• The dreadful name of Henry Hills
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The dreadful name of Henry Hills

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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.
  • 31 March 2026
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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.
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Price: $140.00
Pages: 384
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Imprint: Manchester University Press
Publication Date: 31 March 2026
ISBN: 9781526129390
Format: Hardcover
BISACs: LITERARY CRITICISM / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh, Literary studies: c 1600 to c 1800, BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Editors, Journalists, Publishers, BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Literary Figures, Literature: history and criticism, Literary studies: plays and playwrights
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‘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 Chichester

Michael Durrant is a Lecturer in Book History at the Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London

Endings: An introduction
1 Beginnings: starting out and starting over in seventeenth-century print
2 Queering the books: writing the lives of The Life of H.H.
3 Reading Henry Hills’s imprints: ‘By the tree we may know the ensuing fruits’
4 In Horoscope’s library: bibliography, conspiracy, and the ‘King’s Book’
5 Pirates, parents, and print: reading Henry Hills’s will

Bibliography