Throughout the Tudor Period, English booksellers relied on continental suppliers to keep up with the growing demand for books. Continental immigrants were active in the English printing industry and books produced overseas were imported on a large scale. One of Europe’s leading printing centres was Antwerp, distributing books across Europe, and especially to and from England.
In an era of religious controversies, books dealing with matters of faith were predominant among the shipments to London. In the 1520s and early 1530s, while King Henry VIII was still a ‘defensor fidei’ for the Church of Rome, Antwerp printers provided the English market with dissident Protestant works. A prominent example was Merten de Keyser, who printed several of the polemical works and Bible translations written by the English biblical scholar William Tyndale.
Antwerp has particularly strong links to the English Bible, as both William Tyndale and Myles Coverdale worked on their translations in the city, and saw several of their works through the press there. The year 2025 is the fifth centenary of the first publication of Tyndale’s New Testament translations.
By the second half of the 16th century, the English Reformation had set in motion an exodus of Catholic recusants to the Low Countries, beginning as early as Edward VI’s accession in 1547. A second wave of emigration took place after Elizabeth I came to the throne, creating a considerable migrant community in the Catholic Southern Netherlands, clandestinely producing books for their coreligionists back home. Furthermore, numerous French Huguenots and Low Countries Protestants went to England fleeing religious upheaval. Some of these were booksellers who maintained their professional contacts on the Continent.
Beyond confessional conflicts and crises, there was also a continuous trade in literary and scholarly publications across denominational divides. Christophe Plantin had a successful printing and bookselling business in Antwerp as early as 1555, providing the highest quality to the widest market from very early on. He continued to sell and distribute books across the Channel throughout his career, with many leading figures in Elizabethan England proud to own them.
The two themes mentioned – the importance of vernacular Bible translations during the rise of Protestantism, and the relations between the Antwerp book trade and the English market, are each the focus of one conference day. This conference is therefore expected to lead to new insights into the transnational spread of knowledge, ideas and information, more specifically when humanism and the Reformation discovered the boundless possibilities of the printing press.