`BOOKS`

IN 1631, WHEN NATIVE men brought before Governor William Bradford a fugitive from Massachusetts justice, Sir Christopher Gardiner, the governor discovered that the prisoner carried a little book. This otherwise unremarkable occurrence caught Bradford’s attention because the booklet “was a memorial what day he was reconciled to the Pope and Church of Rome, and in what university he took his scapula, and such and such degrees.” The volume indicated that—besides his other offenses—Gardiner adhered to Roman Catholicism, a faith that made him unwelcome in New England. Knowing that his religious views would win him hostility, Gardiner had previously kept this fact (and his little book) a secret.

Gardiner came into Bradford’s hands after he fled Massachusetts, escaping an order for his arrest and deportation. John Winthrop, governor of Massachusetts, had received complaints from two women in Europe who accused Gardiner of bigamy and (in one case) theft. This tale seemed entirely plausible: gossip in Massachusetts had already questioned his assertion that his young female companion was his cousin. Rumor had it she was in fact his “concubine.” Gardiner had been beaten by the Native men who captured him, so Bradford had his injuries tended to and then sent him (along with the book) to Boston. Winthrop then wrote to Bradford, asking that he refrain from mentioning the book or Gardiner’s Catholicism. The Court of Assistants ordered Gardiner sent back to England to face charges of bigamy, even though he was the protégé of Sir Ferdinando Gorges of the Council for New England.¹

Books of almost all sorts circulated in Plymouth Plantation. The one exception (besides Gardiner’s little volume) was Catholic texts. Inventories enumerating the possessions left at the time of death indicate that none of the earliest arrivals owned such books, not even for the purposes of study. Early Plymouth valued books: planters brought them when they migrated; they got people to send or bring them to add to their collections; they lent them and bequeathed them; and some settlers wrote them and sent or carried them to England to be published. Those who came from Leiden had enjoyed the benefit of life in a university town, where their pastor was a renowned theologian and where some of their number briefly ran a printing press. As one nineteenth-century New England historian observed, Plymouth in its first generation was “a place of books.”²

Books came with the migrants. Francis Higginson listed books among those essential items that settlers ought to bring.³ Numerous Plymouth men anticipated Higginson’s advice, packing books among their other possessions for the sea voyage. William Brewster brought an extensive personal library. Others who transported books included William Bradford, Samuel Fuller, and Miles Standish.⁴ Presumably so did the young Edward Winslow, who had worked in Brewster’s Leiden print shop after apprenticing to a London printer. William Wright, arriving in the plantation’s second year from Leiden, brought a small library of his own, which included two Bibles and various other books.⁵ Many families no doubt had Bibles, the most commonly owned book among Protestants traversing the Atlantic.

Someone on the first ship carried John Smith’s account of New England and the map printed with it. To the author’s disgust, they thought the book could stand in for the expertise of the man, and they declined his offer to accompany and school them on how to set up a plantation. The never-modest Smith blamed all their troubles on this failure: “having my books and maps, [they] presumed they knew as much as they desired.” As a result, he opined, “most vanished to nothing, to the great disparagement of the general business, therefore let them take heed that do follow their example.”⁶ Smith clearly hoped his books would advertise his expertise and availability as a guide, leading to additional employment.

The bookish settlers, valuing these possessions, circulated them within the migrant community. Bradford borrowed Brewster’s copy of a translation of Seneca’s Moral Epistles (authored by a Roman Stoic philosopher who died in the year 65). He had it in hand when he wrote the first part of his manuscript account “Of Plimoth Plantation,” quoting it at a key moment in that narrative. Years later, when he resumed his writing, he had to borrow the same copy from a different owner, Alexander Standish, who had acquired it out of the Brewster estate from one of the ruling elders’ less scholarly heirs.⁷ Only the fact of Bradford quoting this work, which he did not own, made it possible for scholar David A. Lupher to postulate that this sharing had taken place. Generally, the practice of lending books, an activity that occurred casually among friends, would not have been recorded, and so would have remained hidden from modern view. One case of sharing was explicitly recorded, however, because it represented an odd incident in which one of Bradford’s own book re-crossed the ocean. He lent his copy of Henry Ainsworth’s Annotations upon the Fourth Book of Moses to John Pory. On his way to England from Virginia, Pory faced a long voyage and asked to borrow the book when he stopped in Plymouth. This learned work compared different versions of the fourth book of the Old Testament, Numbers, and had been written by a theologian who had led another of the English churches in Holland.⁸ Most book borrowing remained local and so did not garner such notice.

Books also circulated as a result of deaths—such as Brewster’s in 1644—when libraries were dispersed. Brewster’s own collection passed to his two sons, Love and Jonathan. They then sold some of his books to others. Love, for instance, sold the Almanac (produced on a press in Cambridge, Massachusetts) that had been put together by Plymouth’s sometime champion, mariner William Peirce, to Alexander Standish, a book-loving son of Miles.⁹ Brewster, prior to his death, might have passed his copy of Chrysostom, printed in Basle in 1522, to his grandson Thomas Prence. Not listed in his inventory, the volume bears Prence’s inscription, which notes it had been Brewster’s. This indicates that he received it before the inventory of Brewster’s possessions at death was made. Other books dispersed in this way. Some were kept by heirs but others were passed along as gifts or through purchase to those in the community most likely to appreciate them.

William Brewster owned one of the most extensive personal libraries in the early English Americas before its dispersal. The church’s original ruling elder and briefly a partner in a Leiden printing business, Brewster died owning over 400 books. With that many volumes, Brewster’s library rivaled that which John Harvard had bequeathed six years before Brewster’s death, in 1638, to the newly founded college at Cambridge, Massachusetts. Brewster both brought books with him and acquired them later. Some of the books listed in his inventory had publication dates after he sailed on the Mayflower in 1620, and therefore they must have been purchased for him and sent (or carried) to Plymouth. This transatlantic transmission of print material allowed Brewster to remain current by reading in his own broad areas of interest.¹⁰ The books no doubt supported his work as ruling elder, which required that he teach and preach. He also lent his books to others, thus spreading the benefit of his magnificent library.

Brewster’s large book collection was the work of his long life: he died at age eighty-six. His library inventory listed 393 titles, of which most have been identified. Some, listed only as a “bundle of small books and papers,” will never be known. Most were in English, although sixty-two were in Latin. He also owned eleven books off the press he briefly ran in Leiden. Brewster acquired at least eighty-nine of the titles after he migrated to Plymouth. One can well imagine his one-time protégé Edward Winslow bringing him items that had been issued by one of the London presses on his return from a transatlantic journey. Interestingly, Brewster himself apparently did not bother to acquire any works about Plymouth, including those by Winslow himself. The volumes purchased subsequent to his migration include books written by his former pastor, John Robinson, as well as classic works of the English reformed Protestant community, such as four devotional books by the popular religious author William Sibbes. Such books held obvious interest to both Brewster and Winslow, as well as to others in the young plantation.

The majority of Brewster’s books consisted of religious works—doctrinal, practical, or scriptural exposition—but other sorts—historical, philosophical, and the like—were also enumerated. Many of them, like those by Robinson and Sibbes, were typical acquisitions for well-read English Protestants. His book ownership leaned sharply toward the Reformed faith, with books by John Calvin (who designed the government and church of Geneva), Theodore Beza (a French theologian and disciple of Calvin’s), and other reformed theologians. Brewster also acquired numerous anti-Catholic works, including one identified as “a book of Pope Joan,” which may have been Alexander Cooke’s 1610 work attempting to prove that one pope in the distant past had in fact been a cross-dressing woman.¹¹ Although his Protestant books far outnumbered his anti-Catholic texts, Brewster did gather notable examples of the genre, including Thomas Beard’s Antichrist the Pope of Rome (1625), which he acquired after migrating to New England. His copy of the Swedish Intelligencer’s reporting on the exploits of the Protestant hero Gustavus Adolphus, reprinted in London, proved to be among those that his son Love (otherwise not especially interested in his father’s literary pursuits) kept after his death. The elder Brewster acquired one of the works of Sir Walter Raleigh, his The Prerogative of Parliaments (Middleburgh, 1628). He got his hands on some books written by William Prynne, who had become a hero among the “hotter sort of protestants” in England after the court ordered his ears cut off for his printed libels against bishops. Like any well-educated English man of the seventeenth century, Brewster was also interested in ancient Roman authors, and therefore he owned works like Thomas Lodge’s translation of Seneca, from which Bradford quoted. While Brewster’s collecting held to the dominant theme of religious text, he also used his purchases to remain up to date on the varied concerns animating the English reading public.¹²

Brewster’s engagement in books (and Reformed Protestantism) had led him to run a printing press in Leiden for a few of his years there. The press operated briefly, issuing sixteen or seventeen books, before the Dutch authorities shuttered it at the request of the English government. In that time, Brewster along with his partner, Thomas Brewer, and eventually their young assistant, Winslow, printed religious books in English that could not be produced in England. Some made their way clandestinely to England, including one text that was critical of the king. Alerted, the English authorities demanded that the government in Holland close the press. These three men never used their skills in Plymouth to resume the production of books, and indeed Plymouth would not have a press until the late eighteenth century.

Forgoing the local creation of books—which was more than the small settlement had the time or the resources to manage—Plymouth men instead sent writings to be published in England. Their efforts tell us much of what we know about early Plymouth, as a number of these publications recounted events in the infant plantation. In the first years, various manuscripts penned by residents made the transatlantic crossing to be printed on London presses. These missives traveled with their authors, as was the case when Winslow returned to England with the manuscript of his 1624 publication, Good Newes from New England: Or A True Relation of Things very remarkable at the Plantation of Plimoth in New-England, or when Robert Cushman carried his 1622 sermon.¹³ Other book manuscripts made the crossing in the hands of a friend. Cushman, for instance, carried, along with his own sermon’s text, the multiauthored A Relation or Journall of the Beginning and Proceedings of the English Plantation setled at Plimoth in New England (1622). These accounts launched the New England practice of contributing to transatlantic conversations through the circulation of words. While Cambridge and later Boston hosted presses, most of the print materials penned by New England authors throughout the first century traveled, as did Plymouth’s writings, in manuscript, to a London printer.

It took more than a decade and a half, but Plymouth eventually found itself under attack in print in England. Plymouth leaders and eventually those in Massachusetts, too, made an enemy of Thomas Morton, who set up a temporary trading outpost near Plymouth. Local authorities twice removed him from the region, once in 1627 (at the hands of Plymouth but with the backing of the region’s few other English residents) and again in 1630 (through the efforts of the Massachusetts Bay government). Morton took his revenge in the 1637 “scurrilous” book New English Canaan.¹⁴ Divided unequally into three parts, the book described the area, the lives of the Native inhabitants, and Morton’s contentions with his neighbors. Written in a flippant tone, New English Canaan bestowed mocking names on various people. For instance, the short-of-stature Miles Standish was “Captain Shrimp.”

Tucked into his satirical account were various assertions intended to tarnish the reputations of New England leaders. For instance, Morton depicted himself as a godly man, leading worship in his home for his family and servants according to the Book of Common Prayer. Morton emphasized his supposed devotion to the Church of England in order to claim (erroneously) that his piety explained the feelings of annoyance that he prompted. While Morton did many other things—like welcome servants who had run from their masters and sell guns to Indians—to elicit opposition, he correctly asserted that the Book of Common Prayer—which conveyed the liturgy of the Church of England—did not circulate in New England in the 1630s.¹⁵ No contemporary evidence survived to document Morton’s use of it in his family worship, nor does evidence exist that either colony had any inkling that he promoted its use. When Bradford characterized Morton’s effort as “an infamous and scurrilous book against many godly and chief men of the country, full of lies and slanders and fraught with profane calumnies against their names and persons and the ways of God,” he acknowledged with his last point—his reference to “the ways of God”—that Morton attacked Plymouth’s version of Protestant practice. Still it was only one (relatively minor) point of contention, although Morton emphasized it to galvanize Archbishop Laud, who opposed the church order emerging there.

Books were one of many things that circulated through the early seventeenth-century Atlantic. The people who came to Plymouth brought numerous books. Some of these had been produced on the Leiden English-language printing press that Brewster and others founded, but most issued from London presses that produced books suitable to Anglo-Protestant reading tastes. Many households held only one or two books—invariably including a Bible—while a number of church members amassed larger collections. When they packed to go to America, they brought books. Brewster at least worked to keep up his collecting practices by acquiring books from both England and Holland during the twenty-four years he resided in Plymouth. Books mattered in this small outpost because they connected the residents to the larger conversations and changes involving English people in Europe. Although Plymouth went many years without a minister to care for its church—because no man with adequate educational attainments came to the area where he could receive an invitation to preach from the church—it always had books that linked it to intellectual currents, spiritual edification, and events elsewhere.

Books mattered in Plymouth. Most fundamentally, a book carried the word of God, which was the reason the Bible was the most commonly owned work. Books also educated and edified. They gave readers a chance to participate in a broad community, one mostly, but not exclusively, English and reformed Protestant. Books matter to us as well: it is through Plymouth people’s writings—especially their books—that we have come to understand Plymouth Plantation and its relationship to its larger world.