Aaron T. Pratt, Author at Not Even Past

Primary Source: English Martyrs on the Streets of Milan

This and other articles in Primary Source: History from the Ransom Center Stacks represent an ongoing partnership between Not Even Past and the Harry Ransom Center, a world-renowned humanities research library and museum at The University of Texas at Austin. Visit the Center’s website to learn more about its collections and get involved.

1588, Milan. Where via Rispoli ends, you would have found Stefano d’Oriens, owner of a small business selling books and prints. We don’t know much about his operation, except that it sold religious material in formats that were relatively cheap and likely designed to be ephemeral. Given his location at the crook of a road just four minutes from Milan’s Cathedral (the Duomo), Stefano probably did good business—or at least he would have had a shot at doing good business.

An old scripture — *Auisi notabilissimi intorno al progresso della religione Catholica* (Milan: Stefano d’Oriens, 1588), sig. A1r. Harry Ransom Center Book Collection, BX 1492 A95 1588. With US quarter-dollar coin for scale.

That year he published a new edition of a small, eight-page pamphlet that had previously been issued in Bologna almost a decade earlier, in 1579: Avisi notabilissimi intorno al progresso della Religione Catholica [Most notable news concerning the state of the Catholic religion]. The only copy of it known to survive was recently added to the Ransom Center’s already extraordinary collection of English Catholic materials: It describes the martyrdom of four Jesuit priests in 1578, the injustice of their deaths, and consequently their exemplary fortitude. It also underlines the tyranny and illegitimacy of the Elizabethan regime as seen by Catholics and emphasizes the piety of the English Colleges on the Continent, where students were trained for future martyrdom.

In the not-too-distant past, modern scholars would have treated this slight volume as an oddity. They wouldn’t have known what to do with it, and relatively few would have cared to begin with. It would almost exclusively have interested that rare breed of scholar who studied English Catholicism to fight centuries-old confessional battles.

Things have changed.

As I and others have argued, English Catholic history is worth another look for its own sake and because of its significance in European history as a whole. The embeddedness of English Catholics in Europe was not in any way “natural” or foretold; it was the result of active efforts, especially by exiles on the Continent, to become part of a broad intellectual and cultural landscape. To do this, they employed the powerful weapons of paper, pen, and print.

Why would a publisher of quick and saleable leaflets want to publish anything about English martyrs in Italy—and in Italian rather than Latin or English? Simply put, there was likely a market for it.

An old book cover — Nicholas Sander, *De origine ac progressu schismatis Anglicani* ([Rheims: Jean Foigny, 1585]) and Girolamo Pollini’s *L’historia ecclesiastica della riuoluzion d’Inghilterra* (Rome: Giovanni Angelo Ruffinelli, 1594). Harry Ransom Book Collection, BR 375 S3 1585 and BR 375 P56 1594. Images not to scale.

By 1588, English Catholic exiles had been hard at work lobbying for their cause against the Elizabethan regime and spurring European interest in combating (English) heresy. Perhaps the most important tool to this end was De origine ac progressu ac schismatis Anglicani (On the origin and progress of the English schism), a history of England from the time of Henry VIII to the later sixteenth century written by an influential theologian, Nicholas Sander. Originally published in Latin and adapted and translated into several European vernaculars, the widely influential book insinuated itself in the minds of many and functioned as a dire warning of what Protestantism would bring to even the healthiest Catholic kingdom. England had, after all, been the purest flower of the Church before Henry came along.

The pamphlet might seem like an ant to De origine’s elephant, but it does just as good a job at exemplifying both English Catholic efforts to plead their cause on the Continent and their success. Written before De origine and resuscitated afterward, the Avisi captures, with admirable economy, Sander’s fundamental arguments about Protestant threats and an appeal to other Catholics to take up the English cause.

The Avisi‘s source material, printed and manuscript letters, suggest a world thick with reports on the English Catholic situation. The title works to draw in the Italian reader by announcing itself as broadly Catholic (as opposed to English Catholic), pointing to an effort to highlight the relevance of the English plight to all true believers.

A page from an old book. — *Auisi notabilissimi intorno al progresso della religione Catholica* (Milan: Stefano d’Oriens, 1588), sig. A1v. Harry Ransom Center Book Collection, BX 1492 A95 1588.

The fact that a pamphlet first published almost a decade earlier could remain in currency so long after the events it recounts had at least something to do with the continued fragility of English Colleges on the Continent. Subject to the whims of kings and popes, the Colleges were often short on cash. The Avisi, in fact, starts with a notice about the 1578 expulsion of a College from Douai to Rheims. Almost certainly as a way to drum up support for it and other English Colleges, the pamphlet tells of martyrs whose role was essential to the salvation of Christendom. Surely, the pamphlet suggests, the institutions that trained Jesuits on the frontlines against Protestant heresy were worth giving a ducket to here and there. Indeed, several of the English Colleges remain operational today.

Importantly, the Avisi is a report specifically on Jesuit matters. It publicizes the death of Jesuit martyrs and the iconography on the title page evokes the Society of Jesus. The printer ingeniously scrounged for a title page image and found one used previously by the publishing house of Giovanni Giacomo da Legnano and his brothers during the first quarter of the sixteenth century. Although the emblem appeared well before the Jesuit order came along, the “IHS” at the center had become linked to it by the late 16th century. The centrality of Jesuits here implicitly fits into intra-Catholic rumblings about the place of the Society of Jesus within English Catholicism, especially in relation to secular Catholic priests, which in turn connected with broader concerns of the Counter-Reformation church.

1588, too, was the year of the famous Armada, the naval expedition by Spanish forces meant to strike a definitive blow against the Elizabethan regime. One of the central justifications for these efforts was the abuse of English Catholics, which was exemplified by the martyrs. The association between the Avisi and the politico-religious moment resonates more when we think that among d’Oriens’s publications that year there was another text—drawn on previous publications in Verona and Piacenza—dealing with the success of Christian forces against the Muslim enemy in 1571 at Lepanto, the result of coordinated efforts among Christian powers that included the Pope and the King of Spain.

Documents like the Avisi can help unleash the imagination. In Rome, it was said that in the 1580s students at the English College would pass out pamphlets about English martyrs to revelers during feast days, a means of self-promotion and promotion of anti-Protestantism. It is easy to imagine that this little volume served precisely that kind of purpose. Though today we turn its pages gently and with some reverence, it’s not hard to imagine the sound of their flutter and crinkle in the hands of Milanese Catholics. In the Ransom Center’s unique Avisi we have a rare survival of the ephemeral that was, in its way, meant to ensure eternity.

Freddy Domínguez is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Arkansas- Fayetteville. He studies early modern European history with a focus on religion and politics. His first book was Radicals in Exile: English Catholic Books during the Reign of Philip II (Penn State Press, 2020). Domínguez is currently working on two edited volumes and a monograph on Luisa de Carvajal, a Spanish missionary in seventeenth-century England. His next book will be Bob Dylan in the Attic: Essays on Music and History (UMass Press).

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The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

Primary Source: Hares in the Margins of Judgment Day

By Laura Rybicki

Among the many manuscripts from medieval Europe at the Ransom Center are nearly a dozen compact volumes known as books of hours. Though from different places, all were made during the fifteenth century, and each contains a variety of Christian devotional texts. The exact contents vary somewhat from copy to copy, but central in all of them are a group of prayers devoted to the Virgin Mary. They are divided into eight sections to be read at different times, or “hours,” of the day. But while these prayers are what give these books their conventional name, the vivid pictures in many surviving examples are what usually grab the attention of modern audiences. Originally meant by their artists to stoke fervor and imagination, they were surely compelling to medieval devotees, too.

One particularly fine example at the Center is a volume known as the Belleville Hours, crafted in mid-15th-century France for Marie de Belleville, granddaughter to King Charles VI; her name appears in one of the book’s French-language prayers.

From the Belleville Hours, a miniature of the Crucifixion with snails in the lower margin and part of a French-language prayer naming Marie de Belleville. Harry Ransom Center, Medieval and Early Modern Manuscripts 8, fols. 48r and 181r.

Today, the book’s parchment leaves measure only 12.1cm x 8.3cm (~4.8″ x 3.3″). Even at this size, they manage to include both elegant calligraphy and stunningly detailed miniature paintings and decoration. Among other scenes and figures, one encounters the Four Evangelists, the major events in the story of Jesus, and notable saints.

Surrounding the more than three-dozen miniatures still present—each illuminated with gold—one often finds something typical in books of hours yet seemingly bizarre: lavish plant life punctuated by chimerical and undignified beasts called grotesques or hybrids, and a range of other peculiar figures and scenes. Generally, this marginal content appears to be wholly unrelated to the primary illustrations it surrounds.

For example, in the lower margin of the page showing the Crucifixion, we see a man wrangling two snails on leashes. In the same position a couple of pages later, we see two “wild men” (mythical men covered in hair) rolling around in a field of floral designs, brandishing what appear to be knives; they are under a beautiful and dignified representation of the Holy Trinity. These paintings may have been amusing to their artists and the many reader-viewers who enjoyed them, but there is at least one instance where the imagery in the margins seems to resonate with the miniature it surrounds.

From the Belleville Hours, a miniature of the Last Judgment with hares or rabbits being hunted in the margins. Harry Ransom Center, Medieval and Early Modern Manuscripts 8, fol. 218v.

One of the most detailed scenes in the manuscript shows the Last Judgment. In the image, Jesus appears at the top, arms outstretched, surrounded by saints and angels, as the pious followers of Christ await their ascent into heaven. Devils appear in the bottom right, reading out names of damned individuals who are being mercilessly devoured by the flaming maw of hell. This event—grisly, terrifying, hopeful, and triumphant at the same time—is a common subject in medieval books of hours. Images like the one in the Belleville Hours would have reminded readers to remain dedicated to their religious practice so as to not meet the same fate as the damned souls in the illustration.

More puzzling than the main illustration is what we see in the accompanying margins, which depict a medieval hunt. There is a hunter in the upper-left corner, attempting to capture prey that is facing away from him, obliviously enjoying the flowery meadow. Such creatures are somewhat ambiguous, representing either rabbits or hares. Even though they look similar to other medieval drawings of rabbits, the hunting methods on display—hunting with dogs and trapping—may point to them instead being hares. In the bottom-left corner, we see a hunting greyhound, apparently distracted and facing away from three animals playing and snacking on the other side of the page. Hunting scenes are not uncommon in medieval art, as hunting was a popular pastime for the elite, but is there any chance that this one could have something to do with the Last Judgment?

Two miniatures of the Last Judgment in the Hours of Pierre de Bosredont, both featuring a hare or rabbit in the lower-left margin. Morgan Library and Museum, MS G.55, fols. 77v and 139v.

It turns out this pairing shows up elsewhere, too. There are examples of hares or rabbits in the margins of Last Judgment scenes in other books of hours, including manuscripts from other areas of France, such as Brittany and Langres.¹ In these examples, they are not being hunted but still stand in the margins of the page, attracting the viewer’s attention. What are these little animals doing there? Could the artists of these and the Ransom Center manuscript have been up to something?

In Medieval Europe, hares were known for their “fecundity and frenzied mating,” and it has been argued that they serve in some books of hours produced for elite women like Marie de Belleville as symbols of fertility, reminders of a woman’s duty to procreate. At the same time, though, they more regularly appear in margins as convenient symbols of licentiousness.² Because sexuality was an outcome of our fallen humanity, depictions of it in medieval art are often relegated to the margins, apparently unworthy of being a central focus.³ Here, with the hares’ juxtaposition with the Last Judgment, we might suppose that the artist intended the hares to represent (a particularly female?) type of sexual transgression, with the hunter standing in for an angry God set out to punish sinners. In this reading, the vulnerable little hares serve as a warning against earthly desire, which can lead to perdition. The margins thus parallel the main scene on the page by representing the damned facing punishment for their sins, further encouraging reader-viewers like Belleville to make the right decision and choose virtue over more earthly forms of sexuality—lest they be captured by the metaphorical hunter or his dog.

Laura Rybicki holds a B.A. in History from the University of Texas at Austin. She is currently a Gallery Assistant at the Blanton Museum of Art. Her research interests include iconography in Medieval Art, Medieval Decorative Arts, and Early Netherlandish painting. She plans to pursue a Master’s Degree in Art History next year.

¹ See, for example, Morgan Library and Museum, Hours of Pierre de Bosredont (Langres, ca. 1465), MS G.55 fol. 139v; Hours of Pierre de Bosredont (Langres, ca. 1465), MS G.55 fol. 77v; Book of Hours (Brittany, ca. 1465), MS M.84 fol. 86r.

² Madeline H. Caviness, “Patron or Matron? A Capetian Bride and a Vade Mecum for Her Marriage Bed,” Speculum 68.2 (1993), 344. See also, Adelaide Bennett, “A Thirteenth-Century French Book of Hours for Marie,” The Journal of the Walters Art Gallery 54 (1996), 26.

³ Michael Camille, Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art (London: Reaktion Books, 2019), 40.

Primary Source: When Harry Met a Werewolf Manuscript

By Jan Machielsen

In 1603, a thirteen-year old boy called Jean Grenier from La Roche-Chalais, a small barony in France’s Dordogne region, stubbornly confessed that he was a werewolf. The young shepherd boy’s troubles had begun in May when he encountered three female cowherds who were discussing the latest wolf attacks in the region. One wolf had taken an infant out of its crib and eaten it behind a hedge, while one of the girls, thirteen-year-old Marguerite Poirier, had also been attacked while out with her cows. She still had the scars to prove it. The boy, who was widely considered slow and small for his age, approached the teenagers, asking them who was the most beautiful: “because (he said) I want to marry her, so if it is you, I want to marry you.” Finding himself ignored by the three girls, he inserted himself into their original topic of conversation, declaring that he was afraid of no wolves. When he was disbelieved, the boy doubled down on his boasts, again, and again, until he claimed to have been a werewolf himself. “Boys and girls,” the clearly underfed Grenier declared, “were much more pleasant and delicate to eat.”

Given the widespread climate of fear, it did not take the cowherds long to report the teen wolf to the local authorities. Grenier was found and arrested, and he quickly confessed to lycanthropy. Convicted by the local court, the case was swiftly sent up to the Bordeaux Parlement, the region’s appeals court, for review. There the boy’s insistence that he was a werewolf had everyone flummoxed. Two physicians examined him but came to differing conclusions. They both judged him “melancholic” or mentally ill, but one saw evidence of a devil’s mark and witchcraft as well. The judges, too, could not make up their minds. Some supported a death sentence based on the boy’s confession, others could not believe he was telling the truth. It is at this crucial junction that we should turn to the Harry Ransom Center’s Medieval and Early Modern Manuscripts 230. It contains the mysterious text that appears to have settled Grenier’s fate.

First page of “Du Loup Garou.” Harry Ransom Center, Medieval and Early Modern Manuscripts 230, fol. 1r.

We probably know more about the Grenier trial than about any other case that came before the Bordeaux Parlement in its long and illustrious history. The palace that housed the Parlement went up in flames in the early eighteenth century, taking its records with it. The teen wolf case, however, was sensational enough that three separate attempts to excerpt or summarize it were made shortly after the trial’s conclusion. In a 2019 article, I showed that we could learn a lot more about the trial and Grenier’s confession when we collated these three accounts, as each offers different but complementary details. Crucially, MEM MSS 230 was not one of these three versions—in fact, I was not even aware of its existence at the time. While it offers few details on the Grenier trial itself (and does not mention him by name), its study can help us examine outstanding issues about the authorship of the other accounts and reconsider a mystery about the sentence that the Bordeaux Parlement pronounced.

The most extensive account of the Grenier trial is contained in a manuscript that belongs to the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris. MS Français 13346 is described as containing Mélanges théologiques, a mix of theological texts. For the most part, they belong to the late seventeenth century. The strangest contribution, though, is earlier and has a lengthy descriptive title (on fol. 279r):

Criminal trial against Jean Grenier accused of witchcraft on which there has been a judgement by the Parlement on 6 September 1603. Mr Filesac has examined the information and has given his opinion in his own hand as follows.

(Procez criminel contre Jean Grenier accusé de sorcellerie sur lequel il y a eu arrest du Parlement le 6 septembre 1603. Mr. Filesac a examiné les informations et donné son avis écrit de sa propre main comme il suit.)

The document does fall neatly into two almost equal parts: a lengthy description of the legal proceedings followed by an opinion on the case at hand and the possibility of lycanthropy, a rather vexed question on both philosophical and theological grounds. Where the first half of the document provides a detailed account of the judicial investigations that led to Grenier’s arrest and conviction in La Roche-Chalais, the second is a rich tapestry of biblical, classical, and patristic sources about werewolves, the imagination, and human-animal transformations.

Jean Filesac, *De idolatria magica dissertatio* (Paris: Sébastien Cramoisy, 1609), sig. ã1r. Harry Ransom Center Book Collection, BF 1520 F55 1609.

Its purported author, Jean Filesac (1556–1638), was a Sorbonne theologian, who rose to become dean of the Paris theology faculty. Best known for his De idolatria magica dissertatio (Dissertation on magical idolatry, 1609), Filesac would naturally have been interested in the Grenier case. So far, so good, but when we dig deeper, questions appear. How did Filesac obtain an account of the trial? He may have been a logical expert to consult, but there was no tradition of consulting universities in witchcraft matters in France, as existed in Germany at the time. Moreover, if the Bordeaux judges sent Filesac an account of the trial, they evidently did not wait for his response—the manuscript ends abruptly by noting Grenier’s sentence of perpetual confinement in a Bordeaux monastery.

Pierre de Lancre, *Tableau de l’inconstance des mauuais anges et demon*s (Paris: Nicolas Buon, 1612), sigs. ã1r and Kk4v. Harry Ransom Center Book Collection, BF 1565 L35 1612.

The mystery deepens still further when we turn to a second account of the Grenier case. (The third account of the trial does not concern us here.) In 1612, the Bordeaux judge Pierre de Lancre published his Tableau de l’inconstance des mauvais anges et démons (Tableau of the Inconstancy of Evil Angels and Demons), a work of demonology which devoted one of its six books to the question of lycanthropy. De Lancre was not one of the original judges, but he interviewed the imprisoned Grenier shortly before his death, aged 20 or 21, in 1610. (The reformed werewolf told the judge that he used to prefer the flesh of little girls over boys “because they are more tender.”) As part of his discussion of lycanthropy, de Lancre published the full sentence against Grenier pronounced by the court’s first president Guillaume Daffis on 6 September 1603. What comes next is very odd: this sentence, nearly fifty pages of printed text, is virtually identical to the second half —that is the “opinion” part—of the Filesac manuscript. De Lancre prefaced what he called “the judgment delivered ‘in red robes’ in the Parlement of Bordeaux on 6 September 1603” with excerpts from the original trial proceedings so that the reader may correctly interpret it, so evidently his copy did not contain the first descriptive half of the Paris manuscript. Still, de Lancre’s excerpt matches the second half almost word for word. De Lancre thus presents a question that is beyond perplexing: How did the same text end up circulating under the name of two different authors?

The most straightforward hypothesis was that the Bordeaux judge was mistaken. De Lancre obtained the “sentence” only in 1610 from the Daffis estate after the president had passed away. The judge described the manuscript as a complete mess: “so badly and falsely arranged, as if it had passed through an infinity of different hands, that I could hardly recognize the workman in the work.” It was certainly possible, as I suggested before, that Daffis received Filesac’s opinion sometime before his death and that de Lancre confused it with the sentence the first president had pronounced. I took care not settle the issue. For the purposes of my article—I was principally interested in the trial proceedings and the testimony they offered, not the philosophical and theological debates that followed—it did not matter greatly.

Handwritten title, “Sobre la Licantropía.” Harry Ransom Center, Medieval and Early Modern Manuscripts 230, front cover.

Study of the Ransom Center’s MEM MSS 230 suggests a second possibility, however. The manuscript came into the Center’s possession in 2017. Its title on the cover “Sobre la Licantropía” (On Lycanthropy) would appear to indicate that it spent time in Spain, although its provenance is otherwise unclear. The volume contains two items, numbered 49 and 50 in French, suggesting that it was once part of a much larger collection. The first of these has been titled “Du Loup Garou” (On the Werewolf) and fills almost all of the leaves. The second is a mere two pages but, as we shall see, may be helpful for our discussion of the volume’s authorship.

The end of the Grenier werewolf text in the Ransom Center manuscript and in the printed De Lancre. Harry Ransom Center, Medieval and Early Modern Manuscripts 230, fol. 31v. Pierre de Lancre, *Tableau de l’inconstance des mauuais anges et demon*s (Paris: Nicolas Buon, 1612), sig. Qq4v. Harry Ransom Center Book Collection, BF 1565 L35 1612.

Even a casual glance shows that “Du Loup Garou” is a third version of the same text we examined before, and crucially it starts at the same position as de Lancre’s “judgment” does. Like the version that fell into de Lancre’s hands, it lacks an opening account of the Grenier trial and, yet, appears to be complete. The manuscript thus raises the possibility that de Lancre may have been right—that President Daffis was the author and that the attribution to Filesac in the Mélanges theologiques is mistaken. MEM MSS 230 is certainly written in an earlier hand than MS Français 13346. (Whatever its claims about Filesac’s “own hand” the version included in the Bibliothèque nationale manuscript is by the same late seventeenth-century scribe as the rest of the manuscript.) It seems unlikely, however, that the Ransom Center’s version is the one that came into de Lancre’s possession. MEM MSS 230 did not “pass through an infinity of different hands”—I count only three. In addition to the scribe who wrote the main Grenier text, there is evidence of activity by at least two seventeenth-century readers. One extensively corrected parts of the text. The other hand was much less invasive, likely of a later reader not involved in its original composition. This reader underlined sections of apparent interest and added a few notes in the margins.

A page from the Grenier werewolf manuscript with correcting, underlining, and annotation. Harry Ransom Center, Medieval and Early Modern Manuscripts 230, fol. 5v.

The hand that has emended parts of the text offers a potential clue to our authorship mystery. A quick comparison shows that, with one exception, all the corrections were incorporated into the Paris manuscript and de Lancre’s 1612 Tableau. Two solutions thus present themselves. It is possible that the original hand was merely a particularly careless copyist and that the second hand simply checked and corrected shoddy work against another version, such as de Lancre’s Tableau.

Yet the rather early scribal hand and the types of mistakes present both suggest that MEM MSS 230 may well have been considerably more important than that. It is striking that the corrections often pertain to unfamiliar words, often in Latin quotations—the name of an obscure tribe mentioned by Pliny the Elder, for instance, and the name of the little-known Greek historian Palaephatus. Could the original scribe have heard the text (or judgement!) spoken? In that reading, the second hand could have been Daffis himself or, just as plausibly, an educated audience member for whom the document was intended.

The “Remonstrance” following the Grenier werewolf text. Harry Ransom Center, Medieval and Early Modern Manuscripts 230, fol. 33r.

One factor that could support such an interpretation is the second, very short item—number 50—included in the manuscript. Its title, “Remonstrance faicte à la reception du Vicomte d’Aubeterre” (Remonstrance made at the reception of Viscount d’Aubeterre), suggests a similar oral origin and appears to have been written by the same person that emended the Grenier text. Crucially, the individual remonstrated, François d’Esparbès de Lussan, Viscount d’Aubeterre (1571–1628), was a nobleman who held a variety of government positions in the southwest of France during the early seventeenth century, thus placing the manuscript closer to Bordeaux than to Paris and providing further support for an early date.

More careful comparison of the two manuscripts and de Lancre’s Tableau by other (fresher) eyes may bring new hypotheses, but as things stand Filesac’s authorship of this text can no longer be considered a given. Whether MEM MSS 230 is merely another manuscript copy or, more plausibly, closely linked to the text’s composition, De Lancre seems to have been right—the text as preserved in the Ransom Center manuscript may well have been the judgment pronounced in the Grenier case. Daffis’s authorship would explain aspects of this text, notably its ending, although it remains frightfully long and abstract for a sentence. (One wonders how much thirteen-year-old Grenier would have understood.) Other issues also emerge. Daffis’s authorship raises questions about the Paris manuscript—in particular, its first half, which includes details about the trial not found in other sources. Who composed this part, and when, and why, and where? It seems impossible to make all the pieces of the puzzle fit. We may well conclude that these manuscripts have proved as vexing for us today as the issue of lycanthropy was for early modern lawyers and theologians.

Jan Machielsen is Senior Lecturer in Early Modern History at Cardiff University. He is the author of Martin Delrio: Demonology and Scholarship in the Counter-Reformation (2015) and the editor of The Science of Demons: Early Modern Authors Facing Witchcraft and the Devil (2020). He is currently a Humboldt Research Fellow at the TU Dresden, completing a book provisionally entitled Witches, Children, and Refugees: Terror in the Basque Country.

Primary Source: An Archbishop’s Lost Library Catalog

The library catalog of Alfonso Paleotti, the archbishop of Bologna from 1597 until his death in 1619, begins with a flashy title-page bearing Paleotti’s illuminated coat of arms, and, written carefully in red and black ink, the words, “The Library of Alfonso Paleotti, Archbishop of Bologna.” Judging from the long list of books that follows, Paleotti’s collection contained much of what we might expect to find in an archbishop’s library in the early seventeenth century. There were works on religious history, including Baronio’s Annales ecclesiastici, a gargantuan work on the history of the Catholic Church, published in several volumes between 1588 and 1607.¹ He owned the Bible and writings by the early church fathers, like St. Ambrose, too. The catalog even included Paleotti’s own bestseller about the shroud of Turin, an object that mystified and fascinated early modern visitors much as it does those in the 21^st century.²

Title-page of Alfonso Paleotti's library catalog. Harry Ransom Center, Ranuzzi Family Manuscripts, Ph 12840, fol. 173r. — Title-page of Alfonso Paleotti’s library catalog. Harry Ransom Center, Ranuzzi Family Manuscripts, Ph 12840, fol. 173r.

The shelfmarks entered next to many of the archbishop’s books in the catalog hint at the less straightforward story of how Alfonso’s library came to be. They show us that the books were largely inherited from his predecessor in office, his cousin Gabriele Paleotti, archbishop of Bologna from 1567 to 1597. A comparison between a 1586 catalog of Gabriele’s library with the Ransom Center catalog of Alfonso’s reveals that many of the books in Alfonso’s library retained the same shelfmarks they had in Gabriele’s collection.³ For example, a 1578 martyrology by Pietro Galesini under the shelfmark E.2 in Gabriele’s catalog was also listed as E.2 in Alfonso’s.⁴ And although added by a later hand in Gabriele’s catalog, Baronio’s Annales was kept under F.1 in both.⁵ As in Alfonso’s, Gabriele’s catalog generally lists books alphabetically by author, with a shelfmark at the end of the entry.⁶ Even the title-pages of the two archbishops’ catalogs are similar, featuring their shared family crest. But not everything is identical. In addition to adding more recent books like his work on the shroud, Alfonso also removed books that had been included Gabriele’s catalog and could no longer be found. It seems Alfonso had done due diligence: missing books were marked as such in Gabriele’s catalog by a later hand, and a list was compiled of the hundreds of missing books.⁷ Alfonso’s catalog in the Ransom Center lists the books that survived.

Page from the catalog of Alfonso Paleotti’s library listing Baronio’s *Annales ecclesiastici*. Harry Ransom Center, Ranuzzi Family Manuscripts, Ph 12840, fol. 179r.

The many missing books perhaps attest to the collection’s heavy use. Gabriele wanted his books to serve as a kind of public library for clergy, particularly poor clerics who could not afford to buy good books to help them write sermons. During Gabriele’s lifetime, the English Catholic refugee and theologian William Shepreve served as librarian for the archbishop’s collection, “always adding books, not only for the service of the archiepiscopal palace, but also for preachers, or others who have need of the books, of which he keeps an index.”⁸ In his final years, Gabriele took steps to make his personal book collection a permanent feature of Bologna’s archiepiscopal palace. He had a purpose-built room constructed for it in 1595, and in his will, he stipulated that a complete inventory be drawn up within two months after his death, and that no book be sold or taken out of the library.⁹ The catalog in the Ransom Center advertises itself as “the library of Alfonso Paleotti.” In reality, though, Alfonso’s library was both a family heirloom and an institutional resource for the archdiocese of Bologna.

Spine of Harry Ransom Center, Ranuzzi Family Manuscripts, Ph 12840.

Pages with Ranuzzi arms and volume title in Harry Ransom Center, Ranuzzi Family Manuscripts, Ph 12840.

The current location of Alfonso’s catalog is also revealing. It is bound as part of a miscellany of manuscript material (both originals and copies) from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This single volume is one of the 620 volumes the Ransom Center owns from the Ranuzzi collection—another Bolognese family library. This collection was started by Count Vincenzo Antonio Ranuzzi, between 1706 and 1726, who wanted to preserve information and knowledge for his son, Marc’Antonio.¹⁰ As in other Ranuzzi volumes, the one containing Alfonso’s catalog begins with Count Ranuzzi’s own elaborate coat of arms and a title-page with a shelfmark. This one was the 34th volume in the library’s “Raccolta di varii manoscritti,” or “collection of various manuscripts.”

It seems likely that the Ranuzzi acquired Alfonso’s catalog during the Count’s initial burst of collecting in the first decades of the eighteenth century; by 1731, another archbishop of Bologna had searched for this text in vain. Better known as Pope Benedict XIV, Prospero Lambertini was archbishop of Bologna from 1731 to 1754 and made it his pet project to restore the Paleotti library in the archiepiscopal palace to its former grandeur. Lambertini lamented that in 1642, Archbishop Girolamo Colonna had moved the collection to a different and more spacious location: “But in that part [of the archiepiscopal palace], nobody remembered it.”¹¹ During one of Bologna’s wet winters, the books became water damaged. Lambertini had the books repaired, including the magnificent Antwerp Polyglot Bible that he had found “mutilated,” and moved them to another wing. He also sought to fulfil the stipulation in Gabriele Paleotti’s will that an inventory of the books be made by his successor. He wrote, “With no amount of diligence could we find this catalog—if it was ever made.” So, in 1738, Lambertini created a new catalog. And he had it printed so it would avoid the same fate as the manuscript catalog Alfonso must have made:

We had this inventory of the books that could be found printed so that there would be many copies, and it would never again disappear, if it were only left copied in manuscript—as we strongly suspect happened earlier to the first catalog, which we don’t doubt was created and compiled by Alfonso Paleotti, who succeeded Gabriele, even if as we said, it never came into our hands.¹²

If only Lambertini had thought to send his agents on a short walk across town to Palazzo Ranuzzi, where Alfonso’s missing catalog was already bound and shelved as “Raccolta di varii manoscritti,” Vol. 34.

Fortunately for us, the once-elusive manuscript is now in Austin. In addition to solving a little eighteenth-century puzzle about its existence and whereabouts, its presence at the Ransom Center makes it possible to tell part of a long history of the creation, continuation, and destruction of book collections in Bologna. The vast majority of the sources we study as historians are often several times removed from their original contexts, and recovering those contexts often requires tracing the sinuous provenance of the books and manuscripts that preserve them. We can see other places that Alfonso’s catalog had meaning when we learn that it moved to Ranuzzi’s collection and was sought after by Lambertini in the eighteenth century.

A similarly rich story could be told about the catalog’s journey to Texas. What does Paleotti’s catalog tells us about the movement of books in early modern Bologna? The libraries of elite families and ecclesiastical institutions overlapped, and, even though both were intended to preserve knowledge for future generations, books often went missing. The creation of one library drew on the dissemination of books from others. Gabriele’s creation of an archiepiscopal library incorporated his own family’s books.¹³ Books that had once been kept in the Palazzo Paleotti were moved to the Palazzo Arcivescovile. Even then, under Alfonso’s care, the collection continued to blur the line between a personal library and a public, institutionalized resource. And as Alfonso marked books in Gabriele’s old catalog as missing, more almost certainly disappeared. A century later, the Ranuzzi turned to Bologna’s ecclesiastical libraries as well as the city’s private collectors to create their family library, making their collection out of the remnants of many Bolognese libraries. The catalog documenting “The Library of Alfonso Paleotti, Archbishop of Bologna” sheds light on one of them.

Madeline McMahon is a PhD candidate in history at Princeton University, funded by the Mellon-CES Dissertation Completion Fellowship (’20-’21). Beginning in the 2021–2022 academic year, she will commence a postdoctoral appointment in History at The University of Texas at Austin. You can find her on Twitter @madmcmahon.

¹ Harry Ransom Center, Ranuzzi Family Manuscripts, Ph 12840, “Alfonsi Palaeoti Archiep: Bonon: Bibliotheca,” fol. 175r, and “Annales ecclesiastici Baronii Tomi III. F 1,” fol. 179r.

² Ranuzzi Family Manuscripts, Ph 12840, fol. 174v. “Alfonsus Palaeatus Dichiaratione della sindone.” Alfonso Paleotti, Esplicatione del sacro lenzuolo (Bologna: Heirs of Giovanni Rossi, 1599).

³ Biblioteca comunale dell’Archiginnasio, MS B. 1348, “Catalogus bibliothecae…Gabrielis Palaeoti.”

⁴ Pietro Galesini, Martyrologium S. Romanae Ecclesiae (Venice, 1578). Ranuzzi Family Manuscripts, Ph 12840, fol. 198v. Archiginnasio, MS B. 1348, fol. [137r].

⁵ Ranuzzi Family Manuscripts, Ph 12840, fol. 179r. “Caesaris Baronij Annales eccles.ci Tom: IIII F.1.” Archiginnasio, MS B. 1348, fol. [31r]. “Cesaris Baronii Annales ecclesiastici Tom. 4. F.1.”

⁶ In fact, Alfonso’s catalog tended to list works both by title and author’s first name, while Gabriele’s listed works under author’s first name.

⁷ Archivio Arcivescovile di Bologna, Misc. v. 841, fascicolo 7, “Index librorum qui in archiepiscopali bibliotheca desiderantur.”

⁸ Quoted in Paolo Prodi, Il cardinale Gabriele Paleotti (1522 – 1597) (Rome, 1959-1967), vol. 2, 264-65. “sempre si va aumentando di libri, non solo per servitio dell’Arcivescovato ma ancora per predicatori, o altri che habbino bisogno de libri, de quali tiene l’indice.”

⁹ Prodi, vol. 2, 266-67.

¹⁰ Maria Xenia Zevelechi Wells, The Ranuzzi Manuscripts (Austin, 1980), 1–5.

¹¹ Prospero Lambertini, Catalogus librorum qui reliqui inventi sunt in bibliotheca archiepiscopali Bononiae (1738), sig. a 2 v. “Primo adventu nostro Bibliothecam Cardinalis Palaeoti, studio Cardinalis Columnae novis Codicibus ornatam deprehendimus in amplo quidem loco Sedis Archiepiscopalis, sed in ea parte ubi nemo commoratur. Quare ob negligentiam hominum factum est, ut per hyemis tempora in eum locum aquae penetraverint.”

¹² Lambertini, Catalogus, sig. [a 3v]. “Porro hunc Catalogum (si fortasse antea confectus est) nulla diligentia potuimus invenire: Illum modo Librorum, qui inventi sunt, Typis imprimendum committimus, ut multa exemplaria suppetant, ac ne rursus intereat, si solum manu descriptus relinquatur, uti contigisse merito suspicamur primo, quem ab Alphonso Palaeoto (qui Cardinali Gabrieli Palaeoto statim successit) confectum, digestumque minime dubitamus, licet in manus nostras, uti dictum est, nunquam pervenerit.”

¹³ Prodi, Il Cardinale Gabriele Paleotti, vol. 1 (1959), 52-53, vol. 2 (1967), 264.

Primary Source: An Elizabethan Exorcist’s (very weird) Secret Press

By Aaron T. Pratt

John Darrell’s run as a celebrity exorcist during the later 1590s began to go downhill after a young man he was treating in Nottingham accused the wrong person of witchcraft: William Sommers pointed to Alice Freeman, cousin of one of city’s highest-ranking officials, as the cause of his possession.¹ Sommers’s sister chimed in, too, claiming that Freeman had previously killed a child of hers with black magic. Despite this two-pronged accusation, however, the charges didn’t hold up in court, and sentiment toward Darrell soured as many in town became skeptical about the authenticity of Sommers’ possession and frustrated with the disruptions the exorcist’s presence in the city was causing. Darrell’s efforts to dispossess Sommers and his fire-and-brimstone preaching had added a spiritual dimension to existing class conflict in Nottingham, inflaming the situation so much that authorities further south started to pay attention. Only a few months after Freeman was cleared and the spotlight had turned on him, Darrell wound up imprisoned in London awaiting prosecution in front of the High Commission, England’s top ecclesiastical court. The commissioners brought in Sommers and others Darrell had treated so they could testify that he had coached them to feign possession. At the close of 1599, Darrell was free again, but only after being convicted of fraud and stripped of his position as a minister. By that point, he’d spent around eighteen months behind bars and had his reputation tarred by the commission itself and, more lastingly, a major attack in print.

Samuel Harsnett, who was chaplain to the Bishop of London, led the High Commission’s prosecution and used the communication pathways of the book trade to take a shot at Darrell. Before a verdict had even been reached, he’d written A discoverie of the fraudulent practises of John Darrel Bacheler of Arts and worked with John Wolfe, a well-known London publisher, to have it printed. Harsnett would later follow up Discoverie with another work that condemned a series of Catholic exorcisms performed in Buckinhamshire in the 1580s: A declaration of egregious popish impostures (London: James Roberts, 1603). Shakespeare is known to have drawn on this second Harsnett book, particularly in his treatments of King Lear’s madness and, in the same play, of Edgar when he’s disguised as Poor Tom, a possessed beggar.

It’s in another and somewhat later play, though, that we see the impact of Harsnett’s book about Darrell’s “fraudulent practises.” In the final act of Ben Jonson’s The Devil is an Ass, which was written and first performed in 1616, a scheme by the con-artist Merecraft has been upended by a last-minute maneuver, and he comes up with a new plan to correct course and get control of the estate he’s been after. The idea is to convince his dupe, Fitzdottrel, to feign demonic possession and charge his own wife and her collaborators with witchcraft. In coaching Fitzdottrel on how to perform authentically, Merecraft asks him, “Did you ner’e [never] read, Sir, little Darrels tricks, With the boy o’ Burton, and the 7. in Lancashire, Sommers at Nottingham?” “All these do teach it,” he adds.

Detail of Benjamin Jonson, The divell is an asse (London: Robert Allott, 1631), sig. X3v. Harry Ransom Center Book Collection, -f- PR 2610 A1 1631. — Detail of Benjamin Jonson, *The divell is an asse* (London: Robert Allott, 1631), sig. X3v. Harry Ransom Center Book Collection, -f- PR 2610 A1 1631.

Merecraft’s characterization of possession symptoms as “little Darrels tricks” indicates that he believed the charges of fraud that had been levied against Darrell more than fifteen years earlier. His choice of a verb also tells us that he knew about the exorcist’s three most famous cases by reading rather than simply hearing about them. His source—and, by extension, Jonson’s—was almost certainly Harsnett’s Discoverie.

Darrell and his supporters, though, were no slackers when it came to taking advantage of print. In fact, Harsnett’s recourse to the press in the first place was prompted or at least hastened by books that began circulating while Darrell was still imprisoned and his High Commission case underway. As Brendan C. Walsh writes, “Aware that they had little opportunity to advance their cause through the courts, the Puritan network initiated what would become a lengthy print campaign” of their own.² First came an anonymous defense of Darrell’s handling of the Sommers case. Then came two back-to-back tracts by Darrell himself, one an expansion of the other. Even though he was in prison, Darrell evidently had access to writing material and was able to get manuscripts smuggled out to publishers, perhaps with some money changing hands to encourage the jailer turn his head the other way.

But while Harsnett was able to work openly with London publishers to get his book against Darrell out, Darrell and his “Puritan network” had to get creative. Harsnett’s position on the High Commission had not only made him an “enforcer of conformity” in the courtroom, it also made him a censor responsible for approving—and rejecting—books for the press.³ In 1597, a pamphlet that detailed Darrell’s exorcism of the “Boy of Burton,” Thomas Darling, appears to have successfully received a license, but there was almost zero chance of anything sympathetic to Darrell scraping by again, not after the upheaval in Nottingham and the onset of his London trial. Instead, Darrell’s supporters had to work with presses abroad to get out the three pamphlets that preceded Harsnett’s Discoverie. Two were apparently printed in Amsterdam, the other by Richard Schilders in Middelburg; both cities were home to exile communities of English Puritans. Getting the books written while Darrell’s trial was underway and back to England in the form of printed editions before it had concluded was no small feat: the authors had to produce their texts, the original manuscripts had to be sent by ship to the European continent and printed, and then the printed sheets had to be packed up, shipped, and likely smuggled into England.

The imprint at the bottom of the title-page of Harsnett’s Discoverie unabashedly advertises where the book was printed, who printed it, and when. So, too, do the imprints of two books written against Darrell in the wake of his trial: John Deacon and John Walker’s Dialogicall discourses of spirits and divels and A summarie answere to . . . Master Darel his bookes. Both specify that they were published in London by George Bishop in 1601:

John Deacon and John Walker, Dialogicall discourses of spirits and divels and A summarie answere to…Master Darel his bookes (London: George Bishop, 1601), sigs. A1r and *1r, respectively. Harry Ransom Center Book Collection, BT 960 D43 1601. — John Deacon and John Walker, *Dialogicall discourses of spirits and divels* and A summarie answere to…Master Darel his bookes (London: George Bishop, 1601), sigs. A1r and *1r, respectively. Harry Ransom Center Book Collection, BT 960 D43 1601.

Informative imprints, of course, were perfectly standard, but not one of the books written by Darrell or his supporters during or after the High Commission trial advertises any origin whatsoever, foreign or domestic. We only have a sense of where they were printed because of painstaking work undertaken by modern bibliographers, researchers who have combed these books’ printed pages for clues that might help reveal where they’re from. For example, the very first pamphlet to come out of the trial—the anonymous defense of the Sommers case—features a decorative ornament on its title-page, one that also appears on the title-page of an unrelated book from 1597 that says it was “Imprinted in Amstelrodam [sic].” The ornament does not appear in the Darrell-authored book that’s been attributed to the same Amsterdam press, but both it and the anonymous pamphlet that inludes the ornament were printed with the same fonts and share design elements. And, helpfully, both make use of the same floriated capital W when spelling out “William Sommers.” Unfortunately, though, while the ornament match makes Amsterdam the likely origin of these two pamphlets, we still don’t know the specific identity of their printer.

With backstories even more mysterious are four editions of works by Darrell that were published, according to their title-page dates, after his case had concluded: two in 1600 and two in 1602. The same bibliographical authority that attributes the earlier tracts to continental presses suggests with some hesitation that all four of these later books were likely printed on a clandestine press that operated within England.⁴ The editions make use of the same roman and italic fonts and exhibit similar page design, but no one has yet been able to associate these editions with any other books or otherwise identify the press. All we know about the publication and early circulation of the press’s work is that one of the editions from 1600 was probably the “lately printed” book by “m^r Darrell . . . concerning the casting out of Devilles” ordered burned by London’s Stationers’ Company on October 29th, 1600.⁵ But what’s the context for this order: Who wanted the book burned? How many copies did the trade organization have? How did it get them? Did the burning even take place?

John Darrell, A true narration of the strange and grevous vexation by the devil, of 7. persons in Lancashire, and William Somers in Nottingham ([England?]: n.p., 1600), sig. π1r. Harry Ransom Center Book Collection, BF 1555 D377 1600. — John Darrell, *A true narration of the strange and grevous vexation by the devil, of 7. persons in Lancashire, and William Somers in Nottingham* ([England?]: n.p., 1600), sig. π1r. Harry Ransom Center Book Collection, BF 1555 D377 1600.

The Ransom Center has long held a rather curious copy of the edition that’s usually associated with the Stationers’ Company order, Darrell’s A true narration of the strange and grevous vexation by the devil, of 7. persons in Lancashire, and William Somers in Nottingham. While currently in a much later binding, holes in the inner margins of its leaves provide evidence that the copy originally circulated as a stitched pamphlet, just like other books its size and length usually did.

William Shakespeare, The life and death of King Richard the second (London: John Norton, 1634). Carl H. Pforzheimer Library, Harry Ransom Center, Pforz 896 PFZ. — William Shakespeare, *The life and death of King Richard the second* (London: John Norton, 1634). Carl H. Pforzheimer Library, Harry Ransom Center, Pforz 896 PFZ. A rare survival, it represents the typical stab-stitched form in which many books were sold.

Somewhat bizarrely, though, three pairs of leaves from the same press’s other 1600 edition have been inserted into this copy, in three nonconsecutive places. Once page numbering starts in True narration, it proceeds straightforwardly from 1 to 90, but pages numbered 142–145 from that other book, Darrell’s A detection of that sinnful, shamful, lying, and ridiculous discours, of Samuel Harshnet, appear between 90 and 91. Its 146–149 are then between True narration’s 94 and 95; finally, 150 and the next three pages of Detection fall between 98 and 99 of True narration. The interloping leaves exhibit the same pattern of stitching holes as the rest of the volume, making it likely that they have have been in their current positions since the pamphlet was initially assembled at the beginning of the seventeenth century.

Clearly, page numbering cannot provide an explanation for why the extra leaves were inserted where they were, but page numbers were not what early modern bookbinders (or pamphlet-stitching booksellers) generally followed when assembling books. Instead, they relied on what are known as signatures, printed letters or symbols used to identify the leaves of gatherings, the individual folded units that together make up a book. All four of the Darrell pamphlets attributed to the secret English press are quartos: these are books where each sheet of paper handled by the printer ends up transformed into four printed leaves or eight printed pages. The most straightforward type of quarto is one where a single sheet of four leaves becomes a single gathering of four leaves after it has been folded twice:

Diagram of a typical quarto gathering of four leaves. If it were part of a book that was going to be bound, the binder would have been responsible for slicing it and other gatherings’ top folds off with a plough to make the book readable; if a stitched pamphlet, each fold would usually have been cut or torn open individually, either by a bookseller or the retail customer that bought it.

In this diagram, the signature of the gathering is “A.” If the hypothetical sheet were from a typical English book printed in 1600, the first leaf would have “A” printed as a signature at the bottom of its first (recto) page. The same position of the second leaf would read “A2”; the third “A3”; and the fourth would be left blank. Then, the next gathering would begin with “B”; the third “C”; and so on.

In True narration, the “A” gathering follows the standard practice, with the first three leaves signed as expected. Things get irregular after this, though: only the first two leaves in the next gathering are signed, “B1” and “B2.” (Notice that the signature on the first leaf, atypically, includes both the leaf number, “1,” along with the gathering letter.) The same is true for the following gathering, “C.” Then the alphabet starts over with “A” at the beginning of a new section of the text, but this time the signing is a hybrid of what has come so far: the first three leaves of the next gathering are signed, as in the first “A” gathering, but the first leaf is now signed “A1,” with a number. This pattern then holds until we get to the “K” gathering. At this point, instead of continuing with standard quarto gatherings of four leaves, the book pivots to gatherings that are made of only two leaves each, or half of a quarto sheet. These continue for the rest of the book, through the “S” signature. In most of the two-leaf gatherings, both are signed with both letter and number, as in “O1” and “O2.”

It remains unclear exactly why leaves from Darrell’s Detection ended up with the Ransom Center copy of True narration when it was being assembled, but their placement isn’t random. Detection, it turns out, is even more eccentric than True narration when it comes to the ways its gatherings are signed. Like the final section of True narration, most of Detection is in two-leaf—or half-sheet—gatherings. There is an initial alphabet that’s mostly formed by half-sheets signed only on their first leaves. The first “O” gathering, for example, has “O1” on its first leaf and no signature on the second. After the first alphabet ends, however, another begins. In this one, the first leaf of the “O” half-sheet is signed “O2,” with its second leaf unsigned. There’s also a third alphabet of half-sheets that begins with one initially signed “A3” and ends with one that begins with “H3.” This, to put it simply, is very strange.

John Darrell, A detection of that sinnful, shamful, lying, and ridiculous discours, of Samuel Harshnet ([England?]: n.p., 1600), sigs. "O2"1r and "O2"2r. Harry Ransom Center Book Collection, BF 1555 D377 1600. — John Darrell, *A detection of that sinnful, shamful, lying, and ridiculous discours, of Samuel Harshnet* ([England?]: n.p., 1600), sigs. “O2″1r and “O2″2r. Harry Ransom Center Book Collection, BF 1555 D377 1600. These consecutive leaves, which have been inserted into a copy of Darrell’s *True narration*, belong to the same half-sheet. Its first leaf is signed “O2.”

Normally, the numbers in signatures identify the position of a leaf in a gathering. Despite the anomalies in True narration, its signing at least adheres to this basic principle. In Detection, however, the numbers in the signatures on the first leaves of its half-sheet gatherings identify the whole gathering and not an individual leaf. With “A3” printed on the first leaf of a unit that’s made of only two leaves, there’s no other way to make sense of it. When they had exhausted a first run of the alphabet, printers’ standard practice across Europe was to begin the next sequence with “Aa.” Doubling letters like this allowed numerals at the end to continue serving the exclusive function of numbering leaves, saving booksellers and binders the confusion apparently faced by the person who assembled the Ransom Center copy of True narration. The three leaf pairs from Detection that appear in it are the half-sheet gatherings signed “O2,” “P2,” and “Q2.” Likely unfamiliar with the idea of an entire gathering that would begin with leaf signed with a “2,” our pamphlet-maker found the only place in True narration where they could go with any justification: nested in the middle of the two-leaf gatherings that begin with leaves signed “O1,” “P1,” and “Q1.” This way, the leaves with “2” signatures on the stray Detection half-sheets at least follow leaves signed with a “1.” Of course, the Detection half-sheets still don’t really make sense where they ended up—they are, after all, from a completely different book—but their presence in this one copy helps to highlight the weirdness of these later Darrell books at the level of the edition. It is difficult to understand exactly how and why they were printed the ways they were.

John Darrell, A survey of certaine dialogical discourses and The replie of John Darrell, to the answer of John Deacon, and John Walker ([England?]: n.p, 1602), sigs. A1r and A1r, respectively. Harry Ransom Center Book Collection, uncataloged acquisition. — John Darrell, *A survey of certaine dialogical discourses* and The replie of John Darrell, to the answer of John Deacon, and John Walker ([England?]: n.p, 1602), sigs. A1r and A1r, respectively. Harry Ransom Center Book Collection, uncataloged acquisition.

The two 1602 books attributed to the secret press were written by Darrell in response to the volumes by Deacon and Walker mentioned above. Both are composed entirely of two-leaf gatherings. One, A survey of certaine dialogical discourses, is similar to Detection in that it includes many gatherings with numbers in the signatures that identify the gathering itself. That is, there are many half-sheets that begin with a leaf signed with a “2,” as in “B2,” “G2,” and “K2.” But where Detection puts the “2” gatherings back-to-back after the first alphabet ends—B2, C2, D2—Survey represents a new way of doing things: it puts them right after their corresponding “1” gatherings—B1, B2, C1, C2, D1, D2. Then, finally, A replie of John Darrell, to the answer of John Deacon, and John Walker is made of traditionally and straightforwardly signed half-sheet gatherings: the first leaf of each is signed simply with a letter, and the second is left unsigned.

All four of these editions demand further and more intensive analysis to better ascertain how they were printed, but the irregularity of the books’ structures—especially the structures of the editions from 1600—the press’s increasing reliance on two-leaf gatherings, and the idiosyncratic signing patterns of three of the four books support the conclusion that they were printed on an ad hoc clandestine press, perhaps one in a private English residence, and not by professional operation at home or abroad. Darrell may never have been able to pursue his exorcism ministry again, but the lengths that his supporters went to in defending both him and their collective cause demonstrate just how committed they were, even if we just focus on the labor and other resources required to defend Darrell in print. They worked with two different printers in Europe and may very well have invested in a press, type, and the other equipment necessary to ensure that Darrell’s writing was printed domestically and circulated widely. The more we learn about the nuts-and-bolts of the printing processes behind these books themselves, the better we will be able to see the efforts and creative problem-solving of Darrell’s allies.

And the secret press books survive reasonably well today. If any were, in fact, burned by London’s Stationers’ Company, the overall numbers must have been relatively small, because their survival rates compare favorably with the rates for similar books from the period, including Harsnett’s Discoverie. The two 1600 editions are now spread across US and UK libraries in what appear to be roughly equal numbers, adding up to right around fifty copies in research institutions. With the 1602 editions added—including a bound set of them that just entered the Ransom Center’s collection—the number jumps to more than eighty books from the press that have been preserved across the centuries and are available for study today.

Aaron T. Pratt is Carl and Lily Pforzheimer Curator of Early Books and Manuscripts at the Harry Ransom Center. In this role, he supports the Center’s wide-ranging and often deep collections of materials originally created before the eighteenth century. His own research focuses on the literature and culture of early modern England, bibliography, and the history of the book.

¹ For the most recent reevaluation of Darrell and his career, see Brendan C. Walsh, John Darrell and the Shaping of Early Modern Protestant Demonology (New York and London: Routledge, 2021). I draw on this study, in particular, for information about and interpretations of Darrell’s cases and biography.

² Walsh, 154.

³ Marion Gibson uses the phrase “enforcers of conformity” while discussing Samuel Harsnett in Possession, Puritanism and Print: Darrell, Harsnett, Shakespeare and the Elizabethan Exorcism Controversy (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2006), 63.

⁴A Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, & Ireland and of English Books Printed Abroad, 1475-1640 (STC), 2nd edition, ed. A.W. Pollard, G. R. Redgrave, W. A. Jackson, F. S. Ferguson, and Katharine F. Pantzer, 3 vols. (London: Bibliographical Society, 1976-91).

⁵ Records of the Court of the Stationers’ Company, 1576–1602, ed. W. W. Greg and E. Boswell (London: Bibliographical Society, 1930), 79.

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