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To view any of our past lectures please visit our YouTube channel.
To view any of our past lectures please visit our YouTube channel.
Lunchtime Lecture
Illustrious Illicitude: Extra-Illustration and Book Adaptation in the Elizabethan Catholic Underground by Dr Earle Havens
The period c.1570-1600 was marked by a revitalization of Catholicism in England after a decade of Protestant ascendency and decades of iconoclastic depravation. In 1580 came the first of continuous waves of continentally trained English missionary priests steeped in a newly invigorated Tridentine Catholicism, and with them thousands of freshly printed books. Whether printed abroad and smuggled into England, or imprinted on domestic clandestine presses operated by Jesuit priests, many—particularly devotional books—survive in but a handful of copies, and often mutilated, indicating signs of being “used to death.” Other Catholic books, however, emerged even within this shadowy and subversive underground book culture laden with bespoke illustrations, wrapped in splendid bindings, and lovingly augmented in ways that distinctively ventriloquize the personal, private piety of their earliest makers and users: priests and lay, women and men, elites and literate commoners. These little-known books of special magnificence reveal compelling evidence of physical adaptation, scribal reproduction, defiance of censorship, and unique and imaginative “extra-illustration.” These rare survivals provide telling insight into an English Catholic religious culture that was, de jure if not also de facto, no longer supposed to exist and thus quite shy of drawing attention to itself.
Earle Havens is the inaugural Director of the Virginia Fox Stern Center for the History of the Book in the Renaissance, and the Nancy H. Hall Curator of Rare Books and Manuscripts, at Johns Hopkins University. He is also an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures in the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences at JHU. He earned his PhD in Renaissance Studies and History at Yale University with a dissertation on Elizabethan Catholic print culture. His scholarship focuses on the history of the book during the early modern period (ca. 1450-1750), with special emphasis on the material and textual cultures of Catholic Europe.
This event will be both in person at Burlington House and online. Please select the appropriate ticket below.
Attendance at Burlington House:
Open to anyone to attend.
The event begins at 1pm in the Meeting Room, please arrive with enough time beforehand.
Attendance online:
The event will be live-streamed on Zoom (if you register) and recorded on our YouTube channel.
The event will begin at 1pm.
You will receive an email reminder with the link to join the day of the lecture.
If you have any questions, please contact us at [email protected].
