Journeymen-Printers, Heresy, and the Inquisition in Sixteenth-Century Spain - Tapa dura

This is an important contribution to the history of intolerance and of printing-shop practice in Spain. (Barry Taylor The Library)

This is a very carefully researched piece of scholarship that opens up important new horizons on artisanship and marginality in early modern Spain; it deserves wide dissemination. (Helen Rawlings, EHR 494)

...a major and exciting contribution tot he burgeoning field of the history of the book ... provides a highly differentiated and rare perspective from below during a period of radical religious, economic, and political change in European history. (Reviews in History)

...a complex and richly layered vignette of sixteenth-century life...a wonderful book: meticulous, insightful and penetrating; the best sort of archival scholarship. (Andrew Pettegree, TLS)

Clive Griffin has woven a rich and fascinating study...a book of many profound insights and many surprises... (Andrew Pettegree, TLS)

Although the history of the book is a booming area of research, the journeymen who printed books in the sixteenth century have remained shadowy figures because they were not thought to have left any significant traces in the archives. Clive Griffin, however, uses Inquisitional documents from Spain and Portugal to reveal a clandestine network of Protestant-minded immigrant journeymen who were arrested by the Holy Office in Spain and Portugal in the 1560s and 1570s at a time of international crisis. A startlingly clear portrait of these humble men (and occasionally women) emerges allowing the reconstruction of what Namier deemed one of history's greatest challenges: 'the biographies of ordinary men'. We learn of their geographical and social origins, educational and professional training, travels, careers, standard of living, violent behaviour, and even their attitudes, beliefs, and ambitions.

In the course of this study, many other subjects are addressed, among them: popular culture and religion; the history of skilled labour, the history of the book, and of reading and writing; the Inquisition; foreign and itinerant workers and the xenophobia they encountered; and the 'double lives' of lower-class Protestants living within a uniquely vigilant Catholic society.