Censorship in Boston
CENSORSHIP IN BOSTON AMONG the many curiosities of our early history, is the strange beginning of censorship in the sovereign commonwealth of Massachusetts where, notoriously in Boston,...
...CENSORSHIP IN BOSTON AMONG the many curiosities of our early history, is the strange beginning of censorship in the sovereign commonwealth of Massachusetts where, notoriously in Boston, civil censorship still flourishes...
...Though they proved to be splendid soldiers during the Revolution, it has rather been the custom to poke fun at these good Germans and above all to suggest that they were not very much interested in culture or in books...
...It was one chapter of this printed as A Day in the Life of Armelle Nicolas, Known as the Good Armelle, which issued from the press of Christopher Sowr in Germantown as a companion volume to the Imitation of Christ which, thanks to the liberality of Quakers and the absence of Puritan intolerance, the German printer was able to bring out...
...And curiously enough, over two centuries later, Harvard University at Cambridge purchased at considerable expense the best collection of books about and editions of Kempis in the world, and was very proud to be looked upon as the possessor of the completest library on the Augustinian monk that had ever been brought together...
...The second edition in English was printed in Philadelphia in 1783...
...Professor Dowden of Trinity College, Dublin, the well-known Shakespearean scholar and literary critic, in writing the introduction to a recent English edition (1901) of the life of Armelle said: "The life of a domestic servant who did her household work faithfully, yet who became the subject of inner experiences so wonderful, is distinguished by its very modesty of circumstance...
...The Record of the Colony of Massachusetts Bay under date of May 19, 1669, has the following minute (the record is left in the old-fashioned wording because it seems to make more authentic this surprising excerpt from old colonial legislation): "The Court, being informed that there is now in the presse, reprinting, a booke, tit Imitacons of Christ, or to yt purpose, written by Thomas a. Kempis, a popish minister, wherein is conteyned some things that are less safe to be infused among the people of this place, doe comend it to the licensers of the press, the more full revisall thereof, & that in the meane tjme there be no further progresse in that worke...
...Not only are the two little books of themselves a significant chapter in American bibliography, but they are besides material representatives for our generation of high-minded liberality and narrow intolerance...
...Another little book of similar character, which would probably also have failed to pass the censorship in Boston, was printed in Philadelphia not long after the first edition of Kempis appeared...
...This fortunately made very little difference in the circulation of the book, for it is said that altogether some seven thousand editions of it have been printed...
...The Germans made a best seller of the great little book...
...Strangely enough she could neither read nor write, but she had a series of such interesting interior experiences that her confessor, a Jesuit, suggested to the Ursulines that they should write down what the portress would dictate...
...This was a chapter from the life of Armelle Nicolas, known as "the good Armelle," who was the doorkeeper of an Ursuline convent at Vannes in France...
...The printing of it was almost surely brought about by Anthony Benezet, the Quaker schoolmaster in Germantown at that time, who seems to have written the introduction and probably also the conclusion for it...
...The struggle began over a book which today is almost as widely popular among Protestants as among Catholics...
...The two incidents so thoroughly contrasted make the best possible commentary which could be discovered on the danger of censorship...
...It too was printed by Christopher Sowr, jr., Germantown, 1754, and is now reprinted and about to issue from the Paulist Press in New York...
...Thomas a Kempis's Imitation of Christ fell under the ban of censorship in Massachusetts about two hundred and fifty years ago...
...This, however, contained only the first three books, English readers not being quite ready as yet for Kempis's fourth book, with regard to the Eucharist...
...It is to them, however, that we owe the printing of the first edition of The Imitation of Christ, at Germantown in 1749 by Christopher Sowr...
...As a matter of fact, the portress's book, printed originally as an octavo of some eight hundred pages, has appeared in a new edition nearly every generation since and has been translated into three languages...
...It would seem as though a book made under such circumstances could scarcely mean very much for any but a very limited number of people who were interested in certain phases of mysticism...
...Three subsequent editions of this work appeared, so that it is the greatest rival of the Imitation of Christ among our early printed religious books...
...She was not a member of the religious community of the Ursulines...
...Fortunately the Pennsylvania Dutch, as it has become the custom to call familiarly the Germans who came to Pennsylvania from along the upper Rhine, were more liberal minded than the Puritans of Massachusetts...
...During the following year three more editions appeared in Germantown in German, and a fourth German edition in 1773...
Vol. 12 • October 1930 • No. 26
