This chapter considers some of the earliest writers in the Black literary tradition in order to explore the limitations of print publication. Books by James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, Phillis Wheatley, and John Marrant were funded by proslavery British evangelicals associated with Selina Hastings, the Countess of Huntingdon. As she was publishing Black authors, Huntingdon also invested huge sums in the African slave trade and enslaved dozens of people on her plantation in Georgia. I argue that Huntingdon’s patronage helps explain troubling opinions about slavery voiced by the writers she promoted, most notoriously those in Wheatley’s “On Being Brought from Africa to America.” The chapter compares books like Wheatley’s with the writings of an unknown Black writer also associated with Huntingdon: the preacher David Margrett. Huntingdon funded Margrett on a missionary trip to Georgia but fired him after he gave a radical antislavery sermon declaring that “God will deliver his own people from slavery.” Margrett’s sermon survives only in private letters written by white people who sought to silence him. Comparing Margrett’s unpublished sermon with the books Huntingdon promoted illuminates the pressures Black authors strategically faced when they argued for their humanity in a medium controlled by white patrons.

Chapter 1 examines the process of suppression in the 1530s, using memory as a tool for rethinking our approach to this episode. With sensitivity to the language employed by the Henrician government, it characterises the dissolution as a long and uncertain process that can be separated into two main phases: the ‘reformation of the monasteries’ and the ‘surrender of the monasteries’. It pays particular attention to the emergence of narratives of monastic corruption and the expediency of suppression because, it argues, these are the themes that modern scholarship has inherited from its largely Henrician source base. It is the success and longevity of this triumphalist narrative that the remainder of the book sets out to test, complicate, and unravel. This chapter also notes the emergence of early critiques of the dissolution – Catholic, conservative, and evangelical – which are traced alongside the narratives propagated and perpetuated by Tudor governments with a view to highlighting the complexity and diversity of the early modern memory of the dissolution. Crucially, the chapter highlights the prevalence and persistence of the idea that the monasteries were irredeemably corrupt across different confessional perspectives, as well as across time and space.