ABSTRACT
On 1 June 1599, the Master and Wardens of the Stationers’ Company suppressed and had burned certain books unacceptable to London’s ecclesiastical authorities, volumes including translations of Ovid, all of the works of Nashe and Harvey, Davies’s Epigrams, Marlowe’s Elegyes, and several historical and satirical works (Arber II.829, III.677-8). Among the titles deemed inflammatory was The xv Joyes of marriage (London: Adam Islip, n.d.), a translation of the anonymous Les Quinze Joyes de mariage. This set of fifteen racy antimarriage stories had been an early bestseller in France, with at least seven printings between 1480 and 1520.1 English versions seem to have enjoyed a similar popularity, better documented after 1603 than in early print. The irreverent title-an obvious parody of the popular religious works of “fifteen” like the “Fifteen Oes,” the “Fifteen Joys of Mary,” or the “Quinze Joyes de Nostre Dame”—could well have drawn official disapproval even without its subversive and sexual content.2
