Book Burning in Tudor and Stuart EnglandAuthor(s): David CressyReviewed work(s):Source: The Sixteenth Century Journal, Vol. 36, No. 2 (Summer, 2005), pp. 359-374Published by: The Sixteenth Century JournalStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20477359 .Accessed: 04/10/2012 18:56

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Sixteenth CenturyJournal XXXVI/2 (2005)

Book Burning in Tudor and Stuart England David Cressy

Ohio State University

This article treats book burning and censorship in England between the 1 520s and the 1640s as part of the communications repertoire of the early modern state. Combating heresy, blasphemy, and sedition, Tudor and Stuart authorities subjected transgressive works to symbolic execution at key sites in London and the universities.The addition of the hangman to the ceremony in the 1630s reinforced the authority of the state over texts. But the ritual was not always performed according to the script. Through gesture, voice, and narrative, actors and spectators sometimes subverted the ceremony, imposing a contrary meaning on its message. Even as an exercise of power, book burning was unstable and ambivalent and was ultimately counterproductive.

HISTORIANS AND LITERARY SCHOLARS have been engaged in a lively debate about the politics and hermeneutics of censorship in early modern England. Some of this scholarship is concerned with constraints on the theater, and restrictions on what could be said or performed on stage. 1 But the central strand of the debate concerns press censorship, and is rooted in an earlier liberal discourse about freedom of expression.2 Most studies cite book burning as the extreme exemplar of repression, but few attend closely to the spectacles through which that repression was enacted.

The founding studies in this genre are righteously hostile to censorship and aghast at the destruction of books. Most of them are informed by nineteenth century notions of progress, which discerned some sort of trajectory from

Richard Dutton, Mastering the Revels: The Regulation and Censorship of English Renaissance Drama

(Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1991); idem, Licensing, Censorship, and Authorship in Early Modern

England: Buggeswords (New York: Palgrave, 2000). 2Annabel Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation: The Conditions of Writing and Reading in Early

Modern England (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984); A. B. Worden, "Literature and Political

Censorship in Early Modern England," in Too Mighty to Be Free: Censorship and the Press in Britain and the

Netherlands, ed. A. C. Duke and C. A.Tamse (Zutphen: De Walburg, 1987), 45-62; Cyndia Susan

Clegg, Press Censorship in Elizabethan England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Cyndia Susan Clegg, Press Censorship in Jacobean England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Anthony Milton, "Licensing, Censorship, and Religious Orthodoxy in Early Stuart England," Historical

Journal 41 (1998):625-52; Debora Shuger,"Civility and Censorship in Early Modern England," in Cen

sorship and Silencing: Practices of Cultural Regulation, ed. Robert C. Post (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1998), 89-110; Anthony Hadfield, "The Politics of

Early Modern Censorship," in Literature and Censorship in Renaissance England, ed. Anthony Hadfield

(New York: Palgrave, 2001), 1-13. See also David Loades, Politics, Censorship and the English Reformation (London: Pinter, 1991); Sheila Lambert, "The Printers and the Government, 1604-1640," in Aspects of Printing from 1600, ed. Robin Myers and Michael Harris (Oxford: Oxford Polytechnic Press, 1987), 1

29; idem, "State Control of the Press in Theory and Practice: The Role of the Stationers' Company before 1640," in Censorship and the Control of Print in England and France 1600-1910, ed. Robin Myers and Michael Harris (Winchester: St. Paul's Bibliographies, 1992), 1-32; Michael Mendie, "De Facto

Freedom, De Facto Authority: Press and Parliament, 1640-1643," Historical Journal 38 (1995): 307-32.

359

360 Sixteenth Century Journal XXXVI/2 (2005)

repressive intolerance to more pluralist conditions, from a benighted past to a more modern present. The Victorian bibliophile James Anson Farrer, for example, in Books Condemned to be Burnt, condemned "the rude censorship of fire ... in those far-off barbarous days."3 Twentieth-century contributions included Charles Ripley Gillett's two volumes of Burned Books: Neglected Chapters in British History and Literature which came out in 1932; The Strugglefor the Freedom of the Pressfrom Caxton to Cromwell by William Clyde, which followed in 1934; and what once appeared to be the definitive work on the subject, Freedom of the Press in England, 1476-1776: The Rise and Decline of Government Control, by Fred Seaton Siebert, which was published under the shadow of totalitarianism in 1952.4 Guiding these works are modern concerns about "freedom" and "liberties," and uniquely American notions of "constitutional rights" under the First Amendment. There is a proleptic and anachronistic quality to these classic studies, because such concepts as "freedom of the press," "freedom of information," and "individual liberties" had little cultural currency before the eighteenth or nineteenth century.

More recent analyses of censorship in Tudor and Stuart England examine book

burning situationally and contextually, by reference to political culture, religious expression, material bibliography, and the currently fashionable history of the book.The best works locate the suppression of texts and the punishment of writers within the problems of print culture, the production and consumption of writing, and the vagaries of readership and discourse, in particular historical circumstances. They demonstrate that English political culture from the Reformation to the Rev olution experienced a long and continuing nervousness about texts.

Christopher Hill's argument that early modern regimes deployed a repressive regime of censorship "to prevent the circulation of dangerous ideas" has been challenged from several directions, although Hill himself anticipated most objections.5 Annabelle Patterson imagined writers negotiating a coded system of communication "in which ambiguity becomes a creative and necessary instrument."6 BlairWorden argued that early Stuart censorship was more arbitrary and unpredictable than repressive, and showed how constraints in the reign of Charles I could be circumvented with caution.7 Anthony Milton accepts that

3James Anson Farrer, Books Condemned to be Burnt (London, 1892) 28, 47. See also W H. Hart, Index Expurgatorius Anglicanus, or A Descriptive Catalogue of the Principal Books Printed or Published in

England which have been Suppressed or Burnt by the Common Hangman (London, 1872-78). 4Charles Ripley GiUett, Burned Books: Neglected Chapters in British History and Literature (NewYork:

Columbia University Press, 1932); WiUiam Clyde, The Struggle for the Freedom of the Press from Caxton to

Cromwell (London: Published for St. Andrews University by H. Milford, Oxford University Press, 1934,

2001); Fred Seaton Siebert, Freedom of the Press in England, 1416-1116:The Rise and Decline of Govern ment Control (Urbana: University of IUinois Press, 1952). See also Donald Thomas, A Long Time Burning: The History of Literary Censorship in England (New York: Praeger, 1969).

5Christopher HiU, "Censorship and Literature," in his Collected Essays, vol. 1, Writing and Revolu tion in Seventeenth Century England (Brighton: Harvester, 1985), 32-57. HiU points out the inefficiencies and contradictions of early modern English censorship, and aUows that authors could use "evasive tech

niques" including coded messages to see their work into print. 6Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation, 11.

7Worden, "Literature and Political Censorship," 49, 53.

Cressy / Book Burning in Tudor & Stuart England 361

Jacobean censorship was relatively benign, but finds much more interference with texts during the "Laudian hegemony" of the 1630s.8 Cyndia Clegg's two books indicate that Elizabethan censorship was variable and inconsistent, and that Jacobean constraints on the press were neither repressive nor hegemonic. The suppression of texts and the punishment of authors was relatively rare, and the few well-known cases are rooted in particular political circumstances.9 Debora Shuger takes the censor's view, and argues that the few works singled out for punishment deserved what they got. Censorship, by this interpretation, was a necessary and legitimate response to scandalous and malicious writing that violated the norms of civilized discourse.10 Arnold Hunt presents evidence of a relationship between licensers and authors that involved more collaboration and feedback than rigid repression, although he too acknowledges that censorship became more interventionist in the 1630s.11

These studies have shown in detail which texts were suppressed on what occasions and what parts of their contents the authorities found offensive. They have established the chronology of censorship and have exposed many of the circumstances that led to state intervention. But they have relatively little to say about the actual censorship events, the polemical or pedagogical eloquence of book burning, or the cultural and political persuasiveness of the ceremonies

through which the destruction of text was performed.What is lacking, and what this study seeks to supply, is more of an ethnographic approach to symbolic action-more attention to participation, spectacle, and dialogue-which sees book burning as part of the public performance of power as well as a means of policing discourse and destroying words on paper.12

The public rituals of censorship formed part of the communications repertoire of the early modern state. The banning and burning of books involved dialogue and discourse, speaker and audience, spectacle and spectators in the making and trans mission of meaning. Investigation of this process reveals how the authorities deployed the didactic and communicative media at their disposal, and how subjects and citizens could subvert the proceedings to impose meanings and interpretations of their own. Book burning, I will argue, was both medium and message. Henry VIII knew how to put on a good show, and a century later the government of Charles I learned again how to stage such spectacles for maximum effect. But nei ther had full control of its consequences. Over the course of the sixteenth and sev enteenth centuries book burning developed from a rare to an occasional occurrence, relocated from an outdoor to an indoor procedure, and changed from a

8Milton, "Licensing, Censorship, and Religious Orthodoxy," 625-51.

9Clegg, Press Censorship in Elizabethan England; idem, Press Censorship in Jacobean England. 10Shuger,"CiviHty and Censorship," 91-92, 97.

^Arnold Hunt, "Licensing and Religious Censorship in Early Modern England," in Literature and

Censorship, 127-46. 12For a similar approach to Reformation iconoclasm, see Margaret Aston, Faith and Fire: Popular

and Unpopular Religion 1350-1600 (London: Hambledon, 1992), 291-313.

362 Sixteenth Century Journial XXXVI/2 (2005)

bureaucratic to a quasi-theatrical performance.Whether it was an effective means of communication, and how its messages were heard, remain matters for discussion.

Books, as everyone knew, could be dangerous. It was commonly observed that gunpowder and printing were invented in the same age, and nobody could say which caused more trouble. Printing made possible the multiple production of texts and the dispersal of ideas on paper to a promiscuous and uncontrollable public. Martin Luther's theological questions, his handwritten ninety-five theses, became the Protestant Reformation because his ideas, and those of his followers, were dispersed in the relatively new medium of print.13 It was the arrival of Lutheran books in the reign of HenryVIII that prompted the first public book burning in England.14

In May 1521, with Cardinal Wolsey attending in state and the imperial and papal ambassadors present to observe, a selection of Luther's books were burned in

the churchyard of St. Paul's cathedral. John Fisher, the bishop of Rochester, preached against heresy, and the offending publications were set alight in the course of the bishop's sermon. Burning, of course, was what the state did to heretics throughout Catholic Europe, but since Martin Luther was safely protected in

Germany the vengeance of the church was directed against his books. What happened was a kind of metonymy, a symbolic substitution of an attribute for an entity, and a carefully stage-managed demonstration of the English king's Catholic orthodoxy, which earned him the hereditary papal title "defender of the faith." The book burning accomplished its purpose as a display of royal positions and intentions, but it utterly failed to remove Protestant works from circulation. The ironies would only unfold later, for Fisher the bishop would soon be executed as a traitor (or martyr) and Henry VIII himself would spectacularly break England's connections to the pope.15

One more incident stands out from Henry's reign, from a time when he was still punishing heretics. The London merchant Thomas Sommers was caught with some banned books in 1530, at a time when it was illegal to own English transla tions of the Gospels, and was made to take part in a public spectacle involving their

conflagration. It was not he that was being burnt, but the books, as related in John Foxe's Actes and Monuments. 16

13Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communication and Cultural

Change in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979); idem, The Printing Rev olution in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); David McKitterick, Print, Manuscript and the Search for Order, 1450-1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

14Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII, ed.]. S. Brewer et al., 21 vols.

(London, 1862-1932), 3:1:485; Carl S. Meyer, "Henry VIII Burns Luther's Books, 12 May 1521," Jour nal of Ecclesiastical History 9 (1958): 173-87.

15Henry VIII's Asserti Septum Sacramentum appeared in 1521, two months after the burning of Lutheran books, earning him the title "Defensor fidei."

16John Foxe, Actes and Monuments, ed. George Townsend and Stephen Reed Cattley (London, 1838), 5:452-53.The episode is dated to 19 November 1530 in Two London Chronicles from the Collection

of John Stow, ed. Charles Lethbridge Kingsford (1910), 5.

Cressy / Book Burning in Tudor & Stuart England 363

Sommers and others were made to ride in procession from the Tower to

Cheapside, through the streets of London, with the offending publications dis

played about their persons.The books were to be exhibited as a kind of penitential costume. According to Foxe, "When the bishop's officers came to dress him with books, as they had trimmed the others, and would have made holes in his garments to have thrust the strings of the books therein, 'Nay,' said Sommers,'I have always loved to go handsomely in my apparel,' and taking the books and opening them, he bound them together by the strings, and cast them about his neck, the leaves being all open, like a collar."

Arrived at Cheapside, they found "a great fire was made to burn their books in, and a pillory set up there ... in token that they had deserved it."The prisoners themselves were made to participate in their punishment by throwing their books in the fire. Foxe continues: "But when Master Sommers saw that his New Testa

ment should be burned [presumably William Tyndale's translation], he threw it over the fire, which was seen by some of God's enemies, and brought to him again, commanding him to cast it into the fire, which he would not do, but cast it through the fire, which thing was done three times. But at last a stander-by took it up and saved it from burning."

The martyrologist tells this as a story about godly suffering for the sake of the Gospel, and about the providence that allowed at least one copy of the English New Testament to escape burning. It can also be read as a performance of peniten tial public theater-with actions, props, costumes, and audience-staged by the state to announce its anathema against heretical publications. Here too are ironies, not least in the capacity of participants and chroniclers-like Sommers and Foxe to reverse the intentions of the authorities and to appropriate the spectacle for

polemical purposes of their own.17 It was a propaganda demonstration, but not one the state could fully control.

Queen Mary, in the service of Catholic orthodoxy, cracked down even harder on heresy after the brief Protestant regime of her brother, Edward VI.18 Two of Europe's leading Reformation theologians, Paul Fagius, professor of Hebrew, and Martin Bucer, regius professor of divinity, had died while teaching at Cambridge under King Edward's protection. They were buried at Cambridge with full Chris tian honors, Fagius in St. Michael's Church and Bucer in Great St. Mary's. A few years later, under Mary, they were posthumously condemned as heretics, their bodies were dug up, chained in coffins, and publicly burned in the marketplace at Cambridge, along with "a cart load of books." Both they and their books were sub jected to symbolic execution.John Foxe provides a woodcut of this episode, which is one of the few sixteenth-century illustrations of the public burning of books. It

was evidently a major civic spectacle, with townsmen and university dignitaries in

17For other heretical publications suppressed in Henry VIII's reign, with instructions for their for feiture and pubHc burning, see proclamations of 1542 and 1546, Letters and Papers, 17:90; 21:1:611.

18On the loosening of restraint under EdwardVI, see John King, "Freedom of the Press, Protestant

Propaganda, and Protector Somerset," Huntington Library Quarterly 40 (1976): 1-9.

364 Sixteenth Century Journal XXXVI/2 (2005)

attendance. 19 Like the burning of Lutheran works in London a generation earlier, this was a signal of religious orthodoxy and an impressive exhibition of power; but it was no more successful in eradicating heresy, or achieving the extinction of texts.

In the same year as the burning at Cambridge, 1557, the Company of Statio ners was chartered in London. This was a commercial company concerned with the making, printing, and selling of books. Its charter gave the Stationers monop oly power in the London book trade, including the right to "seize, burn or convert ... to the uses of the commonalty" any publications printed contrary to statute or

proclamation.20 It was a kind of privatization or outsourcing, which allowed the Stationers to exercise a police power over books, on behalf of the state. Henceforth the Stationers would perform their own book burnings, if their political and com

mercial interests coincided. For the rest of the Tudor period and through most of the reigns of the first two

Stuarts, the Stationers cooperated with licensers from the established church. Everything they published was supposed to be licensed or approved in advance by the Privy Council, the chancellors of the two universities, or special licensers

appointed by the archbishop of Canterbury or the bishop of London. The censor

ship regime worked by prior restraint, with further punishment for books that

slipped through the net. It would be strange if Queen Elizabeth's forty-five-year reign saw no more

suppression of books; what is surprising is how little use Elizabeth made of the

punitive spectacles of her predecessors. She was determined to proceed against the

dangers of Roman Catholicism, radical Protestantism, scandal, and sedition, but she did so while burning very few books. In most cases it was enough to demand that offending copies be confiscated. Instead of spectacular public book burnings at

Cheapside or Paul's Cross, Elizabeth favored low-key disposal of forbidden texts in the kitchens at Stationers Hall or in the residence of the bishop of London. Book burning had gone indoors.

In 1573, for example, a proclamation ordered subjects "to despise, reject, and destroy" seditious books, especially those advocating Presbyterianism. Sellers or purchasers of the forbidden books were supposed to turn them in to the authorities or dispose of them themselves.Two publications especially raised the ire of the gov ernment, the anonymous Admonition to the Parliament and Thomas Cartwright's Reply to an answere, both produced illicitly on a secret press outside London. One of the printers,John Stroud, was identified and brought before the High Commis

sion, and was asked what became of the remaining copies. Stroud's reply is inter

19John Foxe,Actes and Monuments (London, 1563), 1449, iUustration facing p. 1548; H. C. Porter,

Reformation and Reaction in Tudor Cambridge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958), 55 56.The burning took place on a Saturday morning at the beginning of February 1557. See Martin

Bucer, Scripta Anglicana Fere Omnia (Basel, 1577), 915-35. Books were also burned at the executions of

WiUiam Wolsey and Robert Pygit in 1555 and of John HuUier in 1556, in each case the martyrs clutch

ing the New Testament or Book of Common Prayer to their breast as they burned; Foxe, Actes and Mon

uments, 7:405, 8:379.

20Clegg, Press Censorship in Elizabethan, 21.

Cressy / Book Burning in Tudor & Stuart England 365

esting and revealing. "He had delivered thirty-four of them to the bishop of London in one bundle.... More he said he had, but his wife had burned them, as she was told." The bishop had exercised his power to call in copies, and relied on the publisher or printer to deal with the remainder. There was no public burning, nor were the Stationers involved since the offending text was not one of their pro ductions. It was enough for the regime to pronounce judgment against the book, reprimand those responsible, and attempt to remove copies from circulation.21

Six years later, in 1579, came one of the most violent government reactions to a controversial publication. Queen Elizabeth at this time was contemplating

marriage to the French duke of AlenSon, and some of her subjects feared that England would fall under French Catholic influence. Protesting vehemently against the proposed marriage, and marshaling every traditional English prejudice against the French, the lawyerJohn Stubbs unleashed The Discoverie of a Gaping Guf whereinto England is like to be Swallowed. Neither the names of the author, printer, nor publisher appeared on the title page of this intemperate and inflammatory text. The queen was not amused, indeed she was furious, and came down heavily on Stubbs and his associates. A proclamation in September 1579 ordered the book to be "destroyed in open sight of some public officer," and Stubbs and his associates were tried for "seditious libel." The printer, Hugh Singleton, was let off with a warning, but Stubbs, the author, and William Page, the distributor, were sentenced to have their right hands chopped off. This was pursuant to the mid-Tudor treason law (1 & 2 Philip and Mary, 3, continued under Elizabeth), which provided that offenders should have their right hand stricken off in "some market place" for writings "of slander and reproach and dishonor to the king's and queen's majesty."

The sentence was carried out in the marketplace atWestminster, with compe tent surgeons in attendance but apparently less competent executioners. It took three blows with a meat cleaver, pounded down with a mallet, to sever Stubbs's hand-indeed, to reduce it to a stub. But converting the episode from a humilia tion to a triumph, as soon as the sentence was enacted Stubbs famously pulled off his hat with his remaining hand and shouted "God save the queen," before fainting from pain and loss of blood. Rather like Thomas Sommers under Henry VIII, Stubbs had imposed his own meaning on the event and subverted the theater of the state. Every chronicler told Stubbs's story from a sympathetic viewpoint.22 So who was saying what to whom?

We know what happened to Stubbs, including his subsequent political reha bilitation and election as a member of Parliament, but we have little information about the fate of his books. The proclamation simply ordered their destruction, with an officer looking on. None of the commentators mentions them.There is no evidence that copies of The Discoverie of a Gaping Gu!f became props in the public

21 Clegg, Press Censorship in Elizabethan, 52?54, 67.

22Hart, Index Expurgatorius Anglicanus, 9.

366 Sixteenth Century Journal XXXVI/2 (2005)

punishment, though presumably a number were destroyed.23 Surviving copies (at least eleven in England and six in North American libraries) testify to the incom pleteness and inefficiency of their suppression.

Low-key, unpublicized book burnings continued intermittently for the rest of the Elizabethan era. Perhaps a dozen or so books were suppressed by proclamation,

with no particular specifications for their destruction. For example, the Jesuit William Allen's True, Sincere and Modest Defence of English Catholiques, smuggled in from Douai, could be construed to justify the queen's assassination, but the proclamation against it simply ordered all copies to be turned in to magistrates or to members of the Privy Council.24 It was not Elizabeth's style to make bonfires of her subjects' books any more than she would make windows of men's souls. Reprimand and private pressure proved preferable to spectacles of public punishment, which were not always susceptible to semiotic control. The oven at Stationers Hall or the kitchens of the bishop of London proved convenient places for this indoor burning of the books.

Late Elizabethan censorship, scholars now agree, was variable, inconsistent, and not particularly efficient. If books were burned it was usually with the mini mum of ceremony or fuss.25 The closest Elizabeth's government came to a major crackdown was in 1599 when the archbishop of Canterbury and the bishop of London went after a sheaf of history books, plays, and satires which they deemed

scandalous and offensive. But instead of staging public bonfires, with the panoply and apparatus of state, they delegated the task to the Stationers to take care of their own product.26 And when they seized copies of John Hayward's history of the reign of Henry IV, they simply burned them indoors at the house of the bishop of London.27

A new century and a new dynasty produced changes in procedures for the punishment of books as well as a different public conversation.James I reverted to the earlier Tudor practice of burning condemned books outdoors at Paul's Cross, in the heart of the city of London. It may have been thought especially appropriate to punish publications in the area where the bookshops were concentrated, in the

23Clegg, Press Censorship in Elizabethan, 32, 71,123-24; John Stubbs and Richard Hooker, Gaping Gulf with Letters and Other Relevant Documents, ed. Lloyd E. Berry (Charlottesville,VA: University Press

ofVirginia, 1968), xxxiii-xxxvii, 108-16 for Stubbs's letters, 147-52 for the proclamation. 24William Allen, A True, Sincere and Modest Defence of English Catholiques (Douai(?), 1584); Clegg,

Press Censorship in Elizabethan, 69-70,97,253. 25In 1587 the government ordered burned^. Commission sent to the Pope, cardynales, bishops,friers,

monkes, with all the other rabie of that viperous generation by the high and mighty prince and king Sathanas the Devill of Hell (London, 1586), which the Stationers had legitimately registered a few months earlier. In

1595 Archbishop Whitgift ordered five continental Catholic publications to be burned at Stationers'

Hall; Clegg, Press Censorship in Elizabethan, 60. 26The Stationers were directed to burn seven recently published satires, including Pygmalion by

John Marston and Microcynica by Thomas Middleton. Five of the seven had previously received ecclesi astical licenses. They also burned two satires by Samuel Rowlands, The letting of humors blood and A mery meting, both of which were soon reprinted; Clegg, Press Censorship in Elizabethan, 198?200, 216?17.

27John Hayward, The first part of the life and raign of King Henrie the IIII (London, 1599), which was

implicated in the ambitions of the earl of Essex; Clegg, Press Censorship in Elizabethan, 204?16.

Cressy / Book Burning in Tudor & Stuart England 367

vicinity of St. Paul's cathedral, around the corner from Stationers' Hall.28 A dozen or so books were incinerated there, to the accompaniment of sermons, between 1603 and 1625.These burnings, as Cyndia Clegg has pointed out, were acts of pro paganda rather than efficient operations of censorship.29 They signaled extreme dis approval of writings with deviant or dangerous religious implications.

Several of the texts that James I sent to the fire were obscure imported publi cations from Douai or Heidelberg by Jesuit or Arminian authors. One of them, the Tractatus Theologicus of Conrad Vorstius-described by one historian as "an ugly, square, brown book of five hundred pages ... as unreadable as it is unprepossess ing" -was ordered "to be publicly burnt, as well in Paul's churchyard as in both the universities of this kingdom" in 1611. In 1622 the work of the German reformer David Pareus was given similar treatment.30 None of these were domestic publica tions, nor did they have much circulation among English readers. The burnings

were announcements of official displeasure-James I displaying his Calvinist cre dentials-as much for overseas consumption as for onlookers in London. As one observer wrote in 1622, what good did it do to burn a few books in London "when they are current in all Christendom."31

At the very end of James I's reign, as the king lay dying, an English text, a licensed publication by the orthodox Calvinist minister Edward Elton, was publicly burned in London. On Sunday, 13 February 1625, more than eight hundred copies of Elton's posthumous publication, God's Holy Mind, underwent "a februation or

purging by fire" at Paul's Cross. A sympathetic observer described it as "a holy fire, sanctified in earthly and unhallowed flames" and "the greatest holocaust that hath been offered in this kind in our memory."32

God's Holy Mind, though unexceptional by Jacobean polemical standards, offended the up-and-coming anti-Calvinists, who had captured the favor of Prince Charles and the duke of Buckingham. Its punishment was a sign of the rise of the Arminians and their ability to exercise power.33 The burning had nothing to do with the security of the state and everything to do with the politics of religion. A

28For the geography of this area, see Peter W M. Blayney, The Bookshops in St. Paul's Cross Church

yard (London: Bibliographical Society, 1990).

29Cyndia Susan Clegg, "Burning Books as Propaganda in Jacobean England," in Literature and

Censorship, 165?86. 30Other books burned included Prurit-anus in 1609 and works by Suarez in 1613; Farrar, Books

Condemned to be Burnt, 66; Clegg, Press Censorship in Jacobean, 11,81, 85.

31John Chamberlain, quoted in Clegg, Press Censorship in Jacobean, 85. 32Daniel Featley, Cygnea Cant?o: Or, Learned Decisions (London, 1629), 5. The printer, Robert

Mylbourne, complained that almost nine hundred bound copies were taken, leaving him with losses of more than seventy pounds. Ibid., 39.

33In February 1625 the Arminian Richard Mountague remarked to Northumberland's chaplain "that Elton's books must be burnt," and he told John Cosin,"the next return I shaU hear by you what a goodly fire our Sabbatarians made at the cross." Earlier he had written, half jestingly, about the "masked

puritan" Abraham Darcie:"his books should fire him at a stake; before God it wiU never be weU tiU we

have our inquisition," The Correspondence of John Cosin, ed. George Ornsby, 2 vols. (Durham, 1869), 1:32, 53, 59;Thomas Birch, The Court and Times of James I, 2 vols. (London, 1849), 2:498. For the theo

logical and political background to this controversy, see Nicholas Tyzcke, Anti-Calvinists: The Rise of Arminianism, ca. 1590-1640 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989).

368 Sixteenth Century Journal XXXVI/2 (2005)

rising section of the ecclesiastical avant-garde was proclaiming its hostility to the rigidities of predestination, while mainstream Calvinists, who until recently had dominated the church, could only react with displeasure. Popular responses, pre dictably, were mixed. Some spectators were no doubt cheering or jeering, but others were seen "partly weeping and wiping their eyes to see a book so full (as they conceived) of heavenly zeal and holy fire, sacrificed in earthly and unhallowed flames." Some city wits made a "conceited pageant" of the episode for "innocent

mirth," with an "emblem and motto" which "discovereth the affection of many that were there present."34

Once again, as an act of censorship, it was ineffective. The spectacle subverted its sponsors' intentions. Only part of the edition was destroyed, and surviving cop ies, though "gelded and mangled," could still be found on the market. Indeed, as Jacobean authorities recognized on other occasions, the publicity involved in burn ing a book endowed it with "importance" and caused it "to be sought." "The stir" of suppression made copies "much more inquired after" and turned some of them into best sellers.35

Book Burning was no more frequent in Charles I's reign, but it became much more dramatic. The public performance was orchestrated for maximum polemical effect. Historians still disagree whether Caroline, censorship was benign or repres sive, but it could be argued that the government of Charles I did not need to burn

many books because its prepublication controls were so rigid. Contemporaries cer tainly knew that some texts could not be published and that others could only appear with alterations and excisions. Their vital spark was said to be extinguished when words or passages offensive to the licensers had been gutted, gelded, or emas culated in advance. Daniel Featley's published sermons, for example, were said to have been "gelt" or "castrated" by the expunging of thirty pages, including some "masculine" passages about images that had already passed scrutiny under the pre vious archbishop.36 William Joness commentaries upon the Epistles, published in 1636, only made their way into press, it was said, with "the life, the vigor, and, as it were, the eyes of them picked out."37 This anthropomorphic language precedes John Milton's notion in Areopagitica that extinguishing the life of a book involved a kind of murder of reason, killing "the image of God, as it were in the eye." Milton

34 Featley, Cygnea Cant?o, 5?7.

35Clegg, Press Censorship in Jacobean, 89, 219; Featley, Cygnea Cant?o, 40.

36Daniel Featley, Clavis Mystica:A Key Opening divers Difficult and Mysterious texts of Holy Scripture (London, 1636); William Prynne, Canterburies Doome (London, 1646), 108, 254; Lambert B. Larking, ed., Proceedings, Principally in the County of Kent (1862), 84; Hunt, "Licensing and religious censorship," 140-42.

37Lambeth Palace Library, London, MS Misc. 943, 735?37; Proceedings in the Opening Session of the

Long Parliament: House of Commons, vol. 2,21 December 1640-20 March 1641, ed. Maija Jansson (Roch ester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2000), 525. Jones was the minister of East Burgholt, Suffolk, and died in 1636. Some of his earlier work had been published by his namesake William Jones of Red Cross Street, who had also been one of the printers of Prynne's Histrio-mastix. The 1635 edition of

Jones's Commentary is an expensively produced folio of over seven hundred pages, and its backers may have been more concerned at its failure to sell than because the licensers had tampered with its content.

Cressy / Book Burning in Tudor & Stuart England 369

also likened press censorship to abortion, when "the issue of the brain" was "sti fled" like "the issue of the womb."38

The Caroline state did not burn a large number of books, but when it went

after the few that slipped through the licensing system, it did so thoroughly, con vincingly, and with style. One of the first to suffer was Alexander Leighton, whose Appeal to the Parliament: Or, Sion's Plea Against the Prelates of 1628 cost him a beat ing, branding, fining, and ten years' imprisonment. His ears were cut, his nose was

slit, and he was made to stand at the pillory and be whipped. The principal site of

punishment was the author's body, not his text. Leighton, in his own words, was

made "a theatre of misery to men and angels" for "nothing but a book." The

offending volume was printed abroad, most likely in Amsterdam, beyond sight of

the Stationers or licensers. It was an intemperate attack against the bishops, which

Leighton was misguided enough to think would find favor with members of Par

liament.The details of the author's physical suffering are graphic, but there is noth

ing in the record that describes what happened to the book. Presumably some copies were burned, but in this case the theater of the state was more concerned to exhibit and humiliate the author than to impose punishment on his productions.39

The turning point came in 1634 when the court of Star Chamber came down heavily against William Prynne's Histrio-Mastix, a treatise against stage plays

published the previous year. Prynne was a university trained lawyer, a classically educated scholar, and a puritan who didn't know when to stop writing. He had

already sounded off against the bishops, against Arminian theology, and against long hair on men and makeup on women-and his enemies were waiting to grab him.

Histrio-Mastix, though formally licensed and legitimately published, was Prynne's

undoing. It fulminated against "all popular and common stage-plays, whether

comical, tragical, satirical, mimical, or mixed of either ... as sinful, hurtful, pernicious recreations ... altogether unseemly, yea unlawful unto Christians." It raged against dressing up and cross-dressing, and implied that any woman on the stage was a whore.40 The authorities construed the book to be both libelous and insulting to Queen Henrietta Maria, who had recently taken part in dramatic performances at court, even though the offending passages were written months earlier. The Star Chamber judges lined up to load punishments on Prynne, who was to be fined and imprisoned, to be barred from the law and stripped of his degrees, to be stood in the pillory like Alexander Leighton, and to suffer physical mutilation by the loss of his ears.

38John Milton, Areopagitica: A Speech of Mr. John Milton For the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing (Lon don, 1644), 4,9.

^Proceedings in the Opening Session of the Long Parliament: House of Commons, vol. 1, 3 November?19

December 1640, ed. Maija Jansson (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2000), 58, 63, 66; Alexander Leighton,^ Appeal to the Parliament (Amsterdam(?), 1628). His sufferings are summarized in

Alexander Leighton, .4? Epitome or Briefe Discoverie, From the Beginning to the Ending, of the many and great Troubles that Dr. Leighton suffered (London, 1646), 90. See also Stephen Foster, Notes from the Caroline

Underground: Alexander Leighton, the Puritan Triumvirate, and the Laudian Reaction to Nonconformity (Ham den, CT:Archon, 1978).

40WiUiam Prynne, Histrio-Mastix. The Players Scovrge; or, Actors Tragaedie (London, 1633), 9,830.

370 Sixteenth Century Journal XXXVI/2 (2005)

The chancellor of the exchequer, Lord Cottington, sentenced Prynne's book to a self-consciously novel mode of punishment. "I condemn it to be burnt, in the

most public manner that can be. The manner in other countries is ... to be burnt by the hangman, though not used in England.Yet I wish it may, in respect of the strangeness and heinousness of the matter contained in it, to have a strange manner of burning; therefore I shall desire it may be so burnt by the hand of the hangman." The other judges endorsed this innovation, or exotic importation, and agreed that Prynne should first "be set in the pillory at Westminster, with a paper on his head declaring the nature of his offence, and have one of his ears there cut off; and at another time be set in the pillory in Cheapside, with a paper as aforesaid, and there have his other ear cut off, and that a fire shall be made before the said pillory, and the hangman being there ready for that purpose, shall publicly in disgraceful

manner cast all the said books which could be produced into the fire to be burnt, as unfit to be seen by any hereafter."41

Justice (or vengeance) would be seen to be done, outdoors, publicly, in the same venues where Thomas Sommers was supposed to burn his Bible and where John Stubbs gave up his hand.The punishment was clearly theatrical in its staging, with set, script, actors, audience, and props; it was especially ironic for one who had written against dramatic representation. Prynne was not a heretic to be burned, but his books would be consumed before his eyes in a fire tended by the public exe cutioner. The sentence was carried out in May 1634, with Prynne in the pillory and his books in flames before him. According to one observer, the smoke from the burning almost suffocated the author, which was hardly surprising since each volume had more than a thousand pages.42

Three years later it all had to be done again, this time with Henry Burton the minister and John Bastwick the physician sharing the scaffold with Prynne. All three had published books that the regime found libelous, and all endured mutila tion and incarceration, the loss of their ears as well as their books. This time Prynne's face was branded with the letters S.L. for "seditious libel," but Prynne proudly said they represented "stigmata Laudis," the marks of Archbishop Laud. The state enacted its vengeance and removed these authors from circulation, but the cruelty of the punishment generated sympathy for the sufferers, who became known as the puritan "martyrs."43

By the later 1 630s the hangman had become a standard participant in these rit uals of public punishment. It was he who cut off the authors' ears, the hangman who set fire to their books, remiinding observers of the ultimate power of the state over life and death. The same Gregory Brandon who performed public hangings at Tyburn performed symbolic executions of texts at key sites around London,

41Thomas B. Howell, ed., Cobbett's Complete Collection of State Trials (London, 1809), 3:576.

42William Knowler, ed., The Earl of Strafiforde's Letters and Dispatches, 2 vols. (London, 1739), 1:261.

43David Cressy, Travesties and Transgressions in Tudor and Stuart England: Tales of Discord and Dissension

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 213-33.

Cressy / Book Burning in Tudor & Stuart England 371

including Cheapside, Paul's Cross, Smithfield market, and Westminster Palace Yard.

Just as the state inscribed pain on the bodies of delinquent authors and reduced their books to ashes, symbolically inscribing pain on the author's product, so the ceremony of book burning inscribed orthodoxy, discipline, and textual conflagra tion on the city of London at large.

Just one description of this activity survives in a satiric and seditious pamphlet written about 1640 and published two years later. According to the anonymous pamphleteer, describing his experiences in London, some forbidden Scottish texts were to be "burnt by the common hangman, who at the time appointed came in great state, as if he had been to bishop or brand Bastwick or Burton again, to the palace yard (alias the prelates purgatory) with a halter in each hand and with two trumpeters before him, and two men with a few loose papers following him; where after reading of the proclamation, Gregory very ceremoniously put fire to the fag gots, and so the poor innocent papers paid for it.When he had done he cried,'God save the king,' and flourished his ropes, [adding] 'if any man conceal any such papers, he shall be hanged in these halters'; with which words I was so afraid, that I ran home and burnt all my papers, and so saved him a labor."44

There are multiple entwinings here of who was saying what to whom. In one conversation, the state was using the ceremony of proclamation and trumpeters, the hangman and the fire, to dramatize its power against forbidden publications. In

another, more subversive, the pamphleteer was telling the story to present the intimidation as slightly ridiculous and to display his own nervous reaction to it as a sign of the times. By the time of this pamphlet's appearance in 1642 the authority of the Stuart state had been shattered, the bishops were in retreat, and effective con trol of the press had collapsed, in the beginning of the English Revolution.

Perhaps the most significant consequence of this revolution that swept England at the end of 1640 was the abandonment of licensing for the press. Charles I had lost a war with Scotland, the new Parliament was bent on reformation, and the victims of episcopal tyranny-Leighton, Prynne, Bastwick, and Burton-came out of prison. Press censorship collapsed after November 1640, and in 1641 the prerogative courts that enforced it-Star Chamber and High Commission-were formally abolished. The episcopal licensers ceased to function, and the Stationers'

monopoly proved impossible to sustain. Suddenly just about anyone could publish just about anything. There was an unprecedented media storm, as the numbers of

publications expanded from just six or seven hundred a year in the 1630s to almost nine hundred in 1640, over two thousand in 1641, and over four thousand in 1642. There were more items published in 1641 than in any year in the previous history of English printing. More appeared in 1642 than at any time again before the

44^4 Second Discovery by the Northern Scout (1642), 9.The reference is most likely to the March 1640

proclamation "against libelous and seditious pamphlets and discourses sent from Scotland," Stuart Royal Proclamations ... 1625-1646, ed.James F. Larkin (Oxford: Clarendon, 1983), 703-5.

372 Sixteenth CenturyJournal XXXVI/2 (2005)

eighteenth century. If printing itself was revolutionary, this was a revolution within the revolution.45

Some people were delighted, of course. Parliamentary preachers applauded the "setting our printing presses open" as one of the "unparalleled mercies" of the age. John Milton saw the end of licensing as "the breaking forth of light."46 Another author invoked the book of Genesis to observe that "the stone that made the stoppage of the well of Haran is now removed and the flocks of Laban may drink freely."47 But others were deeply troubled. Conservatives blamed "the liberty of the press" for poisoning "the obedience of his majesty's subjects" and "filling people's minds full ofjealousies both against king and Parliament."48

Even puritans on the parliamentary side were uneasy; even some whose own writings had been suppressed under Charles I deplored the new excessive liberty. What they wanted was a godly press, not a free one, and certainly not one that affronted their policies or offended God's honor. The parliamentary leader John Pym's charge against Archbishop Laud in this regard was not just that his censorship had prevented godly works from being printed, but that he had approved the licensing of books "full of falsehood, of scandals, such as have been more worthy to be burnt by the hand of the hangman in Smithfield."49 Even John Milton, the champion of press liberty in Areopagitica, allowed that "scandalous, seditious and libelous books" should take their chances and deserved to be suppressed.50

It is not surprising, then, that the same parliamentary radicals who had

complained of the bishops and who stood up for William Prynne should

themselves seek to eradicate texts of which they disapproved. Although they lacked the resources, and perhaps also the legitimacy of the courts of Charles I, parliamentary authorities in the early 1640s condemned a series of books and pamphlets to the fire. More than a dozen works went to the flames at this time, more than under the Caroline regime.

As soon as Parliament met in November 1640, members demanded that the recent book of canons should be burned. In February 1641 the Scottish commis

45Alain Veylit, "Some Statistics on the Number of Surviving Printed Titles for Great Britain and

Dependencies from the Beginnings of Print in England to the year 1800," http://www.cbsr.ucr.edu/ ESTCStatistics.html, accessed 10 March 2005; G. K. Fortescue, ed., Catalogue of the Pamphlets, Books,

Newspapers, and Manuscripts ... Collected by George Thomason, 1640-1661, 2 vols. (London, 1908), l:xxi. See also Sharon Achinstein, "Texts in Conflict: The Press and the Civil War," in Cambridge Companion to

Writing of the English Revolution, ed. N. H. Keeble (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 50

54; David Cressy, "Revolutionary England, 1640-1642," Past and Present 181 (November 2003): 35-71.

46John Vicars, Jehovah-Jireh: God in the Mount; Or, Englands Parliamentarie- Chronicle (London, 1644), 42.Thomas Mocket,77ie National Covenant (London, 1642), sig. A2; Milton, Areopagitica, 26.

47William Hinde,/1 Faithfull Remonstrance of the Holy Life and Happy Death of John Bruen (London, 1641), sig. A6, referring to Gen. 29:2-10.

^Calendar of State Papers Domestic 1641-43, 255; [Edward Browne], A Paradox Useful for the Times

(London, 1642), sig. A. 49

[John Pym],77ie Speech of Declaration of John Pymm, Esquire, To the Lords... Against William Laud

(London, 1641), 29.

50Milton, Areopagitica, 4; David Norbrook, "Areopagitica, Censorship, and the Early Modern Public Sphere," in 77ie Administration of Aesthetics: Censorship, Political Criticism and the Public Sphere, ed. Richard Burt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 3-33.

Cressy / Book Burning in Tudor & Stuart England 373

sioners in London, who had cheered the reversal of Laudian policies, now demanded "that all scandalous papers and libels printed against them might be

burnt." The works of the ceremonialist high churchman John Pocklington were burned at Oxford in March 1641 "with a great deal of solemnity." Lord Digby's speech sympathetic to the earl of Strafford was burned publicly inJuly 1641 .A sim ilar fate befell Sir Edward Dering's Collection of Speeches six months later.51 This will serve as a final example before moving to a conclusion.

The House of Commons condemned Dering's publication as "a most scandal ous, seditious, and vainglorious book," partly because it undercut their effort for religious reform, partly because Dering had the nerve to set forth his speeches in

print (including some that he had written but not given), and partly because it exposed to view the privileged and secret proceedings of Parliament. Dering him

self marveled in January 1642, "There are above forty-five hundred ... sold and more in printing; never anything sold like that."52 The book was a hot item, but it was about to get hotter.

One member of Parliament, Sir Simonds D'Ewes, counseled against a public burning, "because that might make the book to be inquired after by many who

would else never hear of it." And that is exactly what happened. Oliver Cromwell, still an obscure backbencher, moved that Dering's books be destroyed on Friday, 4

February. But when the time came the authorities could not lay their hands on suf ficient copies, and "there wanted books of Sir Edward Dering's to burn." Only after

diligent search over the weekend did they round up enough copies for the hang man to make a decent fire and spectacle. But the burning of the book did not lead to the suppression of the text, as surviving copies demonstrate. It only put up the price. One gentleman book buyer reported, "The book I could have bought for 14

pence last night, but now a crown cannot buy it." Another thought the burning might drive the price to fourteen shillings and "hasten a new impression." Dering himself protested to Parliament, "You have burnt my book, and thereby raised the price, and raised the desires of such as would have it. Alas, the burning of my book cannot confute me, nor silence me in the way I go." In this he was absolutely right. Dering was expelled from the House of Commons, and his printer was made to stand in the pillory, but nothing worse. The burning was a form of commentary, a political riposte, a gesture of disapproval, an episode in the theater of revolution, as much as an attempt to suppress discourse or eliminate text.53

^Proceedings in the Opening Session of the Long Parliament: House of Commons, 1:81, 82, 85, 2:420; British Library, Additional MS 70003, fol. 82. Calendar of State Papers Domestic 1641-44, 353.

52WiUson H. Coates, Anne Steele Young, andVernon F. Snow, eds.,The Private Journals of the Long Parliament 3 January to 5 March 1642 (New Haven: CorneU University Press, 1982), 253,261.

53Coates, Young and Snow, eds., Private Journals ... to 5 March 1642, 248, 253-55, 261, 264, 268, 283; Centre for Kentish Studies, Maidstone, Dering MSS, U350/C2/96; Larking, ed., Proceedings, Prin

cipally in the County of Kent, xlii, 75; Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS Rawlinson D 141 ("England's Memorable Accidents"), 19. Dorothy Gardiner, ed., The Oxinden Letters 1601?1642 (London: Consta

ble, 1933), 281; A Collection of Speeches made by Sir Edward Dering, Knight and Baronet, in matters of Religion (London, 1642).

374 Sixteenth CenturyJournal XXXVI/2 (2005)

* * *

Several conclusions emerge from this study: First, that book burning was not particularly effective as a vehicle of censorship, or even as an instrument of domination. If it was intended to suppress texts and consign offensive writings to oblivion, book burning was a consistent failure. Not a single one of the books mentioned here was entirely extinguished, and the fact that we can read them all today testifies to their survival. Material constructions of paper and bindings occasionally went up in flames, but in each case the text endured, often to reemerge in later editions. The paper may have reached Fahrenheit 451, but the words on the page emerged Phoenixlike from the ashes.

Second, attempts at censorship only drew attention to controversial works and stimulated demand among readers. As Jacobean authorities realized, the publicity and "stir" of punishment gave a book "importance" and caused it "to be sought."54 The burning "might make [it] to be inquired after by many who would else never hear of it," said Sir Simonds D'Ewes, and John Milton made much the same point,

echoing Francis Bacon, that the attempt to kill books instead "raises them and invests them with reputation."55 In Tudor and Stuart England the burning of books

was extreme and exceptional, representing a breakdown of the system, a failure of the normal means of control. It was targeted against transgressive works of heresy, blasphemy, and sedition, but its effect was to call attention to such texts rather than to consign them to oblivion.

Above all, book burning was a way of displaying power. It was didactic, polemical, punitive, and instructive. Just as a state execution is not only about kill ing, but says something about the might and the wrath of the lawful killers, so the ritual destruction of books conveys messages about orthodoxy, authority, and com

mand. It signaled to supporters and opponents alike that the government had means of control. The addition of the hangman to the ceremony reinforced the message that this was primarily a symbolic punishment, not a suppression of text. It was a demonstration of authority, not an annihilation of forbidden words.

Finally, the ritual of book burning was not always performed according to the

script.Victims were not always without resources. Actors and spectators supplied glosses and interpretations of their own. The subject of the punishment sometimes subverted the ceremony, imposing a contrary meaning on its message. (This could

also apply at the execution of heretics and felons.) Bible readers under HenryVIII, protestant nationalists under Elizabeth, and zealous puritans under Charles I all had

supporters in the crowd and chroniclers bent on telling their side of the story. Through gesture, voice, or narrative they had means to regain the initiative and to

control the history. Even as an exercise of power, book burning was unstable and ambivalent, susceptible to alternative narratives, and ultimately counterproductive.

54Clegg, Press Censorship in Jacobean, 89, 219; Featley, Cygnea Cant?o, 40.

55Coates, Young, and Snow, eds., Private Journals ... to 5 March 1642, 254; Milton, Areopagitica, 26.