Engraving of a martyred bookseller
For the first of March, I'm resurrecting, in altered form, a piece I wrote for Archaeolibris three years ago today, titled Burning books... and the bookseller: Papal persecution of the Waldenses . It centers on the history behind an image on an engraved plate separated at some point in time from the book in which it was originally published in 1770. As this engraving has likely been flying solo for awhile and stands on its own just fine, I'll qualify it as a piece of ephemera suitable for the scope of this blog. I have here an antique engraving from 1770 that depicts a bookseller being burnt at the stake in Avignon. His crime was selling Protestant Bibles, reportedly printed in the native French tongue of his customers. The engraved plate came from Henry Southwell's, The New Book of Martyrs or Compleat Christian Martyrology , published in London by J. Cooke in 1770. I wanted to know who the bookseller was and why selling certain books cost him his life. I had a similar cur...