The Dreadful Name of Henry Hills: Lives and Afterlives a Seventeenth Century Printer

This compelling book offers a fresh and insightful contribution to the interrelated fields of book history and literary studies, showing us new ways to read and write early modern lives in print. ‘This study contributes to a burgeoning literature on book history and printing 1500-1800 and fills an important gap. The figure of Hills emerges as an important nexus of contradictory and contesting cultural pressures, from Catholicism to sectarian forms of Protestantism. Importantly, it also reads this complex historical and cultural terrain with an eye to its implications for queer history.’—Duncan Salkeld, Emeritus Professor of Shakespeare and Renaissance Literature at University of ChichesterThe dreadful name of Henry Hills offers a fascinating account of the complex and controversial life—and afterlife—of Henry Hills, a master of survival in England’s volatile seventeenth-century print trade. A printer to the New Model Army, the Levellers, and the nascent Particular Baptist movement, an official printer to Oliver Cromwell, to Charles II, and, finally, a ‘Popish printer’ for James II: Hills’s career is a testament to his ability to adapt his public persona to align with the dominant political and religious forces of the time. This book explores the conflicting roles that Hills played and how he came to play them; however, far more than a straightforward cradle-to-grave biography, The dreadful name of Henry Hills shifts focus from Hills’s actions to how his life has been reshaped and manipulated across the generations.Drawing on interdisciplinary frameworks, from material text and literary critical analysis through to queer bibliographical methods, The dreadful name of Henry Hills examines the many ways in which Hills’s life has been remembered, rewritten, and materially reworked by his contemporaries and later writers, who have turned Hills’s biography into a battleground for conflicting political, religious, and bibliographical narratives. This compelling book offers a fresh and insightful contribution to the interrelated fields of book history and literary studies, showing us new ways to read and write early modern lives in print. The dreadful name of Henry Hills re-examines the life of one of the most provocative printers operating in seventeenth-century England. Rather than offering a more conventional cradle-to-grave biographical narrative, however, this compelling book explores how Henry Hills’s reputation, his notoriety, and his legacy has evolved over time. Richly illustrated and thoroughly researched, The dreadful name contributes fresh insights into Hills's life and afterlife, and it offers new perspectives on how early modern book-trade agents, and printers in particular, might be remembered and reinterpreted in contemporary book historical scholarship.