Evidence for the Licensing of Books from Arundel to Cromwell

Summary

This paper, originally delivered at the Early Book Society conference in honour of Professor Toshiyuki Takamiya in York in 2011, arose out of the 2009 Oxford conference ‘After Arundel: Religious Writing in Fifteenth-Century England’. In preparing my own contribution, I spent some time looking at Arundel’s Constitutions in relation to the restrictions on the circulation of books and looking for evidence that these restrictions were enforced in the 120 years of their existence. There is ample evidence for their being enforced in relation to reading, and owning translations of, scripture, but very little evidence that they were enforced in terms of the actual approval, or licensing, of texts. It is the evidence for the licensing of books throughout the fifteenth and into the mid-sixteenth century which will be the focus of this essay.

The Context

The Constitutions of Thomas Arundel, Archbishop of Canterbury (1397, 1399–1414), were issued in the convocation of November 1407 and repeated in that of January 1409. They came to prominence more recently in 1995, when Nicholas Watson wrote his much discussed and disputed Speculum article on ‘Censorship and Cultural Change in Late-Medieval England’. The sixth and seventh constitutions relate specifically to books: the sixth deals with the textbooks used in the Universities and the seventh with translations of scripture. The sixth (‘Quia insuper nova via’) describes how universities must deal with books of Wycliffe or since Wycliffe – they are to be examined and passed to the stationers to copy, check for consistency, and sell or pass on, with a master copy in the University chest.

In this essay I deal with the seventh constitution, the only new addition to what Jeremy Catto has seen as no more than ‘republishing the prohibition of unlicensed preachers and the measures to control unorthodox opinion in Oxford which had been enacted in [the Blackfriars Council of] 1382’.