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

Mansky, Joseph

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

dc.contributor.author	Mansky, Joseph
dc.date.accessioned	2021-05-17T14:17:46Z
dc.date.available	2021-05-17T14:17:46Z
dc.date.issued	2021-06
dc.description.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.	en_US
dc.description.abstract	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.
dc.description.peerreview	Yes	en_US
dc.identifier.citation	Mansky, Joseph. "The Case of Eleazar Edgar: Leicester’s Commonwealth and the Book Trade in 1604." The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, vol. 115, no. 2, 2021, pp. 233-241.	en_US
dc.identifier.doi	10.1086/713980	en_US
dc.identifier.uri	https://hdl.handle.net/11244/329590
dc.language	en_US	en_US
dc.subject	book history	en_US
dc.subject	manuscript	en_US
dc.subject	libel	en_US
dc.subject	Leicester’s Commonwealth	en_US
dc.subject	Catholicism	en_US
dc.title	The Case of Eleazar Edgar: Leicester’s Commonwealth and the Book Trade in 1604	en_US
dc.type	Article	en_US
ou.group	College of Arts and Sciences::Department of English	en_US