1558 - Literature

Literature

England's new queen Elizabeth confirms a charter of incorporation drawn up last year for the Stationers' Company, a guild for bookbinders, booksellers, illuminators, printers, scriveners, and other men engaged in the book trade. Its members have volunteered to limit control of print exclusively to about 97 London freemen and to exclude provincial competitors. The former queen, Mary Tudor, and her husband, Philip, encouraged the guild as a way to suppress "seditious and heretical" books. The guild members leap at the chance to enjoy a lucrative monopoly, and Elizabeth will use it, ironically, to suppress Catholic books. The Stationers receive the right to search the premises of printers and booksellers and seize works that are considered seditious or were printed illegally.

Nonfiction: First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women by Scottish clergyman John Knox, now 53, says, "The nobility both of England and Scotland are inferior to brute beasts, for they do that to women which no male among the common sort of beasts can be proved to do with their females; that is, they reverence them, and quake at their presence; they obey their commandments, and that against God . . . God hath revealed to some in this our age that it is more than a monster in nature that a woman should reign and bear empire above man." Knox fled to the Continent at Mary Tudor's accession in 1553 and has been at Geneva since 1556, meeting occasionally with John Calvin.