Among the thousands of devotional works produced in the centuries following the English Reformation are hundreds that may be called spiritual conduct books. This article defines the term “spiritual conduct book” on the basis of a text’s purpose and audience. Unlike more familiar secular conduct books, such as Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier, spiritual conduct books place success in the next world above success in this world. This group of books, although derived from the Bible and from biblical commentary, also reflects secular interests, including class conflicts.

Researchers should cite this work as follows:

• Razovsky, H., (2025), "Remaking the Bible: English Reformation Spiritual Conduct Books", HSSCommons: (DOI: )

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1. Renaissance and Reformation

Original publication: Razovsky, Helaine. "Remaking the Bible: English Reformation Spiritual Conduct Books." Renaissance and Reformation 34 (4): 2010. 5-25. DOI: 10.33137/rr.v34i4.10799. 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/.