The Reformers' campaign to purge bibles of marginal glosses, finally achieved in the Authorized Version of 1611, was first achieved in the authenticated version of Latin Catholicism—the Sixtine Vulgate of 1590. Its sola scriptura format, however, did not last. Church authorities, printers, and readers scrambled to restore paratexts soon thereafter. Among the readers who marked up their bibles was Thomas Marwood, a later seventeenth-century tutor for a Catholic gentry family. Investigating how Marwood creatively imitated the scholastics' dense theological commentary and opposed currents of vernacular bible culture illuminates how a layman made a Latin bible speak to the circumstances of dwelling both within a Reformed kingdom and across the Catholic world. This study reveals how aggressive annotation practices could be at once both a result and a rejection of Reformation experience. Finally, it reconsiders dualistic interpretive frameworks of conformity and nonconformity, resistance and community, for understanding early modern Bible reading generally.
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