My project sets out from the fact that the same text can be formatted in very different ways and it addresses the question of how these formatting differences affect the reader’s experience. This question is addressed to the text we know as “the Bible,” which originally circulated not as a complete volume but as separate manuscripts of individual books or sub-collections. The project explores the effects of the transition from individual books to “the Bible” by exploring papyrus manuscripts of the New Testament at the Chester Beatty and the 8th-century Codex Amiatinus – the oldest intact single-volume Bible in any language, preserved in Italy but created in the monastery of Wearmouth and Jarrow, made famous by the Venerable Bede.
