Week 4

Week Four will begin by assessing the impact of gender and social rank on reading. As a case in point, books produced for nuns and monks prior to the Reformation remained in use as medieval genres underwent adaptation to suit changing reading practices of Protestant and Catholic men and women. We shall move on to consider resistance to the prohibition on Bible reading by women such as Anne Askew, who cleverly deployed her intimate knowledge of the English Bible. Interrogators accused her of heresy in a plot to bring about the downfall of Catherine Parr, Henry VIII’s sixth and final wife. At the same time, Queen Catherine received a gift copy of an evangelical treatise translated and handwritten by Princess Elizabeth (later Elizabeth I). The reception of Tyndale’s translation of the New Testament exemplifies debate over whether lower-class readers possessed the capacity to understand the Bible on their own. This question was resolved by the time of the King James Bible, which remained the standard translation until the twentieth century.

The Wednesday session will consider printing and reading during the Counter-Reformation by investigating the responses to English Protestant books by Catholic readers exiled in France and the Low Countries. In considering the illustration of Latin martyrologies designed to inspire devotion among Jesuit seminarians in Rome and Spain as well as Catholic laity who remained under duress in England, we shall place Jesuit iconography in conversation with the symbolism of book illustrations studied during previous weeks. Moreover, we plan to interrogate the widespread assumption that the Protestant Reformation produced a distinctive and dominant print culture by considering the vibrancy of Catholic print culture. Professor Alexandra Walsham will co-lead this session. She will also speak to participants about their individual study projects.

Focused on “Re-forming Devotional Reading, Writing, and Publication,” our final rare book exhibition and workshop will consider books central to the dissemination of Protestant and Catholic ideas. Professor Walsham will join us for this session. It will focus on texts central to the spread of the English Reformation and Counter-Reformation, including paraphrases of the New Testament by Erasmus; Protestant versions of the medieval ars moriendi; a pre-Reformation Book of Hours defaced by a hostile reader; Philip Melanchthon’s influential Loci communes with additions by his student alongside a hostile Catholic response; pre-Reformation and Reformation-era sermons, including an edition of Hugh Latimer’s sermons with manuscript additions by the first puritan minister of Salem, MA; influential works of the Counter-Reformation by Luis de Granada and others; polemical attacks on Catholic traditions; English Catholic illustrated martyrologies by Richard Verstegan and Giovanni Battista Cavalieri; treatises on the burning of books; and more.

This seminar will conclude with a roundtable discussion focused on participants’ collective findings and application of their results in teaching, scholarship, conference presentations, publication of articles or books, and so forth.

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