The Case of Eleazar Edgar: Leicester’s Commonwealth and the Book Trade in 1604

Abstract

Scholars have long observed that the Catholic libel known as Leicester’s Commonwealth circulated extensively in manuscript. After its first printing in 1584, the tract was not printed again until 1641. Yet over ninety full or partial manuscript copies survive, suggesting that it was, as H. R. Woudhuysen writes, “one of the most widely circulated prose tracts of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.” Despite the considerable number of extant manuscripts, however, scholars have found few explicit reports of the book’s scribal dissemination.

This note records a neglected report of the tract’s circulation in manuscript. In November 1604, the Stationer Eleazar Edgar admitted that he had procured a “written copie” of Leicester’s Commonwealth for an unnamed gentleman. His testimony helps us address what Earle Havens and Elizabeth Patton have recently called a “lacuna” in scholarship on the dissemination of early modern Catholic texts. As Havens and Patton point out, “the specific material circumstances surrounding the distribution, circulation and popular consumption of these English Catholic books have remained largely undocumented and undefined.” Just as poorly documented is the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean Stationers’ trade in prohibited religious polemic. In fact, there survive from that period only a few accounts of members of the Stationers’ Company distributing either manuscripts or illegal books. I describe here a case of a Stationer trafficking in both: a scribal copy of a banned book.