo.

"As a committee, our response to this challenge has always been to follow the example of the original Bible writers who wrote in forms of Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek that reflected the language spoken by the everyday working people of their day. Just as the New Testament is written in 'Koine' or 'common' Greek, our aim with the NIV Bible is — and has always been — to translate the Bible into what you might call 'Koine' or 'common' English.

"So it is fitting that the new edition of the NIV Bible will be coming out in 2011, the year which marks the 400th anniversary of the King James Version," said Moo. "Our goal in the NIV Bible translation mirrors that of the 17th Century translators themselves: to produce a Bible that removes all unnecessary obstacles to comprehension by drawing on the best available scholarship."

Review of People of the Book

Jeremy Dibbell, of PhiloBiblos, writes a beautiful review of Geraldine Brooks new novel, People of the Book (Viking, 2008). The novel features the 14th-century Sarajevo Haggadah, interweaving its history into the contemporary plot. Dibbell comments:

There's a message here for those of us who study books as artifacts - there are stories there, real people's stories, and although they may be impossible to get at really, we should think of them.

As Hanna is preparing her essay about the Haggadah to accompany the exhibition catalogue, Brooks has her say "I wanted to give a sense of the people of the book, the different hands that had made it, used it, protected it. I wanted it to be a gripping narrative, even suspenseful" (pp. 264-265).

Ritual Rhetoric and Scripture

(With apologies for self-promotion) My book, Ritual and Rhetoric in Leviticus: From Sacrifice to Scripture, is now out. Its contribution to the topic of iconic books is primarily in chapter 9, "The Rhetoric of Scripture," which reproduces my 2005 JBL article with a small addition discussing David Carr's book, Writing on the Tablet of the Heart (2005).