Centres and Peripheries: Early-Modern British Writers in a European Context

The English Short Title Catalogue is one of the most important aids to early-modern scholarship. Early English Books Online, based on the work which the ESTC enshrines, aims to make as many as possible of the books it lists easily available worldwide. This is an endlessly useful achievement. However, the fact that the focus of English bibliography and subsequently, digitization, has been on books published in the British Isles and in the vernacular languages of the island ever since A. W. Pollard and G. W. Redgrave published the first edition of their Short Title Catalogue in 1948, is not without consequences. It privileges a master-narrative of the rise and development of the English language; and tends to conceal, or elide, less insular currents in early-modern British cultural history.¹

A possible unintended consequence of scholarly tools is the reinforcement of the prejudices which determined how they were initially conceptualized. Further, the presence or absence of catalogues and digitized books not only affects what scholars do and how they do it, but more subtly, what they think of doing in the first place. The ESTC facilitates many lines of enquiry, but conceals the possibility of others: the effective invisibility of writing by British authors published outside England in languages other than English makes it very hard even to think about studying topics such as neo-Latin, translation out of English into other European languages, and the contributions of British writers to European literary, scientific, and political controversies.

One basic assumption about early-modern Britain is seldom addressed: it is that London held an unrivalled position as the cultural capital. Whereas medieval writers such as the Gawain Poet had written in their own dialects, whatever they might be, by the sixteenth century, George Puttenham was advising that English should be the English of London: 'ye shall therefore take the vsuall speech of the Court, and that of London and the shires lying about London within lx. Myles, and not much aboue'.² To a German, this was not as axiomatic as it seems to us: in 1668, Georg Neumark observed as a curious fact that English books 'are all written in the dialect of Middlesex, such as is spoken in the neighbourhood of the capital, London, and not in the language of Argyle, Cumberland, Pembroke and similar ruder dialects': he is clearly aware that Scots, northern English, and Welsh speech differed considerably from standard English.³ The Court itself, the Inns of Court, and the developing public theatre, among other institutions, made London a centre of linguistic and cultural innovation, but above all, it was the trajectory of development taken by English printing which confirmed the primacy of London English over all other dialects.⁴ Apart from the academic presses which were eventually established at Oxford and Cambridge, before 1700, early-modern English printing was almost entirely centralized in London, and policed by the Stationers' Company.⁵ It is not always recognised that this degree of centralization is anomalous from the perspective of Europe as a whole; in Italy, France, Germany and the Low Countries, printers distributed themselves wherever they thought a press might be commercially viable, and they sometimes printed in dialect.⁶

The unique importance of London as the centre of printing in the British Isles was not challenged by the other countries of Great Britain: in Scotland, print-culture was rudimentary, effectively policed by religious and secular authority, and catered to purely local markets.⁷ Printing was vestigial in Ireland, beginning only when Humphrey Powell was appointed King's Printer in 1550,⁸ and officially non-existent in Wales, where, apart from a little clandestine Catholic printing, there was no press until 1718.⁹ On this basis, the primacy of London as the centre of British cultural and intellectual life is hard to challenge.

However, some of the conclusions which have been drawn from this assumption of a single centre bear investigation. Given this centralization of publishing in London, it is readily believed that the circulation of knowledge inevitably begins from...