Library of Congress. Library of Congress. Rare Book Division, sponsoring body. moving image eng Mack Holt explored reading practices of the Bible during the 16th-century Reformation. He relied primarily on French and English Bibles in the vernacular. How did readers read it, which parts did they read or not read, and what did they make of it? Treating the Bible as a material object rather than just as a sacred text, his research suggested that the materiality of the Bible -- its size, weight, format, typeface, etc. -- significantly affected how readers used their Bibles. Moreover, there were very few differences in the ways in which Protestants and Catholics read their Bibles, and vernacular Bibles appealed to both groups equally. It seemed clear that most readers were not very interested in abstract theology or doctrine, and were more interested in human narratives of interaction with the sacred. Classification: History (General) and History of Europe. Classification: Language and Literature. Classification: Philosophy, Psychology, Religion. Classification: Social Sciences. Mack Holt. Recorded on 2019-02-01. Mack Holt is a professor of history at George Mason University where he teaches courses in political, religious, social and cultural history of early modern Europe, ca. 1400-1800. Before coming to George Mason in 1989 he taught at Harvard and Vanderbilt universities. Co-president of the Society for French Historical Studies, and in 2009-2011, Holt was president of the Society for Reformation Research. He was also a visiting professor of history at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris in spring 2005 and spring 2014. This past fall he was a visiting fellow commoner at Trinity College, University of Cambridge. He has held fellowships from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He is also co-editor of "Changing Perspectives in Early Modern Europe," a monograph series published by the University of Rochester Press. https://hdl.loc.gov/loc.gdc/gdcwebcasts.190201rbk1500