Biblical Building Blocks:Traces of Use in a Fifteenth-Century “Delftse Bijbel”

In 1477, a Middle Dutch bible was printed for the first time in Delft (The Netherlands). The choice for the vernacular makes clear that the “Delftse Bijbel” was oriented not only towards the clergy, but also included laypeople as its intended audience. These bibles, which could for instance be read in silence for the purposes of bible study and meditation, or out loud by the head of the family, must have taken up an important function in the households of their lay owners. However, medieval readers also treated their bibles as objects of use, which meant that in addition to reading from them, they also did not hesitate to annotate them, underlining important passages or even correcting the text where the printer had made mistakes.(Written as part of the NWO-project Cities of Readers: Religious Literacies in the Long Fifteenth Century (2015-2019))