Our work has already begun to show that the King's Printers' day-to-day work practices were very different from ones used to produce the relatively narrow canon of vernacular literary texts customarily studied by literary historians, a canon which has never comprised (for instance) the Bible, Latin-language texts, or state documents.

The project will take account of the full range of printed texts generated by the Jacobean state: Bibles (including the King James Bible), editions of the Book of Common Prayer, state prayers, elite folios, proclamations, government propaganda and apologia, documents on church government, the king's own collected works, and so on.

These editions helped form or reinforce the distinctive 'official' national culture that emerged in the course of the seventeenth century, and in so doing provide evidence for the emergence of elements of early-modern mentalities in the British State.