Inauguration Day and the Pilgrim Press

Today’s presidential inauguration was a momentous occasion marking a great many long-awaited firsts—the first female, first Black American, and first Asian American vice president in the history of the United States, the first Italian-American First Lady and first First Lady to keep her job (as Professor of English!) outside the White House, the first rescue dog to live at the White House, and, if confirmed, the first openly transgender federal official to be confirmed by the Senate as well as the first openly gay Cabinet secretary, to name just a few.

In light of this tremendous occasion, we have chosen to highlight today a treasure of American history that was written well outside the country’s chronological and geographical formation: a religious text printed in the Netherlands a century and a half before the United States came to be.

John Dod’s A plaine and familiar exposition of the tenne commandements was published in Leiden in 1617 by William Brewster who, only three years later, would lead an intrepid band of English religious Puritans to America on the Mayflower. Published during Brewster's Dutch exile, the work is not only relevant to the history of the Pilgrims prior to their emigration to America, but as a printed document it also aptly embodies the spirit of freedom that has become so important to American life.

[Pilgrim Press]. Dod, John (ca. 1549-1645) [and Cleaver, Robert (fl. 16th-17th century)].

A plaine and familiar exposition of the tenne commandements. With a methodicall short catechime, containing briefly all the principall grounds of Christian religion. According to the last corrected and inlarged copie by the authour, Mr. Iohn Dod. To which is now prefixed three profitable tables. [Leyden, William Brewster], 1617.

See a full description of this copy here.

The story of William Brewster and the English Separatists and their emigration to Holland constitutes an important chapter in the pre-history of the United States. Persecuted for their religious beliefs in England, the community took refuge at Leiden, where Brewster began clandestinely printing books with Thomas Brewer in a workshop in Kosteeg in 1617. The press (known later as the ‘Pilgrim Press’) is known to have printed at least eighteen titles between 1617 and 1619, most now extant in only a handful of copies. Among their first productions (the third item in the standard bibliography of Rendel Harris and Stephan K. Jones) were English and Dutch editions of Dod and Cleaver's Exposition of the tenne commandements, a keystone of Puritan piety, which was first printed in London in 1603.

While the text is competently printed, the many confusions in pagination speak to the rushed nature and sloppiness of occasional or stealth printing. Unlike other Pilgrim Press productions, which were identified by contemporaries such as the English Ambassador Sir Dudley Carleton as prohibited, the present title was not itself a clandestine text. On the contrary, it had already become one of the backbones of Puritan piety especially with the appended Catechism ‘containing briefly all the principall grounds of Christian Religion’. Other texts coming out of the press were indeed more seditious though, and one of the printer’s primary objectives was to print books that went “against the bishops”; amidst the growing Puritan demands for reform against the Church of England—a demand not looked favourably upon by James I—secrecy, even in the Netherlands, remained paramount.

Indeed, in the English version of A plaine and familiar exposition of the tenne commandements the title is dated but unsigned because of the danger assumed by the individual publishing the book. The edition presented here was first identified as a product of the Pilgrim Press by Harris & Jones, and this attribution is unanimously accepted. It is “a typical 'Brewster' book, which the 'acorn' border to the title-page, and other 'Brewster' ornaments, initials and types [...] it is found possible to place it, chronologically, with apparent exactness. The compositor is already using the small 'bear' with the break which appears throughout 1618” (Harris & Jones, no. 3). Recently Ronald Breugelmans has also argued that the publication might have been issued in partnership with the Leiden printer Govert Basson.

The press soon attracted the attention of the English authorities when it became clear that some of its polemical books were re-entering the Kingdom, and at the behest of the English government, the Pilgrim Press and its types were destroyed by Dutch authorities in 1619, just as the community was preparing to depart for America. Brewster was forced into hiding for a year, before joining the first group of around 100 passengers aboard the Mayflower in 1620. Following their arrival at Plymouth in November of that year, Brewster assumed the role of spiritual leader and served as preacher for the Plymouth colony until his death in 1644.

At least some copies of the present edition came to America with Brewster and his fellow Pilgrims, and the book was therefore among the first to arrive in the New World (see also this remarkable copy of Apollonius of Perga owned by Elizabethan Magus John Dee acquired by John Winthrop the Younger in 1631, which will be the focus of a future post). Brewster himself owned three copies of the Exposition (noted in Harris & Jones), and according to Briggs other copies are listed in the inventories of Samuel Fuller (the Pilgrims’ physician and Deacon of the Plymouth church), Godbert Godbertson, and Governor William Bradford.

An extremely rare artifact of North American history, this edition by the Pilgrim Press speaks to the power of printing in the spirit of reformation and it also provides essential background for the first book published in America, the Bay Psalm Book of 1640. Meanwhile, the story of Brewster and his fellow Puritans speaks to the shared personal values that have become among the cardinal principles of American life: freedom of expression, and freedom to dissent.

More broadly, however—and of especial note for this particular inauguration, given the tragic and traumatic events of the past few weeks (and years)—Brewster and his fellow Pilgrims provide insight into the early days of American democracy. For not only was Plymouth the first permanent European settlement in New England, it was also the first to provide an example of successful democratic government. Not all the Pilgrims were Separatists, and when bad weather pushed the group up the Atlantic, to Cape Cod instead of the planned arrival at Virginia, some of these “strangers,” according to Bradford’s famous Of Plymouth Plantation (1651), voiced “discontented and mutinous speeches,” claiming that the new, uncontracted locale meant that “none had power to command them.” Before disembarking from their ship, the Pilgrims therefore drew up a social contract, known as the Mayflower Compact, to ensure everyone abided by the same laws and to “covenant and combine our selves together into a civil body politick.” Of course, the Compact was drafted and signed only by the (white) men on the ship, and the story recounted here is that of a far, far less diverse time. Nonetheless, it is clear that in the precious Pilgrim Press edition presented here one finds the kernels of so much American history, even if its text was written well before any Puritan plans of settling in the New World.

References

STC Low Countries 1601-1621, D-66; ESTC 6973; R. Harris - S. K. Jones, The Pilgrim Press: A Bibliographical & Historical Memorial of the Books Printed at Leyden by the Pilgrim Fathers, Cambridge 1922 (reprint ed. by R. Breugelmans, Nieuwkoop 1987), no. 3; R. T. Briggs, “Books of the Pilgrims as Recorded in their Inventories and Preserved in Pilgrim Hall”, Old-Time New England 61 (1970-71), pp. 41-46; R. Breugelmans, “The Pilgrim Press: A Press That Did Not Print (Leiden 1616/17 - 1619)”, Quaerendo 39 (2009), pp. 34-44; Philobiblon, One Thousand Years of Bibliophily, no. 186.

How to cite this information

Julia Stimac and Margherita Palumbo, “Inauguration Day and the Pilgrim Press,” PRPH Books, 20 January 2021, https://www.prphbooks.com/blog/pilgrim. Accessed [date].

This post is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.