Richard Verstegen, anglicised as Richard Verstegan and also known as Richard Rowlands (c. 1550 – 1640), was an Anglo-Dutch antiquary, publisher, humorist and translator.

Verstegan was born in East London, the son of a cooper. His grandfather, Theodore Roland Verstegen, was a refugee from Guelders in the Spanish Netherlands who arrived in England around the year 1500. A convert to the Catholic Church, Rowlands produced an English translation of the Little Office of the Blessed Virgin Mary; the translation and primer prayer book that contained it remained among the most popular English Catholic devotionals for two centuries.

Under the patronym Rowlaunde, Richard came up to Christ Church, Oxford, in 1564, where he may have studied early English history and the Anglo-Saxon language. Having become a Catholic, he left the university without a degree to avoid swearing the Oath of Supremacy. Thereafter he was indentured to a goldsmith, and in 1574 became a freeman of the Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths. In 1576 he published a guidebook to Western Europe, translated from German, entitled The Post of the World.

At the end of 1581 he secretly printed an account of the execution of Edmund Campion but was discovered and 'being apprehended, brake out of England'. In exile, he resumed his ancestral Dutch surname of Verstegen (Anglicized Verstegan) and, in 1585 or 1586, he moved to the Spanish Netherlands. With covert financial support from the Spanish Crown, Verstegan set up a residence, "in Antwerp near the bridge of the tapestry makers", as a publisher, engraver, "a valued secret agent of the Spanish party", and a smuggler of banned books as well as Roman Catholic priests and laity to and from the British Isles.

Verstegan also used his many contacts throughout the strictly illegal and underground Catholic Church in England, Wales, and in Ireland to both write and publish detailed accounts of the sufferings of English, Welsh, and Irish Catholic Martyrs. To the fury of the English Court, Verstegan's books made the whole of Catholic Europe aware of the religious persecution taking place under the rule of Queen Elizabeth I.

Verstegan's detailed and highly influential Renaissance Latin the volume Theatrum crudelitatum Hæreticorum nostri temporis ("Theatre of the Cruelties of the Heretics of our Time") was published in Antwerp in the Spanish Netherlands in 1587. Irish historian J.J. Meagher has written of the volume and of Verstegan, "He enhanced his account with an engraving which was a composite representation of the three Irish martyrs, Dermot O'Hurley, Patrick O'Healy, and Conn O'Rourke. The printed word helped considerably to propagate and preserve the reputation of martyrdom. There were at least eight editions of Verstegan's Theatrum up to 1607, and these contributed in no small way to maintaining the fama martyrii overseas."

While in Paris in 1588, Verstegan was briefly imprisoned pending extradition to England by King Henri III at the insistence of the English Ambassador, Sir Edward Stafford, who declared the book's claims of religious persecution a libel against Queen Elizabeth I, but, as the recent Latin-Middle French translation of Theatrum crudelitatum Hæreticorum nostri temporis had already heavily contributed to the ideology of the Catholic League during the French Wars of Religion, Verstegan had many influential sympathisers and protectors. At the insistence of both the Catholic League and the Papal Nuncio, the French King refused Sir Francis Walsingham's demands for Verstegan's extradition to England to stand trial for high treason and the exiled Englishman was quietly released. After his release, Verstegan lived briefly in Rome, where he was the recipient of a temporary pension from Pope Sixtus V.

In 1595, Verstegan published in Antwerp the Latin-Elizabethan English translation of An Epistle in the Person of Jesus Christ to the Faithful Soule by John Justus of Landsberg, which St. Philip Howard had made while imprisoned for Recusancy in the Tower of London. St. Philip Howard's literary translation of Marko Marulić's Renaissance Latin religious poem Carmen de doctrina Domini nostri Iesu Christi pendentis in cruce ("A Dialogue Betwixt a Christian and Christ Hanging on the Crosse"), was also published in lieu of an introduction in the Antwerp edition.