page_title: Literature of Birmingham
section_title: Medieval and early modern literature
hierarchical_section_title: Literature of Birmingham / Medieval and early modern literature
caption_attribution_description: English: Frontispiece of The Font Guarded (1652) by Thomas Hall.
context_page_description: The literary tradition of Birmingham originally grew out of the culture of religious puritanism that developed in the town in the 16th and 17th centuries. Birmingham's location away from established centres of power, its dynamic merchant-based economy and its weak aristocracy gave it a reputation as a place where loyalty to the established power structures of church and feudal state were weak, and saw it emerge as a haven for free-thinkers and radicals, encouraging the birth of a vibrant culture of writing, printing and publishing.
  The 18th century saw the town's radicalism widen to encompass other literary areas, and while Birmingham's tradition of vigorous literary debate on theological issues was to survive into the Victorian era, the writers of the Midlands Enlightenment brought new thinking to areas as diverse as poetry, philosophy, history, fiction and children's literature. By the Victorian era Birmingham was one of the largest towns in England and at the forefront of the emergence of modern industrial society, a fact reflected in its role as both a subject and a source for the newly dominant literary form of the novel.
context_section_description: Little evidence remains of the culture of medieval Birmingham, but with a priory and two chantries in the town itself, another priory in Aston, grammar schools in Deritend, Yardley and King's Norton, and the religious institutions of the Guild of the Holy Cross and the Guild of St. John, Deritend, the area would have supported a substantial community of learned religious men from the 13th century onwards.
  The first Birmingham literary figure of lasting significance was John Rogers, who was born in Deritend in 1500 and educated at the Grammar School of the Guild of St. John, and who compiled, edited and partially translated the 1537 Matthew Bible, the first complete authorised version of the Bible to be printed in the English language. This was the most influential of the early English printed Bibles, providing the basis for the later Great Bible and Authorized King James Version. Rogers' translation of Philipp Melanchthon's Weighing of the Interim probably took place between Rogers' return to Deritend from Wittenberg in 1547 and his move to London in 1550, and is the earliest book written by a Birmingham author known to have been printed in England. Rogers' profile as a prominent figure in the Protestant church led to his arrest after the restoration of Roman Catholicism by Mary I, and on 14 February 1555 he became the first Protestant to be burned at the stake in the Marian Persecutions, leaving behind a written account of his three interrogations that was to establish him as an icon of martyrdom and the refusal to recant one's individual conscience. The poem he left to his children at his death, exhorting them to a Godly life and including his famous instruction for them to "Abhor that arrant Whore of Rome", was included in  The New England Primer of 1690, becoming a major influence on the Puritan educational outlook of 18th century Colonial America.
  It is in the mid 17th century that the first evidence of a distinctive and sustained literary culture emerges within Birmingham, based around a group of writers working at the heart of the town's growth as a centre of religious puritanism and political radicalism. John Barton, the headmaster of King Edward's School, was the author of The Art of Rhetorick in 1634 and The Latine Grammar composed in the English Tongue in 1652, but is best known for Prince Rupert's burning love for England, discovered in Birmingham's flames – a widely circulated, influential and vitriolic anti-Royalist tract that documented the sacking of the town by Prince Rupert of the Rhine at the Battle of Birmingham of 1643. Anthony Burgess wrote numerous sermons and theological works while the rector of Sutton Coldfield between 1635 and 1662, entering into a prolonged if amicable theological dispute in print with Richard Baxter that culminated in a face-to-face debate in Birmingham in September 1650. Francis Roberts was similarly prolific during his tenure as vicar of Birmingham's St Martin in the Bull Ring, with many of his works of popular or scholarly theology becoming nationally-known and running through numerous editions. Thomas Hall was the master of the King's Norton Grammar School from 1629, and the minister of the adjacent St Nicolas' Church from 1650, but from the 1630s onwards was drawn into the radical circles of nearby Birmingham. He was the author of a long series of polemical works, combining both populist and erudite writing on religious and social matters. His 1652 volume The Font Guarded – a defence of the practice of infant baptism – was the first book known to have been published as well as written in Birmingham, and provides the first definite evidence of booksellers operating within the town. Between 1635 and 1642 Roberts, Hall and Barton were involved in establishing the first Birmingham Library, one of the earliest public libraries in England.
  This culture of radical writing grew with the influx of Nonconformists and ejected ministers seeking asylum in Birmingham following the Act of Uniformity of 1662 and the Five Mile Act of 1665, which forbade dissenting ministers from living w
caption: Thomas Hall's The Font Guarded of 1652 – the first known Birmingham-published book
exif: {}