Bishop Atherton and the Manufacturing of Textual Authority: A Case Study

This essay analyses printed reports of Bishop John Atherton's execution on Gallows Green in Dublin on 5th December 1640 to show how authorizing strategies associated with oral and manuscript cultures were far from displaced by the so-called 'printing revolution'; in fact print did not usher in radically new standards of textual accuracy and stability, but rather the need to manufacture credit within a new medium which would be, but was not yet, associated with standardization and wider dissemination of stably authoritative texts.