ABSTRACT
In 1563 the publisher John Charlewood issued a small devotional manual called The Treasure of Gladnesse. The book was in its own way an Elizabethan bestseller. It appeared in at least 12 editions before 1603; a Norwich bookseller bought 12 copies between July and December 1568, and 11 more in the following year. 1 Other signs of its broad circulation also survive: a sailor named Massey owned it in 1575, Elizabeth Isham mentions in her Book of Remembrance that it was sent to her mother by her ‘sister Washington’, and a Gloucestershire shoemaker and glover listed it in an inventory of his books in 1627. 2 The Treasure of Gladnesse also had a wider cultural presence. It features in a list of ‘Protestants helpes for Deuotion, and mat-ters belonging to the stirring up of the same’ in John Brinsley’s The Fourth Part of the True Watch (1624), 3 and makes an appearance on stage in the first part of Michael Drayton, Richard Hathway, Anthony Munday, and Robert Wilson’s Sir John Oldcastle, performed by the Admiral’s Men in 1599, as one of a set of English – and therefore heretical – books owned by the Lollard martyr Oldcastle: ‘Heres the Bible, the testament the Psalmes in meter, / The sickemans salue, the treasure of gladnesse, / And al in English, not so much but the Almanack’s English’. 4
