SOURCE: Bowers, Terence N. “The Production and Communication of Knowledge in William Baldwin's Beware the Cat: Toward a Typographic Culture.” Criticism 33, no. 1 (winter 1991): 1-29.

In the following essay, Bowers maintains that Beware the Cat is a “cultural object” that reflects the transition from Catholic oral culture to Protestant print culture, claiming further that the work is a kind of treatise on reading and its social function as well as an argument for widespread literacy.

For as the first decay and ruin of the church before began of rude ignorance, and lack of knowledge in teachers; so, to restore the church … it pleased God to open to man the art of printing … Printing, being opened, incontinently ministered unto the church the instruments and tools of learning and knowledge; which were good books and authors, which before lay hid and unknown. The science of printing being found, immediately followed the...