The Ecclesiastical Province of Cambrai may sound unfamiliar to modern readers. The bishopric of Cambrai dates to the sixth century but only became an archdiocese and, consequently, the centre of a church province in the sixteenth century. The elevation of the see resulted from the heavily contested reorganization of the diocesan map of the Low Countries by King Philip II in 1559. The new province included the medieval sees of Arras, Cambrai and Tournai, as well as the newly created bishoprics of Saint-Omer and Namur. Its borders were established to encompass the French-speaking Walloon provinces in the south of the Low Countries, territories that are now divided between France and Belgium.Footnote 1 In the early modern period, this area was already a border and transit zone between France, the Low Countries, the Holy Roman Empire and the British Isles. The province’s history in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was deeply marked by recurrent and devastating warfare between the kings of Spain and France, eventually resulting in the transfer of significant territory to France.Footnote 2 However, the Province of Cambrai was also the scene of frequent cross-border mobility, and a safe haven for Catholic exiles originating from the British Isles, France and other parts of the Low Countries.
The development of the French-speaking regions of the Low Countries into one of the major centres of Catholic exile is quite surprising. In the middle decades of the sixteenth century, two of the region’s largest trade centres, Tournai and Valenciennes, were still hotbeds of Calvinism. However, increased persecution following the iconoclastic riots of 1566 pushed many Calvinists to flee to England, Germany and what would become the Dutch Republic.Footnote 3 Moreover, by these years the region was already evolving into an early stronghold of Catholic Reform, thanks to the concerted efforts of the archbishops of Cambrai, their suffragan bishops and the reform-minded circles around the newly-opened University of Douai (1562).Footnote 4 While the Calvinists took power in Antwerp, Bruges, Brussels and Ghent in the late 1570s, attempts to gain French-speaking towns were ultimately unsuccessful.Footnote 5 The Treaty of Arras (1579) reconciled most Walloon provinces and towns with Philip II, confirming their predominantly Catholic character. The region subsequently functioned as the operating base for Alexander Farnese, Duke of Parma and Philip’s new governor in the Low Countries, during his reconquest of many Flemish and Brabantine towns.Footnote 6 Taken together, these elements made the Province of Cambrai an attractive refuge for Catholics facing difficulties in the surrounding territories. In the early 1560s, English theologians who had left England after Elizabeth’s accession began to arrive in Douai. By the 1580s, Dutch-speaking Catholics from parts of Flanders, Brabant and Holland that had fallen into the hands of Calvinist rebels found a safe haven in Cambrai, Douai, Lille, Mons, or Saint-Omer. Finally, in the mid-1590s, leading members of the defeated French Catholic League, the so-called ligueurs de l’exil, likewise settled in the province.
The phenomenon of early modern Catholic exile has attracted increasing historiographical attention in recent decades. However, most studies have been devoted to groups of exiles sharing the same geographical background.Footnote 7 Scholars have drawn parallels between several exile communities and even pointed to direct connections between them.Footnote 8 However, few studies simultaneously deal with Catholic exiles originating from different regions and countries.Footnote 9 The Ecclesiastical Province of Cambrai offers a unique opportunity for such an approach. Scholarship has highlighted how Antwerp, Louvain and Paris attracted many English Catholics, and exiles from the Low Countries gathered in Cologne. At the same time, however, the smaller towns of the Province of Cambrai accommodated refugees from England and France, as well as other parts of the Low Countries. As such, they might be compared to Emden or Geneva, Calvinist exile centres which likewise turned into safe havens for refugees from England, the Low Countries and, in the case of Geneva, France. The hundreds of broadsheets, Bible translations and controversial treatises printed in Emden and Geneva were vital for the development of Reformed doctrine and church organization.Footnote 10 It proves more difficult to point to a Catholic exile centre that played an equally influential role. But does this mean that Catholic exiles used the printing press less frequently, less systematically or less effectively?
This article intends to shed light on the functioning of Catholic exile printing by examining the use of the printing press by three exile communities that found shelter in the Province of Cambrai. Without neglecting developments elsewhere—the exiles formed, of course, a very mobile groupFootnote 11 — this article will explore how exiles in this region made use of the printed word, the languages they preferred to publish in, and the main subjects and purposes of their publications. This analysis is based on data collected in Impressa Catholica Cameracensia.Footnote 12 This newly compiled online database lists all religious books known to be published in the Province of Cambrai and reconstructs the networks surrounding Catholic book production in the period 1559–1659. It brings together data formerly scattered across various national reference works, complementing it with information obtained from the consultation of many of the books concerned. The first part of this article discusses publications of English Catholic theologians in sixteenth-century Douai. It will then consider exiles from elsewhere in the Low Countries and France. The final section returns to the English case, focusing on the early decades of the seventeenth century.
English theologians in sixteenth-century Douai
During Edward VI’s reign (1547–53), leading English Catholics settled in the Low Countries. Most of them belonged to the circle of the executed chancellor Thomas More and his family, but several Oxford and Cambridge professors, such as the theologian Richard Smyth (1500–63) and the jurist Stephen Gardiner (d. 1555), also left England and settled in the university town of Louvain.Footnote 13 A more sizeable exile movement only emerged following the accession of Elizabeth I in 1558. As a result of the new religious settlement she imposed, academics in Oxford were increasingly expected to swear an oath recognizing the Queen as supreme head of the Church of England. Many Catholic scholars were unwilling to renounce their loyalty to the pope. They followed the example set by the Edwardian exiles, leaving their chairs and choosing Louvain as the first place of refuge.Footnote 14
The University of Louvain was a vibrant centre of Catholic theology in these years. Its professors were willing to support the exiles, but it proved difficult to offer them permanent academic positions. The foundation of a university in Douai, a French-speaking town close to the French border, created more opportunities. In the course of the 1560s and early 1570s, several of the so-called Louvainists moved on to the new university town. In 1563, the aforementioned Richard Smyth, who had left England for the second time, was selected as the first Regius Professor of Holy Scripture in Douai.Footnote 15 Following his appointment, the theologians William Allen (1570), Thomas Stapleton (1570) and Richard Hall (1576), as well as the canonists Owen Lewis (1566) and Richard White (1572), were also granted chairs in Douai.Footnote 16 The growing English presence in the town was institutionalized by the erection of an English College in 1568. Although the initial plan of its founder, William Allen (1532–94), was to gather the English scholars in exile and preserve Oxford’s intellectual traditions, his college swiftly developed into a training centre for English missionary priests.Footnote 17 As a result, by the early 1570s, Douai became the foremost intellectual centre for English Catholics on the continent and, consequently, an educational hub for the emerging English mission.Footnote 18
Since the early days of printing, book production and trade in England and the Low Countries had been closely related. The Antwerp presses produced over one hundred Protestant texts in English between the mid-1520s and the late 1540s. These titles included treatises by William Tyndale (1494–1536), as well as vernacular Bible translations and English-language versions of the works of Melanchton, Bullinger and Zwingli.Footnote 19 However, in the second half of the sixteenth century, printers in the Low Countries became the main suppliers of Catholic books in English. By the early 1550s, works by Stephen Gardiner and Cuthbert Tunstall (1474–1559) had already been published in Antwerp and Louvain.Footnote 20 In the years following Elizabeth’s accession, Antwerp and Louvain printers produced a large number of controversial treatises responding to Protestant attacks, particularly those of John Jewel, the bishop of Salisbury (1522–71).Footnote 21 Like their earlier Protestant counterparts, English Catholics published mainly in English. More than one hundred English-language editions were printed in Antwerp and Louvain before 1600 (fig. 1).Footnote 22 However, the use of the English vernacular was not always wholeheartedly embraced. In 1565, Richard Shacklock (d. before 1588), a former member of Trinity College, Cambridge, then residing in Louvain, apologized for writing in his ‘barbarous’ native language, rather than in a more ‘eloquent’ foreign alternative.Footnote 23 Indeed, several English theologians in exile, including Richard Smyth, continued to publish controversial treatises in Latin.
Figure 1. Catholic editions in English published between 1561 and 1600 (based on ARCR).
In Douai, English Catholics also turned to local printers. Almost immediately following Richard Smyth’s appointment, his Refutatio locorum communiorum was printed by Jacques Boscard in Douai. The book, one of the first ever printed in Douai, continued Smyth’s series of controversial treatises refuting Calvin, Melanchthon and Jewel’s viewpoints on the mass, the sacrament of the altar and infant baptism.Footnote 24 Smyth died in 1563, but his example was followed by other English theologians in subsequent decades. In 1580, Thomas Stapleton (1535–98), then Regius Professor of Controversy in Douai, issued a book entitled Speculum pravitatis haereticae in which he discussed the heresies of his time in a general way rather than specifically reacting to the situation in his native country.Footnote 25 Eight years later, his better-known Tres Thomae also came from the press in Douai.Footnote 26 This book narrated the lives of three martyrs—Thomas the Apostle, Thomas Becket and Thomas More—and, according to William Sheils, could be seen as a Catholic equivalent to John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments, issued three decades earlier.Footnote 27 In discussing the fate of such notable countrymen as Becket and More, Stapleton instructed the Catholic faithful in England on how they should position themselves against the Protestant authorities. However, by writing in Latin, he could simultaneously contribute to the ongoing debate about the significance of martyrs within the Catholic Church and address a readership that extended beyond the borders of his native England.Footnote 28
The most-published English theologian in Douai was former Cambridge student Richard Hall (d. 1604), who was granted a lectureship at the Abbey of Marchiennes nearby Douai in 1576.Footnote 29 His earliest publication was a Latin translation of Cardinal John Fisher’s Treatise of Prayer (1576), making this older devotional work accessible to non-English readers.Footnote 30 During the 1580s, his attention shifted to polemical books defending Catholic monastic life or diocesan authority. In his Opuscula quaedam, his temporibus pernecessaria (1581), Hall discussed the causes for, evolution of and possible solutions to the revolt in the Low Countries, a conflict that he had observed since his arrival in Louvain two decades earlier.Footnote 31 Hall adopted a broad Catholic perspective on the problems of his time, to an even greater extent than Stapleton had. His later work in particular was not directly linked to the English Catholic cause, but was predominantly aimed at readers beyond his own community.
Some gaps in this publishing activity should be recognised. First, it is striking that few English theologians in Douai published their books locally. For example, the edition of William Allen’s writings was never entrusted to a Douai publisher. The colophon of Allen’s Libri tres (1576) gives the name of the Douai printer Lodewijk De Winde, but the imprint on the title-page credits the Englishman John Fowler (d. 1579), then operating from Antwerp, as the actual publisher.Footnote 32 Thomas Stapleton sometimes collaborated with local printers, but during his professorship in Douai, most of his works came from Michel Sonnius’s press in Paris.Footnote 33 Meanwhile, the English College’s difficult financial situation probably prevented it from coordinating a larger publication programme.Footnote 34 Finally, only one English-language text came from Douai presses before 1600: Richard Bristow’s (1538–81) Demaundes to be proponed of Catholiques to the heretikes (1576). Like Allen’s Libri tres, this was actually published by John Fowler, who assigned the printing to Lodewijk De Winde.Footnote 35 By the late 1570s, hundreds of students had passed through the English College,Footnote 36 but there was still no steady stream of English Catholic texts, in English or Latin, from Douai presses. Antwerp, Louvain and Paris, where no such colleges were established, remained far more significant for English Catholic printing. Although it is sometimes assumed otherwise,Footnote 37 Douai clearly fell short of expectations in this matter.
One explanation for Douai’s relatively small contribution to English Catholic publishing lies in its humble status as a typographic centre. Prior to the foundation of the university, no printer was practising in Douai, and even after its establishment, the city fathers found it difficult to attract a printer. The printers who settled in Douai — Jacques Boscard, Lodewijk De Winde and Jean Bogart — came from Antwerp or Louvain and had little or no experience in printing English-language texts. Only Bogart had produced three such texts in Louvain during the 1560s. Nor did the foundation of the English College spur an English printer or publisher to come to Douai. Instead of establishing his press in the vicinity of Allen’s college, John Fowler actually moved his press from Louvain to Antwerp in 1573.Footnote 38 In short, in the 1560s and early 1570s, Douai offered far fewer facilities and less capacity and experience in issuing English-language texts than Louvain or Antwerp.
The departure of the English College in 1578 further hindered the publication of English Catholic texts. Douai was renowned for its staunchly Catholic population and its loyalty to the crown, but in early 1578, partisans of the States General and William of Orange were able to enforce an exceptional renewal of the town leadership. One of the first decisions of the newly appointed aldermen was the banishment of all English inhabitants except for university professors and children. Hence, the college, its lecturers and its students were compelled to leave. They found refuge in Reims, France, where they immediately received support from the Guise family.Footnote 39 Shortly before this, Fowler had begun the process of moving his press to Douai, but was also now forced to leave the university town.Footnote 40 Considering his previous activities, it seems likely that he intended to continue English-language printing in Douai. Within a few months, however, the old order was restored in Douai. The college was invited to return, but stayed in France until 1593.Footnote 41
During these eventful years for the Low Countries, English Catholic publishing activities increasingly shifted to France. In 1581–2, three English-language texts that defended the English colleges and reported the martyrdom of priests in England came from the press of Jean de Foigny in Reims.Footnote 42 The same printer also published the New Testament of a newly composed English Bible translation, the well-known Douay-Rheims Bible. The translation had been prepared by the theologians of the English College over several years and would probably have been printed in Douai if the English had been permitted to stay.Footnote 43 In these years, Rouen, the capital of Normandy and one of France’s larger typographic centres, also grew in importance for the English Catholic community. Following his escape from England, the Jesuit Robert Parsons (1546–1610) established his own press in Rouen. Nine texts in English, mostly devotional works, were printed on this press between 1582 and 1585, while another printer, George L’Oyselet, produced ten texts in English (fig. 1).Footnote 44 During this period, Latin books written by English Catholics or discussing English Catholic topics mainly appeared in Paris or Lyon.Footnote 45 Due to the political turmoil in France, in the early 1590s the heart of English-language printing shifted again, to clandestine presses in England, while the larger part of Latin publishing returned to Antwerp. Strikingly, the return of the English College to Douai in 1593 did not immediately stimulate the development of an English Catholic press in the town.
Finally, the fact that only a few English-language texts came from the press at Douai was also due to the decrease in such editions that set in around 1570 (fig. 1). As the example of Richard Shacklock demonstrated, English theologians were often reluctant to publish in their own vernacular. The English College embarked upon a Bible translation project, but this was, as Alexandra Walsham has stressed, an exceptional measure in order to react to the wide circulation of Protestant vernacular Bibles in England.Footnote 46 Thomas Stapleton, who published extensively in English during the 1560s, preferred Latin after he moved to Douai.Footnote 47 He reflected wider tendencies since, as Eamon Duffy has recently highlighted, there was little interest in Catholic prayer books in English before the 1580s.Footnote 48 Thus, by the time Douai became an English Catholic stronghold, English writers increasingly shifted their efforts towards Latin publications. Given that these editions were not specifically destined for English audiences, they were often issued by printers in Antwerp or Paris who could ensure a better distribution across Europe.
Calvinist republics, Catholic exiles, and Douai presses
The sudden expulsion of the English College did not end Douai’s role as a refuge for Catholic exiles. In 1578, exiles from other parts of the Low Countries arrived in Douai. After the Pacification of Ghent (1576), the Calvinist party had strengthened its position in the Low Countries. Calvinist rebels overturned the incumbent town governments and founded Calvinist republics in many Dutch-speaking towns in Brabant and Flanders. The new rulers did not expel the Catholic clergy collectively but did expect them to show or swear loyalty. Catholics were increasingly hindered in the open profession of their faith. At a rough estimate, several thousand left their homes and sought refuge in nearby Cologne, or in French-speaking towns such as Cambrai, Douai, Lille, Mons, and Saint-Omer.Footnote 49 In these latter towns, the situation was also tense. As mentioned above, the Douai town government was overturned by partisans of William of Orange, but the foundation of Calvinist republics was avoided. As early as May 1579, the Treaty of Arras reconciled most Walloon provinces and towns with King Philip.Footnote 50 The successive victories of the Duke of Parma then enabled most exiles to return home. In contrast to the English Catholics, these Dutch-speaking exiles did not establish their own institutions or start up a missionary enterprise. This was possibly due to their shorter period of exile but also because most of these exiles found refuge within the borders of their home country and integrated into local circles. However, like the English, they turned to the Douai printer, Bogart, for the printing of their works.
Following the change of power in Ghent, the Dominican Father Petrus Bacherius (1517–1601) was offered shelter by a friend in Cambrai. From the early 1560s, Bacherius published polemical and devotional texts in Latin as well as Dutch. In line with these previous activities, a Latin prayer book, compiled from the works of over 120 authors, was printed by Bogart in 1579.Footnote 51 A work more clearly linked to the presence of the exiles in Douai was the Institutio necessaria de exitu Aegypti et fuga Babylonis, published by Bogart in 1580. In it, Johannes Costerius, a priest from Oudenaarde in the County of Flanders, argued that exile was not cowardly or reprehensible. To avoid being forced to swear loyalty to the new regime or to participate in Reformed services, leaving was a legitimate choice for Catholics.Footnote 52 Costerius underpinned his reasoning by pointing to biblical precedents such as the Babylonian exile. However, in the third chapter, he also referred to the English example, listing numerous English Catholics who had renounced their titles, duties and positions for their Roman Catholic faith.Footnote 53 Geert Janssen argues that Costerius testified to the existence of a new discourse of flight emerging among Catholics in the Low Countries.Footnote 54 Nonetheless, the Institutio necessaria was notable for explicitly addressing and defending exile and for drawing clear parallels with the English Catholic cause.
Two years earlier, a Dutch-language treatise entitled Die verclaringhe ende verworpinghe van het valsch verstant (The explanation and refutation of the wrong understanding) had come from Bogart’s press.Footnote 55 In contrast to the Institutio necessaria, which was eighty pages in length, this was over three hundred pages long. It was originally written in French by Matthieu de Launoy (1537–1608) and Henri Pennetier and was published in Paris in early October 1577. A reprint issued by Bogart in 1578 seems to have spurred the Dutch translation. Since this edition only provided the translator’s initials, their identity remains unclear. However, the fact that Douai printers scarcely printed Dutch-language editions suggests that it was initiated by the exiles or that Bogart had this audience in mind.Footnote 56 Despite the book’s French origins, it fitted the cause of the exiles remarkably well. The first part defended the most essential points of Catholic doctrine, the second refuted the false Calvinist interpretation of Scripture, and the third urged Calvinists to return to the old faith. The book thus had the potential to simultaneously reaffirm the Catholic doctrine of the exiles and to question the religious convictions of their adversaries, and in doing so, undermine the legitimacy of the Calvinist regimes in their home towns. At least in Antwerp, Catholics appear to have used the book to this effect, prompting the publication of an extensive Calvinist rebuttal in 1583. The preface of this last piece deplored that Die verclaringhe had been raised as a ‘sign of triumph’ against the Reformed ministers. A reaction against such a ‘strong poison’ was deemed to be urgently needed, even five years after its initial publication.Footnote 57
Earlier research also assumed the involvement of the exiles in a French-language piece issued in 1581, the Brève réponse à un livre d’un Huguenot.Footnote 58 Its title-page credits the French polemist Gentian Hervet (1499–1584) with its authorship, but this is highly unlikely. At the time of the pamphlet’s publication, Hervet was 82. He had not published anything in the previous eight years, and there is no explanation for the text’s appearance in Douai instead of France. In fact, it was conceived as a response to a comment on a letter by Hervet written by the Calvinist controversialist Philips of Marnix, Lord of Saint Aldegonde (1538–98). The exiles felt the need to refute his work: a manuscript reply to his Bijenkorf (Beehive) received the approbation of two members of the exile community, Cornelius Vrancx (1529–1615), a Benedictine monk and later abbot of the Abbey of Saint Peter in Ghent, and Jacob Eeckius (d. 1588), vicar-general of the diocese of Bruges. The use of the French language in the Brève réponse was possibly an attempt to make the attribution to the authoritative French polemist more plausible.Footnote 59
Many other texts published in Douai around 1580 expressed views that would have been approved of by the exiles. However, except for Bacherius’ prayer book and Costerius’ Institutio necessaria, none can be linked to the exile community with absolute certainty. The number of titles openly published by the exiles thus remains remarkably small.Footnote 60 The abovementioned Cornelius Vrancx published several Dutch-language texts on the mass, confession and the Virgin Mary in the years prior to his exile.Footnote 61 Around 1580, he wrote some polemical and satirical poems, preserved in manuscript, but he seems not to have continued his previous publication efforts.Footnote 62 Only from the mid-1590s, long after his return home, did Vrancx again focus on devotional work in Dutch. It is possible that given the hostile climate in Flanders and Brabant, authors such as Vrancx preferred to contribute anonymously to certain texts, hoping this would ease their distribution. Other projects only materialized with significant delay. During his time in Douai, the Bruges canon and future bishop Mathias Lambrecht (d. 1602) initiated a Dutch-language compilation of saints’ lives, which would only be published in 1590. It is perhaps no coincidence that this work was produced in Louvain by Jan Bogart, who had returned to his home town, leaving his printing office at Douai in the hands of his son of the same name.Footnote 63
The exile community in Cologne appears to have been more prolific. From 1579 onwards, exiles produced theological treatises with the local printer Maternus Cholinus. These editions were all in Latin, and, as Geert Janssen indicates, were ‘intended for an educated audience of hard-line Catholics’, rather than their Calvinist adversaries.Footnote 64 Bernard Vermaseren observes that even during the ongoing peace negotiations in the city in 1579, exiles did not initiate a significant printing campaign. Except for Cunerus Petri (d. 1580), bishop of Leeuwarden, they remained surprisingly silent on the situation in the Low Countries.Footnote 65 Willem Lindanus (1525–88), the bishop of Roermond, had frequently collaborated with Cholinus since the late 1550s, but during his exile in Cologne, Lindanus issued only one controversial treatise.Footnote 66 Meanwhile, the Amersfoort priest Michael ab Isselt (d. 1597) composed Latin translations of the devotional writings of Luis de Granada, thus contributing to the already wide reach of the Spanish Dominican’s books.Footnote 67 The only exile who addressed the situation in his home country more directly was the Benedictine scholar Petrus a S. Audomaro, who, in a treatise of over 300 pages, commented on the causes of and possible solutions to the conflict in the Low Countries.Footnote 68
As Geert Janssen observes, the print cultures of the English exiles and their counterparts from the Low Countries were not separate worlds.Footnote 69 In Douai, they all collaborated with the same printer, Jan Bogart. Costerius’s Institutio was even given ecclesiastical approbation by Thomas Stapleton in his capacity as professor of theology.Footnote 70 In addition, the treatise published by Petrus a S. Audomaro in Cologne is reminiscent of Richard Hall’s Opuscula quaedam, which appeared a year earlier in Douai. However, the exiles from the Low Countries did not copy the strategies deployed by English Catholics immediately after their arrival on the continent. During the 1560s, the English issued large numbers of vernacular controversial treatises. The exiles from the Low Countries, by contrast, showed little interest in attacking their adversaries in Dutch, with Die verclaringhe ende verworpinghe as the sole exception. Instead, they preferred to publish Latin texts not specifically aimed at readers at home. Catholic writers from both England and the Low Countries thus sought alliances with audiences outside their own communities.
However, Catholic writers from the Low Countries were not forced to publish all or most of their works abroad. In contrast to England, the production of openly Catholic texts did not completely cease in Brabantine towns around 1580. In Louvain, for instance, the university theologians Johannes Lensaeus (1541–93) and Michael Baius (1513–89) continued to collaborate with local printers. Baius even launched a response to Marnix’s views upon the sacrament of the altar.Footnote 71 After the Catholic party regained control of ’s-Hertogenbosch, several sharply anti-Calvinist pamphlets came from the press there during 1580.Footnote 72 In Antwerp, Hendrik Wouters continued to print controversial treatises in Dutch whilst under the Calvinist regime, without using fictitious imprints.Footnote 73 In 1578, for instance, he reprinted the aforementioned translation of the book of Launoy and Pennetier.Footnote 74 In later years, he also issued a couple of texts by the prominent Catholic author Martinus Duncanus (1505–90) dealing with the veneration of saints and images and attacking Menno Simons’s doctrine of the Lord’s Supper, while a pamphlet by the Augustinian theologian Jacob van de Velde (d. 1583) defended the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist.Footnote 75 Wouters’s output thus contrasts with the interest in Latin editions that emerged from the texts published in Cologne. The production of the Louvain and Antwerp presses was more similar to that of Douai. Both Douai and Louvain imprints reacted against Marnix, and the book of Launoy and Pennetier was printed in Douai as well as in Antwerp. Moreover, Louvain theologians were still able to print their treatises within the university town. This further explains why the number of works published by exiles in Douai and Cologne remained relatively low compared to those of the English Catholics during the 1560s.
League pamphlets in the border region
The third group of exiles reached the Province of Cambrai in the mid-1590s. After the coronation of Henry of Bourbon in February 1594, his troops took Paris, bringing down the Catholic League that had controlled the French capital in the preceding years. The royal victory did not involve the banishment of all those who had supported the League. However, the League’s leadership left Paris to avoid persecution. Others left intending to continue the fight against the king.Footnote 76 Initially, most of the exiled leaguers (ligueurs de l’exil) gathered in Amiens, which was still controlled by radical Catholics. For a short time, the Picard capital functioned as a ‘leaguer Paris in miniature’,Footnote 77 but in early August, it also fell into royal hands. The only remaining alternative for the leaguers was to cross the border and seek refuge in the territories of Philip II, who was continuing to support them.Footnote 78 Following Jean Châtel’s failed attempt to assassinate the King of France in December 1594, the members of the Society of Jesus, who were thought to be accessories to the plot, were expelled from France. Several Jesuits also moved north and settled at Jesuit colleges in French-speaking towns such as Douai and Lille.Footnote 79
From the mid-1580s, the League engaged in a massive propaganda campaign, which, in addition to public sermons and processions, involved the publication of almost nine hundred texts propagating and defending the League’s political position. Most of these were first printed in Paris and distributed or reprinted across the kingdom. Although the League originated from the theological faculty of the Sorbonne in Paris and several of its leaders were professors, League printing did not particularly focus on theological treatises in Latin. Those who wrote for the League preferred to issue short pamphlets relating current events and instrumentalising these for the radical Catholic cause.Footnote 80 As Denis Pallier has argued, these were primarily aimed at an urban middle-class readership that the League hoped to win over to its anti-royalist ideology.Footnote 81 Following Henry’s entry into Paris, it became impossible to print such texts. Since the printers that had worked for the League simply continued their businesses, the leaguers that had left the capital could no longer count on their services.Footnote 82 Moreover, there was no printer operating in Amiens in these years. Attempting to communicate with the French people, the ligueurs de l’exil were driven to work with printers from the border towns of the Low Countries, who, in previous years, had frequently reprinted Parisian League pamphlets.Footnote 83
On 29 April 1594, approximately a month after Henry’s entry in Paris, eleven theologians of the Sorbonne met in Amiens at the request of Claude de Guise, Duke of Aumale (1551–1631), and one of the League’s military leaders. They were asked to address the question of whether it was permissible for Catholics to recognize and obey the king. They concluded that nobody should do so, especially since Henry had been excommunicated. They also reiterated that all those who submitted to the king’s authority likewise risked excommunication. In previous years, the deliberations of meetings such as these had often been printed in Paris.Footnote 84 Now, two reports were issued in Arras, the first by Guillaume de La Rivière and the second, in an augmented edition, by Gilles Bauduyn.Footnote 85 The message of these editions was, quite obviously, not intended for the public in the Low Countries, although many Catholics there may have approved it. The ligueurs de l’exil were instead trying to reach their former supporters in France, hoping to revive the revolt against the Bourbon king. They thus attempted to continue their propaganda campaign from their respective places of exile.
More substantive attacks against the King of France came from the presses later in 1594. In Arras, Jean Bourgeois printed a new edition of Le banquet et après-dîner du comte d’Arète, Louis Dorléans’ 350-page denunciation of Henry’s many ‘simulations’ and the ‘bad morals’ of his followers.Footnote 86 It was first printed in Paris in late February or early March and, according to the title page of the Arras edition, had since been corrected and augmented by the author. The book received a formal approbation by Guillaume Gazet (1554–1612), parish priest of the church of Saint Mary Magdalen in Arras and ecclesiastical historian, who was convinced that it would help to ‘uncover the ruses and deceit of the politiques and heretics’.Footnote 87 In nearby Douai, Jan Bogart printed a book of almost 400 leaves with sermons discussing Henry’s ‘feigned conversion’ to Catholicism. The sermons were preached in Paris during the summer of 1593 by arch-leaguer Jean Boucher (d. 1646), doctor of the Sorbonne and parish priest of Saint-Benoît, but had remained unpublished until March 1594. Since many copies of the book were burned soon afterward, Boucher most likely initiated this new edition following his arrival in the Low Countries.Footnote 88
Fearing that Philip II was preparing a military intervention in France, Henry IV declared war on Spain in early 1595. In the following three years, the borderlands between France and the Low Countries were once again a theatre of war. Presses in Arras, Douai, and Lille continued to issue pamphlets permeated by League reasoning. Jean Bourgeois, for example, printed a pamphlet narrating the story of a French prisoner who deplored his own previous support of Henri. The text also urged the French to open their eyes, reemphasising that the papacy had not lifted the king’s excommunication.Footnote 89 Other works offered accounts of the siege and capture of French towns by the Spanish in 1595, 1596 and 1597. The League perspective was unmistakable. The Discours sur la bataille, siège et prise de Doullens (1595), for example, opened with a verse addressed to the French king, accusing him of taking advice from a ‘heretical rabble’ and dragging France into a new war. It was again stressed that his kingship was illegitimate.Footnote 90 Another pamphlet, expressing hope that French Catholics would no longer be blinded by a hypocritical king, also explicitly urged them to resume the League’s earlier struggles.Footnote 91
It is unclear who exactly wrote these pamphlets, but it is likely that exiled leaguers residing in the Low Countries were involved. Indeed, the character of these publications resembled those printed in Paris during the late 1580s and early 1590s. They related current events, such as victories of the Catholic side or deliberations of the Sorbonne theologians, were written in French rather than Latin, and addressed a Catholic audience in France. Without their former printers, the exiled leaguers could not equal the output of the Parisian presses, but they continued to use their earlier communication strategies. Theologians such as Boucher underpinned their writings with theological arguments, but his publications were primarily still intended to prevent the final victory of a formerly Calvinist king, rather than to meticulously attack Calvinist doctrine. Therefore, instead of following the other exile communities in publishing controversial treatises in Latin, the ligueurs de l’exil continued a vernacular tradition in French Catholic printing that stretched back to the early days of the Wars of Religion.Footnote 92 Nevertheless, these continued efforts proved to be in vain. The French did not rise up against their king, and Philip II finally acknowledged Henry’s kingship with the Peace of Vervins (1598), after which almost all exiles returned to France.Footnote 93
Douai, Saint-Omer and the apogée of English Catholic publishing
The previous sections demonstrated that during the late sixteenth century, several exile communities sought refuge in the Province of Cambrai and that they turned to local printers, albeit to a limited extent. However, to gain full insight into English Catholic print culture, it is essential to extend the analysis into the early seventeenth century. Unlike the exiles from the Low Countries or the ligueurs de l’exil, English Catholics remained dependent on the Province of Cambrai and the European continent more generally to educate their youth, to train missionary priests, to organize monastic life and, indeed, to produce books until well into the eighteenth century. As Liesbeth Corens stresses, ‘all these activities were focused more on sustaining Catholicism in England, than on English life abroad’, and ‘were in support of a future return’.Footnote 94 Training priests, educating a Catholic laity and printing books abroad all fitted within a long-term missionary undertaking rather than within a context of exile.Footnote 95 The particular development of English Catholic printing during the early seventeenth century can only fully be understood against this background.
Around 1600 English Catholic publishing changed on at least two levels. Firstly, the overall number of English Catholic texts rose significantly, increasing from less than fifty between 1596 and 1600 to almost ninety in the following five years. This increase would continue until the mid-1620s (fig. 2). There was a renewed interest in English-language texts, whose number almost tripled in the first five years of the new century. English Catholic writers apparently no longer preferred Latin above their vernacular. In the period 1610–40, the number of English-language editions regarding English Catholicism almost equalled that produced in all other languages. Continental presses still poured out a multitude of polemical treatises, both in Latin and in English, but the number of English-language books on devotion, spirituality, catechesis, hagiography, monastic rules or church history also grew significantly. English Catholic publishing thus not only reached its all-time apogée in the early decades of the seventeenth century, it also became more diverse than it had been since Elizabeth’s accession.
Figure 2. Catholic editions in English published between 1596 and 1640 (based on ARCR).
Secondly, geographically the centre of English Catholic publishing shifted around 1600, towards Douai and Saint-Omer. As seen above, the English scholars residing in Douai since the 1560s often preferred their books to be published elsewhere. Only one English-language text came from the university town’s presses before 1600. This changed drastically, and quite unexpectedly, during the early years of the seventeenth century. The importance of clandestine presses in England declined, and only a minor number of works were still printed elsewhere in the Low Countries or in France (fig. 2). In total, presses in Douai and Saint-Omer produced over 450 Catholic texts in English in the period 1601–40, covering nearly eighty percent of the total production in these years. In the same period, the Douai and Saint-Omer printers issued more than 150 works in languages other than English (predominantly in Latin) written by English Catholic authors or related to English Catholic matters. Douai now developed into the second most important centre for such editions. This output was far greater than that of Antwerp, Cologne or Rome, and was only exceeded by that of Paris.
To a considerable extent, this growth was the result of a renewed interest in controversy. Many English Catholics hoped to benefit from the accession of James VI, King of Scots to the English throne in 1603. However, these hopes vanished with the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot (1605) and the imposition of a more strictly formulated Oath of Allegiance. In a mass of controversial texts, English Catholic theologians substantiated their opposition to the Oath and to the king’s theological positions, responded to the incessant attacks of the Church of England, applauded the conversion of several high-profile figures from the English Church and pleaded for a greater degree of toleration in their country.Footnote 96 Although figures as notable as Cardinal Bellarmine contributed to these controversies, most treatises were written by English Catholics residing in the Low Countries.Footnote 97 In particular, the presidents, professors and students of Douai’s English College reinforced their efforts.Footnote 98 In Saint-Omer, where the English Jesuits had opened a college in 1593, Robert Parsons and several of his fellow Jesuits likewise started a prolific publication campaign that continued until the end of James’s reign in the mid-1620s.Footnote 99
Simultaneously, presses in Douai and Saint-Omer also produced a growing number of vernacular editions instructing the faithful in their daily prayers, stimulating devotion to the Virgin Mary or the saints and explaining the significance of the Catholic sacraments. English theologians at first showed great scepticism towards devotional work in their own language, but, as Alexandra Walsham argues, from around 1580, they gradually realized that such books were a lifeline for the Catholic faith in England. Books were powerful tools to remedy irregular access to pastoral care, since books could go where missionary priests could not.Footnote 100 Indeed, several English-language prayer books as well as English translations of the work of Luis de Granada and Peter Canisius appeared in the late sixteenth century, mainly in Rouen.Footnote 101 Yet it was only around the turn of the century that English Catholics started to compose and translate devotional works on a larger scale.Footnote 102 In 1599, Richard Verstegan, then based at Antwerp, edited the first post-Tridentine English-language primer, a book destined for private devotion containing the Office of the Virgin Mary and a number of psalms, hymns and litanies.Footnote 103 The realisation that James’ succession brought no improvement resulted in a renewed interest in controversy but also apparently accelerated the publication of devotional texts. In 1604, three English-language prayer books were printed, two on the secret press of Father Garnet in England and the other on Laurence Kellam’s press in Douai.Footnote 104 So, despite the long-term awareness that devotional literature in the vernacular was needed, it took several decades to build such a corpus.
The growing importance of Douai and Saint-Omer clearly fitted within more general tendencies. But why did the output of these smaller, previously almost insignificant typographic centres now outnumber those of Antwerp, Louvain, Paris and Rouen, the leading centres until that point? First, it should be noted that in the early 1590s, Douai regained its previous role as an educational and missionary hub for English Catholics. Following Henry of Navarre’s successes over the Catholic League, the English College decided to return to Douai from Reims in early 1593.Footnote 105 In the same year, the English Jesuits opened a college in Saint-Omer, which would become one of the main centres of the English mission.Footnote 106 In subsequent decades, the English Benedictines and Franciscans founded no fewer than six convents in Douai, Aire-sur-la-Lys, Gravelines and Cambrai.Footnote 107 Similar institutions opened elsewhere on the continent, but their concentration nowhere approached that of the Province of Cambrai.Footnote 108 English Catholic writers increasingly gathered around these institutions, or regularly passed through them on their way to or from England. This process of institutionalisation corresponds chronologically with the rise of English Catholic publishing in Douai and Saint-Omer. From the early 1600s, the strongholds of the English mission and English Catholic education also became the heart of English Catholic publishing. Douai and Saint-Omer now provided both missionaries and books to the Catholic faithful in England, performing a role comparable to that of Geneva for the French Calvinist community during the 1550s and 1560s.Footnote 109
Other explanations might be found in questions of geography and logistics. Although some texts printed in Douai and Saint-Omer were used by the religious and students of the continental convents and colleges, most were destined for Catholics across the Channel in need of pastoral guidance. A great number of books found their way to readers in England, but transport across the Channel was a perilous undertaking. There was always a risk that English authorities would seize and destroy the cargos upon arrival on English soil.Footnote 110 Yet, printing in the vicinity of the Channel coast certainly facilitated transport. Already in the mid-1580s, a Catholic spy credited Rouen as ‘a most convenient city on account of its nearness to the sea [for the] preparation and introduction into the country of books written in English’.Footnote 111 Saint-Omer also offered excellent opportunities in this regard, since no less than four Channel ports — Dunkirk, Gravelines, Calais, and Boulogne — were located within thirty miles.Footnote 112 English Catholic missionaries and students who travelled back and forth between England, the Low Countries, Germany or even Italy would pass through Douai and Saint-Omer, where they could buy books in their own language or look for a printer willing to publish their own writings.Footnote 113 In addition, it is perhaps no coincidence that the rise of Douai and Saint-Omer began only after the Peace of London (1604), ending the Anglo-Spanish conflict and significantly easing transport across the Channel. The increased trade between England and the Habsburg Low Countries also created new opportunities to ship Catholic books into England.
During the 1590s, the Antwerp-based publisher and polemicist Richard Verstegan had been the main agent for shipping Catholic books into England, but in 1603 or 1604 he suddenly stopped publishing and distributing books for the English market.Footnote 114 His previous activities were now continued by his fellow-countryman John Heigham, who arrived in Douai around the same time. Around 1613, Heigham moved to Saint-Omer, possibly to be nearer to the coast, where he ‘became the most important figure in the English Catholic book trade’.Footnote 115 According to informer William Udall he visited England in 1608 and was responsible for sending ‘into England all the seditious bokes which come from Doway and other parts’.Footnote 116 The following year, he was seen in Calais, receiving a shipment of books from Paris that he would later send to England.Footnote 117 His import activities were thus not limited to the books he published himself with the help of local printers in Douai and Saint-Omer. Also in 1609, he sent his wife Marie Boniface, a daughter of a citizen from Arras, to England to disperse a cargo of Catholic books. Despite the fact that she travelled in the ‘habite of a Dutchwoman’, she was arrested and held ‘xvi days in the pursuivants keeping’.Footnote 118 Nevertheless, Heigham continued his risky smuggling activities for another two decades. In 1624, for instance, he was again noticed in London.Footnote 119 The presence of lay intermediaries such as John Heigham contributed significantly to the growing importance of Douai and Saint-Omer for English Catholic printing.
The printing facilities and capacity in Douai and Saint-Omer were also significantly enhanced by the arrival of an English printer and the installation of a specifically English press. In 1603, Laurence Kellam moved from Valenciennes to Douai, establishing his business just two blocks away from the English College.Footnote 120 He immediately started to print books in his native language. One of his first editions was A survey of the new religion by Matthew Kellison (1561–1642), professor at the University of Reims and future president of Douai.Footnote 121 In later years, he also printed writings of the current president, Thomas Worthington, as well as the works of several lecturers and former students of the college, including Edward Maihew (1568–1625), Richard Smith (1567–1655) and Philip Woodward (d. c.1610). In total, Kellam, his son of the same name and his widow printed close to fifty English-language texts before the early 1660s. Kellam’s arrival also created a new opportunity to complete the publication of the Douay-Rheims Bible. Until then only the New Testament had been produced. In 1609–10, the Old Testament finally came from Kellam’s press. The edition encompassed two quarto volumes of some 2250 pages together, three times as many as the New Testament. For a project of such dimensions, the opportunity to collaborate with a printer whose first language was English, worked near the college and fully realized the edition’s importance for the English Catholic community, was a luxury indeed.
In 1608, the English Jesuits decided to establish a press within their college buildings in Saint-Omer.Footnote 122 The college press produced over 200 English-language editions in the subsequent three decades. After 1640, the press operated only sporadically, producing fewer than ten editions in the next twenty years. In a letter from 1615, Guido Bentivoglio (1577–1644), the papal nuncio of the Low Countries, rightly noted that this was a private press.Footnote 123 With a few exceptions, the press was used to print texts written, edited or translated by members of the Society of Jesus.Footnote 124 It was not so much a commercial undertaking as a part of the English mission, with the Jesuits themselves responsible for financing the editions.Footnote 125 In this respect, the college press was a successor to the clandestine presses in England,Footnote 126 whose production sharply decreased from these years on, and the press that had operated under the direction of Robert Persons (1546–1610) in Rouen in the 1580s.
Finally, it should be stressed that the remarkable apogée of English Catholic publishing would have been difficult without the help of continental printers. While only a few printers were active in the Province of Cambrai in the late sixteenth century, an increasing number of new printing offices were opened from 1600. This greatly enhanced the printing facilities in the region’s towns, offering more possibilities for English Catholics seeking to publish their works locally. For example, prior to the establishment of their college press, the Jesuits of Saint-Omer cooperated with François Bellet, the town’s only printer. In the early 1600s, he printed a series of Persons’ controversial treatises. Bellet later moved to Ypres, probably thinking that the new college press would make his business less viable.Footnote 127 However, the English Catholics just further intensified their collaboration with local typographers. The press of the Kellam family and the English Jesuits produced no more than sixty percent of all English-language editions in Douai and Saint-Omer; the remaining share came from the presses of ‘local’ houses of, amongst others, the Boscard, Auroy and Wyon families.
The many typographic errors committed by these French-speaking printers certainly frustrated the English authors, but did not stop the authors from making use of their services.Footnote 128 In Antwerp, Louvain, Paris and Rouen, where a more limited number of texts in English was printed in this period, there was not even an English printer or press active. Even in the Province of Cambrai, the aforementioned John Heigham — who did not operate a press himself but issued 85 editions in the period 1604–34, mainly in English — consistently worked with local printers rather than with the Kellam family, who were fellow countrymen.Footnote 129 In addition, the Jesuits in Saint-Omer did not welcome works written by authors from the Franciscan or Benedictine orders or by members of the secular clergy. For the printers themselves, printing in English must have been very profitable, since this was a kind of jobbing printing. The editions were not initiated by the printers themselves but commissioned by the English, who also assured payment of the printing costs and the distribution of most, if not all, of the print run. This reduced financial risks and possibly also helped to provide the necessary resources for the publication of editions in other languages that were destined for continental markets. Yet, only a more systematic typographical analysis of larger parts of the Douai and Saint-Omer output, including books in English, as well as in French and Latin, will provide more insight into the relationship between English Catholics and the local book world.
Starting from the mid-1620s, the printing of English-language texts in Douai and Saint-Omer rapidly declined. While 111 such works had come from the presses there in the period 1621–5, only 46 would be printed in the following five years. There was a brief revival in the early 1630s, in Douai and Saint-Omer as well as in Rouen, but after 1635, an even sharper decline set in.Footnote 130 In the 1640s, presses in Douai and Saint-Omer produced no more than seven texts in English. Both the press of the Kellam family and that of the English Jesuits came close to total inactivity.Footnote 131 To a considerable extent, this was the result of a period of renewed warfare in the Province of Cambrai, which paralysed printing during most of the late 1630s and 1640s. The college press probably also suffered from the financial problems that the English Jesuit College faced.Footnote 132 However, the outbreak of civil war in England had a particularly significant impact. In these turbulent years, it became easier to print Catholic texts in England again.Footnote 133 Until well into the eighteenth century, English-language works would be printed in Douai and Saint-Omer, but the high output of the first decades of the seventeenth century were never reached again.Footnote 134
Conclusions
The preceding survey shows that there was no specifically Catholic model or pattern of exile print culture. Certainly, the English Catholics, the exiles from other regions of the Low Countries and the ligueurs de l’exil all turned to local presses, but they did so to varying extents and for diverse reasons. They all felt the need to defend their doctrinal and political viewpoints, yet their editorial choices and strategy varied and sometimes evolved over time. English theologians initially responded to the Protestant attacks in their own vernacular, but during their stay abroad, the interest in Latin treatises increased, since these guaranteed circulation beyond their native England. The exiles from the Low Countries publishing in Cologne also focused on Latin treatises. However, if editions in Douai, Antwerp and Louvain are considered too, it appears that there remained a parallel interest in controversial or devotional vernacular editions. Rather than publishing large treatises covering several hundred pages, the ligueurs de l’exil continued the French tradition of publishing vernacular pamphlets. Although a certain reticence about vernacular publications cannot totally be denied, the final choice of language was much more influenced by already existing strategies, the intended audience, and current developments at home and abroad.
English Catholics developed the most prolific printing programme by far during their stay in the Province of Cambrai. They were the only community forced to extend its stay over a longer period. Although there were some clandestine presses in England, publishing large quantities of Catholic books there remained impossible. In the late sixteenth century, English Catholic printing was dispersed over the Low Countries, France and England and its centre regularly shifted. However, shortly after 1600, printing activity was increasingly concentrated in Douai and Saint-Omer. The proximity of the Channel coast, the foundation of new English colleges and convents, the presence of English tradesmen, publishers and printers, the establishment of an English Jesuit press and an intensive cooperation with local printing houses all contributed to the publication of hundreds of editions, in both English and Latin, in less than two decades. The education and organisational centres of the English mission now finally became also the main centres for English Catholic printing. As such, the evolutions in English Catholic printing strongly support Liesbeth Corens’ argument that the continental activities of English Catholics should not be understood in terms of exile, but rather be seen as a part of a missionary undertaking whose aim was the survival of Catholicism in England.Footnote 135
Nonetheless, the role that Douai and Saint-Omer played within the English Catholic community has a lot in common with the significance of Emden for the Calvinist community in the Low Countries between the 1550s and 1580s.Footnote 136 Presses in all three towns produced hundreds of editions, many of which were in the vernacular and most of which were destined for distribution either across the border in the Low Countries or across the Channel in England. Printing in all three towns was part of a missionary enterprise. While Emden editions supported the growth of the Calvinist movement in the Low Countries, those in Douai and Saint-Omer guaranteed the survival of Catholicism in England and prepared a future restoration of the old faith. In this regard, a profound difference between Catholic and Calvinist communities is difficult to maintain. Instead, each expatriate community developed its own relationship with the printing press, depending on the different challenges it faced, the facilities available abroad and the political and religious objectives it was determined to achieve.
