Post-Tridentine Book Smuggling and the Scribal Culture of the Elizabethan Catholic Underground

• In Event: Printers, Smugglers, Readers, and Scribes: The Book Culture of the Elizabethan Catholic Underground

Abstract

This paper examines manuscript miscellanies produced within scribal networks of Catholic aristocrats and gentry during the Elizabethan period. The cultivation of this predominantly continental Catholic tradition—particularly among Englishmen interested in cultivating strong ties with the international Roman Catholic Church—is further linked to periods of incarceration and punishment for religious causes experienced by these same scribal compilers and authors. First smuggled onto English shores in the early 1580s, the appropriation of these foreign imprints into the English vernacular (and into allied scribal adaptations of their accompanying graphic illustrations) will be investigated alongside the posthumous circulation and survival of these rare, imaginative scribal inventions “under the cross” of persecution.

Author

• Earle A. Havens, Johns Hopkins University