Recovered Books: On the Contents and Fate of John Fowler’s Stock Left with Christopher Plantin
2020; Bibliographical Society of America; Volume: 114; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1086/710091
ISSN2377-6528
Autores Tópico(s)Reformation and Early Modern Christianity
ResumoPrevious articleNext article FreeRecovered Books: On the Contents and Fate of John Fowler’s Stock Left with Christopher PlantinJ. Christopher WarnerJ. Christopher Warner Search for more articles by this author Full TextPDF Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreSoon after Elizabeth I’s accession, the Bristol-born Wykehamist John Fowler resigned his New College fellowship and departed overseas to join the community of English Catholic exiles residing in the university town of Louvain. There he obtained a license to become a printer and bookseller in 1565, just as the rancorous Jewel-Harding controversy was reaching full steam. In the fourteen years that followed, up to his death from the plague in 1579, Fowler had a role in printing more than sixty books. Many were treatises defending Church doctrine and papal authority by Fowler’s better-known contemporaries such as William Harding, William Allen, Nicholas Sanders (alternatively Sander), Thomas Stapleton, John Rastell, Robert Pointz, among others. He also issued new editions of works by Thomas More, Reginald Pole, Thomas a Kempis, Marko Marulić and others; new and old works of devotion and consolation; and in the years 1571–73, certain incendiary political treatises from which he withheld his imprint, in particular: A Treatise concerning the Defence of the Right Highe, Mightye and Noble Princesse Marie Quene of Scotlande and Dowager of France; A Treatise of Treasons against Q. Elizabeth and the Croune of England; and A Table Gathered ouut of a Booke Named a Treatise of Treasons.1The most complete and accurate account of John Fowler’s career is one hardly known in English-language scholarship, though it is an essay written in English, by Willem Schrickx published in 1976.2 The source still normally cited is A. C. Southern’s 1950 monograph Elizabethan Recusant Prose, 1559–1582, a pioneering study of its subject that offers a wealth of reliable information but much that is erroneous.3 In a review of the volume, A. F. Allison and D. M. Rogers corrected some of its mistakes, including Southern’s claim, founded ostensibly on the “evidence of the type,” that John Fowler was never himself a printer but had only operated as a book publisher.4 Other of Southern’s claims were subsequently corrected by the research of Lode van den Branden, who in the 1960s and ’70s scoured the archives of Antwerp and Brussels for records relating to the early book trade in Antwerp and was an important contributor to the still-standard Dictionnaire des Imprimeurs, Libraires et Éditeurs des XVe et XVIe Siècles dans les Limites Géographiques de la Belgique Actuelle.5 Van den Branden passed away before he could publish more than a fraction of his findings, but while his work was in progress he was generous in sharing his discoveries, with Willem Schrickx among others, and the archive of his collected papers, which includes photocopied documents, manuscript transcriptions, correspondence with colleagues and other notes, remains available for consultation in the Royal Library of Belgium. In turn, and even as Rouzet’s Dictionnaire was in press, Schrickx pursued his own investigations and added to Van den Branden’s material, compiling a list of Fowler’s imprints and locating other documents that enabled him to expand much upon the Dictionnaire’s information.Nevertheless, Schrickx’s study has its limitations. A fuller inventory of Fowler’s imprints may be gleaned now from more recent resources: the revised STC2, the ESTC, Belgica Typographica 1541–1600, Netherlandish Books, USTC, and the expanded two-volume edition of Allison and Rogers’s catalogue of Catholic books by English writers 1558–1640, hereafter abbreviated ARCR (I or II).6 Also, given the space constraints of a journal article, it is inevitable that Schrickx treated some aspects of his subject less thoroughly than others. To put it another way, Schrickx understandably balked at pursuing certain avenues of research that would have obligated him to develop new areas of expertise beyond his specialization in English literature and write a book instead of a journal article. For example, despite presenting archival evidence additional to that cited by Allison and Rogers indicating Fowler had owned a press and was himself a printer, Schrickx does not attempt to identify which works came from his press and which were printed by others for Fowler (beyond, that is, registering the few of his imprints that state a printer’s name on the title page or in a colophon). Invoking H. D. L. Vervliet’s warnings on the topic, Schrickx notes that by the mid-sixteenth century “the same typefaces were simultaneously used by different printers,” so “great caution needs to be exercised in using typographical material as a basis for inquiry.”7 Very likely the example of Southern’s confidently asserted misinterpretations of this material was for Schrickx an added discouragement. He knew that Southern was at times wrong about it but did not know how often and in which ways. Thus Schrickx concluded: “the problem of deciding whether books commonly associated with Fowler” were printed by him or for him “is, in most cases, to remain unsolved … until we possess an exhaustive comparative study of sixteenth century printing types as they were used by individual printers” in the Low Countries.8Similarly, Schrickx did not attempt a thorough scrutiny of the records pertaining to John Fowler in the archives of the Plantin-Moretus Museum (hereafter MPM).9 He consulted several volumes in these archives but sought in them only indications of the approximate dates of Fowler’s moves between Louvain and Antwerp and then from Antwerp to Douai; the addresses of Fowler’s shops in Antwerp; the starting date of business transactions between his widow, Alice Fowler, and Christopher Plantin, and the last of her transactions with Plantin’s son-in-law and successor, Jan Moretus; and the record of a nephew, also named John, who afterward entered the trade and placed some orders with Moretus. Consequently, Schrickx cites a total of just seventeen entries from MPM archive volumes: two from Plantin’s journal of daily transactions for the year 1566; one from the journal for 1587; and fourteen from three different “grootboeken,” or “grands livres,” which are the master ledgers containing facing-page summary records and running totals of customers’ debits and credits.10 Because fewer than half these references pertain to John Fowler’s activity specifically, they give the mistaken impression that Fowler was but an occasional customer of Plantin’s, and consequently that the documentation of this relationship would afford little more insight into Fowler’s vocation as a printer and bookseller than what Schrickx is able to provide by means of other evidence. On both scores, the opposite is true. Between 26 April 1565 and 21 March 1578, Plantin’s records show that he and Fowler placed nearly 400 orders with each other, exchanging over 9,000 copies of books that can be identified by title and format, in transactions totaling about 4,000 florins in value.11 And there are stories in these records: in the patterns of Fowler’s purchases, sales, and payments; in the manner in which his accounts were kept by Plantin; in Plantin’s sale of Fowler’s imprints to other booksellers; and so on.All of that, however, must await the comprehensive study of John Fowler’s career and press output upon which some years ago I incautiously embarked. The story that follows, in contrast, is discrete and manageable enough to be told in the present essay, an account of “the contents and fate” of a cache of John Fowler’s books left with Christopher Plantin in 1577, to which more books were added later in 1577 or early in 1578. Because this story brings to light some items that were overlooked by Schrickx and not catalogued in ARCR, and because it establishes for other items different printing dates and circumstances than have heretofore been understood, it will contribute in some measure to the bibliography of “the printed literature of the English Counter-Reformation” (to borrow Allison and Rogers’s phrasing). In the case of at least two of the titles, it promises also to expand our understanding of the contemporary reception of works of the English Reformation printed in the early 1570s in London. Finally, and more broadly, by tracking the history of these books across several decades, and in and out of several hands, this study turns up a series of special arrangements made between booksellers, representing their ad hoc responses to special circumstances. These arrangements demonstrate the range and complexity of book trade practices in this period and thus enrich our understanding of both the economics of the early modern book trade and its social operations.The following comment in Schrickx’s essay is our starting point: “John Fowler, before his departure [from Antwerp to Douai in 1577], must have left in Plantin’s safe-keeping a considerable number of books, to the value of more than 200 florins.” An entry in MPM Arch. 41 transcribed by Schrickx records the arrangement: “Item in Julio anno 1577 avons receu quelques livres en garde lesquels montent—fl. 206. st. 16” (Item, in July 1577 we have received some books for safekeeping which amount in value to 206 florins, 16 stuivers).12 Schrickx understood from this that Fowler had simply deposited a portion of his stock with Plantin, valued at the said amount, to be kept in storage until a later date when it could be reclaimed. In fact, this is a record of the amount that Plantin credited to Fowler for having left the books with him. What is more, Schrickx overlooked the two entries following on the same page, which detail the addition of more books to Fowler’s stock in Plantin’s keeping, and he overlooked the last entry there, which is an inventory of what still was in Plantin’s possession as of 28 November 1586, drawn up on this date when Fowler’s widow was present.At this juncture it should be recalled that Alice Fowler was originally Alice Harris, daughter of another Bristol native and Louvain exile, John Harris, who was Thomas More’s last secretary, and Dorothy Harris (née Colly), who had been the personal maid of More’s daughter Margaret. Thus when John Fowler married Alice Harris, he in a manner joined what is sometimes called the “second-generation Thomas More circle,” and when he later edited and issued new editions of some of More’s writings, aided by manuscript material in John Harris’s possession, he was endeavoring to help fashion the Henrician martyr’s “public memory” within England and throughout Catholic Christendom.13 In 1579, after losing both her husband and father to the plague, Alice Fowler secured a license in Douai to continue the family trade (a “normal practice of printers’ widows in the sixteenth century,” as is well known and as Schrickx writes14). There is no indication that she ever set up a printing house, however, and despite her placing numerous large orders for books with Christopher Plantin and Jan Moretus between 1583 and the final settling of her account with the latter, no traces of her having been the proprietor of a bookshop in Douai have been found in this city’s archives.15 Possibly it is just the case that no records of that shop survive. Alternatively we might surmise that Alice Fowler limited her role in the trade to placing orders only for others. Now and then in the Plantin-Moretus records, we do see that she had books sent directly to another party, such as an order placed by “la veufue de feu Jan Foulerus” (the widow of the deceased John Fowler) that specifies it is one “per le college de douaij”; in another instance, a shipment is to be sent “en ung tonneau adressé au Collège d’Anchin, à Douay” (in a barrel addressed to Anchin College at Douai).16 Given the volume and nature of most of her orders, however, it seems likeliest that she kept a space to store books until the time they could be transported, for example to the English College then operating at Rheims or, in secret, into England. I suggest the latter having in mind Karen Bowen and Dirk Imhof’s observation that in the mid-1580s Alice Fowler was one of a few booksellers in Douai buying large quantities of Plantin’s devotional works with etched illustrations, especially the Manuale catholicorum of Petrus Canisius and Cinquante meditations de la Passion de Nostre Seigneur by Franciscus Costerius, which prompted their asking, “Were the hundreds of copies of [these] Catholic works meant for local use at the university, or were they intended, perhaps, for clandestine export?”17 Given John Fowler’s involvement in this facet of the period’s international book trade, as it shall be my task on a later occasion to describe, it would surprise me if his widow did not participate in it also.Typically Alice Fowler joined with one or two other booksellers of Douai in sending to Antwerp a “messager” (frequently named in Plantin’s records) to place orders for books and make payments on their accounts.18 However in late November 1586, after Farnese had put Antwerp under Habsburg control again, she herself traveled to the city, first placing a large order on the 26th that Plantin’s journal entry specifies is for “la veufue de Jan Foulerus present.”19 In the next several days there are journal records of her having made two payments on her account: 80 florins on 28 November and (with a cross reference back to the order placed on the 26th) 98 florins on 4 December.20 There is besides one other journal entry for Alice Fowler dated 28 November: a list of the same books in the same order as in the ledger record cited above.21 In both places, the prefatory note makes clear that whatever were the exact terms of her arrangement with Plantin, the intention was that he would try to sell the books. The journal’s version reads, “Receu de la veufue Foulerus present les liures suynants en commission” (Received from the widow of Fowler, present, the following books on commission). The ledger’s heading indicates both the purposes of safekeeping and selling: the books have been received from Fowler’s widow “en garde” and on “commission.” With the aid of this inventory and other of Plantin’s journal records cited in the following pages, we can confirm what is implied by Plantin having credited 206 florins, 16 stuivers to John Fowler for his stock, and that the earlier arrangement, too, was for the sale of Fowler’s books by Plantin, not just their storage.22The two versions of the 1586 inventory record the number of copies of each of nine titles in Plantin’s possession, each title’s format (folio, quarto, etc.), its value per copy, and the number of pacquets in which the copies are bundled. Differences between the two versions of the inventory make their sequence evident. The journal’s was the first to be entered, but there were at the time still some blanks to be filled because the number of copies of certain titles and/or their values had still to be determined. Before that process was complete, the journal information was copied into the ledger. In the case of four titles there, the stuiver abbreviation was placed at the end of the line, after the number of packets instead of before, with the value left blank in anticipation of its being determined later. Off to the right of the ledger’s inventory is a large bracket implying an intention to fill in a total value, but that was not done and nor was the sum calculated in the journal. Later the information missing from individual title entries was added in the journal, and a few more crossouts and emendations were made there also, but the same changes were not made in the ledger. Thus the journal preserves what seems to be the final version of the inventory.For eight of the nine titles, their stated values in the 1586 inventory can be compared against their prices in up to three other sources: (a) the journal and ledger records that show what Plantin was charged when he ordered copies of the same works from John Fowler in the 1570s; (b) other journal and ledger records that show what Plantin and later Jan Moretus charged when they sold copies of these works to others; and (c) Plantin’s manuscript catalogue of books that he was able to supply to other booksellers, including not only those from his own press but ones printed by others.23 In general the information in these other sources is consistent (allowing for inflation of prices in later decades, to be discussed).24 They reveal, additionally, that the valuations in the 1586 inventory were higher than would seem warranted. We shall see also that by whichever measure of the books’ value we choose to privilege, and even after factoring in the rebates that booksellers customarily granted one another in the form of sums credited to each other’s accounts,25 the total value of Fowler’s stock originally was much higher than the inventory indicates, mainly because the credited amount represents but a percentage of an assessed value to which Plantin and Fowler agreed. Thus, following my analysis of each line item in the inventory and of two sold-out titles not included there, we must return to take up the question of what all this data suggests about the different financial arrangements that were made between the Fowlers and Plantin on different dates.After 1586 Fowler’s books continued to be sold by Plantin—in small numbers, just now and then, and not every title—until his death in 1589, and thereafter they were sold by Jan Moretus, Plantin’s son-in-law who succeeded to his business. The last journal entry of an item sold from the 1586 inventory is dated 26 April 1602. I have not found evidence that Alice Fowler reclaimed the unsold copies from Moretus, nor a record of their transfer to a third party, but it is certain that sometime in the latter half of 1602 or very early in 1603, either by way of Alice Fowler or shipped directly, the remaining inventory was delivered over to the Douai printer and bookseller Balthazar Bellère (Bellerus). Alice and her family had close personal and business ties with Bellère, and he eventually paid off Alice’s outstanding balance with Moretus.26 Some clarification on this last transaction is necessary. Schrickx writes that Alice Fowler’s debt of 650 florins was paid and her account closed on 19 January 1602,27 but this conflates three separate entries on a page in Moretus’s ledger.28 The first is a record of the English priest Thomas Nelson having made a payment of 50 florins on Alice Fowler’s account on 19 January 1602.29 The second entry is another payment of 50 florins delivered by Nelson, made on 26 February 1602.30 The undated third entry that follows, written in a lighter ink than the preceding, concerns Bellère, who rather than having paid the last 550 florins owed by Alice Fowler had this debt transferred to his own account.31 Consequently, the details of this arrangement are to be found on Bellère’s pages in Arch. 111, where we learn that its actual date was 26 June 1603 and the terms of the transfer required him to pay off the balance within five years. This he did, making payments of 100 florins on 25 September 1603, 100 florins on 20 November 1604, 200 florins on 29 December 1605, 100 florins on 11 May 1607, and the last 150 florins on 26 June 1608.32Presumably it was through some combination of payments to Alice Fowler and her creditors, including agreements to take on some or all of her debts (such as the 550 florins owed to Moretus), that Bellère acquired not only her books that had been in Plantin’s and then Moretus’s possession but the rest of her stock besides. We can infer that he did so from Bellère’s printed sales catalogue of 1603, which advertises, besides several of the books in the 1586 inventory, a certain combination of others that at the dawn of the seventeenth century no other bookseller in Christendom would likelier have had in hand than Alice Fowler. These include the 1565/1566 Louvain edition of Thomas More’s Latin works;33 John Fowler’s 1568 edition of More’s Epistola contra Pomeranum;34 Fowler’s 1569 edition of Reginald Pole’s De summo pontifice;35 and Nicholas Sanders’s De visibili monarchia ecclesiae, either in the second edition, dated 1578, which Plantin anonymously printed at Antwerp after the 1571 edition had sold out, or the Würzburg edition of 1592, both of which were produced with Alice Fowler’s cooperation.36 Other books that Bellère probably acquired from Alice Fowler include an account of the trial and executions of Edmund Campion, Ralph Sherwin, and Alexander Briant in William Est’s Latin translation printed at Louvain in 1582,37 additional works by Sanders and Pole, and many by Thomas Stapleton.As for the remaining books that had been left so long ago with Plantin, whether they were still with Moretus or some or all had been transferred to Alice Fowler, they were in such large quantities when Bellère acquired them that he would have immediately understood how difficult it would be to find buyers for them all. Probably he was able to consult a copy of the 1586 inventory that Alice Fowler possessed in Douai, comparing against it the actual number of books sent there by Moretus from Antwerp; he may also have seen, or been given a summary report of, a log of these books’ sales between 1577 and 1602. By either means, Bellère would have learned how slowly Fowler’s titles had been selling in the preceding twenty-five years (a few of them not at all). He decided, therefore, to turn Fowler’s old books into new books, repackaging them with new title pages, modified titles, and his own imprint, “typis” or “ex officina Baltazaris Belleri.”38 We find these retitled books advertised in sales catalogues for the Frankfurt Bookfair, starting with the Lenten Fair (Fastenmesse) of 1603, as well as in Bellère’s 1603 and subsequent annual catalogues. Most of them are recorded by Allison and Rogers in ARCR I, but others are for the first time identified here, and I shall have corrections to make and new information to add to several of their bibliographical notes. We shall see, for example, that in two instances books that would later be reissued sporting Bellère’s new title pages had already, a few years prior to their being deposited with Plantin in 1577, undergone the same process of repackaging for John Fowler.Each line item in Plantin’s 1586 inventory of Fowler’s books is transcribed below from MPM Arch. 63. Where changes were made to an entry, or where there are differences between it and the version of the inventory in MPM Arch. 41, an asterisk is inserted and explanatory note follows in brackets. The order of information in each inventory entry is as follows: (a) number of copies; (b) author’s name (excepting two instances) and title; (c) format; (d) number of packets in which the copies were bundled; (e) value per copy in florins (abbreviated fl, written before the number) and/or stuivers (abbreviated st, written before the number). The book is then identified when possible by its ARCR, BT, and NB numbers; the author’s full name is supplied; and its title and imprint follow. Most of the books listed in the inventory are familiar to scholars as works of their respective authors, and their printing by or for Fowler is well documented and uncontroversial; in these cases nothing more about the book’s publication or contents is rehearsed, and I proceed directly to its history while the book was in the possession of Christopher Plantin, then Jan Moretus, then Balthazar Bellère. In other cases, new information precedes and sometimes accompanies this history.The 1586 Inventory76 Alanus de sacramentis 4° / 6 pacq st 25*[*5 is written over 2, changing the value from 22 to 25 stuivers per copy. Arch. 41 records the value of 22 stuivers.]ARCR I 6; BT 5029; NB 710: William Allen, Libri tres. Id est, De sacramentis in genere, lib. I. De sacramento eucharistiae. Lib. I. De sacrificio eucharistiae. Lib. I. Antverpiae, apud Iohannem Foulerum, 1576. The colophon states that the book was printed at Douai by Ludovicus de Winde, “at the care and expense” (cura et impensa) of John Fowler.The value of 22 stuivers per copy recorded in Arch. 41 and originally written in Arch. 63 matches the price for this title in MPM M 296,39 and it is the price owed per copy that Plantin records on the seven occasions he ordered copies in 1576–77.40 At 22 stuivers (1 florin 2 stuivers) for the eighty-eight printed sheets of Allen’s Libri tres, the book had a wholesale price of ¼ stuiver or 3 deniers per sheet (1 stuiver = 12 deniers; hereafter per-sheet calculations are rounded when possible to the nearest tenth of a denier), which as we shall see is about a denier higher than the per-sheet price of most other books in this inventory, but about the same as that for the one other title Fowler also had printed for him in Douai. My assumption, then, is that the higher price reflects Fowler’s added expense in having had these books shipped to him in Antwerp.41The seventy-six copies of Allen’s book valued at 22 stuivers each would have been worth a total of 83 florins 12 stuivers, but as we see above also, a higher, “corrected” value of 25 stuivers per copy (1 florin 5 stuivers) was later entered in Arch. 63’s version of the inventory, which translates into 3.4 deniers per sheet and a sum of 95 florins. The basis for this higher assessed value is unclear given the history of the book’s sales, though it shall be seen that the other titles in the 1586 inventory pose the same puzzle. In filling orders from other booksellers and preparing shipments of books to be sold at the Frankfurt Bookfair or at Paris, etc., Plantin ordinarily priced books at their wholesale rate; accordingly in nine different journal entries dated between 31 July 1577 and 4 March 1580 we find twenty-seven copies of Allen’s Libri tres priced at 1 florin 2 stuivers.42 This same price is on record after the 1586 inventory was drawn up, when twelve copies of Allen’s book were included in a shipment to Frankfurt on 30 July 1587, and when one other copy was sold on 21 January 1588.43 Yet in Plantin’s records, variations in books’ prices are seen frequently (beyond those that can be readily explained by different illustration and red-ink options, by price inflation over the long term, etc.), and very seldom in any given instance are the grounds for these variations evident. Certain private individuals and institutions were sometimes sold books at their wholesale prices, and sometimes they were charged a little more, while books sent to Frankfurt or Paris sometimes were priced higher than they had been or would be later when included in other such shipments. Thus two copies of Allen’s Libri tres are listed for 1 florin 5 stuivers each in a shipment sent to Georg Willers for the Frankfurt Bookfair dated 9 December 1580, and on 24 December 1585 another copy was sent to Willers priced at 1 florin 10 stuivers.44 It is not clear how to interpret these hikes, knowing as we do that in 1587 Plantin sent twelve copies to Frankfurt at the former lower price of 1 florin 2 stuivers. Later in this essay we shall be able to view this data in the context of Plantin’s pricing of Fowler’s other books and the trajectory of book prices more broadly in this period. Yet we cannot but wonder at this point if there were exigencies that justified these two momentarily higher prices for Allen’s Libri tres in 1580 and 1585. Was it a factor that this was a work of Catholic controversial literature being sold in the early 1580s, after Antwerp had signed the Union of Utrecht and temporarily was not under Hapsburg and Catholic rule? Or, in the case of the 1585 entry, is the very high price that it records just an error? Such mistakes were made now and then in Plantin’s logs and ledgers, and 1 florin 10 stuivers for a copy of “Alanus de sacramentis” looks to me like someone’s confusion for what Plantin normally was charging for the 1573 edition of “Dialogi Alani,” i.e., Nicholas Harpsfield’s Dialogi sex edited by Alan Cope that Plantin printed, as he did the first edition of 1566, with Harpsfield’s name suppressed. As it happens, a copy of “Dialogi Alani” was sold at this price of 1 florin 10 stuivers on the same day as the sale of Allen’s suspiciously expensive Libri tres, recorded in Plantin’s journal on the page opposite.45Another kind of ambiguity is posed by the bound books that Plantin supplied to his customers. On occasion he bought and sold ones that had already been bound, but in most cases books listed with the abbreviation “lig.” (frequently with the binding-material specified) are those whose binding was commissioned on behalf of purchasers at their request. Yet only sometimes are the two prices, i.e., for the printed sheets and for the binding, separately noted in Plantin’s records. So, for example, regarding a copy of Allen’s Libri tres that Plantin sold bound for 1 florin 12 stuivers on 20 October 1578,46 it would be reasonable to assume that Plantin charged the usual price of 1 florin 2 stuivers for the book and that binding added 10 stuivers to its cost. But we cannot be certain that this was truly how the final price was calculated. On occasion (we shall encounter an example), the prices are separately specified in Plantin’s journal, and then we sometimes discover that the charge for the pre-bound book was a little higher than the usual price for unbound copies.In addition to the sales of Allen’s book already mentioned, there are records of four others by Plantin and Moretus: two copies on 24 November 1587 for 1 florin 4 stuivers each; one copy on 20 July 1595 for 1 florin 6 stuivers; another copy on 4 March 1599 for 2 florins; and a last copy on 19 July 1601, for 1 florin 10 stuivers.47 The increases in price that we see in the second
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