Print and Protestantism in Early Modern England
Print and Protestantism in Early Modern England

Author: Ian Green

Publisher: OUP Oxford

Published: 2000-11-02

Total Pages: 716

ISBN-13: 0191543292

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In this highly innovative study, Ian Green examines the complete array of Protestant titles published in England from the 1530s to the 1720s. These range from the large specialist volumes at the top to cheap tracts at the bottom, from radical on one wing to conservative on the other, and from instructive and devotional manuals to edifying-cum-entertaining works such as religious verse and cautionary tales. Wherever possible the author adopts a statistical approach to permit a focus on those works which sold most copies over a number of years, and in an annotated Appendix provides a brief description of over seven hundred best selling or steady selling religious titles of the period. A close study of these texts and the forms in which they were offered to the public suggests a rapid diversification of both the types of work published and of the readerships at which they were targeted. It also demonstrates shrewd publishers' frequent attempts to plug gaps in a rapidly expanding market. Where previous studies of print have tended to focus on the polemical and the sensational, this one highlights the didactic, devotional, and consensual elements found in most steady selling works. It is also suggested that in these works there were at least three Protestantisms on offer an orthodox, clerical version, a moralistic, rational version favoured by the educated laity, and a popular version that was barely Protestant at all and that the impact of these probably varied both within and between different readerships. These conclusions shed much light not only on the means by which English Protestantism was disseminated, but also on the doctrinally and culturally diffused nature of English Protestantism by the end of the Stuart period. Both the text and the appendix should prove invaluable to anyone interested in the history of the Reformation or in printing as a medium of education and communication in early modern England.

Milton's Century
Milton's Century

Author: Michael R. Collings

Publisher: Wildside Press LLC

Published: 2013-03-20

Total Pages: 610

ISBN-13: 1479409944

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No artist creates his works in a vacuum. Beyond the conscious influence of books read, artwork seen, minds probed (through conversation or exchange of letters), writers are in no small part products of everything that surrounds them--people, places, things, events. MILTON'S CENTURY is designed to place one particular genius--John Milton, arguably the finest poet the English nation (perhaps even Western civilization) has produced--in the context of his time. And what a remarkable time it was--a century of revolutions, of discoveries, of literary and artistic efflorescence, of religious turmoil and political turbulence, of plagues and fires and ultimate rebuilding...and of the first adumbrations of the Modern Age. MILTON'S CENTURY becomes vital and alive for twenty-first-century readers through the vast network of connections and interconnections that Professor Collings articulates. [Borgo Literary Guides, No. 15.]