The Elizabethan Catholic underground: clandestine printing and scribal subversion in the English counter-reformation

Abstract

"This is the first book-length study dedicated entirely to the clandestine print and scribal culture of members of the international Elizabethan Catholic underground, c. 1558-1603. Close studies offer fresh material textual evidence of a truly cosmopolitan, polyglot, and trans-European community of domestic and exiled English Catholics, moving well beyond the British Isles to the Dutch Low Countries, France, Poland, Spain, and Italy. Explorations of book smuggling networks, clandestine printers, secret Catholic libraries, illicit scribal publications, international patronage and finance, and press censorship combine in this volume to shed new light on an otherwise shadowy, often subversive, but still relatively understudied early modern book culture" -- Provided by publisher.

Contents

The business of Catholic controversial literature : Alan Cope, Christopher Plantin, and the printing and distribution of Nicholas Harpsfield's Dialogi sex / J. Christopher Warner -- An apostolate of the book : English Catholic print culture before the Jesuit mission, 1559-80 / Earle Havens -- Cross-cultural exchange and accommodation : the reception of Edmund Campion's Rationes Decem in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth / Clarinda Calma -- Missionary printing, Robert Persons's letters, and the logistics of rapid response / Victor Houliston -- Wrapped in deceit : book smuggling from Rouen in 1584 / Gerard Kilroy -- Archives of prayer : medieval books and Catholic memory in Elizabethan England / Alexandra Walsham -- The early manuscript and scribal transmission of Nicholas Sander's Catholic history of the reformation / Mark Rankin -- The professor, the queen and the Nag's head : Thomas Neal reimagines the Elizabethan settlement / Alison Shell -- Southwell's short rule and early modern Catholic written culture / Susannah Brietz Monta -- Catholic verse in manuscript and print as oppositional politics / Arthur F. Marotti -- Text, paratext, context : the scribal and print publications of Tichborne's lament / Robert S. Miola.