Reasons of Refusal, a communication from underground, published under a false name and false imprint, is this term’s Featured Book.

Each term a member of the Library staff selects a text from Gonville & Caius College Library’s historic collections. Chosen by Assistant Librarian (Bibliographic Services) Neil Kirkham, Robert Persons’ book from 1580 was a product of the Jesuit mission to Elizabethan England.

Neil says: “I’m interested in underground political organisation, and at first the Elizabethan Catholic mission interested me as a parallel. But when I started my small research, I realized it wasn’t even that: religion and politics were entangled here, as one writer puts it.

“Like a lot of notable books, Reasons of Refusal isn’t too photogenic. The secret printers took surprising care with its typography, but the only illustration is the conspicuous Jesuit emblem on its title page – I suppose it didn’t give much away if the false imprint was accepted. By luck though I saw a group portrait of what were meant to be infamous Jesuits in a hostile book published a hundred years later, which one of my College Library workmates was cataloguing. Persons had made the list.”

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