External links
- Faber, Robert. "Charlewood, John (d. 1593)". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/5159.(Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
John Charlewood (died 1593) was an English printer.
He went into business early in Mary's reign in partnership with John Tisdale, in Holborn. He was important as one of the first printers to print Italian works in England – the other being John Wolfe, who printed at roughly the same time as Charlewood.
He was a member of the Grocers' Company until about 1574, though he took out licences to print books. From 1562 to 1593 he printed continuously and issued a very large number of books. His address was the Half-Eagle and Key in the Barbican, and in one of the Marprelate tracts it is stated that as printer to the Earl of Arundel he had a press in the Charterhouse. He was known to be one of the ring-leaders of the gang of printers who printed copies of texts to which they had no rights. His widow married James Roberts, who thus succeeded to the business.
A fictitious foreign imprint of Venice helped the sales in England of a book in a foreign language. Charlewood obviously hoped that this stratagem would provide easier and increased sales for these books, which would allow the printing of a larger and more profitable edition. His hopes were apparently not realised since none of them were reprinted in Italian in Great Britain until modern times.
Charlewood printed several books by Italian authors, showing the popularity of the Italian language in England at the time.
Works by Giordano Bruno include: De la causa, principio, et uno (1584), De l'infinito universo et mondi (1584), De gli heroici furori (1585), and Cabala del cauallo Pegaseo (1585). These four works and two others were all published during or immediately following Bruno's visit to Oxford University. They were obviously the backlog of works which he had accumulated during his years of wandering and exile.
He also printed Amorous Fiammetta (1587) by Giovanni Boccaccio, of which only 4 copies are known to exist.
Giordano Bruno was an Italian philosopher, poet, cosmological theorist, and Hermetic occultist. He is known for his cosmological theories, which conceptually extended to include the then novel Copernican model. He proposed that the stars were distant suns surrounded by their own planets, and he raised the possibility that these planets might foster life of their own, a cosmological position known as cosmic pluralism. He also insisted that the universe is infinite and could have no "center".
Henri Estienne, also known as Henricus Stephanus, was a French printer and classical scholar. He was the eldest son of Robert Estienne. He was instructed in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew by his father and would eventually take over the Estienne printing firm which his father owned in 1559 when his father died. His most well-known work was the Thesaurus graecae linguae, which was printed in five volumes. The basis of Greek lexicology, no thesaurus would rival that of Estienne's for three hundred years.
This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1584.
Giovanni Florio (1552–1625), known as John Florio, was an English linguist, poet, writer, translator, lexicographer, and royal language tutor at the Court of James I. He is recognised as the most important Renaissance humanist in England. Florio contributed 1,149 words to the English language, placing third after Chaucer and Shakespeare, in the linguistic analysis conducted by Stanford professor John Willinsky.
Sir Henry Savile was an English scholar and mathematician, Warden of Merton College, Oxford, and Provost of Eton. He endowed the Savilian chairs of Astronomy and of Geometry at Oxford University, and was one of the scholars who translated the New Testament from Greek into English. He was a Member of the Parliament of England for Bossiney in Cornwall in 1589, and Dunwich in Suffolk in 1593.
Guðbrandur Þorláksson or Gudbrand Thorlakssøn was bishop of Hólar from 8 April 1571 until his death. He was the longest-serving bishop in Iceland and is known for printing the Guðbrandsbiblía, first complete Icelandic translation of the Bible.
John Day was an English Protestant printer. He specialised in printing and distributing Protestant literature and pamphlets, and produced many small-format religious books, such as ABCs, sermons, and translations of psalms. He found fame, however, as the publisher of John Foxe's Actes and Monuments, also known as the Book of Martyrs, the largest and most technologically accomplished book printed in sixteenth-century England.
Michel de Castelnau, Sieur de la Mauvissière was a French soldier and diplomat, ambassador to Queen Elizabeth. He wrote a memoir covering the period between 1559 and 1570.
Richard Field (1561–1624) was a printer and publisher in Elizabethan London, best known for his close association with the poems of William Shakespeare, with whom he grew up in Stratford-upon-Avon.
Edward Allde was an English printer in London during the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras. He was responsible for a number of significant texts in English Renaissance drama, including some of the early editions of plays by William Shakespeare.
William Barley (1565?–1614) was an English bookseller and publisher. He completed an apprenticeship as a draper in 1587, but was soon working in the London book trade. As a freeman of the Drapers' Company, he was embroiled in a dispute between it and the Stationers' Company over the rights of drapers to function as publishers and booksellers. He found himself in legal tangles throughout his life.
John Wolfe was an English bookseller and printer. His considerable ambition and his disdain for the printing patent system of Elizabethan England drew the ire of his competitors and authorities in his early career. After being jailed twice and having his printing materials seized, Wolfe transformed himself into an ardent defender of printing privileges. By 1593, he was appointed Printer to the City of London.
Thomas Vautrollier or Vautroullier was a French Huguenot refugee who became a printer in England and, briefly, in Scotland.
John Udall (1560?–1592) was an English clergyman of Puritan views, closely associated with the publication of the Martin Marprelate tracts, and prosecuted for controversial works of a similar polemical nature. He has been called "one of the most fluent and learned of puritan controversialists".
The Doctrina Christiana was an early book on the catechism of the Catholic Church, written in 1593 by Fray Juan de Plasencia, and is believed to be one of the earliest printed books in the Philippines.
Antonio Ricciardi, better known as Antonio Ricardo, was an Italian from Turin who became the first printer in South America and worked in Lima, Peru from 1584 until his death in 1605 or 1606.
Thomas East,, was an English printer who specialised in music. He has been described as a publisher, but that claim is debatable. He nevertheless made an important contribution to musical life in England. He printed the significant madrigal collection, Musica Transalpina, which appeared in 1588.
Robert Waldegrave or Walgrave, the son of Richard Waldegrave of Blockley, Worcestershire, was a 16th-century printer and publisher in England and Scotland. From 1578 to 1588 he printed numerous, mainly religious works in London, and from 1590 to 1603, more than 100 books in Scotland. In 1603, following King James I of England's accession to the English throne, he returned to England, but died later the same year.
Alexander Dicsone (1558–1603) was a Scottish writer and political agent. He is known also as the leading British disciple of Giordano Bruno. He used the pseudonym Heius Scepsius.
