Talk:Robert Crowley (printer)

Celibacy
Mel: There was no implication that a fellowship entailed a vow of celibacy in my earlier wording. There was a requirement that fellows had to be ordained within a ctain amount of time, and ordination meant taking a vow of celibacy. Dan Knauss 15:23, 25 August 2005 (UTC)

Will soon (I hope) add Elizabethan material. -dk


 * No, it was the other way round; your wording implied that a Fellowship involved mandatory sex, not celibacy:
 * "In 1542 he became a Fellow of Magdalen College, but he left the same year, possibly because of a purge of evangelicals and/or because he, like John Foxe, were due to take holy orders which entailed a vow of celibacy."
 * If he gave up the Fellowship because he was due to take Holy Orders, which involved a vow of celibacy, the implication is that a Fellowship was incompatible with a vow of celibacy... --Mel Etitis ( &Mu;&epsilon;&lambda; &Epsilon;&tau;&eta;&tau;&eta;&sigmaf; ) 22:05, 25 August 2005 (UTC)

What you say is not implied even weakly. It's an absurd speculation I suppose someone could draw, but who would? The original sentence was grammatically bad, but it did not imply that a fellowship involved "mandatory sex" or was incompatible with celibacy. It implied that non-celibacy was technically compatible with a fellowship where the possibility of marriage was still open if one quit the university. This was strongly indicated against in that culture because a fellow was on track to being ordained. Analogy: Catholic seminarians can permissably get married without scandal, but that is the end of their prospective priesthood, and it is a bit of an upset and disappointment for the church and seminaries. An ordained priest who quits to get married is shaking things up a lot more. But we're talking about a time in the past when marriage for clergy was mostly considered a terrific scandal. 70.94.8.139


 * Oh good grief. It was an edit summary, and a light-hearted one, pointing out that the sentence was badly formed, and explaining why I changed it.  It was also a month ago; could the issue be dropped now? --Mel Etitis  ( Μελ Ετητης ) 09:05, 23 September 2005 (UTC)

Yes, but only because you've come up with new fish to fry. Dan Knauss

PoV strains
The article tends in places to read like an academic paper, presenting vari[o]us views and then correcting them. For example:


 * On the other hand, Peter M. W. Blayney contends that the revised STC erroneously indicates that Grafton printed Crowley's works. Blayney believes that the revisers realised that the ornamental "A" in Crowley's The baterie of the Popes Botereulx (1550): A6r (STC 21613) "had once belonged to Grafton", but they did not know that "the person from whom Crowley borrowed it was almost certainly not Grafton but John Day, who apparently acquired it from Grafton in 1548 (STC 23004) and never returned it (2087.5, 6849.5, 7633.3, etc.)". Additionally, Blayney suggests that the STC revisers were misled by another fact:


 * "In and after 1560, Grafton's son-in-law Richard Tottell used quite a lot of Grafton's old ornament stock. It has long been the received opinion that when Mary Tudor deprived Grafton of his royal office, he immediately sold off his printing house and equipment to Robert Caly &mdash; except, of course, for the various bits and pieces that Tottell allegedly used to set up shop in that same year. In fact, that is not what happened at all. [my italics] What Grafton did with his printing house was to sublet it to Caly &mdash; and when Elizabeth acceded in late 1558 he took it back and attempted to re-start his own career (STC 16291 of 1559 was really printed by Grafton, as the titlepage claims). By the end of 1559 he had realised that it wasn't going to work &mdash; and it was not until then that Grafton stopped paying the rent for his printing house and Tottell acquired his supply of ex-Grafton initials."

This needs to be corrected; could published sources be found for claims like these? --Mel Etitis ( Μελ Ετητης ) 09:19, 23 September 2005 (UTC)

I'd say it reads like an academic paper or an academic reference work that indicates to readers that there are different views and conclusions about the subject, not all of them of equal value, with reasons given for those judgments.

What exactly needs to be "corrected?"

Wikipedia is a published source. I hope to complete an article or two on these things and get them through the long waiting line for publication in some specialist journals, at which point they may be cited here if you like. But Wikipedia is getting this information first in the most accurate account of Crowley to be found anywhere, as I am probably the only person engaged in a complete review of all the relevant primary and secondary literature. (da-dum! crowd goes wild!) I have done heavy fact checking, and many "published" (i.e., printed) scholarly sources are wrong or misleading on various points, the most important of which are noted above.

Which claims do you feel need corroboration from printed sources? I mentioned Jenniffer Loach, a significant historian who is now deceased, unfortunately. I have corresponded with another scholar who is an expert on Day and Seres; she has informally agreed with me on the Fane and Somerset business, but I don't recall her making this explicit in anything she has published yet. As for the Blayney-Hailey letters, I've corresponded with them both and have a copy of the letter cited here. Blayney sets the gold-standard for authoritative unpublished information in early modern studies. This is material going into a book he will eventually publish, and it will be venerated by all serious students of all things remotely pertaining to the early English book trade.

I realize this is highly irregular, and that is why I am doing it. Print and a scholarly imprint guarantee nothing and perhaps less and less these days. Very little fact checking is done, and in the case of some major research resources like the STC, it is notoriously unreliable on details, yet it is like a spotty recension of scripture on a moldy, moth-eaten manuscript -- if it's all the Bible you have in the monastery, it's the authority. However, in such cases there is not a very strong basis for presumptively dismissing critical correcters as people in need of corroborration by non-existent or equally dubious sources.

FYI, I've sent the ODNB folks lists of errors and dubious claims for three Crowley-related entries. They plan an update of the online edition in a year or so, so it will be interesting to see what happens.

Dan Knauss 03:52, 1 October 2005 (UTC)

No original research

 * Please read No original research. I've listed this at RfC, as it seems that other input would be helpful. --Mel Etitis  ( Μελ Ετητης ) 11:09, 1 October 2005 (UTC)

That's an utterly stupid, incoherent, self-contradictory set of rules, so it isn't very hard to make a case that I am following them. Regardless, you won't find anyone else who know beans about this subject without them doing the same kind of "original research," which I entirely welcome by the way. But I doubt anyone will want to bother with this entry at all unless being a pedantic, censorious meddler strikes their fancy as much as it does yours.

There is no meaningful distinction between "original" vs. "unoriginal" research. 99% of this, like most humanities research, is "unoriginal" in that it is essentially a summary of existing secondary material. What is inevitably somewhat original is the particular arrangement and synthesis of information. All summary is interpretive and leads to some degree of "novelty"--and even more so when factual errors are corrected. That is the only "original" material from me--the correction of secondary sources with primary sources. This cannot possibly be prohibited.

For instance, on Crowley, many of the dates given in secondary scholarship for when he was doing X or was appointed to Y are in contradiction. You can look up all the existing, published authorities, and they disagree. So you go to the primary sources and sort it out. That is "original research," and it is not a violation of the "rules." If you say it is, you are wrong and/or the rule is an ass/also wrong. The only alternative is to produce incoherent, erroneous bilge, which you apparently favor.

As for letters, dissertations, unpublished scholarly material--these are common and accepted secondary, "unoriginal" sources.

It appears it would be wise for me to write, in the future, in a much less intellectually transparent way, without citing so many sources (as is the case for most wikipedia entries) so as not to invite your obstructionistic "help." -DK


 * I'm a little surprised at the infantile abuse and the emotional ranting, but perhaps it's best ignored. Nothing that you've said, however, does anything but confirm that you are, in fact, engaging in original research. This is strictly against Wikipedia policy.  The place for that is in the academic literature.  When and if you've published it there, it can be referred to and drawn upon here. --Mel Etitis  ( Μελ Ετητης ) 09:39, 4 October 2005 (UTC)


 * Mel, "infantile abuse and the emotional ranting"? Could you have been any less constructive? As you point out, DK is at least somewhat out of alignment with our policy. However, he does make some good points and it is clear that he is trying to do the right thing for the article. Rather than fixating on the small inflammatory part of his post you could have responded to the rest and sought ways to get him in alignment with NOR. WP:NOR is an important rule that protects us against wars with crackpot theorists, but it can be take too far... It also has the potential to suppress good work as DK has observed, but that is a trade-off we've deemed acceptable. --Gmaxwell 13:45, 4 October 2005 (UTC)

I'm afraid that I was losing patience &mdash; but also, I'd say that his whole post was couched in the tone he's adopted ever since I first encountered him (when he deigned to reply to me) &mdash; mildly hostile and patronising. The specific bits of abuse were certainly not just one part of this message: If you or anyone else can get him to co-operate, and to edit in line with what he's dubbed "an utterly stupid, incoherent, self-contradictory set of rules" I'll be overjoyed, and suitably admiring and grateful. --Mel Etitis ( Μελ Ετητης ) 21:58, 4 October 2005 (UTC)
 * "I doubt anyone will want to bother with this entry at all unless being a pedantic, censorious meddler strikes their fancy as much as it does yours."
 * "The only alternative is to produce incoherent, erroneous bilge, which you apparently favor."
 * "so as not to invite your obstructionistic 'help.'"

What damning stuff! -DK

Verifyability
For practical reasons (if nothing else), I recommend ignoring the "no original research" question in this context and focusing on the policy Verifiability and its related style guide Cite sources. I think mutual understanding can be arrived at on the basis of the need to be able to verify the contents of a Wikipedia article. That a contributor says "trust me" is not good enough. Then again, there are MANY unsourced claims in Wikipedia, and no one should hold contributors to this article to higher standards than exist in similar articles elsewhere in wikipedia (example: unremarkable uncontested unsourced claims often are allowed to stand). WAS 4.250 23:24, 10 October 2005 (UTC)

Calendars, Dates
Is there a wikipedia protocol for old date references, as in history and literature studies? (NS/OS?) The dates given here and in similar articles may not be uniformly "new" or "old style." At the least, individual articles could indicate which calendar is in use and make all dates follow it. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 70.94.45.243 (talk) 18:53, 6 December 2006 (UTC).

Printer status
This whole section was pretty deep in the scholarly weeds when it was written and is no longer necessary, since the publication of Peter Blayney's magisterial history of the Stationer's Company in 2014. It should be sufficient to identify Crowley as a printer, briefly, who later became a stationer. Blayney's account: https://books.google.com/books?id=SLGkAgAAQBAJ&lpg=PT927&vq=crowley&pg=PT928#v=snippet&q=crowley&f=false Dan Knauss (talk) 17:02, 11 April 2016 (UTC)