Religione, politica e commercio di libri nella Rivoluzione inglese. Gli autori di Giles Calvert, 1645-1653 (review)

Giles Calvert (1612–63) is a well-known figure both to students of the seventeenth-century book trade and to historians of seventeenth-century English religion. According to Caricchio, 813 titles can be traced back to Calvert's shop, representing almost nine per cent of the published output of London booksellers in the period from 1641 to 1662. These figures make Calvert (in one sense, at least) the most prolific publisher of his day, as Caricchio argues. The ubiquity of Calvert's name owes much, however, to the unusual circumstances of publishing in the middle years of the seventeenth century. In particular, Calvert's business (and that of his wife, Elizabeth, who continued to publish during her husband's imprisonment in 1661 and after his death in 1663) was closely tied up with the attempt to use the press as an organ of political and religious debate during these years. The Calverts' shop at the Black Spread Eagle provided the route into such exchanges for a succession of so-called radical authors. This association began with the publication of the writings of army chaplains like John Saltmarsh in the mid-1640s. It developed through collaboration with such writers as Abiezer Coppe, Gerrard Winstanley, and William Dell, which drew Calvert increasingly into the ambit of spiritualist religion. Its apogee came in the role that Calvert and his family played in the early Quaker movement, both as publishers and distributors of books and as the centre for a network of friendship and finance for Quakers who were visiting London. The political as well as religious commitment of the Calverts, moreover, was demonstrated after the Restoration, when they continued to publish anti-monarchical and seditious texts, several of which had a prophetic flavour.

Although Calvert is almost invisible in the fourth volume of The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain (2002), where he is conflated into the index entry for his wife, his involvement with the Quaker movement has been extensively studied, most recently by Kate Peters in her Print Culture and the Early Quakers (Cambridge, 2005). In this respect, Caricchio has relatively little to add to the conclusions that Peters had already reached in her thesis (1996). He provides an effective summary of Calvert's life and of his activities before 1645 and after 1653, but his main concern is the analysis of Calvert's publications over a period of eight years at the height of the so-called English Revolution.

The heart of Caricchio's work is the study of the impact of the authors whose books Calvert published or distributed on the political and religious debates of this period. One chapter concerns the attack on clerical authority mounted by John Saltmarsh. Caricchio interestingly links this to a parallel debate about the authority of scripture, where other authors whom Calvert published, especially those with a spiritualist bent, were prominent. Caricchio ties Calvert's apparent sponsorship of spiritualist authors and translators, including those with an interest in the works of Jacob Boehme, to his involvement with Winstanley's utopian project to establish and publicize an ideal, agrarian community. More convincingly, Caricchio charts the way in which Calvert's association with authors such as Coppe drew him into the world of radical religious practice in London, from which further publications, for example those of Thomas Totney (alias Thearau John Tany), emerged. Caricchio argues that Calvert played a role in the failed defence of religious liberty, which he sees as being allied to the programme of commercial expansion that was proposed by Sir Henry Vane and other radicals with links to the colonies. For Caricchio, the high point of this argument was reached in 1652, although he gives a persuasive account of the coda, focused around educational freedom, that was played out through the publications of William Dell and...