Early protestant publications in Antwerp, 1526-30

Abstract

AbstractAt the beginning of her life-long commitment to Dutch post-incunables Miss Kronenberg concentrated on two hitherto unsolved pseudonyms: Adam Anonymus in Basel, the publisher of certain important heterodox works in Dutch, and Hans Luft at Marlborow, the printer of various books for the first Protestant authors in England, including Tyndale. In the work that appeared under these pseudonyms she encountered a number of woodcut initials which originated from the Officina Corveriana in the town of Zwolle in the Northern Netherlands. She thus developed an ingenious theory according to which the true printer was Johannes Hoochstraten, a young man from Antwerp whose father was one of the most eminent publishers in the city. This verdict was generally accepted and, to this day, Miss Kronenberg's analysis is cited without its accuracy ever having been called in doubt. Yet renewed investigation shows that her attributions are unacceptable. It was not Johannes Hoochstraten who printed these clandestine editions but Marten de Keyser (Lempereur) in Antwerp. He collaborated in the production of books in Dutch with the well-known printer-publisher Adriaen van Berghen and, in some publications in English, with his colleague Joannes Grapheus. The part played by De Keyser in the first years of the English reformation thus appears to have been still more important than has hitherto been admitted, while nothing remains of the eminent position which had been accorded to Hoochstraten.