Volume 8 of Private Libraries in Renaissance England (PLRE) represents a new direction for an ambitious and valuable project. Here the editors go beyond the booklists captured in the Oxford University inventories, 1507–1653, to focus on other categories. These booklists have been retrieved from probate records and state papers, where titles and authors are often missing or incompletely recorded, and then edited to complete the record to the degree possible. Throughout, contributing editors provide illuminating headnotes and bibliographic support. The Short Title Catalogue and related resources tell us what books were printed; PLRE volumes tell us that the books were purchased, and which owners presumed to find them valuable — an immense aid to research on individual topics.
The Norfolk and Suffolk booklists from probate inventories (1580–1603) include 436 books from twenty-six owners. The professions or status of the owners include eighteen professions and trades (such as cleric, lawyer, carpenter, grocer, blacksmith, baker, physician, scrivener, haberdasher). Religious works dominate, with standard holdings: the Bible, Book of Common Prayer, Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, history, and books by Jean Calvin, John Jewel, and Hugh Latimer. Some lists have unique concentrations, such as law and travel for William Atwood, landowner.
The section on Catholic libraries covers lists of books seized in Fleet Prison, 1582; in Winchester Jail, 1583; in raids of Catholic households, 1584–86; and, a decade later, books held by Gatehouse and Newgate prisoners who were transferred to Wisbech Castle in 1615. Alexandra Walsham and Earle Havens provide an important introduction to these libraries in which, describing “post-Reformation English Catholicism” as “a religious culture of the book” (129), they report the vast amount of English and Continental Catholic writing and printing, as well as the multiplicity of ways that books were distributed and hidden in England. If English authorities were determined to root out the Catholic threat, the prison culture reveals the ardent persistence of the recusants.
The dates 1582–86 signal a period, following the execution of Edmund Campion in December 1581, of intense persecution of English Catholics. Determined to quell treasonous plots, authorities increased the number of arrests and executions, forcing many Catholics and sympathizers to adjust and qualify their participation in the public sphere (Donna B. Hamilton, Anthony Munday and the Catholics [2005], 32–62). Simultaneous suppression of printing and seizure of books from prisons and households were variations of one effort. The Catholic books seized include authors understood as the most dangerous polemicists: Gregory Martin, A treatise of schisme, printed by William Carter in 1578 (Carter was executed in 1581); Edmund Campion, Rationes decem; William Allen, A defense and declaration of the catholike churches doctrine, touching purgatory; Persons, A brief discours containing certayne reasons why catholiques refuse to goe to church, and others by Persons; Nicholas Sanders; Gregory Martin; and Thomas Stapleton. Present also are books of comfort and prayer by Thomas More, Thomas á Kempis, Francis of Sales, Gaspar Loarte, and Robert Southwell. Many lists itemize a breviary.
The lists of books (totaling twenty-nine, twenty, and fifty-two) owned by three women (noted as nobility, landowner, and widow) are primarily religious in nature, as are the booklists from the libraries of five clerics. Thomas Wood of Lincolnshire owned at least twenty-five books, including works by Augustine Marlorat, John Jewel, Philippe de Mornay, Johannes Lodovicus Vives, Thomas Cooper, and John Whitgift. Leonard Harrison of Warwickshire had a larger library, 159 books, covering a wider range of authors and subjects, including competing anti-Catholic works by Anthony Munday and John Nichols (see Hamilton, 32, 33, 47), and books of history and law. A library of 173 volumes was that of John Marshall of Stratford-upon-Avon, a collection studied by scholars interested in the books available in Shakespeare’s environment and given interesting editorial treatment here. Marshall’s list includes books common to grammar schools, classics, primers, and books by More, Calvin, Latimer, Luther, and Ascham.
A collector (111 books) of a different sort was the Parisian Jean Liseau de Tourval, who worked for King James as a clandestine agent. His theological holdings have a reformist and Continental character. The books of Hanserd Knollys, a Protestant religious radical, were confiscated in 1639 by order of King Charles. Fleeing to New England, he was excluded from Massachusetts. His booklist includes the radical theologians John Penry, Dudley Fenner, William Bradshaw, and William Prynne, as well as Continental Reformers. Vastly detailed and offering insights into numerous topics, this volume’s central contribution is its unique focus on books owned by Catholics.
