Malignant Reading: John Squier's Newgate Prison Library, 1642–46

Abstract

Abstract A collection of about one hundred and fifty pamphlets dating from the years 1641–45, mostly signed, dated and heavily annotated, allows a detailed study of their owner, John Squier ( c .1587 – 1653), Vicar of Shoreditch. Squier had been a hardworking parish priest before the Civil War, and the political crisis of the early 1640s strengthened his outspoken loyalty to King and Church. However, he was ejected from his parish by Parliament, and from 1643 was imprisoned in Newgate. The bulk of his pamphlet collection was assembled and read there. It is of particular interest in providing a precisely dated example of the newer form of committed reader engaging in contemporary controversy, for the light it casts on Squier's methods of reading, and for his opinions themselves. All these are exemplified in his preparations for one published pamphlet, The Perswasion of Certaine Grave Divines to such as suffer for the King (1645).

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 42 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.