With the collapse of press censorship that followed the impeachment of William Laud in the Fall of 1640, a group of London printers took advantage of their new-found freedom and encouraged the House of Commons to convene an assembly of divines whose sole task was to revise the notes located within the margins of the Geneva Bible. The new annotations, it was agreed, were to be affixed to the margins of the Authorized Version, which would subsequently be sold as an annotated Bible. London’s newly liberated presses, however, produced a flood of Bibles, and the price of Bibles naturally fell. Such market conditions meant that an annotated Bible, more costly to produce, would be rendered unmarketable. Fortuitously, the men assembled to compose the new annotations came up with a set far too lengthy to be confined to the margins of the Authorized Version. The resulting commentary, which was published in 1645 as a separate volume, proved to be a marketable alternative.

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Original publication: Lampros, Dean George. "A New Set of Spectacles: The Assembly’s Annotations, 1645-1657." Renaissance and Reformation 31 (4): 2010. 33-46. DOI: 10.33137/rr.v31i4.11705. This material has been re-published in an unmodified form on the Canadian HSS Commons with the permission of Iter Canada / Renaissance and Reformation. Copyright © the author(s). Their work is distributed by Renaissance and Reformation under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. For details, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/.