The nature of religious books and the religious use of print

‘What multitude of Bookes full of sinne and abominations have now filled the world!’ complained the puritan divine Edward Dering in 1572, ‘witlesse devises’, ‘baudie songes’, ‘unchast Fables’. Such conventional complaints about the prevalence of ‘profane’ and ‘ungodly’ literature would be routine for decades to come. This may help us to define ‘religious publishing’ by means of exclusion. But the problem of inclusion remains. For the modern world, the term ‘religious’ marks off a more or less discrete area of life, but this is anachronistic for the period under review, in which the commodity which we might want to distinguish as ‘religion’ permeated much, if not all, of what is now secularized. This is a health warning to be attached to otherwise useful statistical analyses of religious publishing in the period covered by the Short-Title Catalogue, or in the Stationers’ Register. ‘Religious books’, in conventional terms, are found to have been the single most important component of the publishing trade, comprising around half the total output of the industry, and outweighing political, scientific, practical and fictional works: indeed, fiction had yet to establish its respectable credentials, often disguising itself as edification, or morality.

Or so attention to titles, and to professed authorial intents, might suggest. But do we exclude from our tally of ‘religious’ titles almances, medical treatises, cookery books, ‘news’, all saturated with pious vocabulary? Nor can we solve our problem of demarcation by examining the supposed motives of publishers, as if we can identify ‘religious’ propagandists, altruistic precursors of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge.