Accessible Cambridge Bibles: 1591 and 2026

Bridger M. Bartlett, Postdoctoral Research Associate

Frontispiece of the 1591 Cambridge Bible

Cambridge University Press has become the latest of several publishers to produce an edition of a religious text that is designed to be accessible for people with dyslexia and other reading-related disabilities.¹ As the Cambridge UP announcement itself notes, ‘Cambridge is the world's oldest continuous publisher of Bibles and Prayer Books, having printed its first Bible in 1591.’ This blog post will reflect on the publication of the dyslexia-friendly new Crystal Edition of the ESV (English Standard Version) of the Christian New Testament in light of Cambridge’s first Bible printing and how that printing fitted into a broad movement to make the Bible and Christianity more accessible to more people. 

That 1591 printing in Cambridge was of an edition of the Geneva Bible. First printed 31 years earlier in 1560, the Geneva Bible was an early complete English translation of the Protestant Bible. It was called the Geneva Bible because it was produced in Geneva, Switzerland, by English Protestants who sought refuge there during the Marian persecutions. Famously, Reformers advocated the translation of the Bible into vernacular languages so that ordinary people who did not read or speak the customary Latin could have unmediated access to scripture. The Cambridge Bibles Blog highlights features specific to the Geneva Bible that further heightened accessibility for the vernacular Bible’s broader audience: a simple typeface; a relatively low price; introductions, summaries, and glosses to aid comprehension; maps and other visual elements. 

Today, we often associate the terms ‘access’ and ‘accessibility’ with making things more usable specifically for people with disabilities. The design for the Cambridge dyslexia-friendly New Testament, interestingly, works disability-specific accessibility into something of a continuation of the innovations that made the Geneva Bible an accessible text for as many people as possible. While earlier dyslexia-friendly typefaces focused on usability for a solely dyslexic audience, the Cambridge Bibles Blog explains, the design developed for Cambridge – called Grace – stresses universality. In other words, this typeface is engineered to feel welcoming and unobtrusive for everyone, ‘Making Scripture more readable … not as a convenience, but as a form of inclusion,’ as the same blog post puts it. 

Some of the strategies for universal accessibility featured in the ESV Crystal New Testament are ample empty space and a single column of text of each page, and I would argue that these design elements carry forward an effort for universal access that was present, in a certain fashion, the first time Cambridge printed a Bible. That may sound curious given the roles of marginal notes and other supplementary elements in the Geneva Bible’s accessibility for everyday people in 16^th-century England, but societal access needs can change with technology and the way we live our lives. There were no search engines 500 years ago, after all. And search engines as we know them wouldn’t exist today without the pervasive way literacy has become a more mundane and unavoidable part of the fabric of modern life since 1591. 

It is interesting to speculate on how (or whether) a 16^th-century vernacular Bible could have made itself as accessible to dyslexic readers as it was to non-dyslexic readers who didn’t know Latin, but it is equally important to recognize that reading differences widely experienced as disabilities today may not have been experienced as consistently as major access barriers in the early modern period. Low literacy rates – especially among women and poorer groups – hampered access to the Bible and books more generally, on one hand, but the fact that it was quite possible to go about one’s everyday life in early modern England without needing to read or write meant that a brain difference like dyslexia might never go noticed or be experienced as a disability. The simple fact that an ordinary English person could have the Bible read to them in their own language was a revolution for access in the 16^th century, and one that universally helped neurodivergent and neurotypical people of all reading abilities gain access to Christian scripture. The Geneva Bible may not have been much of a helpful new innovation if you were a person in Elizabethan England who had a reading disability but were literate and knew Latin, to be sure, but its goals of universal access would have brought new access to your peers who did not know Latin whatever their experiences with reading. 

The idea that the English Reformation and, specifically, books that it generated, could have had beneficial and inclusive effects for neurodivergent people has already been explored by Mardy Philippian, Jr. In a contribution to an early scholarly collection on early modern disability, Philippian has suggested that early modern people whom we might understand today as autistic might have found The Book of Common Prayer useful ‘as a behavioral script that ushered those of atypical cognitive development into corporate religious and social life’ (151) and ‘a communicative mode that uniquely made accessible to those in the pews the emerging theological system of belief and the physical movements and utterances that comprised the church’s liturgical service’ (152). As it has grown in more recent years, Neurodiversity Studies has largely shifted attention away from the ‘Theory of Mind’ concept with which Philippian’s chapter engages, but the idea that a vernacular textual product of the English Reformation may have served a prosthetic or guidance-like role for some users that potentially supported greater community inclusion remains an exciting one. Reflecting on Cambridge’s new dyslexia-friendly New Testament against the backdrop of their 1591 Bible printing invites us to think still more expansively about what books could mean in the lives of early modern neurodivergent people and their communities. 

Bridger M. Bartlett, PhD, is AMEND's postdoctoral research associate. Broadly, their research focuses on neurodiversity as an intersectional consideration in 16th- and 17th-century English culture. With Laura Seymour and Bradley J. Irish, they are a co-editor of the collection Neurodiversity and Early Modern English Literature (forthcoming from Edinburgh University Press). Bartlett's research has appeared in ELH and JEMCS, and they have recently completed a monograph manuscript on neurodiversity and race-making in early modern English literature.

References

“ESV Crystal New Testament.” Cambridge Bibles, https://www.cambridge.org/universitypress/bibles/esv-crystal-new-testament. Accessed 2 May 2026. 

“The Grace Dyslexic Typeface.” Cambridge Bibles Blog, 30 Apr. 2026, http://www.cambridge.org/universitypress/bibles/the-grace-dyslexic-typeface. 

Midgley, Matt. “Pioneering New Testament for Dyslexic Readers.” Cambridge University Press & Assessment, 30 Apr. 2026, https://www.cambridge.org/news-and-insights/new-dyslexia-friendly-new-testament. 

Philippian, Mardy. “The Book of Common Prayer, Theory of Mind, and Autism in Early Modern England.” Recovering Disability in Early Modern England, edited by Allison P. Hobgood and David Houston Wood, Ohio State University Press, 2020, pp. 150–66, https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv17260bx.14.  

“Where it all started - the Geneva Bible.” Cambridge Bibles Blog, 8 Jan. 2026, http://www.cambridge.org/universitypress/bibles/where-it-all-started-the-geneva-bible.