Mary Wilson Carpenter Imperial Bibles sku-707027412

Mary Wilson Carpenter's Imperial Bibles, Domestic Bodies (sku-707027412) is a hardcover Christian Books & Bibles study of British commercial Family Bibles. Published in affordable serial parts, these Bibles helped families express their status and national and imperial identity. Eighteenth-century editions advertised access to “universal knowledge.”

In the early nineteenth century, some marked passages for omission from family reading and reserved them for the “Master of the family” to read privately. Other editions appealed to female buyers through images of women and children and family registers depicting domestic life. Carpenter examines their notes and engravings on same-sex relations, masturbation, menstruation and circumcision.

She also reads works by Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot and Elizabeth Barrett Browning alongside these commercial editions of the Authorized Version, or King James Bible, to explore how Victorian discussions of religion also addressed sex.