Elizabeth Calvert 

Elizabeth Calvert (d. 1675?) was a Quaker bookseller, along with her two sons, Nathaniel (b. 1643), and Giles (b. 1653). Her bookshop was a major source of radical and Quaker publications during the Civil War and the Commonwealth. Her politics were republican, nonconformist. She and other bookseller/printer wives, when many of their husbands were in and out of prison in the 1660s through ’80s, kept their businesses going and often even more radical than their husbands. Warrants for Elizabeth Calvert’s arrest were issued in 1662-3. Her shop was destroyed in the Great Fire of 1666, but she continued on in the trade, though watched carefully by Roger L’Estrange, the surveyor of the press. Her name, however, appears on only 27 imprints, but she published many more without an imprint, including Benjamin Keach’s A Trumpet Blown in Sion (1666) and A True and Faithfull Account (1667), and Andrew Marvell’s Directions to a Painter (1668), which led to her indictment. She was tried in 1671 and fined, but she absconded and remained in hiding for a time. She was sought for arrest again in 1674. After 1656 she appears to have separated from the Quaker.