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The Elizabethan Catholic Underground
Clandestine Printing and Scribal Subversion in the English Counter-Reformation
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Edited by:
Earle Havens
Language:
English
Published/Copyright:
2025
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About this book
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.
Author / Editor information
Earle Havens, PhD, is the Nancy H. Hall Curator of Rare Books and Manuscripts, and Director of the Virginia Fox Stern Center for the History of the Book at Johns Hopkins University. His most recent book, with Walter Stephens, is Literary Forgery in Early Modern Europe, 1450-1800 (2017). He has several other co-authored volumes in press, including an extensive study of the Elizabethan Catholic earl of Arundel Philip Howard and his wife the Countess Anne Howard.
Mark Rankin, PhD, is Professor of English at James Madison University. He is the co-editor of Henry VIII and His Afterlives: Literature, Politics, and Art (Cambridge, 2009), contributing editor of Sermons at Paul’s Cross, 1521-1642 (Oxford, 2017), and Editor of the journal Reformation. He is completing critical scholarly editions of William Tyndale’s The Practyse of Prelates and The Bale-Cancellar Controversy.
Mark Rankin, PhD, is Professor of English at James Madison University. He is the co-editor of Henry VIII and His Afterlives: Literature, Politics, and Art (Cambridge, 2009), contributing editor of Sermons at Paul’s Cross, 1521-1642 (Oxford, 2017), and Editor of the journal Reformation. He is completing critical scholarly editions of William Tyndale’s The Practyse of Prelates and The Bale-Cancellar Controversy.
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Publishing information
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook published on:
July 9, 2025
eBook ISBN:
9789004426412
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
Front matter:
20
Main content:
404
eBook ISBN:
9789004426412
Audience(s) for this book
Scholars and students across the humanities disciplines interested in the Catholic and Protestant Reformations, the history of the book in manuscript and print, and the broader cultural history of international Catholicism. Rare book and manuscript libraries that hold copies of the hundreds of titles explored in this volume, across many of the major research collections in the UK, Europe, and North America. Keywords: Elizabeth I, Early Modern Europe, Catholic Reformation, Protestant Reformation, Elizabethan, Recusancy, Book History, Print Culture, Scribal Networks, Book Smuggling, Clandestine Printing, Missionary Printing, Censorship, England, Scotland, Spanish Netherlands, Dutch Low Countries, France, Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Spain, Italy, Roman Catholic Church, Church of England, Religious Persecution, Christopher Plantin Edmund Campion, Robert Persons, Nicholas Sander, Robert Southwell, Catholic Poetry
