Protestant printing and humanism in Beware the Cat

Here I turn to William Baldwin’s prose narrative from the early 1550s, Beware the Cat, to explore its depiction of the printing house of John Day. Baldwin establishes two important contexts for his work: the Protestant printing scene of mid-sixteenth-century London and the supportive networks of humanist publication practices. Simultaneously, he radically destabilises print’s authority by undermining both of those contexts. He symbolically marks the printing house as a place of violence and diabolism, satirises the figure of the humanist scholar, and presents Beware the Cat as if it were not yet printed but still a text in manuscript.