Kuskin, William. Symbolic Caxton Literary Culture

symbolic caxton
K usk i n
Literary Culture and Print Capitalism
William Kuskin
“This is an important book about the origins Symbolic Caxton is the
symbolic
of printing and print culture in England by first study to explore the
North America’s leading younger scholar of introduction of printing
William Caxton. It will contribute to debates in symbolic terms. For
a xton
about the English fifteenth century and the Kuskin, William Caxton
nature of Chaucerian reception. And it (1422–1491/92), the first
will offer a productive qualification and, at English printer, becomes
times, corrective to larger and more general a unique lens through which to view
accounts of print history.” the development of the English canon.
—Seth Lerer, Avalon Foundation Professor Kuskin contends that recognizing the
in the Humanities, Stanford University fundamental complexity inherent in
the transformation from manuscript
symbolic caxton
“This elegant, closely-argued study is one to print—the power of literature to
of the most important books to have yet formulate its audience, the intimacy of
appeared on Caxton and fifteenth-century capital and communication, the closeness
English literary culture. Kuskin’s fine-grained
attention to book history, his allegiance to the
conceptual methodology of ‘history of the
of commodities and identity—makes
possible a clear understanding of the way
cultural, bibliographical, financial, and
Literary Culture
book,’ and his command of literary history technological instruments intersect in a
all combine to reconfigure our view of early
print production, patronage, commerce, and
process of symbolic reproduction.
and
literary authority. This is a major contribution William Kuskin is associate professor of
to the history of vernacular textual production
and vernacular knowledge in the fifteenth
century—and to media history as a whole.”
English at the University of Colorado,
Boulder. He is the editor of Caxton’s Trace:
Studies in the History of English Printing
Print
—Ruth Evans, University of Stirling
“There are certainly recent books on Caxton,

(University of Notre Dame Press, 2006).
Capitalism
but none that takes the literary approach used University of Notre Dame Press
here, which is what makes this book such an Notre Dame, IN 46556
important contribution to the field. It serves www.undpress.nd.edu
as a solid introduction to the subject of Cover art: Caxton’s device. The Eneydos, L7v. Printed
printing in England in the fifteenth century. by William Caxton, Westminster, 1490 (STC 24796).
British Library IB.55135. By permission of the British
William Kuskin shows how print, through a Library.
William
‘logic of reproduction,’ constructs and shapes Cover design: Margaret Gloster
its audience.” —Maura Nolan, University of
California, Berkeley ISBN-13:978-0-268-03317-0
ISBN-10:0-268-03317-X
Kuskin
90000
9 780268 033170
Kuskin.SymbolicLobic.indd 1 11/14/07 10:30:38 AM

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Symbolic Caxton
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Symbolic
AXTON
Literary Culture
and Print Capitalism
WILLIAM KUSKIN
University of Notre Dame Press

Notre Dame, Indiana
Kuskin FM 11/15/07 9:18 AM Page iv
Copyright © 2007 by University of Notre Dame

Notre Dame, Indiana 46556
www.undpress.nd.edu
All Rights Reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
Frontispiece. Caxton’s device. The Eneydos, L7v.

Printed by William Caxton, Westminster, 1490 (STC 24796).
British Library IB.55135. By permission of the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Kuskin, William.
Symbolic Caxton : literary culture and print capitalism / William Kuskin.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn-13: 978-0-268-03317-0 (pbk. : alk. paper)
isbn-10: 0-268-03317-x (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Caxton, William, ca. 1422–1491. 2. Printing—England—History—
Origin and antecedents. 3. Book industries and trade—England—
History—To 1500. 4. Books and reading—England—History—To 1500.
5. England—Civilization—1066–1485. I. Title.
z232.c38k88 2007
686.209—dc22
2007033007
This book is printed on recycled paper.

Kuskin FM 11/15/07 9:18 AM Page v
Contents
List of Illustrations vii

Acknowledgments xi
Works Cited in Short Form xv
Introduction
A Theory of Literary Reproduction 1
PA RT I Capital and Literary Form
Chapter One
Affixing Value: The Bibliography of Material Culture 29
Book Buying: Consumption in the (Post)modern
Library
Book Selling: Production in Caxton’s Chamber
The Printer’s Mark: The Bibliography of Material
Culture
Chapter Two
Reading Caxton: Capital and the Alchemical Logic
of the Press 81
The Fourmes of Commerce
The Besynes of Patronage
Posting Bills: Multiplying the Signs of Capital
Kuskin FM 11/15/07 9:18 AM Page vi
PA RT I I Authorship and the Chaucerian Inheritance
Chapter Three
Chaucerian Inheritances: The Transformation of
Lancastrian Literary Culture into the English Canon 117
Beginning at the End: Chaucer’s Retraction and the
Cycle of Reproduction
Profitable Impressions: Literary Reproduction as Social
Reproduction
Caxton’s 1483 Prologue to Chaucer and the History of the Book
Chapter Four
Uninhabitable Chaucer: Patronage and the Commerce
in the Self 155
Anthony Woodville and the Problem with Patronage
Christine de Pizan and the Demand for Gender
Patronage as Mass Production
PA RT I I I Print and Social Organization
Chapter Five
Caxton’s Worthies Series: Fifteenth-Century Imagined
Communities 193
The Structure of Spontaneity
The Production of Literary Authority
Reading the Subject of Desire
Chapter Six
Vernacular Humanism: Fifteenth-Century Self-Fashioning
and the State-Crowned Laureates 236
Dido Overdetermined
The Laureate System
Epilogue
The Archival Imagination (or What Goodes Has to Say) 284
Notes 299
Index 368
vi c o n t e n t s
Kuskin FM 11/15/07 9:18 AM Page vii
Illustrations
Frontispiece
Caxton’s device. The Eneydos, L7 v. Printed by William Caxton, Westminster,
1490 (STC 24796). British Library IB.55135. By permission of the British
Library. ii
Figure 1.1
“Chaucer Fetches £4.6m,” The Times, Thursday, July 9, 1998, Home News, 3.
By permission of the News International Syndication Ltd. 40
Figure 1.2
The print shop. La grante danse macabre des homes et des femmes, b. Printed by
Matthias Hus, Lyons, 1499. British Library IB. 41735. By permission of the
British Library. 45
Figure 1.3
Johannes Fust and Peter Schoeffer’s device. Justinian I, Institutiones. Printed
by Peter Schoeffer, Mainz, 1476 (ISTC ij00512000). Bridwell Library Special
Collections 06418a. By permission of the Bridwell Library Special Collec-
tions, Perkins School of Theology, Southern Methodist University. 51
Figure 1.4
The Schoolmaster’s device. St. Albans Chronicle, K9. Printed by the St. Al-
bans Schoolmaster Printer, St. Albans, c. 1485 (STC 9995). By permission of
University of Chicago Library, Special Collections Research Center. 57
Figure 1.5
The “tractys in armys.” Boke of St. Albans, 2e6v. Printed by the St. Al-
bans Schoolmaster Printer, St. Albans, c. 1485 (STC 3308). British Library
IB.55712. By permission of the British Library. 63
vii
Kuskin FM 11/15/07 9:18 AM Page viii
Figure 1.6
The “Saltori a maner of a cros.” Boke of St. Albans, 2f4 v. Printed by the
St. Albans Schoolmaster Printer, St. Albans, c. 1485 (STC 3308). British Li-
brary IB.55712. By permission of the British Library. 64
Figure 1.7
Johannes de Colonia’s and Nicolas Jenson’s device. Lectura super Clementinas.
Printed by Johannes de Colonia and Nicolas Jenson, Venice, 1481. British
Library IC.20368. By permission of the British Library. 66
Figure 1.8
Wynkyn de Worde’s device. Robert Whittington, Syntaxis, G4v. Printed
by Wynkyn de Worde, London, 1520 (STC 25547). British Library
C.40.e.1.(5.). By permission of the British Library. 68
Figure 1.9
Johannes Froben’s device ( by Ambrosius Holbein). Desiderius Erasmus,
Moriae Encomium. Printed by Johannes Froben, Basle, 1519. British Library
1080.k.3. By permission of the British Library. 69
Figure 1.10
Guillaume Le Tailleur’s device. Nicholas Statham, Abridgment des libres an-
nales, z7v. Printed by Guillaume Le Tailleur (for Richard Pynson), Rouen,
1490 (STC 23238). British Library IB.43928. By permission of the British Li-
brary. 71
Figure 1.11
Richard Pynson’s device. Geoffrey Chaucer, Canterbury Tales, k5v. Printed
by Richard Pynson, St. Clement Danes, c. 1492 (STC 5084). British Library
G.11588. By permission of the British Library. 72
Figure 1.12
Robert Redman’s device. The Boke of Magna Carta with Diuers other Statues,
f. 200v. Printed by Robert Redman, London, 1534 (STC 9272). British Li-
brary C.112.a.6. By permission of the British Library. 73
Figure 2.1
London merchants’ export trade in wool and broadcloths from 1459 through
1471 as recorded in enrolled customs and subsidy accounts. 84
viii i l l u s t r at i o n s
Kuskin FM 11/15/07 9:18 AM Page ix
Figure 2.2
Total English export trade in wool and broadcloths as recorded in enrolled
customs and subsidy accounts in three-year averages from 1453 through
1479. 89
Figure 2.3
Dedicatory engraving. Raoul Le Fèvre, Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye, fron-
tispiece. Translated and printed by William Caxton, Bruges, 1473/74 (STC
15375). H. E. Huntington Library, San Marino, RB 62222. By permission of
the Huntington Library, San Marino, California. 98
Figure 2.4
Miniature by the Master of Mary of Burgundy. Jena De consolatione, Jena
MS El.F.85. By permission of Thüringer Universitäts und Landesbiblio-
thek. 101
Figure 2.5
The Monkey Cup. Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Cloisters Collection,
1952. 52.50. Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 103
Figure 2.6
Caxton’s Advertisement. Printed by William Caxton, Westminster, c. 1477
(STC 4890). Douce, frag.e.I. By permission of the Bodleian Library, Univer-
sity of Oxford. 104
Figure 3.1
The Retraction. Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, f. 372v. Printed
by William Caxton, Westminster, 1476/77 (STC 5082). British Library
IB.55009. By permission of the British Library. 128
Figure 3.2
The General Prologue. Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, C3v. Printed
by William Caxton, Westminster, 1483 (STC 5083). IB.55094. By permis-
sion of the British Library. 141
Figure 4.1
Miniature, Dictes and Sayings of the Philosophers, Lambeth Palace Li-
brary, MS 265, 1v. By permission of Lambeth Palace Library, London/
Bridgeman Art Library. 170
i l l u s t r at i o n s ix
Kuskin FM 11/15/07 9:18 AM Page x
Figure 6.1
John Skelton, “Upon the Dolorus Dethe.” British Library MS Royal
18.D.ii., 166. By permission of the British Library. 271
Figure 6.2
18.D.ii., 166v. By permission of the British Library. 273
Figure 6.3
18.D.ii., 165. By permission of the British Library. 274
Figure 6.4
The Eneydos, A1. Translated and printed by William Caxton, Westminster,
1490 (STC 24796). British Library IB.55135. By permission of the British
Library. 280
Figure E.1
John Skot’s device. Everyman, D4v. Printed by John Skot, London, 1535
(STC 10606.5). By permission of the British Library. 291
Figure E.2
Pynson’s device. The Boke of John Maunduyle, kivv. Printed by Richard Pyn-
son, London, 1496 (STC 17246). British Library G.6713. By permission of
the British Library. 292
Figure E.3
Everyman, pa.i. Printed by John Skot, London, 1535 (STC 10606.5). By per-
mission of the British Library. 294
x i l l u s t r at i o n s
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Acknowledgments
Symbolic Caxton is meant to accompany Caxton’s Trace: Studies in the His-

tory of English Printing, a collection of essays on the impact of fifteenth-
century printing including pieces by David R. Carlson, Mark Addi-
son Amos, Jennifer F. Goodman, A. E. B. Coldiron, Alexandra Gilles-
pie, William N. West, Patricia Clare Ingham, Tim William Machan, and
Seth Lerer, also published by the University of Notre Dame Press. If
Caxton’s Trace sought to articulate some of the implications of fifteenth-
century printing, Symbolic Caxton is my own attempt to think through the
dynamic nature of fifteenth-century culture at the last quarter of the
century, a period I believe is underexplored in comparison with other lit-
erary periods. The experience of working with the contributors to Cax-
ton’s Trace and studying their ideas makes me indebted to them in this, my
solo effort. It is to them that I give my first thanks.
I would also like to thank the Oxford University Press for allowing
me to reprint sections of chapter 2, which first appeared as “Reading Cax-
ton: Transformations in Capital, Print and Persona in the Late Fifteenth
Century,” New Medieval Literatures 3 (1999): 149–83, and the Johns Hop-
kins University Press for sections of chapter 5, which was originally
printed as “Caxton’s Worthies Series: The Production of Literary Cul-
ture,” ELH 66 (1999): 511–51.
This book could not have been written without the work of a num-
ber of scholars before me and without the generous support of a number
of institutions and individuals. Foremost, I should very much like to
thank the Bodleian, Bridwell, British, Huntington, and Stanford Li-
braries, as well as the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Special Col-
lections Research Center at the University of Chicago Library. I thank
the Stanford Humanities Center for a generous year-long research grant,
and particularly Susan Dunn, who helped me make that year a success.
xi
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The University of Colorado provided a last-minute grant to cover the

cost of images, and I also thank John Goldfinch of the British Library for
helping me assemble the various images that that library contributed to
the project, as well as Lotte Hellinga, who is an inspiration.
A number of scholars commented on the text, contributing both
ideas and support. Bruce Holsinger has been an unflagging ally, expecting
the best from me at all points and freely giving of his very limited time
and unlimited knowledge. I thank him for his exceptional generosity and
wonderful spirit most of all. Jennifer Summit, perhaps the critic who
shares my approach most closely, helped me with long hours of conversa-
tion. Her work powerfully shaped my thinking for chapter 4. The writ-
ings and teachings of Larry Scanlon and David Lawton brought me to
the study of the fifteenth century and launched my interest in fifteenth-
century literary culture. Stephen Orgel provided sage encouragement at
crucial moments. At the University of Southern Mississippi a number
of graduate students suffered through my thinking about Caxton as I
worked it out; Leah Holmes deserves particular mention, as does one
undergraduate, Melanee Slade. At the University of Colorado at Boulder,
Katarzyna Rutkowski suggested an exacting finishing touch, and Theresa
Cecot helped me prepare the final manuscript. Notre Dame’s two anony-
mous readers gave the manuscript extraordinary careful readings at a cru-
cial stage in the book’s development, and I thank them for that. Again, I
thank my editor at the University of Notre Dame Press, Barbara Hanra-
han, and the production staff, Margaret A. Gloster, Wendy McMillen,
Rebecca DeBoer, Katie Lehman, and Margo Shearman for seeing the
book through to print.
Two scholarly works stand out as shaping my thinking in powerful
ways, and I would like to acknowledge my intellectual debit to them in
particular. Seth Lerer’s Chaucer and His Readers and Paul Needham’s The
Printer and the Pardoner come to Caxton quite differently, and both have
fundamentally reshaped the field. Together they demonstrate the concep-
tual diversity and intellectual richness possible in the study of old books,
and I have been fortunate to have had the opportunity to learn from Pro-
fessor Lerer and Dr. Needham directly. They are both uncannily sharp
intellectuals gifted with wonderful eloquence and powerful humor, ex-
actly the sort of humanist bibliophiles Caxton would have wanted pester-
ing him about some old evidences.
xii a c k n ow l e d g m e n t s
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Ultimately, however, two individuals shaped this book most of all:

Richelle Munkhoff and Helen Kuskin. I have learned tremendously from
Dr. Munkhoff’s rich feel for critical theory, deep archival sensibility, and
intense understanding of how language works. At this point, Helen Kus-
kin is somewhat less of a scholar, but for sheer joie de vivre she cannot
be beat.
It is to them that I dedicate Symbolic Caxton.
William Kuskin
Boulder, Colorado, 2006
a c k n ow l e d g m e n t s xiii
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Chapter One
Affixing Value
The Bibliography of Material Culture
The main biographies of William Caxton are epic romances. 1
Di±ering in detail, they tell his life as a courtly narrative of alienation and
return. The story typically begins with an account of Caxton’s boyhood,
the details of which are now lost to us in the wilds of the Kentish forest of
the Weald, as he tells us in the prologue to the Recuyell of the Histories of
Troye: “[ I ] was born 7 lerned myn englissh in kente in the weeld where I
doubte not is spoken as brode and rude englissh as is in ony place of en-
glond” (STC 15375; unsigned, 2v ). Caxton emerges from this broad and
rude past as his life begins to take documentary shape in London, first
through the 1438 records of his enrollment as an apprentice to Robert
Large, a prominent London merchant who became one of the wardens of
the Mercers’ Company in 1427, a sheri± of London in 1430, and lord
mayor in 1439. Named in Large’s will in 1441, Caxton next appears in
Bruges in 1450, and then vanishes from the archival record for seven
years.2 The narrative line picks back up with his reappearance as a diplo-
mat in the late 1450s, his appointment as the governor of the English na-
tion around 1462, and his association with Margaret of York’s Bruges
court in 1469. From there, the story goes, he is “exiled” into the Conti-
nent where, after happening upon the art of printing in Cologne, he re-
turns to Margaret’s court as a champion, presenting her with the first
book printed in English: the 1473 Recuyell of the Histories of Troye.3 The
next episode finds Caxton settled in Westminster in 1475, now in the
29
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service of Anthony Woodville, the Lord Scales, Queen Elizabeth’s

brother. Caxton printed three editions for Woodville, and Caxton’s biog-
raphers, figuring him as a squire to this quintessential fifteenth-century
knight, have attributed all his major literary publications throughout the
late 1470s and 1480s—the two runs of Chaucerian poetry and the Le
Morte D’Arthur—to Woodville’s influence.4 Woodville was executed by
Richard III in 1483, and with this, Caxton’s career is understood as again
falling into a “crisis” or “lean time,” from which he is, again, saved by an
English knight, this time the Earl of Oxford, John de Vere, who returns
him to court with the 1489 edition of Christine de Pizan’s Fayts of Arms
(STC 7269).5 And so the Middle Ages come to a close: with the Wars of
the Roses behind him, the Tudor state firmly in place and the major writ-
ers of the English canon in print, Caxton can finally rest. Defined by the
narrative structure he did so much to popularize, Caxton’s biography is a
literary story twice over: it is a romance about the making of romances.
The story is, then, essentially self-reflective. As Caxton so often
pauses to meditate on his life and the literature he chooses to print, it
could not be otherwise. Romance evokes this quality by recalling one of
the late fifteenth century’s central literary genres, and thus it not only
provides an aesthetic background for Caxton’s biography, it also frames
a number of social issues—reading practices, class hierarchy, political
organization, economic activity, psychological unity—as resolved. For ro-
mance makes Caxton’s England appear insular, divorced from the com-
plex Chaucerian sense of character and ambiguity that he was equally
invested in by naturalizing secular organization according to the mili-
tary and masculine ideals of chivalry.6 But if we accept this at face value
we have done little to analyze Caxton’s engagement with late fifteenth-
century literary culture in any depth. When Caxton approaches the print
market he does so not as a knight-errant in a static social condition but as
an entrepreneur. This does not mean that early print production is not
self-reflective; rather it means that such a reflective quality needs to be
understood as a dynamic component of the larger literary economy, one
that figured literature as a symbolic commodity.
There are a number of ways into the history of symbolic production.
One might approach it through economics, through the physical struc-
ture of books, or through their poetic content. Here I would like to sug-
gest Caxton’s broad relevancy to the history of books by exploring one
30 c a p i t a l a n d l i t e r a ry f o r m
Kuskin Ch 1 11/15/07 9:21 AM Page 31
of his most cogent strategies: his emphasis on his name in print: “me
symple persone william Caxton.”7 As Seth Lerer writes, “Caxton remains
a touchstone for that history, as the invocation of his name or the venera-
tion of his books signals an understanding of just what it means to be a
scholar or collector, a reader or a writer—not just in the fifteenth or the
nineteenth century, but now.”8 In this chapter I turn to two eponymous
moments in the history of Caxton’s books, the sale of the Wentworth
Chaucer in 1998 and the development of Caxton’s 1487 trademark, as
moments that illustrate the way Caxton’s name a¤xes value to his books
by fusing literary and commercial enterprises in a notion of the self as a
literary subject. Caxton’s particular emphasis on attaching his name to his
books, either in prose or through his trademark, is only one way into the
larger issue of symbolic relations; there are a number of examples of this
self-reflective quality in early print, and in the course of this chapter I
compare Caxton’s articulation of the relationship between the self and
the book to that of his contemporaries. For though Caxton emerges as the
significant English printer of the fifteenth century, his approach to print-
ing is part of a larger cultural scene. In this, Caxton’s story is less biogra-
phical than bibliographical, less the story of an individual man than of the
cultural construction of books as objects that are symbolic of identity.
Defined by the genre of romance, Caxton’s reflections appear the rumi-
nations of the last medieval hero; viewed as part of a larger social econ-
omy transforming itself through its own terms, we can understand it as
strategically connected to the development of authorship, class identity,
and the personal library, what Caxton calls “his chambre or studye.”9
Books invite self-reflection—they invite books about books—and in this
they exceed their material status and become machines for reproducing
the self. Caxton’s is indeed a story of literary production twice over: it is
a story of the individual making books, which is simultaneously a story of
books making individuals.
Book Buying: Consumption in the (Post)modern Library
On July 8, 1998, Christie’s London auctioned o± the Wentworth Chau-

cer, one of the ten extant near-complete copies of William Caxton’s
1476 /77 edition of the Canterbury Tales (STC 5082).10 Christie’s experts
a f f i x i n g va l u e 31
Kuskin Ch 1 11/15/07 9:21 AM Page 32
valued the book between £500,000 and £700,000; within minutes, how-
ever, a contest among three agents (one competing by phone) established
interest at 4 million, which a last-minute bid by Sir Paul Getty II’s proxy,
Bryan Maggs, resolved at £4,621,500. With Getty’s purchase, Caxton’s
first edition of Chaucer became, for a time, the most expensive printed
book in history, far more costly than the previous record holder, a 1455
Gutenberg Bible, which sold for $5.3 million in 1987, and still a good bit
more than the most expensive First Folio of Shakespeare’s plays, which
sold in October 2001 for $6,166,000. This amazing price is due, in part,
to the soaring stock market of the 1990s, and, in part, to Lotte Hellinga’s
and Paul Needham’s redating of Caxton’s Canterbury Tales from 1478
to 1477, or late 1476, making it not only the first edition of Chaucer but
also the first folio book printed in England.11 The auction demonstrates a
process of a¤xing value to a historical text, one Getty’s explanation for
his high bid elaborates: “I have always hoped that it might be sold one
day by the [ Fitzwilliam] family,” he reveals, “but never dared to expect
that I would be able to own such a book and ensure its retention in [ En-
gland].” More than just a valuable object, the book facilitates a transfor-
mation from private to public spheres: it allows Getty to produce per-
sonal interest—his hopes, dares, and ownership, and the decision to sell
of Olive, Countess Fitzwilliam—as of national consequence, his inten-
tion to retain the book in England, the country to which he was natural-
ized the same year. Indeed, this relationship is entirely reversible, for as
much as the purchase furthers Getty’s self-creation as an Englishman, the
national possession of objects of the past such as Caxton’s Canterbury
Tales underwrites English identity. The silent medieval artifact, the incun-
able edition of Chaucer, is thus a part of a much larger circuit involving
books, investment capital, and identity. I argue that this is true for the
fifteenth century as well.
Getty’s purchase of the Wentworth Chaucer recalls another defin-
ing sale in the history of English book collecting, the 1812 Roxburghe
auction of the Valdarfer Boccaccio, a 1471 Venetian edition of the De-
cameron. The Marquis of Blandford purchased this book for the then-
staggering sum of £2,260, ushering in what Seymour de Ricci has called
“a new era in British book-collecting” defined by the frenzy of book buy-
ing known as bibliomania.12 Caxton’s books were very much a part of the
fervor, and it is across the period that the major studies of early English
Kuskin Ch 1 11/15/07 9:21 AM Page 33
printing were written: Thomas Frognall Dibdin’s extensive revisions of

Joseph Ames’s Typographical Antiquities, Henry Bradshaw’s essays estab-
lishing the science of bibliography, and William Blades’s landmark stud-
ies of Caxton.13 The dinner celebrating the Roxburghe auction founded
the club of the same name, the club that, as David Matthews has argued,
initiated the development of Middle English studies.14 The collecting of
Caxtons, then, is part of the development of English scholarship, and in
this it legitimizes its own practices: unabashedly immersed in buying and
selling, bibliomania is a self-conscious phenomenon, one that fosters a
history of the books that define its interest.
That Getty wishes to participate in such a history is clear from the
layout of his Chiltern Hills estate, Wormsley.15 The ancestral home of
the Scrope and Fane families, Wormsley is no ordinary manor: its main
building is a refurbished medieval castle fronted by Doric columns and
connecting to a secondary building of Georgian façade.16 Such asymme-
try follows eighteenth- and nineteenth-century fashion, and Wormsley’s
library also takes its cues from this period, for housed in the gothic sec-
tion of the manor as it is, the library evokes the great nineteenth-century
bibliomanic Lord Spencer and his Gothic Library at Althorp. Spencer
developed the Althorp library while in his thirties, beginning with the
purchase of the Count de Reviczky’s collection and avidly buying Cax-
tons throughout his life: he bought the second edition of Caxton’s Can-
terbury Tales for £7 in 1795, and paid £111 for the Knight of the Tower
in 1807. At the Roxburghe sale, Spencer bought a copy of Caxton’s Blan-
chardin and Eglantine for £215, an imperfect Speculum vitae Christi for £45,
a second edition of the Festial for 100 guineas, an imperfect Recuyell for
£116, and a Chastising of God’s Children for £140.17 Getty’s and Spencer’s li-
braries provide a venue to the past, for libraries are, of course, overtly in-
terested in history: they house the books of and about history, and they
order these books for posterity. A place for the private consumption of
books, the library nevertheless produces a larger public statement about
its owner and history alike. Production through consumption—the li-
brary is a metaphor for material culture: it reveals the ways in which com-
modities articulate a symbolic relationship between individuals and the
objects that occupy their lives.
We can see this relationship in Thomas Dibdin’s bibliographical ac-
count of the 45,000 items in Spencer’s collection, Aedes Althorpianae. In
Kuskin Ch 1 11/15/07 9:21 AM Page 34
the first volume of this massive endeavor, Dibdin brings the reader on
an imaginative tour of the library’s five rooms. Dibdin is never at a loss
for words about books, but as he moves through the library’s rooms, it
is commodities—art, furniture, and gaming equipment—that occupy his
attention. The usual purpose of these rooms, as Dibdin tells it at least, is
not scholarship but socializing: the Long Library is a morning sitting
room or a drawing room where the company assembles after dinner; the
Raphael Library is governed by its art collection, the Billiard Library is of
self-explanatory uses; and the Marlborough Library is for the family
members when they are alone. Only the Gothic Library seems conducive
to reading a book, and this is just one of the many possible forms of re-
pose it invites. Dibdin writes that
sofas, chairs, tables, of every commodious form, are of course lib-

erally scattered throughout the room. The bay-window looks into
the pleasure-garden, or rather into a luxuriant shrubbery; where
both serpentine and straight walks invite to a ramble among larches
elms and oaks. . . . Upon the whole, it must be confessed that
this room, both within and from without, has a character peculi-
arly bookish—and such as we might suppose to belong to a well-
endowed monastery.18
Dibdin remarks in a later passage that “the studious may steal away from
the animated discussions carried on below,” and this sums up the rooms
as a whole: reading is a sideline activity, performed in alcoves and galleries
removed from the main area, which is largely social. In this vein what the
libraries achieve, indeed what the substantial bibliographical descriptions
that follow in the next four volumes achieve, is “a character peculiarly
bookish—and such as we might suppose to belong to a well-endowed
monastery.” The eighteenth- and nineteenth-century library o±ers an
ostensibly private space rooted in the solitary activity of reading and the
privileged exclusivity of the learned and noble book collector as a stage
for public entertainment, and it makes this o±er in a form accessible to a
broad consumer base. Thus Dibdin imagines Althorp as a kind of secular
monastery, a place that derives the spiritual energy of pre-Reformation
England from the objects of the commercial world.
Dibdin describes Spencer’s libraries as chiefly about the organization
of people, and this is of a piece with the larger history of the library in
Kuskin Ch 1 11/15/07 9:21 AM Page 35
the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries when it became the
social center of the English manor. The fashion for libraries, as for book
collecting in general, moved down the social scale so that by the end of
the eighteenth century, though the clubs that defined the book collec-
tors’ community remained exclusive, the material trappings that suggest
a bookish character were exported to the English public. Library fur-
nishings from bookcases to busts could be ordered through catalogues
in various styles—gothic, Oriental, or Indian—replete with a selection of
optional veneers, moldings, decorative adornments, and accessory fur-
nishing.19 In part, then, Dibdin’s construction of the library is entirely
about commodities, and just so, as the tour of the library concludes, he
reflects upon what these commodities announce:
It is barely possible, even for the most uninterested visitor, to walk

through the apartments in which this extraordinary library is de-
posited, without being struck with the general beauty of the copies
and of the bindings. Such an assemblage of valuable, rare, and pre-
cious books—the result of the ardour, judgment, and liberality of
one man—its present noble owner—while it has very few similar ex-
amples in our own, or other countries—cannot fail to produce reflec-
tions the most congenial with enlightened minds, and of the most
honourable and flattering description in favour of the founder of
such an intellectual banquet.20
Here the rooms, furnishings, artwork, books—even the bindings of such

books—conspire to an almost objective statement that even the most
uninterested visitor cannot ignore, and the more enlightened viewers will
not fail to reflect upon it. This statement is concerned with beauty and
nationalism, but finds its center in the contemplation of individual great-
ness and sets out the personal traits of ardor, judgment, and liberality. In
his study of seventeenth-century libraries, T. A. Birrell writes that “a pri-
vate library is part of its owner’s biography,” and this much Dibdin sug-
gests as well; by the nineteenth century, however, this biography is itself
constructed for public consumption, and so Dibdin sets it forth as a ban-
quet. The library provides a backdrop of exclusivity, of literary heritage,
of historical sophistication, accommodating a rising bourgeoisie into
English culture by suggesting to them what they might do in the morn-
ing and the evening, how they might comport themselves publicly as
Kuskin Ch 1 11/15/07 9:21 AM Page 36
hosts when entertaining and privately as a family when alone. Thus the
library provides an order for books that is also an order for people, a
model for the social subject that is also a model for the individual. This
provision contains within it a series of symbolic tensions captured in the
library’s very décor, for the more the library becomes simply a den or a
living room, the more it loosens its purchase on the exclusive club culture
that legitimizes it; similarly, the more the library’s furnishings are made
available through machine production and catalogue orders, the less ex-
clusive the genre, the less spiritual the setting. Like the printing press
itself, then, the library’s potential for order is wrapped up in the perils
of commodification: both threaten to degenerate their symbolic value
into mere consumerism, the press by adulterating the rarity of books
through its overwhelming multiplicity, the library by presenting things
of worth—books, knowledge, culture—in a potentially frivolous salon.
For the nineteenth century, these dangers were worth inhabiting because
they o±ered a symbolic system of social organization that embeds class
hierarchy within consumer goods.
Like Spencer’s Gothic Library, Wormsley Library o±ers a com-
fortable combination of sofas, overstu±ed chairs, reading alcoves, and
a gallery, all surrounded by books so as to achieve, as Dibdin says, “a char-
acter peculiarly bookish.” Wormsley, too, presents study as only one of
many possible ways of passing the time comfortably; one might just
as well examine the fine cases on display or admire a pleasant view. Still,
though Getty’s is reminiscent of the nineteenth-century library, it is con-
structed at a much greater historical remove. Where the eighteenth-
century asymmetrical architectural design developed to accommodate
servants’ quarters, Wormsley’s medieval, neoclassical, and Georgian vi-
sual cues create a historical pastiche. The library continues this theme: its
beamed roof is painted with the astrological arrangement at the hour of
Getty’s birth, recalling star maps from the fifteenth century; the design
of the overmantle is lifted from eighteenth-century exemplars; the man-
tle itself is from the nineteenth century.21 The Wentworth Chaucer pre-
sents such historical layering to no less a degree: the third most complete
copy extant, the book is bound in mid-eighteenth-century red goatskin,
its missing outer leaves of text are supplied in facsimile on paper from the
1820s, and two of the inner leaves are cannibalized from another copy.22
When these alternations were made they were no doubt done so as to
Kuskin Ch 1 11/15/07 9:21 AM Page 37
make the book more perfect, more true to an ideal notion of books; now
they reveal yet another palimpsest of historical periods. Even Getty’s
choice of a Caxton Chaucer is bound up in considerations of historical
distance. A Gutenberg Bible commemorates the invention of print-
ing through the most universal of works; it transcends history. In con-
trast, the Wentworth Chaucer is involved in historic specifics: it is the
first English folio edition of the father of English poetry. “To renew the old
world,” writes Walter Benjamin, “that is the collector’s deepest desire
when he is driven to acquire new things, and that is why a collector of
older books is closer to the wellsprings of collecting than the acquirer
of luxury editions.”23 For Spencer and his fellow bibliomaniacs, this re-
newal occurs through the imagination of pure forms, and so the excesses
of their libraries and librarians, their willingness to cut into fifteenth-
century books, now appears calculated but nevertheless straightforward,
an attempt at an ideal organization of books and people, history, and cul-
ture: understandable, if unforgivable. Collecting almost two centuries
later, Getty returns to modernity as an incomplete project, and finding
such straightforwardness impossible, encounters history as pastiche and
palimpsest.
Getty does not just evoke English culture, then, he evokes it nostalgi-
cally, and this is not only part of his historical condition, it is of a piece
with his larger political agenda. A resident in England since 1971, Getty
was regally invested with knighthood at Buckingham Palace just before
purchasing the Wentworth Chaucer in 1998, at which time he also gave
up his U.S. citizenship. Always a generous philanthropist, in 2001 he
donated £5 million to the Conservative Party, the largest donation ever
given to a British political organization, explaining, “The Conservative
party, in my view, is the party best equipped to defend the British way
of life.”24 Getty’s purchase and his politics form a defensive return to
the past. This is not the only possible relationship between book buy-
ing and politics; it is specific to the book collector. For example, on
March 10, 2000, at another Christie’s auction, this time in New York, the
Fox-Bute four-volume subscriber set of the double-elephant folio of
Audubon’s Birds of America sold for $8,802,500 (at the time of this writ-
ing, the Wentworth Chaucer remains the most expensive incunable). The
Fox-Bute Audubon was purchased by Sheikh Hamad Bin Khalifa Al-
Thani, king of Qatar. Both wealthy oil aristocrats, Al-Thani and Getty
Kuskin Ch 1 11/15/07 9:21 AM Page 38
had substantially di±erent uses for their books. Al-Thani’s plans for the
Audubon are resolutely public: best known for supporting the Arabic-
language news channel Al-Jazeera in 1996–97 with a $140 million start-
up grant, Al-Thani intends to house the book in the natural history
museum he is building in Qatar. Getty remained a private collector, in-
fluencing scholarship and politics as a subject not as a king, and so he tells
of his gift to the Conservative Party, “Since I’ve lived here and been
happy here for such a long time, I think it’s my duty here.” Like Spencer’s
library, Getty’s is a private statement that achieves public dimensions.
Books and buildings articulate their symbolic statement in overt and
implied ways. Such a combination of discourse and objects need not
be entirely coherent to be e±ective. For example, if Getty’s library and
his selection of the Wentworth Chaucer demonstrate the ways in which
symbols can be put to use by an individual, they also demonstrate the
ways they exceed his purpose, in this case revealing his defense of the
British way of life as somewhat labored, his library as overly nostalgic and
publicly isolated rather than forward looking and socially engaged. These
qualities, too, register the particular tensions of Getty’s cultural moment,
one at which the discourses of nationalism as well as book culture are
themselves in transition, and enjoy a tremendous surge in patriotism and
supermarket-size bookstores while the larger mechanisms of capital-
ism nevertheless move increasingly toward a global and digital economy.
Regardless of these tensions, Wormsley coheres successfully enough to
draw attention away from the most glaring contradiction inherent in
the purchase of the Wentworth Chaucer: books, even very important
books, cannot be worth the human labor represented by well over £4.6
million. Indeed, Getty produces the Wentworth Chaucer as of such value
through his bid, through Wormsley’s historical connections, through his
political vision. However tinged with irony this symbolic system appears,
it forms a mode of consumption that successfully a¤xes value to a simple
object, producing it as monetarily quantifiable and placing it in a context
in which it has direction and purpose. For the nineteenth century, a sim-
ilar symbolic system gave the rising bourgeois family a floor plan for liv-
ing; for the twenty-first, it ensures that Getty bought one of the most
important books in history and not a sheaf of old papers tampered with
by numerous anonymous hands across the centuries. Outside this circuit
of production and consumption, the connection between the object and
Kuskin Ch 1 11/15/07 9:21 AM Page 39
its value appears arbitrary, and we need look no further than the Rox-
burghe sale to see this truth, for Lord Spencer, underbidder by a narrow
margin at the auction itself, ultimately bought the Valdarfer Boccaccio
from the Marquis of Blandford for only £750 only a few years later.25
Within the context of the auction, of the frenzy of bibliomania, the
book’s value was apparent for all to see; outside the auction its value
changes, and the same must be true for the Wentworth Chaucer: it ap-
pears a coherent object only as long as the larger symbolic apparatus
holds together. All about books, the library is, paradoxically, not about
books at all: it is about the connection between objects—books and build-
ings—and intangible categories—capital, authority, and identity. In short,
the library, indeed, the book itself, constitutes a symbolic mechanism of
which Caxton’s name is a significant part.
Book Selling: Production in Caxton’s Chamber
The relationship between material and symbolic forms which we see

in the story of the Wentworth Chaucer has largely been misunderstood
for fifteenth-century literary culture. This is plain in the publicity sur-
rounding the Getty purchase. For example, the London Times reported
Christie’s auction with an image from Caxton’s 1481 Mirrour of the
World (STC 24762; c5), misidentified as the start of the Wife of Bath’s Tale
(fig. 1.1).26 While it is di¤cult to imagine for what occasion the Times ac-
quired a picture of the Mirrour of the World, its substitution is somewhat
understandable, for an actual page from Caxton’s version of the Wife
of Bath’s Tale—a column of Caxton’s Type 2 with, at most, a 3-line hand-
rubricated initial as decoration—is almost entirely unremarkable to
the nonspecialist. In contrast, the Mirrour gives the Times’s reader a page
thick with medieval curiosities. The mistake glosses the unfamiliar and
historically specific (1481 The Mirrour of the World; the Wentworth
Chaucer) as canonical and timeless (the Wife of Bath’s Tale; the Canterbury
Tales) and, in doing so, confirms for its readers that the fifteenth-century
book is quite obscure, while also reassuring them that this fact needn’t
detain them in any real way; however bizarre the book actually looks, it
is still the Wife of Bath’s Tale and everyone knows about that already. In-
deed, the brief article accompanying the piece underscores this sense by
Kuskin Ch 1 11/15/07 9:21 AM Page 40
Figure 1.1.
“Chaucer
Fetches £4 .6m,”
The Times,
Thursday,
July 9, 1998,
Home News, 3.
By permission
of the News
International
Syndication Ltd.
Kuskin Ch 1 11/15/07 9:21 AM Page 41
mentioning that the Wentworth Chaucer’s title page is missing. Caxton

never uses title pages; the remark conspires with the image to construct
the fifteenth century as eccentric, yet nevertheless conforming to the rec-
ognized structure of books.
The Times’s substitution is emblematic of a larger misreading of
fifteenth-century literary production, and the further we look at writing
on The Mirrour of the World the more we see this view. For example, as the
first English book to contain woodcuts, the Mirrour is largely taken
as a failure: Edward Hodnett opens his definitive study of English wood-
cuts by remarking, “England stumbles on to the book-illustration stage
with some of the poorest cuts ever inserted between covers . . . the
outlook for English illustration could hardly be worse.”27 The remark
typifies a longstanding verdict about fifteenth-century English writing
from Thomas Hoccleve, through John Lydgate, directly to Caxton: it
could hardly be worse. Thus, the general sense of the English fifteenth
century is that it is unselfconscious about the terms of literary pro-
duction, happy to knock out miserable woodcuts, labored verse, and de-
rivative prose. I suggest the opposite: that the textual producers of the
century are tremendously aware of the terms of production. Indeed,
I suggest that we can put our finger down virtually anywhere in the
fifteenth century and realize this complex self-awareness, and as a test
I suggest we begin at a perversely arbitrary example: folio c5 of the Mir-
rour of the World.
The Mirrour of the World ’s woodcuts may well be rough, but this
fact should not distract us from reading the page on its own terms. If we
do, we find that it is actually quite concerned with literary production.
Coming in the midst of a discussion of the seven liberal arts, the page
concludes the “scyence of Rethoryque” and introduces the chapter on
“Arsmetryque.”28 Hodnett describes the upper woodcut as of “a bearded
schoolmaster standing. Four pupils, two more indicated,” but the wood-
cut is more perplexing than this brief description allows, for in it a crowd
of students present a book to the schoolmaster, who reacts, seemingly, by
flinching.29 The lower woodcut features writing as well: in it a mathe-
matician sits at an inclined writing desk holding a tablet of obscure calcu-
lations in one hand and a writing implement in the other. Ancient forms
of inscription and computation litter the desk before him: a tablet, a roll,
a set of circles. The page thus depicts literary production on a number of
Kuskin Ch 1 11/15/07 9:21 AM Page 42
levels: its prose tells a story of the historical development and intellectual
categorization of the liberal arts; its woodcuts illustrate the produc-
tion and dissemination of writing. It also suggests how writing organizes
people: the lower woodcut shows the solitary mathematician physically
at work doing intellectual labor; the upper one shows how the finished
book unifies the students in relation to their master. Taken as they come,
the woodcuts reverse our expectations of book production to suggest
that, in fact, the use of books precedes their production; taken as a whole
they present the two operations simultaneously so that the writing and
use of documents occur as reciprocal actions within the larger discussion
of forms of knowledge. In either reading, the first woodcuts in an English
book reflect upon the order and use of books.
Caxton discusses the woodcuts in his “Prologue declaryng to whom
this book apperteyneth” to the Mirrour, where he tells us that his manu-
script source “was engrossed and in alle poyntes ordeyned by chapitres
and figures in ±renshe in the toun of bruggis the yere of thyncarnacion
of our lord . M . CCCC. lxiiij. in the moneth of Juyn” (a5).30 Caxton is
often accused of padding out his source material through various tech-
niques of amplification. Yet Caxton edits his sources in precise ways.
Here he has translated this passage from MS Royal 19 A IX; however,
this manuscript only reports that it was written in 1464. Caxton added
the month of production from his own knowledge, from another manu-
script, or from his imagination. In turn, he omits the manuscript’s men-
tion of the bookseller “Jehan le clerc librarier & bourgois dicelle ville
de bruges.”31 On one hand, then, Caxton calls attention to his book as a
specific reproduction, an English copy of his manuscript’s “chapitres and
figures in ±renshe” made on a specific date; on the other, he abstracts the
manuscript from its commercial context: thus, when he narrates the pro-
duction of the printed edition from his manuscript exemplar, he trans-
lates, “Whiche said book was translated out of latyn in to ±rensshe by
the ordynaunce of the noble duc / Johan of Berry and Auuergne the yere
of our lord . M . CC . xlv +” (a4v) adding,
And now at this tyme rudely translated out of ±rensshe in to En-

glissh by me symple persone william Caxton / at the request+ desire+
coste and dispense of the honourable & worshipful man Hugh Bryce
Alderman & Cytezeyn of london / entendyng to present the same
Kuskin Ch 1 11/15/07 9:21 AM Page 43
vnto the vertuous noble and puissaunt lord / wylliam lord hastynges
lord Chamberlayn vnto the most Crysten kynge / kynge Edward the
fourthe kynge of England & of ±raunce & etc and lieutenaunt for the
same of the toun of Calais and marches there. (a4v)
Caxton presents the book’s reproduction through a narrative of personal

connections. His particular work with the press fits this history, not as
radical break from manuscript production practices but as a tangible ex-
pression of social relations, of his patronage by Hugh Brice the alder-
man, who plans to present the book to William, Lord Hastings, who is,
himself retained by Edward IV. Caxton takes part in these social relation-
ships, and so he announces himself: “me symple persone william Caxton.”
There is much else that Caxton could publicize, for he printed the Mir-
rour during a period of heavy investment in new technology: the Mirrour
is printed in Type 2*, a new version of his standard type, somewhat
cleaned up, which he brought out in late 1478 or 1479. Around this time
he also purchased new “two-pull” presses, which introduced a carriage
mechanism allowing the pressmen to print two halves of a folio sheet
with one imposition to increase the speed of production, called “by the
forme” printing.32 These innovations represent a significant financial in-
vestment in the commercial end of print production, and though Caxton
does mention the book’s “coste and dispense,” he also accounts for it
rather easily, suggesting that it can be defrayed by one man, wrapped up
in the story of one book. Further, in his 1480 Chronicles of England (STC
9991), Caxton introduced another new type, Type 4, and made a number
of changes to the look of his books: he justified line endings, giving his
texts a more uniform look, and added printed signatures, of use to the
binder in collating a book from its individual sheets. Instead of trumpet-
ing these investments in hardware and evolutions in technique, Caxton
emphasizes facts that make the book a social object: he gives its manu-
script history, its Burgundian pedigree, its similarity to his source; he
places it in a chain of patrons; he looks ahead to its use as a gift.33 If
the master’s flinch evidences the potency of possession of the book, Cax-
ton’s prologue echoes this to emphasize the authority of book culture
over production; and if the mathematician woodcut acknowledges such
production, it is as scribal work rather than printing. Prologue and
page are of a piece: they both idealize the production process to foster a
Kuskin Ch 1 11/15/07 9:21 AM Page 44
connection between intellectual production and social consumption

which elides the mechanics and economics of printing.
That Caxton discusses literary production should not come as a sur-
prise, for fifteenth-century literary culture is intensely interested in the
construction of the vernacular book. Vernacular literary production ex-
panded dramatically throughout the century: for example, Derek Pearsall
and A. S. G. Edwards count some thirty extant English vernacular literary
manuscripts from 1325 to 1400, and six hundred from 1400 to Caxton’s
introduction of the press.34 After the development of the press, Lotte
Hellinga and J. B. Trapp estimate, some 59 percent of books printed in
England were in English, a striking number considering that on the Con-
tinent only 30 percent of fifteenth-century printed books were in vernac-
ular languages.35 Clearly the laborers involved with book production
during this period had to reflect upon what should constitute the ver-
nacular book. What is surprising about Caxton’s prologue is that he
should neglect the actual production process before him. For his is not the
only way of depicting the early press. In fact, the first representation of a
print shop, and the only fifteenth-century portrayal remaining, is a wood-
cut in the 1499 edition of La grante danse macabre des homes et des femmes,
printed in Lyons by Matthias Hus (fig. 1.2).36 As a fifteenth-century
genre, the danse macabre stems from the frescoes in the Hall of Columns
in the cemetery of Innocents in Paris. This painting presented a proces-
sion of social stations moving from the pope through the nobility, citi-
zens, and merchants, and finally coming to a hermit, a dead king, and a
“maistre.” Each person is interrupted by “Le Morte,” not so much death
as the self-same person as a corpse, rent in the abdomen.37 Two eight-
lined rhymed stanzas record Le Morte’s summons. The woodcuts in
Hus’s edition follow those of Guy Marchant’s Latin edition of 1492, but
the particular cut of the printer’s o¤ce and the “librarie” is unique. In-
deed, it is the only woodcut in the book to depict the subjects in the midst
of their work. Like Caxton, then, Hus is a printer of vernacular literature
who works into his book a digression on literary production.
To a large degree Hus follows the pattern set by Marchant. For ex-
ample, Marchant’s woodcuts present the arcades visible here, regardless
of whether the action takes place inside or outside. Hus adopts this fram-
ing mechanism, but also modifies it so the print shop and bookseller’s
stall seem to be adjoining, two aspects of one process, if not two separate
Kuskin Ch 1 11/15/07 9:21 AM Page 45
Figure 1.2. The print shop. La grante danse macabre des homes et des femmes,
b. Printed by Matthias Hus, Lyons, 1499. British Library IB. 41735. By permis-
sion of the British Library.
Kuskin Ch 1 11/15/07 9:21 AM Page 46
rooms of one building. Space is at a premium in the print shop even be-
fore the ghouls arrive, and the printers are all elbows: the compositor al-
most bumps into the plank of the press; the pressmen work from the
corners of the room. This closeness is only intensified by the amount
of visible detail. All the compositor’s equipment is present: his copy sits
before him, clipped into what appears to be a “visorium,” as he sets his
type in his composing stick and transfers it to a two-page form. The
pressmen work the press: one has folded the frisket and tympan down to-
gether and moved what looks like a two-pull press’s carriage into place.
The press itself, twisting and flexing as its screw converts human strength
into torque, further contributes to the overall closeness of the room be-
cause, braced as it is by massive wooden beams to the floor and ceiling, it
towers over the room’s human occupants, comparable in size only to the
corpses. Indeed, if we are to take the corpses as avatars of the humans in
death (as all the literature on the danse macabre insists we must), then the
press actually stands in for the third man’s corpse. The overall e±ect is to
suggest activity—the flutter of the compositor’s fingers moving from case
to stick and back, the action of the platen coming down upon the paper,
form, and stone every fourteen to fifteen seconds—but also to freeze it at
the moment of Le Morte’s arrival.38 One corpse touches the compositor,
whose eyes have just turned up and whose brow is still vexed with concen-
tration (or perhaps with the frustration of being distracted); another has
seized the pressman’s hand at the very moment he releases (or reaches for)
the bar; the beater looks on agape, holding one of his ink dabbers in
midair. Read one way the woodcut is all motion, capturing the hustle and
bustle of printing; read another way, it is entirely static, the taking of life
caught forever on the printed page. The press is Le Morte and printing is
death; conversely, print counters the anonymity of death by providing a
permanent record of the workers’ labor. So Le Morte remarks, “A lou-
urage on congnoise louurier” (From the work one can know the worker),
because, for Hus, to put the print room in the danse macabre is to frame
the moment at which human work becomes fixed in time: the printed
page. Again, the discussion of book production is immersed in self-
reflection so that the very depiction of printing becomes a kind of com-
mentary on its historical nature.
Caxton also sees the book as a marker of human e±ort against time,
but his perspective is, somewhat surprisingly, as a reader not a printer.
Kuskin Ch 1 11/15/07 9:21 AM Page 47
Returning to The Mirrour of the World, Caxton discusses the value of lit-
erary production at the very beginning of his prologue. Like much of his
writing, part of the prologue is lifted from his exemplar, and part of it is
an original composition:
Consideryng that wordes ben perisshyng / vayne / 7 forgeteful / And

writynges duelle 7 abide permanent / as I rede Vox audita perit litera
scripta manet / Thise thinges haue caused that the faites and dedes
of Anncyent menn / ben sette by declaracion in fair and Aourned
volumes / to thende that science and Artes lerned and founden of
thinges passed myght be had in perpetuel memorye and remem-
braunce. (a4)
Considerant que parolles sont 7 demeurent vaines et escriptures per-

manentes ont les fais des anciens este mis par declaracion en beaulx 7
aournes volumes A¤n que des sciences acquises et choses passees fust
perpetuelle memoire39
Here Caxton adds the proverbial expression from Isidore of Seville’s Ety-
mologies, “Vox audita perit, littera scripta manet” ( The heard voice per-
ishes, the written letter remains).40 In the Huntington copy of the text,
the phrase also appears on a ribbon drawn onto a woodcut so as to report
the words of a master to his students. The sentiment is not far from
Le Morte’s, and Caxton’s emphasis on the tangible durability of writing
here is echoed in a number of his prologues, particularly in his discussion
of “monumentis wreton” that endure through time in the 1483 edition
of the Canterbury Tales (a2; STC 5083) and, before that, in his praise of
“lyberal monumenties / whiche ben the permanente recordes of euery
vyrtuouse and noble Acte” in the 1482 Polychronicon (a2v; STC 13438).41
This assessment of the material passage of historical knowledge in books
comes, in the Polychronicon at least, from his reading of Poggio Bracci-
olini’s translation of Diodorus Siculus’s Bibliotheca historica.42 Diodorus
conceived of the Bibliotheca historica as a historical library in a single book,
an encyclopedia written so the Roman empire could know its world. Cax-
ton finds in this preface an image of the private library “in whiche hysto-
ryes so wreton in large and aourned volumes / he syttynge in his chambre
or studye / may rede / knowe and understande the polytyke and noble
Kuskin Ch 1 11/15/07 9:21 AM Page 48
actes of alle the worlde as of one Cyte” (a2).43 Here is a library as a room
exclusively for study, a chamber that opens inward to show to the reader
“alle the worlde” (a phrase that apparently resounded for Caxton, who
also used it in the prologue to the 1484 Ordre of Chyualry, STC 3326,
now 3356.7, where he remarks that “the many large volumes” of King
Arthur’s tales “is a world or a thyng incredyble to byleve”). Where the
print shop of Hus’s woodcut is noisy and busy, claustrophobic with work
and activity, Caxton’s chamber is encased in the quietude of books. If it
finds any parallel in Hus’s woodcut at all, it is in the bookseller sur-
rounded by stacks of books. Yet for Hus, the bookseller is adjacent to the
print shop and the tasks of printing and reading appear in concert. In
Caxton there is no attendant panel, and if there were it would look out
to a world of manuscript production and patronage relationships. Cax-
ton’s chamber is a secular cell, a place of solitary work cluttered with ob-
jects perhaps not unlike the mathematician’s writing desk but possess-
ing a character peculiarly bookish, such as we might suppose belonged
to a very well endowed monastery, but illustrating the work of a secu-
lar reader.
Caxton virtually presents himself as Diodorus’s reader in one of
his last literary translations, the 1490 Eneydos, where he writes, “I sittyng
in my studye where as laye many dyuerse paunflettis and bookys. hap-
pened that to my hande cam a lytyl booke in frenshe . . . I delybered and
concluded to translate it in to englysshe And forthwyth toke a penne 7
ynke and wrote a leef or tweyen / whyche I ouersawe agayn to corecte”
(STC 24796; a1).44 Work in this study is remarkably passive: Caxton ap-
parently sits there and little books in French happen to come into hand.
Other readers come to consult: in the Mirrour, Hugh Brice submits his
request; in the Eneydos, Abbot Eastlake brings “certayn euydences wryton
in olde englysshe for to reduce it in to our englysshe now vsid / And cer-
taynly it was wreton in suche wyse that it was more lyke to dutche than
englysshe” (a1v ).45 The terms are always personal, and the image is drawn
from a legacy of manuscript production in which to be a book producer
is first to be a reader. Caxton knew these images from illuminations of
Christine de Pizan (such as the British Library manuscript of Les proverbs
moraulx, MS Harley 4431, fol.261v, which Anthony Woodville used for
the translation that Caxton printed in 1478, STC 7273) and the manu-
scripts of John Lydgate’s poetic works.46 Yet even these images represent
Kuskin Ch 1 11/15/07 9:21 AM Page 49
a cleaning-up of the actual terms of labor for as several studies have

demonstrated the vernacular manuscripts of the late medieval commer-
cial book trade were no more composed by solitary craftsman than was
the early modern book. Caxton postulates a late medieval romantic ide-
ology, one that represses the labor of the print shop in favor of a techno-
logically older yet still quite contemporary textual practice of book
copying to suggest that writing and reading are two parts of the same ac-
tion of textual reproduction. Thus he uses his own position as a printer
to illustrate a form of consumption for his readers. In doing so he pro-
duces an intellectual context for the books that his shop produces in a
more material fashion. Caxton writes his chamber as an imaginative loca-
tion for books and people, and thus inscribes a mode of consumption
within print production.
For the nineteenth century, the library is living room and study,
a repository for private indulgence that is also a place of public gathering
and performance. The historical circumstances are di±erent for Cax-
ton but nonetheless public. Caxton constructs himself as an occupant of
Diodorus’s library, uninterested in the materials of production and en-
tirely engrossed in the world of reading. If the nineteenth- and twentieth-
century libraries show us, generally, that the consumption of books is also
a mode of social production, Caxton’s depiction of his study shows us that
the mode of production constitutes a mode of consumption as well. All
three libraries are as much symbolic constructions as they are physical
places, and as such they speak their culture in ways beyond individual in-
tention; in each case, however, the book appears as one element in a larger
cycle of social production and consumption.
The Printer’s Mark: The Bibliography of Material Culture
We can further understand the book as an object of fifteenth-century cul-

ture by turning to the printer’s mark, the trademark devices early printers
used to identify their books.47 Without scribal precedent, the printer’s
mark flourishes in print: H. M. Davies estimates that some 660 di±erent
devices appear in the last third of the century.48 Caxton first used his de-
vice on two service books he imported from the Parisian printer Guil-
laume Maynyal, the 1487 Missale ad usum Sarum (STC 16164) and the
Kuskin Ch 1 11/15/07 9:21 AM Page 50
1488 Legenda ad usum Sarum (STC 16136).49 To identify these texts as his,
he designed, or had designed for him, a device featuring his initials sepa-
rated by an interlace pattern and ornamental surround with which
he stamped these books when they arrived in England (frontispiece). This
device appears on ten of Caxton’s subsequent editions, and there is a long
tradition of reading it as dense with biographical detail.50 For instance, in
his 1749 Typographical Antiquities, Joseph Ames suggested that the in-
terlace design separating Caxton’s initials contained the numerals 7 and,
in the loop that constitutes the left side of the pattern, an Arabic “4,”
which he took to be a reference to 1474, the year he dated Caxton’s first
book printed in England, The Game and Play of the Chess (STC 4920).51 In
1863 William Blades, disparaging of Ames’s rationale for The Game and
Play of the Chess and convinced of his own theory that Colard Mansion
taught Caxton to print in Bruges, updated the argument so that “74” re-
ferred to his candidate for the first English book, the Recuyell of the Histo-
ries of Troye, marking, as he put it, “an epoch to be commemorated.”52
Blades ultimately abandoned this reading, but more recently George D.
Painter has revised it to argue that the numbers read both ways, as “1474”
for the Recuyell, and as “1447,” the date he argues Caxton became a free-
man in the Mercers’ guild.53 Each of these readings presupposes that Cax-
ton should commemorate the advent of print through his own biography.
Surely it is true that regardless of the obscurities within the interlace de-
sign, “W.C.” makes an unmistakable announcement of Caxton’s identity
in print. Committed to reading the device as performing a memorial
function, however, Caxton’s biographers have passed over a much more
fundamental question: Why, in contrast to the anonymity of manuscript
production, does the printed book evoke a biographical trademark at
all? Framed in this way, the question behind the printer’s mark becomes
not what does it commemorate? but what does it accomplish in the mar-
ket for books? Stamped on the book, the printer’s mark operates much
as does Caxton’s prose: it serves to articulate partially the symbolic rela-
tions of the existing circuit of production and consumption within which
it makes identity and authority physical properties transferable to the
reader as through retail sale. This suggests a much larger symbolic truth
about books overall: books o±er their readers purchase on material cul-
ture. The printer’s mark on early English printing and culture is, there-
fore, to construct books as commodities in relation to the self.
Kuskin Ch 1 11/15/07 9:21 AM Page 51
Figure 1.3. Johannes Fust and Peter Schoeffer’s device. Justinian I, Institutiones.
Printed by Peter Schoeffer, Mainz, 1476 (ISTC ij00512000). Bridwell Library Special
Collections 06418a. By permission of the Bridwell Library Special Collections,
Perkins School of Theology, Southern Methodist University.
Originating in craftsmen’s and merchants’ marks, the printer’s mark

takes four main forms: the Shield, the Orb and Cross, the Four and Orb,
and the most common, the “Four,” which Davies explains stems particu-
larly from thirteenth-century merchants’ marks.54 The first printer’s mark
is Peter Schoe±er and Johannes Fust’s, two shields hanging from a bough
stamped on the Vienna copy of the 1457 Mainz Psalter (fig. 1.3). The
Kuskin Ch 1 11/15/07 9:21 AM Page 52
psalter is also the first book to carry the place and date of its publication,
as well as the name of its printer. The mark is suggestive of the way print
di±ers from manuscript production in a number of ways: for instance,
its two shields, representing Schoe±er’s mechanical expertise as a printer
and Fust’s as the financial backer, combine craft skills with capital invest-
ment. The 1457 date of the Vienna Psalter, too, is telling, for the device
appears on only one of the five remaining copies and does not appear
again until the 1462 Bible, and even then only sporadically until 1469.
This implies that the device was a later innovation, a postproduction
addition created to invigorate in some way copies remaindered from the
initial print run.55 Thus, the device speaks of a second and more general
di±erence introduced by the press: the press is a machine of large-scale
production. It not only needs capital investment to create its commodi-
ties, but these commodities must in turn be reconverted into capital in
order to continue investment in pressmen’s wages, ink, and, above all,
reams of paper. The ongoing nature of investment and reinvestment
pressurizes the print production cycle so that, barring some exterior
source of investment funds, printers had to strategize not just their next
project but the overall market for their books. As David R. Carlson ob-
serves, “Something had to be done. The machines required to be busy,
in order to generate returns on the labor and materials invested in them.
At a profit or a loss, however, it remains their nature nevertheless: to
produce.”56 The first printer’s mark indicates the complex nature of the
introduction of print: it was not enough to set the machine in motion and
reap its profits: without demand the press would fall dormant and fail to
reproduce the terms for its operation. The machine’s productive capacity
necessitated that demand be created through production strategies. The
history of the printer’s mark, of the design stamped on various books and
of the impact of fifteenth-century printing, is of such strategies.
After 1469 a number of printers quickly adopted some version of
Fust and Schoe±er’s mark as their own. In Rome, Ulrich Han made an
exact copy of it for his 1470 Regulae cancellariae apostolicae, and in Co-
logne, Arnold ter Hoernen revised it into a single shield containing his
own mark and his initials for his De remediis utriusque fortunae, issued on
February 8, 1471. Caxton moved to Cologne in June 1471 and remained
there for eighteen months, apparently financing folio editions of Bar-
tholomaeus Anglicus’s encyclopedia, De proprietatibus rerum, the Gesta
Kuskin Ch 1 11/15/07 9:21 AM Page 53
Romanorum, and Walter Burley’s De vita et moribus philosophorum, all

printed in 1472 by Johannes Schilling and Johannes Veldener.57 To what
degree Caxton participated in this operation is unclear, but Ter Hoernen,
Schilling, and Veldener were all either students or assistants of Ulrich
Zell, the first Cologne printer. Trained by Schoe±er, Zell matriculated
at the University of Cologne in 1464, purchased a press for 165 guild-
ers soon after that, and began quarto production in 1466. The Cologne
printing scene appears to have become increasingly competitive during
this period: in 1472 Johann Koelho± the Elder arrived in Cologne from
the overheated Venetian print market, and in 1473 Johann de Westphalia,
also from Venice, matriculated at the university in Cologne, setting up
with Thierry Martens in Alost before eventually settling in Louvain.
Koelho±, especially, drove the smaller presses out of Cologne, north into
the Low Countries; Veldener moved to Louvain, Schilling to Basel.58
For his part, Caxton returned to Bruges in late 1472 or early 1473
with two or three working presses, type, and a sta± of compositors and
pressmen.59 In late 1473 or early 1474 he issued the Recuyell, The Game
and Play of the Chess, and his French texts: the Recueil des Histories de Troie,
Méditations sur les sept psaumes pénitentiaux, Histoire de Jason, and Cordiale
quattuor novissimorum. With the exception of the Cordiale, these texts are
printed in Type 1, a bâtarde (or bastarda) designed by Veldener and based
upon the cursive script used by Burgundian scribes. Veldener’s typefaces
were an intrinsic part of a growing interest in vernacular production in
the Low Countries: when Zell established his Cologne press he used a
semi-gothic (or textura) face reminiscent of Schoe±er’s Mainz press. By
1468, however, Ter Hoernen began printing vernacular authors using a
bâtarde provided by Veldener and soon eclipsed Zell’s business. Veldener
used his own type to print vernacular books as he moved from Louvain to
Utrecht and then on to Culemborg in an attempt to avoid war.60 The
significance of Veldener’s bâtarde typeface cannot be overemphasized.
Veldener provided type for no fewer than thirteen printers in the
Low Countries: his is the face both of early northern printing and of the
vernacular language texts printed there. Caxton recognized this, and just
as his Recuyell and the Game and Play of the Chess are the first books
printed in English, his French texts are the first in French.61 When the
third original printer’s mark appeared in Cologne on Nicolaus Gotz’s
1474 edition of the Meditationes vitae Christ, a single shield bearing his
Kuskin Ch 1 11/15/07 9:21 AM Page 54
name, Caxton not only had developed his own press but had also ex-
plored vernacular printing.
The development of Caxton’s press can be read in his books’ com-
position as well as in their typefaces. For example, Wytze Hellinga and
Lotte Hellinga point out that the Recuyell demonstrates how, on his own
in Bruges, Caxton wrestled with the press:
In the first phase of producing the Recuyell, there was a burst of ac-
tivity involving several people who did not as a rule work together in
producing one book. It is also possible that during this phase of in-
tense activity, part of the text was set up in cooperation with two
presses, but that when the pace slackened o±, and at the time that
Compositors B and D were working at the text, they were unable to
provide enough material to keep even one press going.62
The halting process that the Hellingas describe, anathema to a commer-

cial operation, illustrates both Caxton’s learning curve and his ability to
survive, for an initial period at least, as a noncommercial agent. Caxton’s
early work during this period was apparently with Colard Mansion, and
the contrast between the two underscores the significance of Caxton’s
financial independence.63 Mansion was a founder of the Confrérie de St.
Jean, a guild of Bruges scribes and booksellers. Dean of the guild from
1472 to 1473, he was patronized by the two greatest book collectors
in Burgundy: Philip the Good and Louis de Bruges. Mansion’s printed
work is comparable to Caxton’s on a number of counts: both initially
printed with Veldener’s bâtarde face, both wrote their own translations
and often accompanied them with prologues and epilogues, both used
uneven line endings (a manuscript practice that was already out of favor
with printers in the early 1470s, one Mansion did not give up until 1479,
Caxton until 1480), and both favored similar texts even after Caxton re-
turned to England, such as versions of Boethius’s De consolatione philoso-
phiae and the Ovide Moralisé. But after Mansion began printing he also
continued to write, as evidenced by his promise to Charles the Bold’s
general, Philippe de Hornes, to copy “in his hand or the equivalent” Va-
lerius Maximus’s Facta et dicta memorabilia in 1480. Although Caxton sold
manuscripts, there is certainly no suggestion that “his hand” was a mar-
ketable commodity. Mansion’s printed books reflect the sensibility of one
Kuskin Ch 1 11/15/07 9:21 AM Page 55
who works on deluxe manuscripts: he planned nine copper engravings for

his 1476 edition of Boccaccio’s De casibus vivorum illustrium, and he com-
missioned an expanded version of Caxton’s Type 2 for his 1484 Ovide
Moralisé. Printed in such a large type, this edition, because of its cost, ap-
parently bankrupted Mansion’s press, for afterward he fled Bruges to es-
cape his creditors. Caxton almost always uses woodcuts as opposed to the
more expensive copper engravings, and when he turns to long texts—
such as Le Morte D’Arthur, the Polychronicon, and the Golden Legend—he
uses a smaller type, Type 4, presumably to cut down on paper costs. In
short, Mansion approaches the press as a scribe and this is clear in his
printed work. Caxton comes to textual production with a powerful finan-
cial sensibility, and as the Hellingas point out, it is palpable in his prod-
ucts and in his ability to support the press as a start-up concern.
By the time Caxton returned to England in late 1475, then, the prac-
tice of using the printer’s mark had taken hold throughout the Low
Countries: Andreas Frisner and Johann Sensenschmidt used twin shields
in Nuremberg; Veldener used two shields (one bearing his housemark,
the other the arms of Louvain, where he worked); and Westphalia in-
troduced his portrait mark the same year. The device is, therefore, a com-
plex sign evoking the second generation of Continental printers’ en-
counter with the machine. In it we can read both the exploration of the
early print market and some of the logic behind this exploration. Its
initial appearance on the Mainz Psalter suggests, through the psalter’s
remaindered status, the way Fust and Schoe±er attempted to move left-
over copies by adding some sort of value to their product. The mark
also tracks the development of printing across the Low Countries: Ter
Hoernen’s and Gotz’s devices show a clear appropriation from Fust and
Schoe±er and a willingness to experiment within the given structure, to
alter the imagery available to them and make it their own; after all, they
had adopted the technology of the press, why not also its sign? This ex-
perimentation can be felt in other ways as well: it involved aesthetic
and mechanical exploration of typeface design and formation, concep-
tual exploration of capital investment, and organizational exploration
of machine production; it involved an assessment of the vernacular mar-
ket, and, for Caxton, a subsequent commitment to printing vernacular
books. Indeed, if the printer’s mark signifies anything, it is the inter-
twined nature of technical and financial expertise which defines print as a
Kuskin Ch 1 11/15/07 9:21 AM Page 56
commercial form of literary production, one that relies on scale to re-

cuperate its costs.
In this larger context, Caxton’s device is not unique, in fact it is not
even the first produced in England. That title belongs to the St. Albans
Schoolmaster printer, who introduced the first English printer’s mark
(fig. 1.4) on the 1483 St. Albans Chronicle (STC 9995), his first vernacular
work and, though not a direct reprint of Caxton’s Chronicles of England,
clearly a move into Caxton’s vernacular market.64 The Schoolmaster
printer is best known for his last edition, the 1486 Boke of St. Albans (STC
3308). A folio of ninety leaves, this work combines four texts, signed in
two discrete groups (a1–f8; 2a1–f10). The first signature contains the
“booke of hawkyng” (a2–d4), followed by, as the prologue to the second
book tells, a verse treatise on “the maner of hunting for all maner of
beestys” (e1–f10), the final colophon of which attributes it to Juliana
Berners:“¶ Explicit Dam Iulyans Bernes in her boke of hunting” (f4).65
The second signature is also composed of two parts, a “prima pars” pre-
senting the “liber armorum” or “booke of . . . Coote armuris” (2a1–b5v),
which begins with a biblical history for churls and gentlemen, itemizes
gentlemanly behavior in some detail, and ends with a final blank leaf
(2b6). This is followed by “the Blaysng of all maner armys in latyn french
and English” (2a1), which enumerates the various symbols of heraldry
(2c1–f9v). The book ends with the Schoolmaster’s printer’s mark (2f10)
under which is printed, “¶Sanctus albanus,” followed by a final blank
leaf. The groups of signatures, the blank leaves, and the separate colo-
phons dividing the two books into two sections construct a sense of di-
vided unity for the books, suggesting that they might exist separately
but cohere, too, in an overall interest in the terms of aristocratic sport
and imagery. Thus, George R. Keiser refers to the Boke of St. Albans as
an “o±-the-rack miscellan[y].”66 And so it is. For in its lost reference to
“Dam Iulyans Bernes,” in its use of vocabulary lists and scraps of po-
etry to round out its incomplete quires, in its yoking together of separate
texts that are nevertheless, by degrees, centered around a common theme,
it is a mass-produced commodity that suggests the idiosyncratic hetero-
geneity of a personal book. The Boke of St. Albans is a book of contradic-
tions: though it provides a history for the interests of a landed aristocracy
and emulates the very shape that such a history would come in, it is none-
theless made up of new forms and disseminated in a medium that seeks to
make a return on investment through volume.
Kuskin Ch 1 11/15/07 9:21 AM Page 57
Figure 1.4. The Schoolmaster’s device. St. Albans Chronicle, K9. Printed by the St.
Albans Schoolmaster Printer, St. Albans, c. 1485 (STC 9995). By permission of
University of Chicago Library, Special Collections Research Center.
Kuskin Ch 1 11/15/07 9:21 AM Page 58
The Boke of St. Albans’s rhetorical modes—taxonomy and instruc-

tion—appear to foreclose on any exploration of such contradictions.
Everything in the Boke of St. Albans seems to be defined by the same
literal logic by which “the huntyng of the haare” (e5v) is reduced to a set
of protocols, or the company names—“an unkyndenes of Rauenes,”
“a Synguler of Boris,” “a Noonpaciens of Wyues,” and “a multipliencs of
husbondis,” and so forth (f6–f7)—are listed o±. So, the eagle appears, ob-
jectively, the first bird in a list of birds arranged according to social rank
beginning with an emperor and moving all the way through to “Mus-
kyte,” which is just as objectively presented as the only bird befitting a
“holiwater clerke” (d3v –d4). This rhetorical style continues until the last
book, “the blasyng of armys” (2c1), which focuses on heraldry, a topic,
the text admits, too vast to cover in its entirety: “Bot for to reherce all
the signys that be boren in armys as Pecok Pye Barr Dragon Lyon &
Dolfyn and flowris and leeuys it war to longe a tariyng . ner I can not do
hit : ther be so mony” (2c1). After proceeding through 117 colored wood-
cut shields, each with a short prose commentary, and a blaze in Latin,
French, and English, the text finally breaks out of taxonomy and proposes
a more general rule for understanding heraldry:
Bot ye shall knaw generally that for all tharmys the wich lyghtly
any man has seen in his days : ye haue rules su¤cient as I be leue. to
dyscerne and blase any of theym : and it be so that ye be not in yowre
mynde to hasty or to swyfte in the dyscernyng . Ner ye may not
ouerryn swyftly the forsayd rules . bot dyligently haue theym in
yowre mynde . and be not to full of consaitis . For he that will hunt ii
haris in oon owre : or oon while oon . an other while an other lightly
be losys both . Thefore take heede to the rules . I± so be that they
be not a generall doctrine : yet shall thai profecte for thys sciens
gretly (2f8v )
The passage suggests a system of analysis drawn from the process of

description. This sense is at the heart of the verb to blaze, which the Ox-
ford English Dictionary defines as “To describe heraldically, to blazon
(v 2.3).” The OED first records this usage for 1440, explaining, “Its later
history is confused with that of blazon, evidently through associating
the infinitive blasen with the pre-existing n. blason, blazon ‘shield,
Kuskin Ch 1 11/15/07 9:21 AM Page 59
heraldic shield.’ The proper senses of blaze and blazon, acted and reacted
upon each other in the 16th century . . . there may also be often traced
an association with blaze v.1, as if to ‘blaze abroad,’ were to ‘expose to
the full blaze of publicity.’” The entry under Blazon pushes this develop-
ment back to the fifteenth century. Across the period, then, the noun for
shield becomes the verb for analyzing and announcing the shield’s sign.
The etymology suggests a compression of meanings by which the ob-
ject becomes its own analysis, indeed, its own public announcement. The
eighteenth-century sense of to gloss as to glaze (OED v 2.b.) presents a sim-
ilar parallel between appearance and interpretation, but the relationship
is never so close as with to blaze: glossing is premised on the insertion of a
new word clarifying the original text, and its archetypal manifestation is
the interlinear or marginal note; blazing asserts the description of the ob-
ject itself as a form of analysis. Unlike glossing, blazing makes no direct
hermeneutic claims, and unlike allegory, it does not move inward to a ker-
nel of truth but instead remains skating along the surface of a sign, trac-
ing out the details of the shell itself. The Boke of St. Albans’s “generall
doctrine” is not doctrinal at all; it o±ers reading as an engagement with
literal appearance.
The illusion of such a system of reading as superficial description is
that it is without depth of insight, that because it derives from and con-
centrates on the surface, its implications are by definition shallow. The
Boke of St. Albans certainly is occupied with articulating the literal, but
this does not preclude its recognition of the way objects conspire to a
profound symbolic complexity. The text makes this point explicitly on its
final leaf of prose. The first tract on heraldry, the “liber armorum,”
o±ered a clear division between the gentlemen and the churls where it re-
counted that both kinds of men descended from Adam and Eve, but
“Cayn bec[a]me a chorle and all his ofspryng after hym by the cursing of
god and his owne fadre adam ¶ And Seth was made a gentilman thorow
his fadres and moderis blissyng . And of the ofspryng of Seth Noe come
a gentilman by kynde” (2a1v). So Noah divided the world among his sons:
to Ham, the churl, he gives “Europe that is to say the contre of churlys”;
to Japheth, “the West parte of the Worlde. And to the occident ende . . .
that is to say the contre of gentilmen”; and to Shem, “the oryente thow
shal take . . . that is to say the contre of tempurnes” (a2). Here social dis-
tinction appears embedded in biblical history and inscribed across the
Kuskin Ch 1 11/15/07 9:21 AM Page 60
surface of the earth. The book’s final pages would seem to follow this out
by arguing that coats of arms, too, are inherited “of owre fadyrs or of
owre moodyr or of owre predycesessoris” (2f 8 v ). Yet the very final pas-
sage ultimately turns away from such a conclusion in its closing remarks
that anyone may assume a coat of arms:
¶ The faurith maner of whise we haue thoos armys the wich we take
on owre awne propur auctoritie . as in theys days opynly we se . how
many poore men by thayr grace fauoure laboure or deseruyng : ar
made nobuls Sum by theyr prudens . Sum bi ther manhod . sum bi
ther strength . sum bi ther coning . sum bi od jusituys And of theys
men mony by theyr awne autoritie haue take armys to be borne to
theym and to ther hayris of whom it nedys not here to reherse ye
namys . Neuer the lees armys that be so takyn they may lefully and
freely beer . Bot yit they be not of so grete dignyte and autorite as
thos armys the wich ar grauntyt day by day by the autorite of a
prynce or of a lorde . Yet armys bi a mannys propur auctorite take : if
an other man haue not borne theym afore : be of strength enogh.
(2f9r–v)
As with the entire book, the argument begins with taxonomy—all the
ways one may come to arms—and this lends it a sense of concrete reason-
ing. Prepared for by the earlier argument that gentlemen are made so by
biblical precedent, the reader might expect disparagement of social mo-
bility, “as in theys days opynly we se.” Instead, the book moves away from
this taxonomy to suggest that “a mannys propur auctorite . . . be of
strength enogh” to assume a coat of arms. Rather than fixed in history
and passed on through inheritance, heraldry—the mark of a gentleman—
is a tangible sign of authority dating back to Cain and Abel which may
“yet” be taken up by “proper” (OED, 1.A., “intrinsic”) authority in the
present. Here, then, is the central contradiction of Boke of St. Albans: on
its surface—in its emulation of the personal manuscript, its attentiveness
to birds and shields as discrete objects—it appears to view the material
forms of authority as literal, fixed by predetermined categories that it has
no part in shaping; within its governing logic, however, it recognizes that
all these objects—shields, birds, and by extension books—are markers of
authority in a wider context and in fact are constituted through individual
Kuskin Ch 1 11/15/07 9:21 AM Page 61
participation. The method is superficial but nonetheless profound; for

by remaining descriptive rather than becoming didactic, the Boke of
St. Albans avoids its fundamental contradiction to a large degree. So the
aristocratic buyer may recognize the book’s peculiar “o± the rack” quali-
ties but still be assured that the basic distinction between the descen-
dents of Abel and those of Cain can be read in the contemporary signs
of hunting and heraldry; just so, a more variegated class of readers—
the clerks and merchants of Oxford, the minor gentry, anyone who
might have free time enough to aspire to the rather loose social category
of “gentleman” over “churl”—may appropriate those same objects for
themselves, not by consciously thinking through the abstract implications
of authority but by simply purchasing the book and relishing its descrip-
tion and evocation of the materials that define his or her culture. In short,
the St. Albans Schoolmaster o±ers his readers a bibliography for ma-
terial culture.
Like Caxton before him, and Hus after him, the Schoolmaster
printer reflects on printing in a way that suggests he is not only interested
in producing vernacular literature, but in engaging his audience in the
process of reading the printed book. For example, the St. Albans Chronicle
opens with a short rubric explaining the use of signatures as a table of
contents for the uninitiated: “Here begynnys a schort & breue tabull on
thes Cronicles And ye must vnderstond yt eueri leef is markid vnder with
A. on .ii. iii . & iiij. & so forth to viij . all the letters . an what sum euer ye
fynd shortli writin in this table . ye shall find oppenli in the same letter”
(a). The Schoolmaster’s emphasis is chiefly bibliographical, on the de-
scription of the page, and on identifying marks on leaves. Yet this mate-
rial interest is pointed at a social context. Signatures are technically an aid
to the binder; the Schoolmaster printer has turned this production system
into an aid for consumption so as to teach his buyer to read the book, not
as a process of construing letterforms into sounds (which he seems to as-
sume his readers can already do) but by teaching his readers to move
around the surface of the book as an object. The Schoolmaster e±ectively
reproduces an instrument of production (the signature) as one of con-
sumption (the index). The St. Albans Chronicle and the Boke of St. Albans
are similar: they both come late in the Schoolmaster printer’s career, and
are his only vernacular works and his only folio editions. They are both
printed in multiple colors. Thus though they may both appear to follow
Kuskin Ch 1 11/15/07 9:21 AM Page 62
out traditional manuscript genres, history, and heraldry, they are also
overtly innovative, moving into the vernacular by exploiting new techno-
logical practices, and further, by assuming a first-person voice in their
various prologues and colophons, which, if not as personable as Caxton’s,
still speak directly to the reader.
This self-reflective quality, in which one mode turns into the next, is
inherent in bibliography: derived from the Greek word for book writing,
its earliest English meaning, first recorded in 1678, is not about the re-
search into or description of books so much as their creation: bibliogra-
phy is the writing of books (OED, no.1). Concerned with both the pro-
duction (writing) and consumption (use, description, and cataloguing) of
books, bibliography encompasses both ends of book use. A bibliography
of material culture would apply this logic outward, doubling the produc-
tion of books with its consumption as a model for commodities overall.
To put the implications of my argument somewhat plainly, then, I suggest
that the study of early printing has tended to forget this aspect of bibli-
ography and to concentrate almost exclusively on the description of early
books and the taxonomy of early printers. As a result bibliography as a
field has avoided any serious engagement with the relationship between
production and consumption, and with the symbolic elements of the book.
Thus, much writing on early printing tends to read like the first three sec-
tions of the Boke of St. Albans, fascinating for its detail but strangely literal,
as if it is uninterested in the larger questions of authority that underwrite
the entire field. The Boke of St. Albans is significant for many reasons—it
is one of the first uses of the printer’s mark in England; the first printed
treatise on hawking, heraldry, and hunting; the first use of red, black, and
yellow printing in England—and one of them is because it reflects on the
symbolic power of commodities to evoke authority. The Boke of St. Al-
bans’s process of reflection is intrinsic to what makes it a book, and as
such is part of, and not opposed to, bibliographical analysis.
Such a self-reflective bibliographic mode gives the Boke of St. Albans a
particularly autoexegetical quality, for ultimately the Boke of St. Albans in-
vites the reader to turn its lessons upon itself. A number of the individual
elements of the Schoolmaster’s mark are illustrated in the Boke of St. Al-
bans: 2e6v shows the “tractys in armys” (fig. 1.5) that appears within the
Schoolmaster’s orb, and 2f4v presents a “Saltori a maner of a cros” (fig. 1.6),
a sign that “were geuyn to rich men” (2f5), a very close approximation
Kuskin Ch 1 11/15/07 9:21 AM Page 63
Figure 1.5. The “tractys in armys.” Boke of St. Albans, 2e6v. Printed by the St. Albans
Schoolmaster Printer, St. Albans, c. 1485 (STC 3308). British Library IB.55712. By
permission of the British Library.
Kuskin Ch 1 11/15/07 9:21 AM Page 64
Figure 1.6. The “Saltori a maner of a cros.” Boke of St. Albans, 2f4v. Printed by the
St. Albans Schoolmaster Printer, St. Albans, c. 1485 (STC 3308). British Library
IB.55712. By permission of the British Library.
Kuskin Ch 1 11/15/07 9:21 AM Page 65
to his variation on the cross. More broadly, from the Mainz Psalter on-
ward, the use of shields for a printer’s mark makes an obvious connection
between them and the signs of heraldry. Sylvia L. Thrupp notes a specific
doubling between heraldry and the term mark in Harley MS 2259, which
she describes as “the heraldic treatise compiled in 1454–5, which bears the
name R. Strangeways, had also placed the origin of arms at the siege of
Troy. At first called ‘marks,’ they were not called arms, it says, until after
‘brute and his knyghtis’ had settled in England.”67 In the passage under
the rubric “How longe Cote armures wer begunne afore thyncarnacion of
owre lorde Ihesu cryst,” the Schoolmaster too describes the founding of
heraldry before Christ at the siege of Troy:
Iafeth made first Barget and ther in he made a ball in token of all the
worlde . and afterwarde . iix x . yere and . xxiij . before thyncarnacion
of Criste : Cote armure was made . and figurid at the sege of troye
where in gestys troianorum it tellith that the first begynnyng of the
lawe of armys was . the wiche was essugured and begunne before any
lawe in the worlde . bott the lawe of nature . and before the . x . co-
mawndementis of god (2a2r–v )
The passage locates the founding moment of the blaze, the moment
of inscription at which the shield and the sign of the shield become one
before the coming of Christ at the founding moment of European
mythology. This doubling of the shield and the sign on that shield re-
curs in the Schoolmaster printer’s own mark: for where Japheth inscribes
a ball on his shield to begin the practice of cote amure for history, the
Schoolmaster inscribes a shield on a ball to introduce the English printed
trademark. Both of these moments are assertions of authority, and in
the Schoolmaster’s case it is also a moment of twofold appropriation:
appearing initially on a work lifted from Caxton’s own catalogue, the
Schoolmaster’s mark represents the “Orb and Cross” style, first used at
the monastic press at Rostock in 1476 by the Brothers of the Common
Life. This device was the first used in Germany not based on Fust and
Schoe±er’s design and was widely disseminated in a version introduced in
1481 on Johannes de Colonia’s and Nicolas Jenson’s Lectura super
Clementinas (fig. 1.7).68 Jenson’s device suggests the imperial orb, dividing
the globe into three sectors and locating Jerusalem.69 The Schoolmaster
Kuskin Ch 1 11/15/07 9:21 AM Page 66
Figure 1.7.
Johannes de
Colonia’s and
Nicolas Jenson’s
device. Lectura super
Clementinas. Printed
by Johannes de
Colonia and
Nicolas Jenson,
Venice, 1481.
British Library
IC.20368.
By permission of
the British Library.
Kuskin Ch 1 11/15/07 9:21 AM Page 67
appropriates a sign from Jenson, stamps it onto his version of a title lifted
from Caxton’s portfolio, and follows it up with the very text that explains
his practice. In e±ect, he asserts that since “an other man haue not borne”
these particular arms “afore” he “be of strength enogh” to bear them
himself. The Boke of St. Albans blazes it own mark.
We can see exactly this sort of self-conscious appropriation in the
English printer’s marks of the early sixteenth century. Briefly, upon Cax-
ton’s death, de Worde took over his business, moving it to Fleet Street
in London in 1500. De Worde used a number of di±erent devices
throughout his career, all of which draw upon Caxton’s initials and inter-
lace design. His last mark, introduced on his 1520 edition of Robert
Whittington’s Syntaxis (STC 25547) and passed on to John Byddell upon
his death, is particularly synthetic (fig. 1.8). This device combines a styl-
ized version of Caxton’s original with elements referring to de Worde’s
own operation: the sun stands for his shop at the sign of the sun on Fleet
Street, and the roses for the house of Lancaster, important to de Worde
after 1494 when he adopted the title “The King’s Mother’s Printer,” re-
ferring to his client Margaret Beaufort. De Worde reproduces Caxton’s
device as one of a set of signs authorizing his press. What is striking here
is the way these signs are repeated: Caxton’s device appears three times,
on the center shield and on the movable upper and lower borders; de
Worde’s sun recurs twice; the Lancastrian rose five times, once in the cen-
ter and then on all four corners of the borders; and the whole device is
actually repeated on both the recto and verso sides of the page. Indeed,
the device’s design is, in fact, a much larger repetition of one made the
year before by Ambrose Holbein for the Basel printer Johannes Froben
(fig. 1.9). De Worde has merely had the arches, martial figures, and
cherubs cut away and then inserted his own insignia. Just as the School-
master used Jenson’s design, de Worde uses Holbein’s as a contemporary
frame for presenting an array of signs pointing to his authority, in a sort
of collage of repetition highlighting his inheritance from Caxton, his
location, and his noble client.
Similarly, Richard Pynson’s first device demonstrates how aware
these early printers were of the symbolic nature of appropriation. Pyn-
son bought out the remains of de Machlinia’s press some time after 1486
and began printing on his own after 1489.70 Pynson’s first editions were
two English law books printed by Guillaume Le Tailleur of Rouen,
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Figure 1.8. Wynkyn de Worde’s device. Robert Whittington, Syntaxis, G4v. Printed
by Wynkyn de Worde, London, 1520 (STC 25547). British Library C.40.e.1.(5.). By
Kuskin Ch 1 11/15/07 9:21 AM Page 69
Figure 1.9. Johannes Froben’s device ( by Ambrosius Holbein). Desiderius Erasmus,

Moriae Encomium. Printed by Johannes Froben, Basle, 1519. British Library 1080.k.3.
By permission of the British Library.
Kuskin Ch 1 11/15/07 9:21 AM Page 70
Thomas Littleton’s Tenures (STC 15721), and Nicholas Statham’s Abridg-

ment des libres annales (STC 23238; fig. 1.10). These books bear Le Tail-
leur’s mark, one Pynson seems to have used as a basis for his own, which
first appears in his 1491/92 Canterbury Tales (STC 5084; fig. 1.11), a
reprint of Caxton’s edition. Both marks are designed as weavings of the
printers’ initials: in Tailleur’s case, playing o± his profession as a tailor, in
Pynson’s, his as a glover. Indeed, some copies of the Tenures have this new
design stamped on them. Like the Schoolmaster printer’s mark, then,
Pynson’s mark reveals the series of appropriations he used to secure his
position in the market. Appropriation is endemic to the genre: the very
mark that identifies Pynson is in fact purchased with the rest of his stock
by Robert Redman after Pynson’s death. Richard Pynson’s initials are
thus reproduced as “R.R.” for Robert Redman throughout the 1530s.
Redman’s widow, Elizabeth Pickering, even uses Pynson’s original mark
in her 1541 edition of the Magna Carta (STC 9275). This seamless passage
obscures Pynson’s antagonistic relationship to Redman: while Pynson
was alive Redman reprinted an edition of the Magna Carta giving his ad-
dress as Pynson’s old shop at the sign of the George in St. Clement’s
parish just outside Temple Bar. At that time, Pynson’s location was also at
the sign of the George, but in St. Dunstan’s parish, just inside Temple
Bar. Redman seems to have intended some confusion here, as he went on
to reprint Pynson’s own titles under the sign of the George, and used a
slightly modified version of one of his later marks (STC 9272; fig. 1.12).
Pynson immediately reissued these titles, objecting to Redman’s practice
and quality by nicknaming him “Rudeman” in a letter to the reader.71
To sum up: the development of the printer’s mark illustrates some
crucial terms for early English printing. It shows the way the press devel-
oped a heraldry for itself that combines craft and mercantile sensibilities,
and emphasizes an overall practice of appropriation. In this, it broaches a
general fact about print production: print may be an example of mecha-
nized production, but its insertion into manuscript culture was not auto-
mated. Printers had to think through relationships of supply and demand
in order to ensure that consumption grew in pace with production. This
immersion in strategy gives the early printed book both a tremendously
naïve sense—witness the Schoolmaster’s instructions to his reader as to
how to move around his text—that is correspondingly sophisticated, an
ongoing reflection on the nature of textual change. If any aspect of the
Kuskin Ch 1 11/15/07 9:21 AM Page 71
Figure 1.10. Guillaume Le Tailleur’s device. Nicholas Statham, Abridgment des libres
annales, z7v. Printed by Guillaume Le Tailleur (for Richard Pynson), Rouen, 1490
(STC 23238). British Library IB.43928. By permission of the British Library.
Kuskin Ch 1 11/15/07 9:21 AM Page 72
Figure 1.11. Richard Pynson’s device. Geoffrey Chaucer, Canterbury Tales, k5v. Printed
by Richard Pynson, St. Clement Danes, c. 1492 (STC 5084). British Library G.11588.
Kuskin Ch 1 11/15/07 9:21 AM Page 73
Figure 1.12. Robert Redman’s device. The Boke of Magna Carta with Diuers other
Statues, f. 200v. Printed by Robert Redman, London, 1534 (STC 9272). British Li-
brary C.112.a.6. By permission of the British Library.
printed book is paradoxical, it is this simultaneous urge to proclaim the

superficially obvious and the knowingness that any such proclama-
tion implies. The importance of the printer’s mark is that it is a sign of
market development, a visual poetic of commerce that describes a graphic
process of engagement with the reader and indicates the symbolic depth
Kuskin Ch 1 11/15/07 9:21 AM Page 74
of the printed page. I term the study of this printed page symbolic bib-
liography.
More specifically, the fifteenth-century printers’ mark on English
literary history concerns the importance of vernacular-language books.
For soon after Caxton’s return to England three other printers begin op-
erating there too. In 1478 an anonymous printer in Oxford issued texts
featuring Jerome, Aristotle, and Aegidius de Columna: the Exposicio sancti
Ieronimi (STC 21443), followed by two texts in the same typeface, the
Libri ethicorum (STC 752) and the Tractatus de peccato originali (STC
158).72 In 1479 the Schoolmaster printer published his first text, the Li-
bellus super Tullianis elegantiis (STC 6289); and in 1480 John Lettou, a
Lithuanian trained in Rome and apparently working with an English
draper, William Wylcoks, as a financier or partner, printed the Quaes-
tiones super xii libros metaphysicae (STC 581) and number of indulgences.
These printers’ early output is halting, but clearly aware of and interest-
ing to Caxton: the Oxford printer used signatures before Caxton, and
both the Schoolmaster printer and Lettou adopted a type similar to his.73
By 1482 each of these presses seems to have experienced a pause in pro-
duction, and in London and Oxford this was accompanied by a change of
personal: E. Gordon Du± records the Schoolmaster printer as printing
nothing in 1482 and only three other texts afterward; an undated edition
of Thomas Littleton’s Tenores nouelli (STC 15719) shows Lettou as joined
by William de Machlinia, from Mechlins, who ultimately bought out his
operation and married his wife, Elizabeth North, also an alien, in 1483;74
in 1480 the Oxford printer is replaced by a Cologne printer, Theodoric
Rood, first recorded in the colophon to the Expositio super tres librios Aris-
totelis de anima (STC 314). Throughout the mid-1480s this new group of
printers moves toward vernacular titles and English writers. In London,
after Lettou’s death, William de Machlinia shifts his business from an ex-
clusive focus on law books to political tracts such as the Promise of Ma-
trimony (STC 9176), and titles of more general interest, such as the 1485
Treatise on the Pestilence (STC 4590, 4591), a reprint of Caxton’s Chronicles
of England (STC 9993), and, more speculatively, John Kay’s Siege of Rhodes
(STC 4594). After the appearance of Rood, the Oxford press has a more
English quality, too, and behind the Latin titles during this period are
a number of commentaries or editions by English writers: in 1482
Rood printed the Long parvula (STC 23163.13), a Latin grammar by John
Kuskin Ch 1 11/15/07 9:21 AM Page 75
Stanbridge with English instructions, and the Liber moralium super threnis
Ieremiae, by John Lathbury (STC 15297); in 1483, with Thomas Hunte,
he printed the Compendium totius grammaticae (STC 695), by John An-
wykyll, a master at Magdalen College (d. 1486), which is followed in one
copy (separately noted as STC 696) by an edition of Terence’s Vulgaria
quedam abs Terencio in Anglica[m] linguam traducta, an edition of Terence
with English interlinear translation in continuous register with the gram-
mar (STC 23904). Rood also printed the text of the Constitutiones prouin-
cials ecclesiae Anglicanae (STC 17102), edited by William Lyndewode, the
Explanationes notabiles deuotissimi viri Richardi Hampole heremite (STC
21261), by Richard Rolle, and, in 1483, the [Q]uonia[m] ex t[er]mi[ni]s
fiu[n]t p[ro]po[si]c[ion]es (STC 16693), which includes the “Insolubilia,”
by Richard Swineshead. In 1485 he printed the Epistolae of Phalaris (un-
listed by STC, Du± 348) containing a prologue by court poet Petrus
Carmelianus, and in 1486 an edition of John Mirk’s Liber Festivalis (STC
17958), a text of English sermons printed by Caxton a few years be-
fore (STC 17957). What appears to have happened in the early 1480s,
then, is a process of self-reflection on business strategy, resulting in a co-
herent move toward vernacular production—what N. F. Blake refers to as
“a strong English association”—by printers who had either observed
Caxton’s practices or come to the same conclusion themselves: English
printing must focus on English texts.75
Rather than a robust turnaround through the strategic use of ver-
nacular titles, however, by 1486 all the printers other than Caxton disap-
pear. Thus we see both St. Albans and de Machlinia introducing vernacu-
lar titles at the end of their careers. The topicality of their work is clear:
Du± records de Machlinia as turning out three editions of the Treatise on
the Pestilence (one with the first English title page; STC 4591); and the Boke
of St. Albans is reprinted by de Worde (with an added treatise on fishing)
in 1496 (STC 3309) and in 1518 (STC 3309.5), and no fewer than thirteen
times under various titles in the sixteenth century. As early as 1484
Richard III’s Parliament instituted legislation enabling foreign labor to
operate in the English market without restriction.76 Nonetheless, the
market appears to have su±ered a tremendous delay in which production
outstripped demand. This is the exact period in which Caxton invested
heavily in new types and presses. Appearing in 1487—a year after the
other printers had given up—Caxton’s mark announces his monopoly on
Kuskin Ch 1 11/15/07 9:21 AM Page 76
English print production and importation, indeed, from what we can

tell, on the entire trade in printed books.77 Though this reveals Caxton’s
ultimate success, it is not entirely triumphant. Paul Needham’s most re-
cent chronology of Caxton’s editions based on watermark evidence shows
Caxton printing only four texts between 1487 and 1488: The Book of Good
Manners (STC 15394), the second edition of the Quattuor sermones (STC
17957), the Festum transfigurationis Iesu Christi (STC 15854), the Com-
memoratio lamentationis (STC 17534), and, hypothetically, the single-sheet
Image of Pity (STC 14077.6). Taken with Caxton’s two liturgical imports,
his emphasis during this period actually demonstrates a turn away from
vernacular titles with the Festum and the Commemoratio. The period after
1483 is indeed a “lean time” for printers in England, not because of a cri-
sis of patronage surrounding Richard III’s court—Richard’s Parliament
seems to have tried to energize the print market—but because of the in-
tense production of vernacular works throughout the middle of the cen-
tury. It is in this context that the printer’s mark signifies: though Rood
and his partner Thomas Hunte in Oxford, and de Machlinia in London
all used colophons naming their operations during their careers, only
Caxton and the Schoolmaster use marks. With the resumption of the
market after 1488, and after Caxton’s death in 1491/92, the new printers
on the English scene—de Worde, Pynson, and Julian Notary and Jean
Barbier—all cultivated their marks with some care. In the wake of the
collapse of the English print market, anonymity ceases to be the rule.
The history of the English printer’s mark is a twofold process: on one
level it entails the overall reflection on book production and consump-
tion; more specifically it concerns a reflection on the vernacular nature of
the English market. These two processes coalesce in the stamp of per-
sonal identity, which extends the circuit of vernacular production and
consumption to the individual English reader.
With this background we can now turn to the multiple layers of
meaning within Caxton’s mark.78 On one layer, it o±ers the St. Albans
Schoolmaster a twofold answer: stamped on Caxton’s liturgical imports,
it signals his turn to the Latin liturgical market in the same way that the
Schoolmaster introduced his mark when he moved into Caxton’s ver-
nacular market. Thus it contrasts the Schoolmaster’s “Orb” with the
elaborate “four” design that asserts Caxton’s particular biography as an
English merchant. I discuss Caxton’s commercial operations in the Low
Kuskin Ch 1 11/15/07 9:21 AM Page 77
Countries in the next chapter; here I would like to emphasize that Cax-
ton repeatedly identifies himself as a Mercer in his prologues and epi-
logues. Mercers were chiefly involved in the export of English cloth,
where the other main guild concerned with export to the Continent, the
Staplers, was primarily concerned with shipments of raw wool to the En-
glish staple at Calais. Still, individual merchants often held dual mem-
bership in both guilds; as E. M. Carus-Wilson, writes, “Wise merchants
became members of both companies.”79 Caxton was no exception, and
Louise Gill has recently brought forward a 1483 pardon that clearly
identifies Caxton as belonging to both guilds.80
Considering Caxton as a Mercer and a Stapler is important for a
number of reasons. In terms of his biography, it clarifies Caxton’s activi-
ties during the late 1450s. For example, there are two charters referring
to William Caxton of the Staple of Calais, dated 1453 and 1458 respec-
tively. The first accuses Caxton of concealing sa±ron in a cask bound
up with a larger shipment of luxury goods, cloth, furs, silk, and ermine;
the second allows him safe conduct into Bruges as part of a diplomatic
party taking part in the Anglo-Burgundian negotiations; a third, un-
related document, records a William “Caston” as purchasing a manu-
script translated in Calais and bound in Flanders.81 As Mercer and Stap-
ler Caxton is an entrepreneur using both cloth and wool export venues to
generate capital for reinvestment in other commodities. Caxton’s silence
around his own role as a Stapler, as well as his absolute silence about the
economic conditions of the press in general—the price of press, paper,
binding, and finished books; the number and kind of laborers he hired;
his relationship with de Worde—should remind us that his biography is
very much a construction, as much a fiction as his role as a dull-witted
bibliophile at the beck and call of his patrons. There are clear reasons
for Caxton to want to streamline his economic identity: during his ten-
ure abroad the Mercers’ guild took increasing control of the Merchant
Adventurers and solidified their identity as a Yorkist political group.82
London-based English economic power progressively favored the prod-
ucts the Mercers shipped—finished cloth—over raw wool after the 1460s.
Caxton’s identity as a Mercer thus serves to present him as a corporate
entity, a guild member rather than an entrepreneur. In this, it writes what
is improvisational in Caxton’s background—his career as a trader mov-
ing between guilds, at times skirting the law, always dealing in economic
Kuskin Ch 1 11/15/07 9:21 AM Page 78
risk—as coherent and institutionally a¤liated. We should not assert

simply that Caxton was a Mercer as an explanation in and of itself with-
out recognizing the complexity inherent in mercantile identity.
If the device contains a message at all, then, it is in this parallel be-
tween these two English commodities, wool and cloth: the arching of the
so-called Arabic four forming a loop through which the seven pierces—
like thread through the eye of a needle—suggests both the wool Cax-
ton dealt with as a Stapler and the cloth he traded in as a merchant. The
decorative paneling and the embroidered leaves contribute a third layer
to this parallel, this time between textile and textual commodities, for at
once they make the device appear a swatch of cloth and, as its left-hand
vertical band doubles the entire image into the stamped cover, a bound
book.83 D. F. McKenzie reminds us that this play between books and
weaving was not unknown to the Middle Ages: “We can find in the ori-
gins of the word ‘text’ itself some support for extending its meaning
from manuscripts and print to other forms. It derives, of course, from the
Latin texere, ‘to weave.’”84 Rather than pointing to an economic system
comfortably situated within a romance world of quiet hierarchies, of
Mercers and Staplers inhabiting mutually exclusive categories, Caxton’s
biography demonstrates the entrepreneurial nature of medieval com-
merce; taken with his continual insistence on his identity as a Mercer, it
suggests his attempt to give this free-form environment definition. Cax-
ton’s claim to be a Mercer renders corporate an economic field that is, in
fact, largely improvisational, hierarchical what is deeply competitive; in
turn, his mark is a graphic assertion that writing and weaving belong to
the same field of commerce. Guild “existence suggests a degree of order
and coherence in the structure of medieval industry,” writes Heather
Swanson, “a precision in the definition of artisan employment that is
in fact quite illusory,” and more abstractly, the mark extends this coher-
ence to the purchaser of the book, o±ering it not just as a commodity
within the world of known commodities, but as one given order and co-
herence by Caxton’s biographical experience and expertise.85 The mark is
both a sign of Caxton’s success in this market and symbol of his authority
over it, and this is what the book o±ers the individual purchaser. Caxton’s
chamber, his prologues and epilogues, and his device, too, perform the
same function: they mold otherwise chaotic market practices into a
coherent shape.
Kuskin Ch 1 11/15/07 9:21 AM Page 79
In part, then, the printers’ mark is entirely generic: hence the stylis-
tic tropes—the various fours, orbs, and shields—that form the devices’
vocabulary. Paradoxically, it is also entirely individual: it imprints in-
dividual identity—Fust and Schoe±er, Ter Hoernen, Gotz, Veldener,
Caxton—onto a specific book. The relationship between the generic and
the singular signifies a relationship between property (the books shipped
across the Channel) and identity (the bold “W. C.”) as an abstraction and
as a specification. That is, it o±ers the book as not just a product but as a
product marked with a symbolic valence. In doing so it embodies a model
for commodity consumption in a condensed form, for private property is
always a movement of appropriation from the generic to the individual.
This is an important di±erence from manuscript production, for it an-
nounces a shift in the mode of production of objects—the increase in
volume, for instance, that makes wholesale importation viable—that is
also a shift in the symbolic relations surrounding the book’s consump-
tion by its audience. The printer’s mark signifies not only the spread of
printing but also a logic of appropriation that accompanies this spread: it
registers how various printers appropriate from one another as the tech-
nology of the press moves across the Continent, and marks each product
as enabling a secondary appropriation by the individual consumer. If the
printing press is a physical machine for the literal production of objects of
knowledge, the trademark device is a symbolic machine for the produc-
tion of these objects’ larger meaning. Physical and symbolic, the printer’s
mark is not simply reflective of the political economy; it is productive of
that economy as well. In this lies a mandate: bibliographical study cannot
restrict itself to the object of the book, for to do so is to separate o± the
book from the totality of cultural production that creates the individual.
Caxton’s biographers have sought to find something to cele-

brate in the act of printing and have told a history in which fours and
sevens speak less of commerce than of Caxton’s awareness of the histori-
cal significance of the press. In this they have read the device as partici-
pating in the history it would create from the perspective of a con-
noisseur rather than a capitalist. Such a reading romanticizes Caxton’s
endeavor and obscures his biography; indeed, it accepts the persona Cax-
ton creates prima facie and looks for depth of meaning in the fours and
sevens. From Caxton’s perspective the trademark had more pressing work
Kuskin Ch 1 11/15/07 9:21 AM Page 80
to do: it had to produce his role as a commercial, indeed as the commer-

cial agent on the book. It accomplished this not in coded depth but in a
symbolic level of meaning that remains entirely on the surface of the
page. Freed of its commemorative relationship to history, the printer’s
mark acts as a sign lifted from commerce and applied to the object of the
book as a symbol of its mode of production. In this, the device accom-
plishes the same function as the modern and postmodern library: it im-
plies an order for books as a metaphor for social organization. To answer
the question of the relationship between print production and biography
embedded in the printer’s mark, then, I o±er the following: the printer’s
mark consolidates the individual into an identity, and makes that identity
available for public consumption. It describes the book as a particular
printer’s work, a form of property transferable to the reader through re-
tail sale, but never entirely divorced from its maker. Thus, it articulates
a relationship between the individual and the book in which the indi-
vidual is organized by the book, but also by implication beyond it, in ways
incoherent.
Kuskin Ch 2 11/15/07 9:29 AM Page 81
Chapter Two
Reading Caxton
Capital and the Alchemical Logic of the Press
The early printed book’s authority is complex: a combination

of the work’s authorial and exemplary authority clearly, but also an ex-
pression of the social and political authority vested in the various audi-
ences that sponsored its initial production in manuscript and its subse-
quent reproduction in print. Readings of William Caxton traditionally
rely on the categories of patronage and commerce to explain his press’s
relationship to this authority.1 Whether patronage and commerce fully
encompass the complexities of textual production during any period of
the Middle Ages is beyond the scope of this book; however, in Caxton’s
case the terms have done a particular disservice. Caxton’s prologues and
epilogues move between the issues of patronage and commerce rather
freely; in insisting on a static opposition of these categories—that Caxton
viewed his work according to one process or the other—we obscure both
the cultural context in which he operated and his specific contribution
to literary history. In an e±ort to understand better Caxton’s early con-
struction of the printed book’s authority, I suggest that we reconsider the
categories of patronage and commerce within the larger production of
knowledge fostered by the press.
In place of patronage and commerce, I o±er capital as a medium for
reading Caxton which recognizes the essential doubling of textual and
economic practices at work in his production process, a doubling that al-
lows him to present the printed book as an object of authority connected
81
Kuskin Ch 2 11/15/07 9:29 AM Page 82
to but also separate from the manuscripts of the English and Burgundian
courts. Caxton’s use of capital can be read at a number of points. In this
chapter I examine four: the London Mercers’ letter of October 17, 1464,
instructing him to negotiate on behalf of Edward IV; his prose accompa-
niment to the first English book, the 1473 Recuyell of the Histories of Troye
(STC 15375); his 1476 Advertisement (STC 4890) for the Ordinale ad usum
Sarum (STC 16228); and his entry on printing in the 1480 Chronicles of
England (STC 9991). My logic for this selection is fairly straightforward:
the letter demonstrates capital’s symbolic authority for Caxton prior to
his work with the press, the Recuyell and the Advertisement are among his
earliest announcements of the printed book to readers in Burgundy and
England, and the brief entry in the Chronicles provides Caxton’s terse
definition of printing. Taken together, these texts articulate the multiple
forms of authority contained within the printed book, and in what fol-
lows I trace Caxton’s construction of a persona—what A. S. G. Edwards
and Carol M. Meale have called the “distinctive identity as a producer”—
that allows him to introduce the printed book into the reading practices
of the late Middle Ages.2 In these four texts the issues of authority, per-
sona, and printing are bound to capital by the word fourme, but we should
recognize that the essential relationship they describe is not unique: capi-
tal, authority, print, and persona dominate Caxton’s writing from begin-
ning to end, and if Caxton’s first major literary prologue in the Recuyell
opens his career with these topics, his last in the Eneydos (STC 24796) is
no less concerned with them. Understood as engaged with the production
of knowledge, rather than contained by pre-existing scholarly categories,
Caxton’s writing reveals an awareness not merely of the complexities of
the printed book, but of a larger economy in which capital is specifically
used to reproduce it in greater amounts. Capital for the production of
greater capital: Caxton’s is a capitalist mode of production.
The Fourmes of Commerce
Caxton is first recorded in Bruges around 1450 amidst a period of un-

stable trade negotiations among England, Burgundy, and France.3 In
1433 Philip the Good appropriated Brabant, Hainault, Zeeland, and Hol-
land from Jacqueline of Bavaria, Duke Humphrey’s wife, to consolidate
Kuskin Ch 2 11/15/07 9:29 AM Page 83
them with Burgundy and Flanders under his rule. To protect these hold-
ings, Philip aligned himself with Charles VII and banned English cloth.
Weavers in the Low Countries were dependent upon this cloth, however,
and uprisings in Bruges encouraged Philip to meet with English repre-
sentatives and restore trade at the 1438 Treaty of Calais. This treaty was
renewed until 1447, at which time Philip again banned English cloth. In
1449 the English countered with an embargo against Burgundian goods.
Combined with the outbreak of the English civil war, this resulted in a
fierce decline in wool exports, including almost ten months without trade
between 1459 and 1460.4 Appointed governor of the English Merchant
Adventurers shortly after this crisis, Caxton was deeply involved in
restoring stable trade relations, and a letter from the London Mercers
dated October 17, 1464, records his initial instructions to take diplomatic
action. These instructions describe an economy in which capital and po-
litical authority circulate so freely that Caxton is required to perform an
abstract conversion from one to the other. Both material and discursive,
this process of exchange illustrates the use of capital in the construction
of political authority.
English trade to the Continent traditionally went through two main
groups: the Staplers, who exported wool to Calais, and the Merchant Ad-
venturers.5 The Adventurers represented a fellowship of guilds involved
in import and export trading, particularly in the Low Countries’ seasonal
fairs of Antwerp, Bergan op Zoom, Ghent, and Middelburg. The Adven-
turers’ business was ultimately interrelated with the Staplers’, whose ex-
port of wool to Calais often underwrote their more speculative imports.
Any reduction in wool production and export, therefore, impacted the
Merchant Adventurers twice over, first by reducing cloth output and sec-
ond by shrinking the credit available for their import business. As captain
of Calais, Richard Neville, the Earl of Warwick, aligned himself with the
exiled dauphin, Louis, and when the political landscape shifted in 1461—
Edward became king and Charles VII of France died—Louis became a
natural and important political ally for Warwick, persuading him to bro-
ker a marriage between Edward and his sister-in-law, Bona of Savoy. As
Warwick developed this alliance, trade negotiations involving Burgundy
were repeatedly postponed and, while the English wool trade was bol-
stered by the garrisoning and supply of Calais, the Merchant Adventurers
remained without a firm treaty with Burgundy.6
r e a d i n g c a x t o n 83
Kuskin Ch 2 11/15/07 9:29 AM Page 84
Chartered in 1296, the Adventurers were by the mid-fifteenth cen-

tury largely dominated by the Mercers’ guild and headquartered in Mer-
cers’ Hall in London.7 The Mercers exported English-made cloth to the
Low Countries and imported wine and luxury merchandise such as hats,
tennis balls, playing cards, featherbeds, furs, and spices. Concentrating
their export trade on Burgundy, the Mercers were particularly sensitive to
fluctuations in the market, and when trade initially falters in 1459 they
show a 60 percent drop in exports, one much greater than the national
average (fig. 2.1). The governor of the Merchant Adventurers in Bruges
at this time, a fishmonger named William Overey, obtained temporary
renewals for trade with Burgundy through 1463, but competing against
the Italians and Hansa for a wide range of markets without a negotiated
treaty, the Merchant Adventurers’ cloth trade continued to decline even
after wool began to recover. The London Mercers responded by insisting
that a Mercer be made governor: in May 1462 they obtained a patent
from Edward to elect one of their own; by June Overey was discovered
Units 24,260
exported
20,000
19,000
18,000 Broadcloth s
Broadcloths
17,000 Sacks
SacksofofWool
Wooland
andFell
Fell
16,000
15,000
14,000
13,000
12,000
11,000
10,000
9,000
8,000
7,000
6,000
5,000
4,000
3,000
2,000
1,000
0
1459 1460 1461 1462 1463 1464 1465 1466 1467 1468 1469 1470 1471
Figure 2.1. London merchants’ export trade in wool and broadcloths from 1459
through 1471 as recorded in enrolled customs and subsidy accounts.
Kuskin Ch 2 11/15/07 9:29 AM Page 85
taking bribes from the town authorities at Antwerp and was replaced by
the mercer John Pickering as interim governor; by August Caxton ap-
peared in o¤ce. In truth, Overey seems to have presided over a growth in
the London Mercers’ exports but a decline overall, and his political clout
is testified to by the fact that he remained in important diplomatic posi-
tions through 1471, well after this scandal. With Caxton’s appointment,
however, the national average begins to grow as well, apparently in the
face of the existing Anglo-Burgundian embargoes.8 Still, the Adventurers
lacked a permanent treaty, and in the summer of 1463 the English Parlia-
ment put greater pressure on Burgundy by announcing an embargo on
imported luxury items. At the same time Edward attempted to control
the flow of bullion out of England by reiterating the 1430 Ordinance of
Partition of Wool that legislated that at least 75 percent of the value
of wool sold on the Continent be paid for in cash.9 Warwick’s proposed
solution to marry the king to Bona of Savoy was eliminated by Septem-
ber 1464, when Edward publicly announced his marriage to Elizabeth
Woodville and trade negotiations ground to a halt.
In response, Edward commissioned Caxton and Warwick’s repre-
sentative, Sir Richard Whetehill, to meet with the Duke of Burgundy.
In October 1464 the London Mercers John Lambert, John Warde,
John Baker, and John Alburgh forwarded to Caxton a letter from Edward
IV concerning the approaching expiry, on November 1, of the Anglo-
Burgundian treaty. A copy of the Mercers’ cover letter remains in the
Mercers’ records. It opens, “Welboloued we grete you well certifiyng
youe that as towchyng the convencion of the lordes that was appoynted
to begyn at sent Omers the first daye of the present moneth of october /
the whiche we trusted vppon / it is so that it holdith not.”10 The occasion
for the letter is the long postponed “convencion of the lordes” scheduled
to meet on the first of the month at St. Omer. With an unresolved treaty
and an overdue meeting, Edward’s economic program seems desperate.
“Neuer the lesse,” the letter continues, “oure soueraign lorde the kyng
Remembryng that thentrecourse expired the ¤rst day of Nouembre next
comyng / hath written a letter to the maire of london / wherof ye shall
receyue a copye closed in this letter / And where as the kyng by his lettre
willeth that suche a persone as shulde go in message for the perogacion
of thentrecours shulde be provided in suche fourme as ye may conceyve
by the lettre.” Rather than simply detailing Edward’s plans, the Mercers’
Kuskin Ch 2 11/15/07 9:29 AM Page 86
cover letter records the sequence of letters—from Edward to the mayor,

from the Mercers to Caxton, and in its roundabout way, from Edward to
Caxton—involved in communicating royal authority. Indeed, instead
of delineating Caxton’s new role, it merely directs Caxton to adopt
“suche fourme as ye may conceyve by the lettre.” Initially, at least, the
Mercers’ letter is concerned with giving discourse on authority a material
form, first by tracing its movement from the king to the anonymous “per-
sone as shulde go” in the exchange of letters and second by locating the
“fourme” of this authority in the “lettre”—the enclosed letter that allows
Caxton to adapt royal authority to his person and the individual letters
that spell out Caxton’s instructions. In a sense, the Mercers’ cover let-
ter is a letter about letters, and as such it produces Caxton’s authority
through a twofold process of giving form to discursive authority.
As the Mercers’ letter continues, it reveals additional concerns about
Caxton’s change of “fourme.” The Mercers tell Caxton, “It is thougth
here that it is not oure parte here in the Citie to take vppon vs a mater of
so grete weyght where that all tymes here to fore the kyng by thavise of
his lords of his Councell have made the provision in that behalfe.” They
present their own authority as tremendously limited, extending to the
boundaries of London and judging the king’s actions based on prece-
dence. Given these limitations, they defer their reply to the mayor of
London: “Vppon this we have labored to the mayre with the wardens
of diuers felyshippes aventerers that he will write an aunsware to the kyng
of his lettre in the most plesuant wise that he can that it will pleas his
highnes by thavise of his Councell to provide for this mater for the weall
of all his subietts.” According to the Mercers, the mayor and wardens
command “most plesuant wise” language and can answer the king appro-
priately. This detail returns the letter to the relationship between writ-
ing and authority. Yet the Mercers are not just concerned about the writ-
ten representation of authority, but also about who will “provide” for
this “mater.” This consideration reveals an implicit understanding that
any change of “fourme” on Caxton’s part must be underwritten finan-
cially. These moneys are no doubt necessary to cover the pragmatic ex-
penses of Caxton’s travel, communication, and per diem; nevertheless,
they also constitute another transformation from the abstract and discur-
sive—financial capital—to the material goods involved in Continental
diplomacy.
Kuskin Ch 2 11/15/07 9:29 AM Page 87
The Mercers conclude that Caxton will have to fund his change in
status himself. This funding, they suggest, should occur not through
Caxton’s available cash but through his ability to raise capital by obtain-
ing credit on his personal assets: “Wherfor we pray youe for the welle of
alle the kyngs subietts by thavise of the felishipp there in as goodly hast as
ye can labour for a meane by the whiche your persones & goods may be
in suretie for a reasonable tyme.”11 Caxton’s biography records him mak-
ing such credit deals long before and well after his tenure as governor.
For example, on December 11, 1453, Caxton appears in London at the
King’s Chancery permanently transferring all of his material and finan-
cial assets in England and abroad to the mercer Robert Cosyn and to a
clerk of the papers of one of the sheri±’s courts, John Rede; yet on Sep-
tember 7 of the following year Cosyn testified that he owed Caxton £290,
to be repaid in regular shipments of cloth and pewter vessels. As partial
payment, Cosyn gave another mercer, John Shelley, £72 in cloth on Cax-
ton’s behalf. By May 1455 Caxton is back in London as a witness in arbi-
tration between Cosyn and the mercer John Neve, and is dealing with
even larger sums. During these proceedings Neve testified that he owed
Caxton £200 for a deal in Ghent concerning linen. Caxton, in turn, re-
ported that Neve had stood him surety for at least £80, £36 of which he
had repaid, and further said that he was bound for 1,000 marks (approxi-
mately £666) in a dispute with the mercer John Harowe. These dealings
continue across Caxton’s life: in 1474 Caxton paid Neve £190 only to be-
come entangled in a complex countersuit by Neve and the mercer John
Salford; and as late as 1487 Caxton is recorded as taking possession of all
the assets of William Shore, presumably on a credit deal similar to the
one he himself had entered into thirty years before.12
In a literal sense, then, the Mercers’ cover letter and these examples
report a common awareness of the importance of capital for maintaining
and producing greater capital: Caxton needs capital in order to protect
English interests abroad; one way of generating this capital is by obtain-
ing credit on his assets. Yet Caxton’s use of capital here also operates on a
more symbolic level. Edward needs an operative on the Continent; un-
willing, or perhaps unable, to extend the necessary financial resources, he
instead grants an anonymous agent the authority to operate amidst the
nobility at his own personal financial risk. This grant is entirely discur-
sive; indeed, it can only be made tangible through the process of writing
Kuskin Ch 2 11/15/07 9:29 AM Page 88
letters and credit—hence the cover letter’s interest in tracing the move-
ment as well as the embodiment of authority, and hence its interest in es-
tablishing the credit arrangements necessary for making the required
capital available. In return for this grant, the Mercers promise Caxton the
authority to set the terms for his reimbursement: the letter concludes,
“in the mene whyle there com wrytyng from the kyng to the duke / or
eles from the duke to the kyng if it will so happen for perogacion of the
same / and suche costs as ye do vppon the suytt we will that they be gen-
erally levied there in such manner and fourme as ye seme most expedi-
ent.” Though the Mercers must wait for writing between Edward and
Warwick to set the levy, they acknowledge that the final decision as to the
“manner and fourme” of this payment is Caxton’s. Overall, the letter
elaborates an exchange of capital for authority that draws Caxton out of
anonymity and initiates him into Edward’s service; further, it looks ahead
to a second exchange, this time of authority back to capital, in which
Caxton has the authority to decide upon his financial reward. Represent-
ing Caxton’s new authority and the financial measure of that authority,
the term fourme actually encompasses the relationship between authority
and capital completely, demonstrating a singular point at which persona,
authority, and capital intersect.
Caxton and Whetehill succeeded in obtaining an agreement from
Philip, who nevertheless had already issued a complete embargo against
English cloth. As a result, cloth exports from London plummeted once
again. Caxton’s response was to move the Merchant Adventurers to
Utrecht, obtaining grants for trading and fairs, but in January 1465 the
English Parliament issued a second embargo of their own, banning all
Burgundian imports except food. France and Burgundy entered the War
of Public Weal in the summer of 1465, and by December of that year
London exports hit a low of 776 cloths. In any case, Caxton’s change in
status following the October 1464 letter seems to have placed him in di-
rect contact with Warwick. This is evidenced through a 1465 letter in
which Warwick reminds Caxton, as the London Mercers summarize, of
“thabstinens of bying Wares forboden in the dukes londes of Burgoyn.”13
As Anglo-Burgundian trade continued (even though Warwick planned
French marriages for Gloucester and Margaret of York), Caxton appears
to have disregarded these instructions. Edward countered Warwick by
marrying Margaret to Charles the Bold in 1468, and while this did not
Kuskin Ch 2 11/15/07 9:29 AM Page 89
resolve the trade issues between England and Burgundy—diets in Bruges

and Antwerp failed to negotiate trade and bullion relations entirely—it
returned the Merchant Adventurers to Bruges for Margaret and Charles’s
wedding with a positive e±ect on cloth trade for the London Adventurers
(fig. 2.2). Whether Caxton was completely reimbursed for his e±orts is
unknown; he remained, however, in the service of the Yorkist nobility
well after his resignation from the o¤ce of governor: in 1470 he orga-
nized ships for Edward’s return to England in 1471, in 1475 he repeated
this service for Edward’s assault on France, and throughout 1475 he is
recorded as meeting with merchant o¤cials from Burgundy and the
Hansa. Capital provides the structure for Caxton’s transformation of au-
thority, and if the Mercers’ letter portrays the discourse of the fifteenth-
century nobility as operating in a sphere in which they are tentative about
33,052
Units
exported 24,927
24,000 Broadcloth s
Broadcloths
23,000
S ackof
Sacks s oWool
f W o oand
l anFell
d Fell
22,000
21,000
20,000
19,000
18,000
17,000
16,000
15,000
14,000
13,000
12,000
1 1, 0 0 0
10,000
9,000
8,000
7,000
6,000
5,000
4,000
1453–56 1456–59 1459–1462 1462–1465 1465–1469 1469–1471 1471–1476 1476–1479
Figure 2.2. Total English export trade in wool and broadcloths as recorded in
enrolled customs and subsidy accounts in three-year averages from 1453 through
1479.
Kuskin Ch 2 11/15/07 9:29 AM Page 90
asserting their own authority, it also recognizes Caxton’s movement into

this sphere.
The Besynes of Patronage
Caxton is last recorded as governor of the Merchant Adventurers in 1470.

He next surfaces in June 1471, a resident of Cologne, and only reappears
in Bruges after 1472. In late 1473 or early 1474 he printed the Recuyell of
the Histories of Troye, immediately followed by The Game and Play of the
Chess (STC 4920).14 Caxton’s writing in the Recuyell fills these dates out:
the Recuyell begins with a brief preface reviewing the text’s Burgundian
history as originally compiled from Latin and French sources by Raoul le
Fèvre, “preest and chapelayn” to Philip the Good in 1464, and then ex-
plains how Caxton, “mercer of we cyte of London,” began his translation
in Bruges on March 1, 1467, and finished it in Cologne on September 19,
1471. Because the preface, a prologue, and two epilogues provide an ac-
count of Caxton’s faltering progress with his translation, Margaret of
York’s “dredefull comaundement” that he continue, and his eventual use
of the press, Caxton’s biographers have generally read the Recuyell as a
testimony to his loss of the position of governor, his patronage by Mar-
garet, and his general debt to Burgundian literary culture.15 We can sig-
nificantly complicate this reading by recognizing the ways Caxton’s writ-
ing oscillates between a series of conventions—between Burgundian and
English literary traditions, between personal autobiography and the re-
quirements of the genre, and between patronage and commerce. These
tensions allow Caxton to fashion his authority—his “fourme”—in spe-
cifically literary terms.
Caxton opens the Recuyell with three introductory pieces: a preface, a
prologue, and a translation of Le Fèvre’s preface to the original text. Cax-
ton’s preface is very short, telling largely of Charles’s sponsorship of le
Fèvre and of Margaret’s “comaundement” (unsigned, 2) to Caxton. The
prologue is much longer and begins by countering the preface’s textual
history of Burgundian commands with an entirely ahistorical “comande-
ment” of its own: “Whan I remembre that euery man is bounden by the
comandement & counceyll of the wyse man to eschewe slouthe and
ydlenes whyche is moder and nourysshar of vyces and ought to put my
Kuskin Ch 2 11/15/07 9:29 AM Page 91
self vnto vertuous ocupacion and besynesse” (unsigned, 2v). Instead of

contextualizing Caxton’s production of the text in the political environ-
ment of the Burgundian court, the prologue opens with a generalized
“wyse man[’s]” command to activity, “busy-ness.” This shift can be ex-
plained, in part, as Caxton’s adaptation of Le Fèvre, whom he translates
as writing, “But whan y consydere poyse & weye the dredfull comande-
ment of the forsayde redoubtyd prynce whyche is cause of thys werke
not for to correcte the bookys late solempnly translated . but onely for to
augmente y yelde me obeissaunt . . . And alle them that shall rede hyt for
teschewe ydlenes . that so rudely haue put my penne vnto the histories
afore named” (unsigned, 4). Le Fèvre’s preface is a model for Caxton’s,
and in response to the command he lifts from le Fèvre, Caxton takes to
reading “a frenshe booke,” which returns him to the specifics of Burgun-
dian literary culture. The book gives him “grete pleasyr and delyte” for
the “nouelte” of its “fayr langage of frenshe,” and the way its “prose [ is]
so well and compendiously sette and wreton.” Still, Caxton decides to
reproduce the text in a way that revises these pleasures and delights:
“I thought in my self hit shold be a good besynes to translate hyt in to
oure englissh / to thende that hyt myght be had as well in the royame
of Englond as in other landes / and also for to passe therwyth the tyme”
(unsigned, 2v). The prologue therefore acknowledges that literary pro-
duction is culturally specific—that the Recuyell is born of dukes’ and
duchesses’ commands, that its aesthetic value springs from its material
and linguistic context. It also insists that “good besynes” lies in denying
this specificity, in obeying an ubiquitous moral command to “busy-ness,”
in reproducing the text in a new language and form. Yet this denial of
specificity is itself an assertion of the maxim taken from Le Fèvre: thus
Caxton’s prologue sets out its governing tension between abstraction and
specification, between the politically and culturally specific and the apo-
litical and culturally universal.
We can see this tension played out with some precision in Caxton’s
discussions of the process of translation and his relationship to Margaret.
Caxton tells that he took “penne and ynke and began boldly to renne
forth as blynde bayard in thys presente werke whyche is named the
recuyell of the troian historyes” (unsigned, 2v), that he is “simple” and
“imperfect” in French, “rude” in English, alternately poor or simple in
“connyng,” and “meek” in general. Caxton’s writing here is frequently
Kuskin Ch 2 11/15/07 9:29 AM Page 92
dismissed as formulaic, no more than a collection of humility topoi

drawn primarily from Lydgate.16 Following David Lawton, I would like
to suggest that Caxton directs this dullness toward cultural commen-
tary.17 More than merely conventional, Caxton’s writing plays upon its
conventionality to discuss literary production in the service of politi-
cal authority. For Caxton fashions himself as so dull that he simply can-
not complete his project: “Aftyr that y had made and wretyn a fyve or six
quayers . y fyll in dispayr of thys werke and purposid nomore to haue
contynuyd therin and tho quayers leyd apart and in two yere aftyr la-
boured nomore in thys werke” (unsigned, 3). Caxton’s dullness actually
forms the occasion for Margaret’s command:
Anone she fonde a defaute in myn englissh whiche sche comanded

me to amende and more ouer comanded me straytli to contynue and
make an ende of the resydue than not translated . whos dredefull co-
mandement y durste in no wyse disobey because y am a seruant vnto
her sayde grace and resseiue of her yerly ±ee and other many goode
and great benefetes . and also hope many moo to resseyne of her
hyenes. (unsigned, 3)
Margaret’s commands rain down on Caxton from a position of authority,

a position he repeatedly underscores by naming her as her highness and
himself as a servant of “pour connyng.” Where Caxton’s progress was
blind, Margaret’s commands “straytli” reassert the successful production
of the text. Taskmaster and grammarian, she is the rider necessary to
steer Caxton-as-Bayard toward completion. Indeed, the passage finally
resolves the tensions inherent in Caxton’s use of one set of conventions—
how Caxton can complete his text if he is entirely defined by dullness—
by appealing to another set, those of literary patronage, which Caxton
emphasizes by remarking that he receives a “yerly ±ee” from her. These
conventions place the two actors in complementary roles, so that Mar-
garet is Caxton’s patron, his master but not his double; her authority
matches his humility but is not capable of producing a text itself: both are
necessary to complete the translation.
Caxton’s characterization of Margaret is especially successful be-
cause it plays directly into her own self-construction as scholarly, book-
ish, a patron of the arts.18 As tailored as it may be, however, it too is
Kuskin Ch 2 11/15/07 9:29 AM Page 93
carefully predicated on a series of conventions. For example, in the con-

clusion of his Troy Book Lydgate testifies to Henry V’s patronage, and just
as Caxton is saved from his dullness by Margaret’s command, Lydgate
writes that Henry,
ˇat whylom gaf me in commaundement,

Nat gore a-go, in his faderes tyme,
ˇe sege of Troye on my maner to ryme,
Moste for his sake, to speke in speical.
Al-woug wat I be boistous and rual,
He gaf me charge wis story to translate,
Rude of konnyng, called Iohn Lydgate,
Monke of Burie we professioun.19
In the Troy Book, Henry’s “charge” focuses Lydgate’s rudeness, allowing

him not only to complete his translation but also to present himself as a
poet. The more specific Caxton is regarding his autobiography, the more
conventional his language becomes; conversely, the more conventional
his assertions, the more they show his awareness of the traditions provid-
ing him with the literary voice necessary to stage himself. Caxton’s use of
established tropes enables us, therefore, to refine our reading of the pro-
logue: by setting his experiences in Burgundy—his personal residence in
Bruges and Cologne, his appreciation of the Burgundian style and the
text’s particular pedigree, his relationship to Margaret—with an opposed
set of tropes—the general “comandement” against sloth, the English
Chaucerian tradition, the conventions of patronage—Caxton argues that
personal experience is crosscut by the rhetorical forms of authority, and
that although these forms may, at times, be Burgundian, they are also
English.
In addition to the three introductory passages, Caxton also appends
epilogues to books II and III of the Recuyell, and if the prologue to book I
complicates Caxton’s production of the Recuyell in terms of translation
and patronage, the epilogues to books II and III look to the task of dis-
semination. For example, in the epilogue to book II, Caxton addresses his
work’s relation to Lydgate’s to argue for its unique status as a prose Troy
story: “And as ferre as I knowe hit is not had in prose in our tonge /
And also paraventure / he translated after some other Auctor than this is”
Kuskin Ch 2 11/15/07 9:29 AM Page 94
(unsigned, 251v). Again, Caxton alternates between convention and per-

sonal experience—his inheritance of the Troy genre and his specific work
in prose. Yet here Caxton continues on to press the specifics of his work:
“And yet for as moche as dyuerce men ben of dyuerce desyers . Some to
rede in Ryme and metre . and some in prose.” The point that an audience
of “dyuerce men” are of “dyuerce desyers” renews Caxton’s progress
from a di±erent angle, and when Caxton turns to the issue of production
in the epilogue to book III, he registers this change by phrasing his hu-
mility as a physical, rather than mental, feebleness: “And for as moche as
in the wrytyng of the same my penne is worn / myn hande wery & not
stedfast myn eyen dimmed with ouermoche lokyng on the whit paper /
and my corage not so prone and redy to laboure as hit hath ben / and that
age crepeth on me dayly and febleth all the bodye” (unsigned, 351). Cax-
ton’s hands hurt and his eyes are strained; it is not just the intellectual
labor of translation that overwhelms him but the physical one of dis-
semination. As he applies himself to his task, it actually seems to increase
exponentially: “Also be cause I haue promysid to dyuerce gentilmen and
to my frendes to adresse to hem as hastely as I myght this sayd book.”
The epilogues to books II and III of the Recuyell thus adapt the prefatory
matter’s use of convention, but revise it to stress the material constraints
of manuscript production.
The revision presented by the epilogues opens up room for Cax-
ton to introduce his new mode of production, the press, and with that, his
newfound authority as a printer. In fact, as Caxton continues to write of
dissemination, he asserts his authority quite clearly: “Therfore I haue
practysed & lerned at my grete charge and dispense to ordeyne this said
book in prynte after the maner & forme as ye may here see.” Caxton’s
language here returns us to the intersection between authority, capital,
and the “lettre” established by the Mercers’ use of “manner and fourme.”
In fact, the term form is not unique to Caxton’s discussion of print tech-
nology. The colophon to the first edition of Johannes Balbus’s Catholicon,
printed by Gutenberg in Mainz in 1460, announces that “illustrare que
dignatus [sic] est Non calami. Stili. Aut penne su±ragio, sed mira pa-
tronarum formarum que Concordia proporcione et modulo, impressus
atque confectus est” (it is not worth of the approval of pen, or stylus, or
quill, but the admiration of patrons’ forms, which has been impressed
and prepared with harmony in proportion and measure).20 Paul Needham
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has demonstrated that this text was not printed with movable type, but
with two-line slugs cast as units; what patron and form mean in this con-
text, then, is not entirely clear. Nevertheless, the Mercers’ letter called at-
tention to the circulation and “fourme” of written letters; Caxton’s
“maner & forme” refers to the actual typeface “ye may here see” and thus
revises the term’s evocation of capital, authority, and discourse toward the
printed page.
Caxton’s early typefaces were made for him by Johannes Velde-
ner. Type 1, the typeface Caxton used for most of the vernacular books
he printed in Bruges between 1473 and 1475—his English Recuyell and
Game and Play of the Chess, and his French Recueil des histories de Troie,
Méditations sur les sept psaumes pénitentiaux, and Histoire de Jason—is a
large bâtarde inspired by the contemporary Burgundian bookhand. Cax-
ton draws on this aesthetic throughout his career, and even when he in-
troduces new typefaces they too are reminiscent of the Burgundian style.
Only with his very last face, Type 8, does Caxton fully abandon Burgun-
dian for French influences.21 Much scholarship has argued for the perva-
sive influence of Burgundian literary fashions on Edward IV’s court and
on fifteenth-century English literary culture in general, and critics have
been quick to see Caxton’s use of Burgundian styles as evidence of his
slavish devotion to the Burgundian court and libraries.22 Yet Caxton was
an early producer of vernacular books in vernacular type, and if he adapts
Burgundian styles, he also sets them: Veldener sold versions of Caxton’s
types widely, and they appear in the works of printers in Antwerp and
Louvain, as well as in his own editions. In fact, in England Caxton’s faces
were copied by the St. Albans Schoolmaster printer and by the partners
William de Machlinia and John Lettou.23 Caxton’s invitation to his read-
ers to witness the “forme” before them, therefore, condenses the issues
of literary convention and change into a term with political currency
enough to evoke the new exigencies of the literary environment as well as
his own financial control of the press.
Galvanized by this financial authority, the press allows Caxton to re-
spond to the material di¤culties of production by moving the text into
the economic realm. Subsequently, Caxton remarks upon how the press
matches the demand for the text “hastely” with a speed of its own: “And
[this book] is not wreton with penne and ynke as other bokes ben / to
thende that euery man may haue them attones / ±or all the bookes of this
Kuskin Ch 2 11/15/07 9:29 AM Page 96
storye named the recule of the historyes of troye thus empryntid as ye

here see were begonne in oon day / and also fynyshid in oon day.” In this
sense, the “good besynes” of the text that Caxton praised earlier for
keeping him from idleness, now suggests another kind of “besynes”: the
text is also “good besynes” because it promises to sell well, to convert
Caxton’s “grete charge and dispense” into a quantity of texts. “Good
besynes” not only operates within the conventions of patronage and dull-
ness, but also points to Caxton’s actions beyond the text, to the economic
culture it moves within and to the financial demands it must answer.
The result of this change in production is a collateral change in
the literary authority vested in the text. Where le Fèvre’s and Lydgate’s
texts emerged from their intimate relationship to royal authority, the
printed text’s authority is less discretely located. In the epilogue to book
III Caxton observes that
dyuerce men haue made dyuerce bookes / whiche in all poyntes

acorde not as Dictes . Dares . and Homerus ±or dictes & homerus as
grekes sayn and wyrten fauorably for the grekes / and gyue to them
more worship than to the troians / And Dares wryteth otherwyse
than they do / And also as for the propre names / hit is no wonder
that they acorde not / ±or some oon name in thyse dayes haue
dyuerce equyuocacions after the contrees that they dwelle in / but
alle acorde in conclusion the generall destruccion of that noble cyte
of Troye. (unsigned, 351r–v )
Rather than a singular text produced under a singular authority, Caxton’s

text is caught between “dyuerce” men and “dyuerce” books, fostered by
multiple authorities and, in turn, drawn from divergent texts. Yet Caxton
insists that these “dyuerce equyuocacions” are not issues of textual accu-
racy but of politics and history “after the contrees that they dwelle in”
that trace back to Dictes, Dares, and Homerus, and in this he actually
di±ers from his immediate predecessors: le Fèvre claims he assembles the
Recuyell “not for to correcte the bookys late solempnly translated,” and in
the Troy Book, book V, Lydgate argues for a relative harmony between
Dictes and Dares. Though his sources present the Troy story as the result
of a singular literary authority, Caxton suggests that rather than fixed
with each impression, the printed text’s authority rests upon a literary
Kuskin Ch 2 11/15/07 9:29 AM Page 97
history rife with conflict and unified only in the common point that Troy
fell. Thus, the disjuncture between the two existing senses of Caxton’s
“besynes”— involving courtly and commercial conventions, busy-ness
and business—gives way to a third sense of “besynes” as “anxiety” (OED,
5a) and “disturbance” (OED, 5b), a contestation of textual authority as
the story’s transmission destabilizes its meaning.
We can explore how Caxton’s persona as a printer allows him to
manage this tension by examining the copper engraving pasted into the
Huntington copy of the Recuyell (fig. 2.3).24 The precise history of the en-
graving is lost, but it is generally accepted that the engraving is an early
addition to the text, perhaps added to a few select books after the initial
printing.25 Lotte Hellinga points out the engraving’s similarity to other
miniatures made in Bruges during this period, particularly the depiction
of Margaret and her five accompanying women in the Master of Mary of
Burgundy’s dedicatory miniature in the 1476 Jena De consolatione. Espe-
cially interesting about the engraving for our purposes is the way it sup-
plements Caxton’s description of his humble dedication of the text to
Margaret by presenting a tableau of “besynes” jarring to the personal and
complementary relationship the prologue initially puts forward and sug-
gestive of the way the printed text symbolizes literary authority in the
social arena.
Caxton’s presentation of the Recuyell to Margaret is the focal point of
the engraving, the actual volumes forming a visual line back to Margaret’s
bed, over which Charles and Margaret’s coat of arms and her motto Bien
en Aviegne—“May good come of it”—appear on a baldequin. While this
focus suggests that a unified royal authority dominates Caxton’s re-
production of the text—indeed the tiles on the floor direct the viewer’s
eye from the books to the arms—the rest of the engraving’s perspective is
somewhat askew: we can see the right window’s shutters fully open, but
the left window is slightly blocked by the central piece of furniture. Simi-
larly, the beam-supports in the upper left appear at increasingly radical
angles. This perspective is augmented by the grouping of the figures in
the frame. On the right side Margaret’s women reinforce the engraving’s
border, moving the viewer’s attention toward the left, which is cluttered
with objects and figures. These figures carry the gaze from the row of
women past the right window, across the center line, through the chest
with the jugs and decanters, and to the man entering on the far left.
Kuskin Ch 2 11/15/07 9:29 AM Page 98
Figure 2.3. Dedicatory engraving. Raoul Le Fèvre, Recuyell of the Historyes of

Troye, frontispiece. Translated and printed by William Caxton, Bruges, 1473 /74
(STC 15375). H. E. Huntington Library, San Marino, RB 62222. By permission of
the Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
Kuskin Ch 2 11/15/07 9:29 AM Page 99
Though the male figures block the path from the books to the coat of
arms, this interruption ultimately works to enclose the action of the pre-
sentation in a surround, setting the coat of arms somewhat above and
apart, so that the symbol of Charles and Margaret’s combined political
authority overlooks the entire assembly. The composition creates a circle
enclosing printer and patron, a circle contained within the symbol of the
duke and duchess’s political authority and encompassed by a community
that we—standing somewhat behind and to the left of the woman with
her back to us—e±ectively take part in. Initially, at least, the engraving vi-
sually depicts what Caxton’s prologue describes through the precedent of
Philip’s patronage of Le Fèvre in the text’s Burgundian literary history,
Caxton’s narrative of Margaret’s personal patronage, and the conventions
of Lydgate’s language: an uninterrupted circuit in which the relation-
ship between patron and producer organizes the entire court. We see this
specifically in the central action: a kneeling Caxton deferentially hands
the two volumes up to Margaret; Margaret takes them from him in a ges-
ture that validates their textual accuracy and literary authority.
Yet if the general composition suggests that royal patronage orga-
nizes the text’s dissemination, the engraving’s separate details argue that
this organization is only transitory. For example, the figures in the en-
graving are grouped in pairs according to gender. There are six men and
six women, and the room can be divided along these lines. Each of these
pairs is paired yet again: there are two male courtiers in the back watching
and whispering and two women with their arms crossed in judgment;
there are two pages pouring water from a jug to a basin and two women
waiting: all four have one hand lifted and one lowered. Placing Caxton
and Margaret together, the presentation interrupts this organization by
gender; in fact, that Margaret’s mate waits with her back to us and Cax-
ton’s enters at a side door disrupts the pairing altogether. While the pre-
sentation organizes the entire engraving, then, the action within the
engraving insists that this organization is momentary, superimposed over
the court’s pre-existing patterning, disturbing the daily routine for a mo-
ment in which whispers and water are frozen, and a man is caught in the
midst of his entrance. Indeed, if this man had come a moment later he
would have entirely missed the presentation. Because our perspective lies
somewhat behind Margaret’s waiting maid, we are actually the first of the
circle to see the man entering; thus we too are arrested, distracted from
Kuskin Ch 2 11/15/07 9:29 AM Page 100
the main event by a sideline action, and then forced to draw our attention
back to the business of the presentation itself.
Compared with the hand-painted miniature by the Master of Mary
of Burgundy in the Jena De consolatione (fig. 2.4), Caxton’s copper engrav-
ing is striking not for this sense of interruption but for the way the inter-
ruption trivializes the presentation as a whole. In the Jena manuscript
Margaret and her maids appear to have come across the scribe-poet in a
cloistered garden, and he has used this moment to present her with his
text. The miniature too conveys a sense of interruption as well as the
broad division in gender, but it uses these elements to suggest intimacy:
there are no additional watchers, the environment is serene, and Mar-
garet’s and the scribe’s hands are both firmly on the codex as it passes be-
tween them. If the Jena presentation is a spontaneous interruption of
Margaret’s daily activities, it is also a solemn one. The Caxton presenta-
tion, in comparison, hardly causes a pause in the business of the court.
Though all eyes turn toward Caxton and Margaret, the men whisper, the
women attend a dog, and the pages pour their water. Looking away at the
man at the side door, we too are distracted by the goings-on at court and
have actually missed the exact moment of presentation only to look back
in time to see that the books have already passed from Caxton’s hands
to Margaret’s possession. Like Caxton’s prologue, the scenario depicts a
“besynes” in which authority and community contend.
Within the engraving Caxton and Margaret form another circle, a
circle in which sits, remarkably, a monkey. Indeed, if the eye moves up-
ward from the books to the coat of arms, it inevitably also moves down-
ward to consider the monkey. An exotic pet in a court decked with the
signs of wealth—fashionably dressed courtiers, ornate jugs and de-
canters—the monkey is yet another symbol of the court’s extravagance.
The monkey continues the general disruption of the engraving’s internal
organization: if Caxton and Margaret interrupt the gendered patterning
of the court, the monkey moves the overall patterning from units of two
to units of three. More specifically, the monkey seems to mimic Caxton
explicitly, parodying his humble gesture of presentation with a similar
hand position. This parody, perhaps, alludes to a popular Burgundian
fable in which a band of monkeys robs a sleeping merchant and frol-
ics with his wares, represented on the “Monkey Cup,” an enamel beaker
made for the Burgundian court around 1460, and thus a commodity
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Figure 2.4. Miniature by the Master of Mary of Burgundy. Jena De consolatione,

Jena MS El.F.85. By permission of Thüringer Universitäts und Landesbibliothek.
Kuskin Ch 2 11/15/07 9:29 AM Page 102
quite contemporary with Caxton’s life in Bruges (fig. 2.5). Taken with the
monkey, Caxton’s construction of his persona is layered: his definition as
a Mercer initially suggested his central di±erence from the courtly scribe
Le Fèvre and the poet Lydgate, though his prose uses the exact formulas
of such poets and scribes. The monkey represents this somewhat awk-
ward combination of roles: within the court, Caxton’s text symbolizes
its wealth and positions him as the broker of the multiple authorities
involved in its production; yet Caxton is also an outsider to the court, and
as such his presence interrupts its internal structure, and he bears the
brunt of its ridicule. Though this disruption may be only momentary, it
is also central to Caxton’s construction of his own persona. As merchant
and printer Caxton occupies a somewhat undefined role, and this status
gives him his ability to change his “fourme,” to go—financially, diplo-
matically, and commercially—where the nobility cannot. Where produc-
tion according to a model of patronage contains its authority within the
court and the surrounding community of readers, production according
to a model of commerce expands this authority toward new communi-
ties, correspondingly changing the text’s symbolic worth. Caxton makes
use of both of these modes of production, and this joint appeal defines
his text in relation to the power and prestige of the Crown, while also al-
lowing it to go outside the court. Caxton is willing to play the monkey
because it locates him within the Burgundian court, while emphasizing
his distance from it and his professional relationship to capital. Rather
than simply undermining traditional formulations of literary authority,
Caxton works both to demonstrate the complications existing within this
authority and simultaneously to contain them loosely through his per-
sona. The engraving therefore presents the text as a symbol of authority,
of the Burgundian authorities it reproduces, and of the English authori-
ties Caxton relates to it. Caxton constructs the printed text’s symbolic
worth, in other words, through an oscillation between the established
traditions of patronage and his experience with commerce.
Posting Bills: Multiplying the Signs of Capital
We can see the relationship between capital and authority on a larger

scale in Caxton’s early English prints. For example, soon after his return
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Figure 2.5. The Monkey Cup. Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Cloisters
Collection, 1952. 52.50. Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Kuskin Ch 2 11/15/07 9:29 AM Page 104
Figure 2.6. Caxton’s Advertisement. Printed by William Caxton, Westminster,

c. 1477 (STC 4890). Douce, frag.e.I. By permission of the Bodleian Library,
University of Oxford.
to England in late 1475 or early 1476, Caxton printed what is now known
simply as the Advertisement (fig. 2.6):
If it plese ony man spirituel or temporel to bye ony pyse of two and
thre comemoracions of salisburi use enpryntid after the forme of this
present lettre whiche ben wel and truly correct / late hym come to
westmonester in to the almonelrye at the reed pale and he shal haue
them good chepe.
Supplico stet cedula26
In part, the Advertisement is a commercial sign easily recognized by

the twenty-first-century reader: it tells of a new product, promises an ap-
pealing price, and reports directions to Caxton’s shop—in short, it does
everything one would expect of an advertisement. The Advertisement
makes its pitch, however, at a tremendous historical remove, and even the
product it announces—“ony pyse of two and thre comemoracions of sal-
isburi use”—requires some explanation: a “pye,” in this case Caxton’s Or-
dinale ad usum Sarum, is a liturgical calendar that contains directions for
conducting weekly commemorations on the occasions that they conflict
with annual saints’ days; a pye of “two and thre comemoracions” is re-
quired when a church has more than one patron saint. The juxtaposition
Kuskin Ch 2 11/15/07 9:29 AM Page 105
of the familiar and the foreign creates a sense of compression for the
twenty-first-century reader, one we can also recognize for the medieval
reader in the text’s self-consciousness about its status as a printed docu-
ment: remarking on its “forme,” announcing its printed mode of produc-
tion, and requesting—in Latin no less—that it not be torn down, the
Advertisement speaks with a double stress: it is at once a sign for a material
product, the Ordinale, and also a sign for print production’s place in the
larger textual marketplace. This double stress demonstrates a movement
in the relationship between text and audience toward the roles of product
and purchaser. This transformation marks the influx of capital demanded
by the printing press, one that Caxton’s description of the press in the
1480 Chronicles of England elaborates upon to rea¤rm his texts’ literary
authority in a more symbolic sense.
One place to begin a reading of the Advertisement’s double stress is at
its claim to represent the “salisburi use enpryntid after the forme of this
present lettre whiche ben wel and truly correct.” Read one way, the Ad-
vertisement’s emphasis is on the Ordinale’s qualities, its “forme” or type-
face, its general accuracy; read another, the Advertisement’s commentary is
on itself, its claim to be “wel and truly correct,” less a discussion of the
Ordinale than a reflection on its representation of that text. As both the
Advertisement and the Ordinale are printed in Caxton’s Type 3, this repre-
sentation is precise in a way unique to movable type. Introduced in 1476,
Type 3 is a Gothic face, a textura, also designed by Veldener and which
Caxton uses for liturgical books or as a counterpoint for his bâtarde faces.
Yet the Advertisement demonstrates Caxton’s commitment to the vernacu-
lar movement even in this Gothic mode: as Nicolas Barker points out,
Type 3’s capitals—such as the prominent capital I in the Advertisement’s
first line and the S in its last—are Burgundian (see fig. 2.6).27 Though in-
troducing the Ordinale, a liturgical text Caxton was no doubt proud to
present in a fittingly Gothic font, the Advertisement makes this announce-
ment in such a way as to underscore his allegiance to the emerging ver-
nacular print medium and the Burgundian court. “Enpryntid after the
forme of this present lettre,” the Advertisement takes part in the symbolic
and commercial importation of Burgundian culture to England with a
technical precision made possible by the press.
The Advertisement’s “forme” is double, then, in its representation of
both its product and the larger textual economy in which that product
Kuskin Ch 2 11/15/07 9:29 AM Page 106
moves. It specifically underscores this latter function by telling the reader

where the Ordinale is to be purchased, at Caxton’s shop at “westmonester
in to the almonelrye at the reed pale.”28 Upon returning to England, Cax-
ton leased a group of shops in the Westminster area: a small outbuilding
between the flying buttresses of the Westminster Chapter House on the
pathway to Westminster Palace, two tenements outside the precincts at
the Almonry, and a loft over the Almonry gate.29 Caxton apparently ran
his presses, a retail shop, and a bindery from these locations.30 The West-
minster precincts and Almonry area, moreover, housed several other
craftsmen involved in textual production: William Ebesham, the scribe
of John Paston’s “Grete Booke,” had a shop here, as did a group of book
binders.31 Noting that Ebesham copied a few of Caxton’s texts over into
manuscripts, A. I. Doyle reasons that “the connections with his fellow
tenant Caxton illustrate the early collaboration, rather than competition,
of the professional pen and printing press.”32 Indeed, in his prologue to
his 1490 Blanchardin and Eglantine (STC 3124), Caxton himself claims
to have sold manuscripts as well as printed editions. The Westminster
precincts comprise a network of production in which craftsmen with
overlapping skills complement one another.
To sum up: the Advertisement is a visually specific sign that introduces
the individual to the printed text by referring both to a product and to the
larger economy in which that product circulates. We see this doubleness
in the Advertisement’s commentary upon its material form—the actual
font it is printed in—that is symbolic of larger cultural trends: the En-
glish adaptation of Burgundian literary culture, the development of ver-
nacular printing, the location of English textual production. We also see
it in the way “fourme” or “form” resonates throughout Caxton’s writing.
Like the Recuyell, the Advertisement stresses the way its material “forme”
is related to larger literary conventions; like the 1464 letter, it touches
upon the way capital shapes the individual subject: in its first line the Ad-
vertisement hails the passerby as a potential buyer, “if it plese ony man
spirituel or temporel to bye ony pyes.” This hail is all-encompassing: dis-
regarding class, it makes an initial division between cleric and layman
only to assert that the Ordinale is pleasing to, and purchasable by “ony
man.” In that medieval English manuscript production has traditionally
been viewed as a small scale, bespoke trade, the presence of an advertise-
ment hawking textual products to anonymous purchasers seems anachro-
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nistic; thus the Advertisement’s complicated status as a historical docu-

ment: ostensibly authored by Caxton, it confounds the twenty-first-
century reader’s expectations of the Middle Ages by doubling textual and
commercial practices. 33 Commenting on its capital letters and on the cir-
culation of capital itself, the Advertisement epitomizes the self-reflective
quality of fifteenth-century textual production.
Of course, one way of historicizing the Advertisement’s complexity is
to view the fifteenth-century press as introducing changes in the rela-
tionship between production and audience that are only resolved in the
sixteenth century. This claim is put forward most forcefully in Elizabeth
Eisenstein’s The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, yet it is also endorsed
by critics who otherwise distance themselves from Eisenstein’s model
of the press as revolutionary. For example, in her study of turn-of-the-
century French printers and authors, Poets, Patrons, and Printers, Cynthia
Brown argues that the press’s complexity is progressively worked out in
the sixteenth century:
The commodification of the book, a result of technological advances

made through new instruments of production, contributed to a
growing distance between individuals and things in the external
world. This development of an increasingly estranged form of sub-
ject-object relationships gave rise in turn to distinctions between pri-
vate and public property . . . In part because typography provided
physical means for a writer to extend dimensionally in space and
time, . . . a greater concern about authors in the print culture gradu-
ally replaced the earlier literary anonymity and general sharing of
ideas. Furthermore, as books came to play an increasing role in the
developing capitalistic system, authors sought more control of their
writings, participating more actively in their publication and seeking
greater identification with their own words.34
Given this sense of progressive development, questions of text and audi-

ence naturally feed into a larger narrative of literary history in which the
categories of literary production—printer, author, patron, and buyer—
change with the Renaissance. To a large degree this model implicitly, if
somewhat silently, underwrites Caxton scholarship—hence the critical
insistence that Caxton’s work relies on the established conventions of
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commerce and patronage to define him as fundamentally premodern

in thought.
This model of literary history underestimates the complexity inher-
ent in fifteenth-century manuscript production. Much recent scholar-
ship, for example, argues that rather than a small-scale system based in
personal patronage, manuscript trade was e±ectively servicing a large and
anonymous clientele from the fourteenth century: Kate Harris reports
that in Bruges manuscript books of hours were produced for the English
market by the hundreds; C. Paul Christianson illustrates how the physical
organization of London Bridge textwriters’ workshops allowed multiple
scriveners to work independently on a single product; and C. F. R. de
Hamel points out that Bruges and Ghent operated as clearinghouses for
hand-produced elements of books and manuscripts.35 Fifteenth-century
textual production relied heavily on specialized division of labor, mana-
gerial control, and credit payment.36 Indeed, the development of the
Scriveners’ guild pushes such sophisticated commercial organization back
to the fourteenth century.37 Christianson makes clear that manuscript
production was financed through much the same techniques Caxton used
for Continental trading, writing that “in the largely cashless society of
fifteenth-century London, lines of credit could be extended by making a
symbolic pledge of goods and chattels. Such debit transactions were en-
tered into by various trade members on over eighty occasions recorded
between 1431 and 1488, some of which would have represented specific
instances of financing book-trade activities.”38 The press did not displace
this industry: manuscripts continued to be produced long after the advent
of the press, and many of Caxton’s imprints were copied over by hand.39
Although Brown’s discussion of sixteenth-century French copyright liti-
gation demonstrates that the legal codification of the author occurred
only in the sixteenth century, Caxton’s interest in printing Chaucer and
Lydgate directly upon returning to England reminds us of the status
fifteenth-century readers accorded the vernacular author. If we are fully
to appreciate Caxton’s introduction of printing to England we must di-
vorce ourselves from a romantic understanding of the fifteenth century
as o±ering a simplified literary culture free of a “capitalistic system,”
or given to extremely close “subject-object” relations and a “general shar-
ing of ideas.” That the press reorganized literary culture for the six-
teenth century has never been questioned; that it is a central expression of
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fifteenth-century practices surrounding and outside of textual produc-

tion needs to be recalled.
My argument, then, is not with the fact that the press led to long-
term historical change, but with the way early print production is related
to the social practices of the late Middle Ages. The traditional view of
Caxton’s role assumes that textual and commercial modes of production
in the Middle Ages are largely static until after the advent of the press. If
we reread medieval production as possessing its own sophisticated and
abstract organizational systems, Caxton’s use of the press focuses us less
on an imagined opposition between the court and market than on the
specific ways the press brings economic and textual production together.
A case in point: Caxton’s 1476 Horae ad usum Sarum (STC 15867) remains
in a number of fragmentary copies, one of which is printed on vellum and
illuminated in the Bruges style. Given that Bruges was already exporting
hand-produced books of hours to England in quantity, Caxton’s Sarum
reproduces existing textual and economic practices. In this sense, the
early press duplicates manuscript production, an argument put forward
most forcefully by Curtis Bühler in The Fifteenth-Century Book. Yet Cax-
ton’s is among the first printed Horae, and it represents his early entrance
into an almost insatiable market for liturgical material, particularly books
of hours: Mary C. Erler writes that by “the turn of the century, we might
imagine 1 out of every 35 London merchants, wives, artisans and nuns
being supplied with a printed Sarum book of hours.”40 Still, in making
this observation we are asserting an important correction to the existing
model: rather than “technological advances made through new instru-
ments of production” which foster the “commodification of the book,”
we have reversed this sequence to argue that it is, in fact, the commodi-
fication of the book that causes a transformation in the mode of produc-
tion. Caxton recognized this demand and strategized ways of supplying
it, but he did not invent it. Printing is neither mimetic nor progressive,
but a manifestation of the textual and economic practices—the forms of
knowledge—already in place.
Let me be clear about the sequence of production and reproduction I
am suggesting. Printing derives from fifteenth-century culture, and as
such it reproduces that culture’s literary works and practices. In doing so,
however, it also produces the work as a text, a book, an object materially
and symbolically di±erent from the manuscript. For evidence of the way
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this material di±erence is also a symbolic di±erence we need only look to

the two of Caxton’s texts for which we still have rough estimates of the
cost and quantity he dealt in: the 1487 Missale ad usum Sarum and the
1488 Legenda ad usum Sarum. Printed by Guillaume Maynyal in Paris on
December 4, 1487, and August 14, 1488, respectively, the Missale and Le-
genda are recorded in the London custom accounts: N. J. M. Kerling re-
ports that in February and April 1488 Caxton “brought to London 1161
books, and one container with books, to the total value of £41 1s. 8d.”41
We must assume that Caxton brought over even more books at a later
date to account for the Legenda. Considering that the two texts are over
250 pages folio apiece, these quantities represent a substantial investment
in paper alone, many times what the customs agents estimated their over-
all worth. Further, Caxton left a number of copies of the Legenda to St.
Margaret’s Abbey at Westminster where they were subsequently sold
from 1496 to 1500, initially for 6s. 8d. apiece, but finally for only 5s.42 The
Legenda also appears in a 1496 suit involving Caxton’s daughter, Eliza-
beth, and her estranged husband, Gerard Crop, a tailor. Crop asserted
that Caxton willed him £80; the court, however, interpreted Caxton’s gift
as “xx prynted legendes at xiijs iiijd a legend.” What is crucial here is not
just the quantity Caxton dealt in but the ease with which the customs
agents, the wardens at St. Margaret’s, and the legal counsel value, revalue,
and devalue—in e±ect, interpret—the texts as symbolic of cash. Though
printing derives from existing modes of textual production, the printed
book represents a symbolic transformation in the textual practices of the
Middle Ages.
Capital is essential to this transformation, and the earliest documents
of the press underscore its intimacy with the development of printing.
For example, the first archival witnesses to the press, a 1439 lawsuit,
places Johannes Gutenberg in Strasbourg late in the 1430s and shows him
financed by Hans Ri±, Andreas Dritzehen, and Andreas Heilmann to
perfect three “secrets” for the 1439 Aix-la-Chapelle fair: techniques to
polish gems, manufacture mirrors, and perfect “things related to the ac-
tion of the press” [der zu dem Trucken gehöret].43 Upon Andreas Dritze-
hen’s death, his brother George sued Gutenberg for refusing either to
refund his brother’s investment or to admit him into the partnership.
Gutenberg won the suit, but in need of further financial support he re-
turned to his native city of Mainz to find a backer in Johannes Fust.
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A second lawsuit, this time in 1455, reports Fust’s accusations that

Gutenberg was neither repaying loans nor showing development. Guten-
berg lost this suit and was ruined within two years. Fust and one of Gu-
tenberg’s assistants, Peter Schoe±er—rather than Gutenberg himself—
produced the first datable book, the October 14, 1457, Mainz Psalter.
Fust went on to make good on his investment by marketing what we now
refer to as the Gutenberg Bible in Paris; Schoe±er developed the business
into one of the most powerful printing firms of the sixteenth century;
Gutenberg’s name does not appear on a single book.44 Instead of a nar-
rative of individual genius and technological change, the documents sur-
rounding Gutenberg insist that the invention of movable type is both
collaborative and contingent, dependent upon existing forms of textual
production and the investment of capital in pursuit of greater capital.
Polishing gems, manufacturing mirrors, reproducing texts: Guten-
berg’s research is in transforming abstract investment capital into material
objects of wealth that can, in turn, be transformed back into capital. That
Caxton himself understood this transformative process is clear in his
1480 Chronicles of England, a version of the Brut to which Caxton added a
number of entries, such as the following around the date of 1456: “Also
aboute this tyme the crafte of enprinting was first founde in Magunce in
Almayne / whiche craft is multiplied thrugh the world in many places /
and bookes bene had grete chepe and in grete nombre by cause of the
same craft” (Y1v).45 Caxton underscores that the press makes books more
accessible both in cost and quantity. Yet he is not only interested in this
ability to multiply books “in grete nombre” at “grete chepe” prices,
he specifically remarks on the press as a form of knowledge, “a craft,”
which is itself “multiplied thrugh the world in many places.” The term
multiplication is frequently used to describe material transformation in
discussions of alchemy. Chaucer’s Canon’s Yeoman, for instance, com-
plains, “but swynke sore and lerne multiplye,” and later, “and of my
swynky blent is myn ye | Lo such avauntage it is to multiplye.”46 These
lines point to a material multiplication of value—the “avauntage it is to
multiplye”—and also to a multiplication of the knowledge that the Yeo-
man devoted himself to master, “but swynke sore and lerne multiplye.”
Further, at this connection between printing and alchemy the notion
of “forme” resurfaces, this time through goldsmithing, the craft that
contained the skills, the “secrets” necessary to make movable type.47 This
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overlap between goldsmithing and alchemical language exists in Caxton’s

biography as closely as Johannes Veldener, the master printer who de-
signed almost all of Caxton’s “formes,” his printed type. In the colophon
to his 1476 Epistolares, Veldener describes himself as skilled “in cutting,
engraving, pressing, and stamping, and also in designing and fashioning
and whatever secret in the art is more closely hid.”48 The press crosses
paths with alchemy symbolically as well, in that neither gold nor texts
have intrinsic value unto themselves; both depend upon the cultural as-
sertion of a symbolic value. Drawing from the material techniques of
manuscript production and the discursive logic of alchemy, Caxton pairs
existing forms of knowledge to argue that the craft of the press and its
products are multiplied throughout the world.
Like the Canon’s Yeoman, Caxton labors in various ways to e±ect a
transformation of his base texts. Throughout his prologues and epilogues
he emphasizes both the financial investment that goes into the press and
the labor of “translating,” “fynyshing,” “accomplishing,” and “reducyng”
his texts. Caxton uses “fynyshed,” “achyeved,” and “accomplysshed” for a
sense of completion, either of a stage of his project or of the entire print-
ing. “Reducyng,” on the other hand, is at once exclusively related to
translation and a more ambivalent term in general: in the prologue to the
1485 Charles the Grete (STC 5013) Caxton writes, “I haue enprysed and
concluded in my self to reduce this sayd book in to our englysshe / as all
alonge and playnely ye may rede” (aiiv ); and in the 1485 Royal Book (STC
21429) he states that the text is “translated or reduced out of frensshe in to
englysshe by me wyllyam Caxton” (v9).49 In both cases reduction is syn-
onymous with translation and appears as a process of linguistic conver-
sion from French to English. The OED reminds us, however, that Caxton
uses reduction in other senses as well: he uses it to mean “to bring back”
in the Golden Legend (STC 24873; “God . . . shal reduce and brynge you
agayn unto the londe of your faders,” OED, 2b.), “to restore” in Jason
(STC 15383; “to reduce his yongth in suche wise as he shall seme . . . in the
aage of xxxij yere,” OED, 5), “to bring to a certain condition” in Charles
the Grete (“Fraunce was enhauced & reduced to mageste ryal,” OED, 10),
and “to draw together” in Mirrour of the World (STC 24762; “Yf he mete
ony beste that wold doo hym harme he reduyssed hym self as rounde as
a bowle,” OED, 25). Rather than either a sense of conversion (which the
OED first records in the seventeenth century) or a modern sense of di-
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minishment, Caxton’s reduction is a return to or rearrangement of an ob-

ject’s natural qualities. In the case of translation in particular, reduction
represents less a wholesale change of language than a transformation that
returns or draws out some latent quality from the text.
When Caxton announces that the craft of printing is multiplied
throughout the world, we can take his remark to signify three things.
First, that the process of printing literally multiplies the quantity of texts
available. Second, that this material multiplication is also an intellectual
disclosure of knowledge that opens the craft of printing—Gutenberg’s
and Veldener’s “secrets”—outward, to the public readership. These two
aspects of multiplication rely on an investment of capital and on the
physical and intellectual labor of finishing and reducing the text. Yet
rather than lessening the text, this process of reduction is, in fact, an
amplification, one that transforms its authority in a way similar to Cax-
ton’s own transformation of authority as governor. Thus, the third
quality of the press is that it transforms the text’s “forme” in an entirely
positive direction, symbolically reducing it to its intrinsic qualities while
at the same time materially multiplying it throughout the world. Reduc-
ing and multiplying, Caxton’s production of literature presents the very
paradox we find within the alchemical sense of multiplication. In his dis-
cussion of alchemical “multiplication,” Lee Patterson writes,
The history of the term [multiplication] shows that it means two com-
pletely opposite things: (1) to intensify a substance through sublima-
tion and (2) to proliferate needlessly and confusingly the materials or,
especially, words used in the alchemical work. It signifies, in short, an
intensification into singularity, purity, and essence (identity) and a
proliferation into multiplicity and heterogeneity (di±erence).50
E±ecting a return to some more intrinsic literary value but also mov-
ing outward into heterogeneity, this double meaning of multiplication is
exactly the sense we get both from Caxton’s precise use of the term in
his Chronicles of England and from his larger and more general discussion
of the press. For Caxton, the printed text is a paradox, one that uses es-
tablished conventions to speak of his unique production of the printed
book, introduces fixity to create confusion, and generates multiplicity
through reduction.
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When Caxton comes to printing he comes, like Fust, as a capi-

talist. Caxton may not have used this term to define himself—indeed, I
suggest that Caxton might have better understood his actions as alchem-
ical—but as we understand capitalism as the investment of capital for the
production of greater capital, it defines his practice. For both alchemy
and capitalism are processes of transformation that essentially link the
manipulation of things in the world—metals, books, individuals—with
the symbolic representation of authority. This provides us with an im-
portant reminder for reading Caxton: Caxton’s prose and press speak not
of static literary or economic categories arranged in opposition, or un-
dergoing either a radical or glacial process of transition, but are imbri-
cated in a variety of forms: literary and political, courtly and common,
mercantile and capitalist. The printing press’s unique emphasis on using
capital to accelerate—multiply—this combination of modes of pro-
duction suggests its particularly capitalist emphasis, but it is important
to remember that Caxton’s understanding of the utility of using capital
to produce capital predates his encounter with the press. Thus, Cax-
ton’s Advertisement o±ers in miniature what his work with the press ac-
complishes for the English canon overall: it doubles economic and tex-
tual production to revise the relationship between text and reader. This
doubling is, in part, something Caxton takes for granted: a reflection of
his conceptualization of capital and his general awareness of literary cul-
ture. It is also an aspect of his production methods that he is especially at-
tentive to, particularly for the ways it allows him to reach an expanded
audience. When we read Caxton as a textual producer we are reading
this ongoing synthesis of economic and textual production within the
marketplace for literature.
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PA R T I I
AUTHORSHIP
AND THE
CHAUCERIAN
I N H E R I TA N C E
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Kuskin Ch 3 11/15/07 9:31 AM Page 117
Chapter Three
Chaucerian Inheritances
The Transformation of Lancastrian Literary Culture
into the English Canon
The English canon is an abstraction that takes place in the con-

crete. Thus John Guillory argues in Cultural Capital that “the canon is an
imaginary totality” because it exists only in the individual books and bib-
liographies that evoke a greater authority.1 Composed of paper, ink, wood
boards, and leather, these books therefore possess a representative func-
tion beyond their material shape and intellectual statement. Indeed,
this representative aspect is dynamic, for as much as a book’s form and
contents inspire the imagination of the greater totality, they also embody
the technology by which the book was produced and the economy
through which it moves. Because the book is simultaneously material and
intellectual, its symbolic evocation of English literature, either the au-
thority of the canon, of authorship, or of a product invested with value, is
tied to social relations.
The fifteenth century is a period of consolidation of the English
canon. Simon Horobin and Linne R. Mooney suggest that in the 1430s
and 1440s the writing practices of the Chancery and Exchequer are con-
solidated.2 I argue that a similar process occurred around the more ab-
stract concepts of authorship and canonicity during this period, and read
in its poetics an imaginary system tied to vernacular knowledge—writing,
textual production, and commerce—which dovetails material and in-
tellectual reproduction in the object of the book. I term this imaginary
system the Chaucerian inheritance and argue that it was cogently articu-
117
Kuskin Ch 3 11/15/07 9:31 AM Page 118
lated after Chaucer’s death by a number of Lancastrian readers and writ-

ers, such as Thomas Hoccleve, John Shirley, John Lydgate, and William
and Alice de la Pole. Print came to this structure in the last quarter of the
century and infused it with volume, flexing and deforming it from within,
and so accelerating its practices, ultimately changing it piecemeal rather
than wholesale. Hence the alchemy of the press: in putting Chaucer to
print, Caxton reduces the pre-existing notion of Chaucer’s authority to a
pure essence embedded in the material text by multiplying him outward to
the reading communities of the English body politic who, in turn, use
books to wrestle with the social reproduction of authority. The English
canon develops not as a break from the past into modernity, but through
a transformation of its terms.
I trace the Chaucerian inheritance over the next two chapters. Here
I read its construction of the Chaucerian canon; in the next chapter I fol-
low out the ways minor writers used Christine de Pizan as a way to fashion
themselves a place in such a canon. Overall, I define the Chaucerian in-
heritance as a material and intellectual format for the production of lit-
erary authority based in the consolidation and appropriation of previ-
ous writing and argue that it develops into a self-conscious practice over
the first half of the fifteenth century. We can establish the terms of the
Chaucerian inheritance that Caxton encountered upon his return to En-
gland in 1475 or 1476 by looking into a minor poem written at the middle
of the century, “Myn Hert ys Set.”3 Early on in this poem, the anony-
mous poet finds his poetic skill unworthy of the task before him and uses
this failing as an opportunity to meditate upon Chaucer’s greatness:
So wolde God that my symple connyng

Ware su¤ciaunt this goodly flour to prayse,
For as to me ys non so ryche a thyng
That able were this flour to countirpayse.
O noble Chaucer, passyd ben thy dayse,
O± poetrye ynamyd worthyest,
Ande of makyng in alle othir days the best.4
In its protestations of “simple connyng” and its praise of Chaucer’s

worthy making, the poem o±ers an example of the infamous fifteenth-
century rhetoric of dullness, unremarkable in itself.5 Written some fifty
118 a u t h o r s h i p a n d t h e c h a u c e r i a n i n h e r i t a n c e
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years after Chaucer’s death, it uses this formula to consolidate Chaucer’s

legacy in a number of ways: it announces his poetry is of great value (ca-
pable of describing “so ryche a thyng”) and, having made this announce-
ment, locates Chaucer within a particular historical moment (“passyd ben
thy dayse”), but also names him as transcendent of history in general (“of
makying in alle othir days the best”). It also appropriates this legacy: for
Chaucer is not set out as an impossible standard; rather, the poet readily
concedes Chaucer’s place to the “Monke of Bury,” John Lydgate, in the
very next stanza:
Now thou art go, thyn helpe I may not have;

Wherfor to God I pray, ryght specially,
Syth thou art dede and buryde in thy grave,
That on thy sowle hym lyst to have mercy.
And to the, Monke of Bury, now speke I,
For thy connyng ys syche, and eke they grace,
After Chaucer to occupye his place.
(22–28)
If the poem defers to Chaucer’s poetic stature, it does so precisely to ap-

propriate it for Lydgate. This appropriation is layered, and if it consti-
tutes the poem’s theme it also defines its mode. Hence the poem writes
Chaucer’s mortality (“syth thou art dede and buryde in thy grave”) in
lines remarkably similar to Chaucer’s own gloss on Petrarch in the Clerk’s
Tale (“now deed and nayled in his cheste”).6 On its face, then, the poem
defines the terms for inheriting Chaucer’s authority as a consolidation
and an appropriation.
The techniques of consolidation and appropriation are no less popu-
lar throughout the mid-fifteenth century than the rhetoric of dullness
and are common in the poetry of Hoccleve, James Stewart, and Lydgate
himself. What is unique about “Myn Hert ys Set” is the way it twists the
humility trope into an accusation, for within the strategy of consolida-
tion and appropriation, “Myn Hert ys Set” plays a double game, and this
is what marks both its rhetorical sophistication and its limitations: no
sooner does the poem state that Lydgate is “after Chaucer to occupy his
place” than it reverses this course, berating Lydgate for writing against
women in ensuing stanzas.7 Cupid, of course, lays a similar allegation at
c h a u c e r i a n i n h e r i t a n c e s 119
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Chaucer’s feet in the Legend of Good Women, announcing that Chaucer’s

“Romaunce of the Rose . . . is an heresye ayeins my lawe” (F 329–30).
“Myn Hert ys Set” applies this line to Lydgate, telling him “in your con-
seyt yt is an eresy” (63), and continuing:
A, fye, for schame, O thou envyous man:

Thynk whens thou came, and whider to rapayr.
Hastow not sayd eke, that these women can
Laugh and love nat? Parde, yt is not fair,
Thy corupt speche enfectyth alle the air;
Knoke on thy brest, repent the now and ever.
Ayen therwyth, and say though saydyst yt never.
(64–70)
Lydgate’s conceit is a heresy, his speech is infectious, and his lungs are
polluted—strong words in the middle of a century of Lollard persecu-
tions and plague. “Myn Hert ys Set” thus transforms exactly the brand of
humanist praise that Lydgate uses to describe Chaucer’s eloquence in his
own humble testament to Chaucer’s greatness—the “saws sweet” and
“surged mouth” Lydgate put into currency through his Siege of Thebes, for
example—into a rhetoric of condemnation. Deferentially combative, the
poem is woven from a series of contradictory poses: it proclaims its for-
mulaic dullness with a sharp wit, it ratifies Lydgate’s authority by itemiz-
ing the ways he is insu¤cient, and it imagines him eloquent enough to
inherit Chaucer’s place but not so eloquent that he can speak for himself
in court, finally telling him to “lat thyn attourney sew and speke for the”
(80). This last distinction separates literary and political discourse; more
fundamentally it suggests that the two can be compared, a comparison
that allows the poem’s author to fashion his or her own voice as a kind of
righteous prosecutor, as both humble Chaucer and indignant Cupid.
The di±erence between Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women and “Myn
Hert ys Set” is the di±erence of history: both poems reflect upon what it
is to be a vernacular author writing under the authority of love, and both
poems use a rhetoric of humility to do so. If “Myn Hert ys Set” begins
with a lament for its author’s simple cunning, it serves to echo Chau-
cer’s Legend: “Allas, that I ne had Englyssh, ryme or prose, / Su¤sant this
flour to preyse aright” (F 66–67). The Legend uses this rhetoric to con-
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struct Chaucer’s persona, and so the business of Cupid’s accusations and

Alceste’s defense provides Chaucer with an opportunity to itemize his
previous writing and launch the ensuing poem. Written after Chaucer,
“Myn Hert ys Set” is more concerned with imagining the reproduction of
literary authority across a series of authors than with enumerating
particular titles. Its sophistication lies in its wealth of allusions, not in its
justification of authorship itself. And here is the poem’s ultimate con-
tradiction: concerned as the poem is with questions of authorship—with
articulating the passage of literary authority through named English au-
thors, with demonstrating its own canniness with particularly Chaucerian
and Lydgatean allusions, with assembling an English canon of major au-
thors and minor poetasters, in crafting its own authority—it remains a
very conscious act of literary self-fashioning that nevertheless does not
provide its own author’s name. “Have mynde of this,” the poem con-
cludes, “for now I wryte no more” (84): all about the politics of author-
ship, “Myn Hert ys Set” falls silent within the literary history of named
authors it works so hard to produce.
“Fifteenth-century English literature is a literature of paradoxes,”
writes Seth Lerer at the beginning of Chaucer and His Readers.8 And so it
is. “Myn Hert ys Set” illustrates the case well: on the one hand, it speaks
of a literary culture that is relentlessly self-reflective, one that sees writ-
ing after Chaucer very much as what Lerer describes as a cogent literary
system of invention through mediation. On the other hand, in its in-
ability or unwillingness to name its own originality, in its overall defer-
ence to the past, it is also a poetics of alienation. Scholarship throughout
the twentieth century has taken this paradox as evidence that the fifteenth
century has little place in literary history overall. Observe René Wellek’s
confident opening section to The Rise of English Literary History entitled
“Origins”: “There was no literary history in the Middle Ages, though
some knowledge of the past of literature existed. . . . Something like the
faint outlines of a rudimentary history of English literature can be dis-
cerned in the first appreciations of the roles of Chaucer and Gower by
their successors and disciples, for example, in Lydgate’s, Occleve’s, and
Dunbar’s well-known verse in praise of the master, Chaucer.” 9 Wellek’s
assertion—that the work of the poets of the fifteenth century shows a
rudimentary sense of authorship—hits precisely where these writers are
most anxious: that they have failed to appreciate Chaucer’s eloquence. Yet
Kuskin Ch 3 11/15/07 9:31 AM Page 122
there are no fourteenth-century manuscripts of Chaucer’s work, no

“foul papers” for future editors to sift through, no evidence of his super-
vision of a single manuscript.10 “Chaucer’s poetry,” as Lerer points out,
“in a quite literal sense, is the product of his fifteenth-century readers and
writers.”11 What Wellek overlooks in his claim for origins is not simply
the paradoxical nature of fifteenth-century writing, but that the physical
reproduction of poetry is an active engagement with literary history it-
self, for in a preprint culture lacking libraries filled with printed editions
easily summoned up for critical review, the distance between scribe, com-
piler, author, and literary historian is not so great: all four roles engage in
a reproduction process that constructs authority from pre-existing mate-
rial. Fifteenth-century literary production is paradoxical, but it is not
rudimentary. Indeed, it is so tremendously aware of the ways in which the
Chaucerian canon is constructed through the material and intellectual re-
production of his legacy that it finds his role largely uninhabitable for
contemporary writers. Thus the paradox: in reproducing Chaucer’s au-
thorship as canonical, fifteenth-century writing produces itself as anony-
mous, and this holds true for both individual poets, such as the author of
“Myn Hert ys Set,” and the period overall.
“Myn Hert ys Set” also illustrates the way the Chaucerian inheri-
tance combines material and intellectual production in its paradoxical
imagination of a literary history of canonical vernacular authors. Regard-
less of the poem’s protestations—or, lest we read too literally, because
of its protestations—the poem appears in a specifically Chaucerian book
as part of a unique lyric sequence remaining in a miscellany of vernacu-
lar poetry from the so-called Oxford group, Fairfax 16. An anthology
of poems by Chaucer, Lydgate, John Clanvowe, Thomas Hoccleve, and
Sir Richard Roos, Fairfax 16 is composed of a selection of independent
booklets sewn together to produce a unified codex.12 Dated about 1450,
this manuscript was owned, if not compiled, by John Stanley, who in 1450
was warden of the Tower and custodian of William de la Pole. Duke
of Su±olk, admiral and chamberlain of England, governor of the Staple at
Calais, constable of Dover Castle, and warden of the Cinque Ports, de la
Pole is an appealing candidate for the poem’s author.13 De la Pole knew
the lyric poet Charles d’Orléans (first as a prisoner, then as a keeper, and
finally as a diplomatic partner); he is named as an author of minor verse
by the literary antiquarian John Shirley, who attributes to him the seven
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French poems in Trinity College Cambridge, R.3.20;14 and he actively

associated himself with Chaucer’s legacy: he is third husband to Alice
Chaucer, Chaucer’s granddaughter by his son, Thomas Chaucer, and
he sponsored Lydgate’s 1441 petition for an annuity of £7 13s. 4d.15 With
Alice, de la Pole commissioned MS Arundel 119, the earliest and most
extensively finished manuscript of Lydgate’s Siege of Thebes.16 In this
poem Lydgate imagines himself as a pilgrim who meets Chaucer’s fel-
lowship in Canterbury and agrees to tell the story of Oedipus, preceding
the Knight’s Tale, on the return trip to London. Arundel 119’s marginalia
marks the levels of authorship and sponsorship at work in the manuscript
alongside the poem’s text: Lydgate’s Canterbury Tales prologue is bor-
dered on all four sides and has a large initial W, in the center of which is
a miniature of Lydgate in his black robe and hood, riding a horse; part 1
has a similarly four-sided vinet with the Duke of Su±olk’s arms, a red
eagle on a shield with two grayhounds, in the center. By Lydgate’s line
“By hym wat was / gif I shal not feyne” is written “¶ Chaucer,” and the
marginalia tracks Lydgate’s own incorporation into the pilgrimage.
Arundel 119 thus represents Chaucer’s authorship materially, in its mar-
ginal glosses and illuminations, and intellectually, in Lydgate’s discussion
of his importance and his imaginative participation in the Canterbury
Tales. Like “Myn Hert ys Set,” then, it is explicitly and implicitly about
the construction of an English canon: both texts recognize Chaucer as an
author in order to construct the passage of authority, and both associate
this construction with a courtly context: “Myn Hert ys Set” in its imagi-
nation of Lydgate’s banishment from court, Arundel 119 in its proclama-
tion of de la Pole’s authority. As with the scribal transmission of the
Canterbury Tales, literary reproduction in the fifteenth century is an intel-
lectual as well as a material process; indeed, these two processes conspire
in a larger symbolic statement about the nature of authority vested in the
vernacular book of literature.
Recent scholarship on the first half of the fifteenth century, the Lan-
castrian period, argues that this symbolic statement connecting the tex-
tual, royal, and literary constitution of authority is expressed through a
central metaphor of paternity.17 Implicit in “Myn Hert ys Set,” in de la
Pole’s biography, and in Lydgate’s tale of Oedipus, however, is the failure
of this metaphor, for these are stories in which paternity bequeaths only
loss and fragmentation. Such is the passage of the Chaucerian inheritance
Kuskin Ch 3 11/15/07 9:31 AM Page 124
in the middle of the century. For example, in 1445, five years before
his stay in the Tower, de la Pole brokered the marriage of Margaret of
Anjou and Henry VI, actually standing in for the king at the betrothal
in France. The marriage began de la Pole’s rapid accumulation of titles
and power; coinciding with the loss of Normandy and the end of war-
time profiteering, it also made him a convenient scapegoat for English
frustrations. Accused of making side deals with France during the mar-
riage negotiations, of unfairly influencing the king, and of plotting to
put his own son on the throne, de la Pole was impeached for treason in
1450, sequestered in the Tower, and, finally, exiled to the Continent for
five years. As he set sail for Calais with safe-conduct letters from Philip
the Good, his ships were overtaken by the royal privateer, Nicholas of the
Tower, and he was subsequently apprehended, tried, and executed at sea.
Letters from William Lomner and John Crane to John Paston III report
that his decapitated body was left on the sands of Dover beach.18 This is
in “Myn Hert ys Set” too, in its strange sense of a literary prophecy, for
it is a poem of exile, one that bestows Chaucer’s authority upon Lyd-
gate, but then expels him from court to cast him upon the legal process.
After de la Pole’s assassination, Cade’s Rebellion precipitated the Wars
of the Roses by demanding that Richard of York be recalled from Ire-
land and installed as a check on the king’s councillors. The demand was a
recognition of the power vacuum left in de la Pole’s wake, for de la Pole’s
influence was immense, at times limiting attendance at the Royal Coun-
cil to a few clerks. Thus, as the poem describes a canonical dividing line
between Chaucer and his fifteenth-century followers, de la Pole’s bi-
ography describes a political one; poem and biography push toward one
another but remain unconnected. Caught in this chasm in the passage of
authority, English culture of the second half of the century responds by
killing o± its fathers and commodifing the very literature that explains its
situation. In doing so, it neither breaks from the past nor signals a com-
pletely new mode; instead it transforms the terms of the Chaucerian
inheritance into a poetics of reproduction mediated by print.
If Lancastrian literary culture is defined by the problems of inherit-
ing the Chaucerian paternity, the Yorkist literary scene finds this legacy
uninhabitable and attempts to consolidate it by reproducing it at a new
level of commercial volume. For example, Caxton printed two discrete
runs of Chaucerian poetry—an initial series between 1476 and 1479, and
Kuskin Ch 3 11/15/07 9:31 AM Page 125
a second run of new folio editions of texts by Chaucer, John Lydgate, and
John Gower in 148319 —at moments of ruthless internecine struggle: in
1478 Edward IV executed his brother Clarence, resolving any immediate
claims to the throne and allowing Queen Elizabeth Woodville’s family
unchecked influence over Prince Edward; in 1483 Richard eliminated
the Woodvilles and denied Edward V’s legitimacy in a single stroke, cre-
ating himself as king while opening up the possibility for the Tudor as-
cension. Scholars of the fifteenth century have suggested that, faced with
the social chaos resulting from a century of such brutal political maneu-
vering, literary culture e±ectively shut down, retreating from the late
fourteenth-century experiments in vernacular composition and bibli-
cal translation in favor of a narrow and backward-looking aesthetic, a
literature of propaganda rather than of invention.20 In this chapter I sug-
gest that more subtle patterns are at work. First, I use Caxton’s 1476 /77
text of Chaucer’s Retraction to examine the manuscript tradition of the
Canterbury Tales as a unified work authored by Chaucer. I then turn to the
canonizing tendency of fifteenth-century literature to frame the utility
of such a book for social reproduction, largely through one of Cax-
ton’s minor publications, his 1477 Book of Courtesy (STC 3303), a courtesy
manual authored by an anonymous yet self-proclaimed student of Lyd-
gate. These two readings suggest how an edition of Chaucer operates as
a commodity in late fifteenth-century culture, for just as the Yorkists se-
cure their authority by reducing claimants to the throne, Caxton’s two se-
ries distill the intellectual legacy carried in singular manuscripts into a
concrete set of texts: in both cases the process of reproducing authority
works through a consolidation that simultaneously opens up new pos-
sibilities for appropriation. Combined with the self-reflective nature of
fifteenth-century writing, the process develops into a sense of corruption
in Caxton’s writing on Chaucer, and so the chapter’s last section reads
Caxton’s prologue to the 1483 Canterbury Tales (STC 5083) as a discussion
of literary history after Chaucer. Like the printer’s mark, then, the
printed book of literature promises the consumer a greater unity, a reso-
lution of corruption in the comfort of commerce. We can understand
this as the metonymic function of books themselves, for neither the
author nor the book is unified; both exist as principles of unity that allow
the imagination of wholeness from the fragmentary nature of textual
transmission and of social identity.
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Beginning at the End: Chaucer’s Retraction and the Cycle of Reproduction
One place to begin thinking about the transition from manuscript to

print in the Chaucerian canon is at a notable ending: Chaucer’s Retraction.
In his study of the development of authorship and the English canon,
Kevin Pask writes that in the Retraction
Chaucer claims authority for the majority of his poetic texts only
in the act of renouncing them. His casual failure to remember “many
another book” simply dismisses any possibility of an authorial canon.
Despite, then, the rapid inflation of Chaucer’s canon, including many
spurious works, in the sixteenth century, the “Retraction” awaited
John Urry’s 1721 edition of Chaucer’s Works to be printed. The ne-
glect or even suppression of the “Retraction” testifies to an impor-
tant break between the sacred authority of late medieval texts and the
early modern elaboration of vernacular poetic authority.21
Despite Pask’s claim for the neglect and suppression of the Retraction
before the eighteenth century, it appears prominently in the early print
editions of the Canterbury Tales. Both of Caxton’s editions of the Canter-
bury Tales include the Retraction: the 1476 /77 edition presents a version of
it as its last page, which the 1483 edition revises with a new page layout
and recovered lines. Richard Pynson reprinted this edition in 1491/92
(STC 5084) but eliminated the Retraction entirely, creating the exception
to the rule: in 1498 Caxton’s foreman and successor, Wynkyn de Worde,
produced his own edition (STC 5085) with a new collation of Caxton’s
1483 text and a new version of the Retraction; in 1526 Pynson returned
with an ambitious volume (STC 5086) and pointedly included a reprint
of Caxton’s 1476/77 version of the Retraction, as if to rectify his ear-
lier omission. The Retraction does not systemically disappear from the
Canterbury Tales’ print history until Thomas Godfray’s 1532 edition, The
Workes of Geffray Chaucer Newly Printed (STC 5068). As that text’s editor,
William Thynne, announces that the edition is his own “collacion” of
the “bokes of dyuers imprites” before him, the concept of an authorial
canon articulated by books can hardly be at issue at this time: Thynne is
clearly constructing a particular rendition of Chaucer from what he sees
as a coherent, if disorganized, received tradition. The absence of the Re-
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traction from his edition surely signals his particular interpretation of this
canon, but given the welter of editions before him—the most impressive
a mere six years earlier—it is di¤cult to see his choice as a sudden break
from the past that institutes a new way of thinking, for by this time the
Retraction existed as the definite end to the Canterbury Tales on the shelves
and in the cupboards of literally thousands of readers.22 Pask describes
a long Middle Ages tentative about sacred authority and secular writ-
ing, and thus perpetuates a brand of literary history that tells of slow and
progressive evolution, and in which the actual evidence of early book
production simply doesn’t matter. If we look to these books we can see
that, as Ralph Hanna points out, the printed editions of the Canterbury
Tales “derive in linear succession” from Caxton.23 This linearity is only an
extension of the logic of manuscript production, which constructed the
Canterbury Tales as a single-author book of vernacular poetry prior to
print. Again we are met by paradox: though the printed book appears as
an object of unity, it derives from a manuscript tradition premised on
knitting together fragmentary parts, and its overall mode of production is
a pastiche of techniques. This is the magic of the book: it reduces con-
tradictions in its production process to coherency without resolving them
and e±ectively extends this constellation of ideas to its readers through
commercial sale. Thus, I argue that the impact of print occurs neither
through slow evolution nor sudden burst; it is an uneven combination of
established and insurgent textual practices, a partial revision of the pre-
vious mode that transmutes the handmade codex into a wholesale com-
modity by adjusting the relationship between the book and capital invest-
ment. The symbolic power of the book derives from this uneven mode of
production overall and this can be read on each individual page.
Caxton’s Canterbury Tales is a deceptively simple book, and in this
it asks us to consider some fundamental questions about the nature of
books in general. Printed in folio but lacking the prologues, tables, ini-
tials, woodcuts, and even signatures that identify many of Caxton’s later
editions, it presents the reader with a single column of unadorned text
(fig. 3.1). Appearing on its last verso leaf, the Retraction a±ects a clean
finale to the book overall. Indeed, firmly separated from the Parson’s Tale
by a rubric on the previous page as it is, it fits Caxton’s twenty-nine-line
page perfectly, o±ering a final turn of the page that modulates Chaucer’s
voice from frame-tale-pilgrim to authorial farewell through an almost
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Figure 3.1. The Retraction. Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, f. 372v. Printed
by William Caxton, Westminster, 1476/77 (STC 5082). British Library IB.55009. By
Kuskin Ch 3 11/15/07 9:31 AM Page 129
solid surface of black ink. The e±ect is understated but unambiguous, the
self-explanatory end to Chaucer’s book and career. But if Caxton’s Retrac-
tion brings the book to a convincing close visually, it is nonetheless con-
structed to do so, for the page layout is not entirely natural to the fall of
Chaucer’s text.24 Separated from the paratextual apparatus that appears in
so many manuscripts, and neatly compressed to a single page, it is missing
a number of coherent and discrete phases for which there are no com-
plete analogues in any manuscript tradition, let alone the family of which
his exemplar is said to belong.25 The evidence for this constructed nature
is easily swallowed up in the page itself, for here is textual production
without human hands, the only personal touch a rubricated initial in
some remaining copies over the telltale printed guide letter. That the
Canterbury Tales is a book that ends where it should—on its last page—
should not be taken for granted: it is a significant construction that in-
volves the thinking through of the relationship between authorship and
the nature of the book which achieves simplicity only in the success of
its performance. Behind the straightforward appearance of Caxton’s
1476/77 Canterbury Tales is a history of artifice and labor, of scribes and
compositors making intellectual decisions about what a book should
look like.
Silent manipulation toward unity is endemic in the manuscript his-
tory of the Retraction. It has long been argued that, with the Parson’s Tale,
the Retraction originally circulated as an independent tract, Chaucer’s
“Treatise on the Seven Deadly Sins,” attached to the Parson’s Prologue by
the early compilers of the Canterbury Tales as they sought a fitting end for
the Tales amongst Chaucer’s extant writings.26 We can see this in the ear-
liest of the six manuscripts produced in the decade after Chaucer’s death,
the Hengwrt.27 The Hengwrt manuscript lacks its final leaves and is thus
missing the Retraction entirely, but Charles A. Owen, Jr., and more re-
cently Míc≥eál F. Vaughan, have pointed out that the manuscripts descend-
ing from Hengwrt, particularly Hatton Donat 1 and Bodley 414, present
the Parson’s Tale and the Retraction as a continuous unit. Again, the physi-
cal structure of the book is telling: Vaughan provides a striking example
in Bodley 414, which joins the two texts at the very bottom of the page,
a convenient spot to have divided them should the scribe have viewed
the texts as separate. The production team that worked on the Hengwrt
also worked on the Ellesmere, an extremely finished manuscript with a
Kuskin Ch 3 11/15/07 9:31 AM Page 130
complete set of links between the tales, the Canon Yeoman’s Prologue and
Tale, and an extensive apparatus overall, and Linne R. Mooney has iden-
tified one particular scribe, Adam Pinkhurst, as working on both texts.28
The name “Adam” suggestively links this man to Chaucer’s short poem
“Adam Scriveyn.” So, though Hengwrt and Ellesmere are usually dated
to the first two decades of the fifteenth century, the identification of
Pinkhurst places the manuscripts closer to Chaucer’s own lifetime. Still,
the Hengwrt and Ellesmere seem to di±er in their treatment of the Re-
traction. In contrast to the descendants of Hengwrt, the Ellesmere brack-
ets the Retraction with a set of rubrics that firmly divides it from the rest
of the text, so that the Parson’s Tale ends “Here taketh the makere of this
book his leve” and the Retraction closes “Heere is ended the book of the
tales of Caunterbury, compiled by Ge±rey chaucer, of whos soule Jhesu
Crist have mercy. Amen.” The organizational di±erence between Hen-
gwrt and Ellesmere is thus larger than their chronological distance would
suggest; it implies an active reworking of the text into a more finished
state. In the case of the Ellesmere, this seems to have proceeded so that
the scribe’s experience of producing the first manuscript inflected his
production of the second. Other early manuscripts tell of di±erent ar-
rangements; for example, Harley 7334 separates the Retraction from the
Parson’s Tale with a two-line break, a gold paragraph mark, and the title
“Preces de Chauceres,” beginning it with a blue-and-red-filled gold ini-
tial N. The implication Owen and Vaughan draw is that the Parson’s Tale
and the Retraction circulated as one piece, a separate treatise on penitence,
at first awkwardly soldered onto the Canterbury Tales as a unit and then
divided into a tale and a final authorial statement in the first decade of the
fifteenth century. That Pinkhurst may indeed have been known to
Chaucer does not derail the importance of his work; rather he carries out,
reproduces Chaucer in a material form. This is no less than Chaucer
himself would accord him in the short poem “Adam Scriveyn,” where he
marks the scribe’s participation in the construction of his own identity as
an author. Thus as the various rubrics defining this point of attachment
became more elaborately contrived by the text’s scribes, the text’s po-
sition in the Canterbury Tales became, paradoxically, more suggestive of
seamless overarching authorial control.
The Retraction discusses this very problem through a series of con-
tradictions around Chaucer’s “entente.” On the one hand, in breaking the
Kuskin Ch 3 11/15/07 9:31 AM Page 131
pilgrimage-frame (“Now pray I to hem alle that herkene this litil tretyse
or rede . . .”), it is one of Chaucer’s most unmediated authorial pro-
nouncements. In its submission to Christian authority (“that yf ther be
ony thing that liketh hem / that therof they thanke our lord Ihesu Crist of
whom procedeth al wit & goodnes”), it also seems to return any authority
generated by this break back to Christian doctrine. Similarly, Chau-
cer’s use of the Pauline dictum from Romans 15:4 (“al that is Writen / is
Writen for our doctrine”) suggests that doctrinal meaning underwrites
his work in general. Though he asserts this all-encompassing pardon,
however, he is also driven to itemize his nondoctrinal works with some
care: “the whiche I reuoke in my retractions / as is the book of troylus /
the book also of fame / the book of xxv. ladies / the book of we duchesse /
the book of seynt Valentyns day of the parlament of bridis / the talis
of Caunterbury tho that sownyn vnto synne / the book of the lyon /
and many other bokis.” Even the title, “my retractions,” performs a con-
tradictory rhetorical gesture: in that it alludes to Augustine’s Retracta-
tiones, it ostensibly asserts the sincerity of Chaucer’s intentions by
comparing them to Augustine’s; by the same token, in that it invites a
comparison between a Church father and a Richardian bureaucrat at all
borders on vulgarity. In each case, Chaucer at once submits to the greater
authority of Christian doctrine and uses this submission as an opportu-
nity to substantiate himself. Larry Scanlon suggests that this is Chau-
cer’s endgame: “Because [Chaucer] retextualizes Christian authority at
the very moment that he is ostensibly submitting to it, his submission is
an appropriation. For this reason the retraction should be considered a
consolidation and not a rejection.”29 I argue that the point holds true for
the material construction of the Retraction as well:30 for rather than negat-
ing the unity of the Canterbury Tales, the textual history of the Retraction
demonstrates the way scribal production constructs authorial intent
through contradiction so that the more the book appears to be a unified
whole with a definitive end, the more Chaucer appears intentionally to
govern the work as an author even as the e±ect itself is premised on a
greater level of scribal mediation. The result is that Chaucer, the author
speaking the Canterbury Tales in all its contradiction, operates as a prin-
ciple of unity capable of holding his work together in the face of its ge-
neric range precisely because he describes his role as sustaining, indeed as
born from, contradiction.
Kuskin Ch 3 11/15/07 9:31 AM Page 132
The Retraction is, therefore, a material appropriation that produces

the Canterbury Tales as a symbolic object, a book unified in its begin-
ning and end, as much encased in Chaucer’s authority as it is in its covers.
The importance of this point is that it suggests that the Tales, let alone
Chaucer’s role as an author standing apart from the work, emerge not in a
finite moment of authorial decision but through an extended process of
textual manipulation, which includes the consumption and reproduction
of the text. Horobin and Mooney suggest a network of scribes, all per-
haps known to one another through mutual bureaucratic employ, sharing
the copying of the major vernacular literary texts of the late fourteenth
century. These early scribes read the Canterbury Tales as separate texts
and reproduced it as a unified whole, revising the “Treatise on the Seven
Deadly Sins” as the Parson’s Tale and Retraction in order to grant the book
a possible, if contradictory, end. In e±ect, the scribes’ consumption of the
“Treatise on the Seven Deadly Sins” reproduced it as a productive part of
the Canterbury Tales. This reproduction cycle is fundamental to the logic
of manuscript assembly, a logic by which the final state of a manuscript
is not necessarily realized by the initial production process, or even in
the initial purchaser’s consumption, for every manuscript is potentially an
exemplar for, or part of, another product. This process is paradoxical—
hence the combination of seemingly oppositional practices, produc-
tion and consumption—but productive overall, and the o±shoot is the
anonymity of the very producers, the scribes, who focus so intently on
articulating Chaucer’s identity in relation to the ideal work. As an ex-
ample of the Chaucerian inheritance, then, the Retraction combines the
material and intellectual ends of literary production to imagine a larger
unity, in this case the unity of author and work over that of the indi-
vidual text.
Caxton’s editions participate in and extend this cycle. For example,
Caxton’s copytext stems from the b-group, a manuscript family be-
ginning in the 1450s, which John Manly and Edith Rickert identify as
one of the main “constant groups” by which the Canterbury Tales develop
in the fifteenth century.31 To refer to the b-group as a “constant” group is
somewhat misleading, however, because the b-group develops not by ra-
diation but by enchainment, not by generations moving outward from a
single ancestor but by derivation from successive copies. Caxton’s text is
taken, like these manuscripts, as a unique witness to the Canterbury Tales,
Kuskin Ch 3 11/15/07 9:31 AM Page 133
but its most striking qualities are unification and standardization, for
aside from Caxton’s edition, the manuscripts of the family overall reveal
their history in their physical composition: they are the disordered, muti-
lated, fragmentary quires of vellum and paper sewn together across half a
century. The progenitor of the group, the Helmingham manuscript (now
Princeton University Firestone Library MS 100), is also the archetype for
this structure: the codex is a paper shell sewn around a “nucleus” of five
vellum quires copied, by turns, in the 1420s. Within these quires, Manly
and Rickert add, “the text is much manipulated to fit.”32 There is no par-
ticular reason to consider Caxton’s exemplar (which Manly and Rickert
refer to as a “shattered” ancestor”) any more coherent than the remain-
ing examples.33 Fractured as they are, the b-group manuscripts testify to
fifteenth-century readers’ desires to own the Canterbury Tales as a coher-
ent book, and this is true for the Canterbury Tales overall: there are eighty-
two manuscripts containing Chaucer’s tales, at least fifty-five of which
appear to have been produced as complete texts. “In the fifteenth century
the Canterbury Tales appeared in one format,” observes Daniel S. Silvia, “a
complete version of the Tales that with only rare and notable exception
dominated the MS in which it appeared, if indeed it were not the sole
item (which was far more generally the case).”34 In contrast, only sixteen
manuscripts featuring excerpted versions of the Tales remain. Materially,
the manuscripts Caxton encountered are the shards of history, remnants
of previous productions put to new uses. Through their damaged bodies,
they speak not just of the improvisational nature of manuscript produc-
tion, but of the way consumption reproduces the object as an expression
of its readers’ desires for a complete work.
Though print may fuse the joints that mark the past, it does not deny
the overriding logic of this pre-existing assembly circuit. For example,
two manuscripts derive from Caxton’s print. The first, Bodleian Library,
MS Laud 739, is a fragmentary combination of vellum and paper cor-
rected according to Caxton’s edition and another manuscript, Royal 18
C.II. The second, Trinity College Cambridge, MS R.3.19, a manuscript
from the 1490s, carries a copy of Caxton’s General Prologue for its Can-
terbury Tales, and one of his Monk’s Tales for a work it describes as John
Lydgate’s “Bochas.”35 This manuscript is an anthology of items Chaucer-
ian: Lydgate’s Churl and Bird, Chaucer’s Parlement of Fowls, William Wal-
ter’s “Guyscard and Seiesemonde,” George Ashby’s Prisoner’s Reflections,
Kuskin Ch 3 11/15/07 9:31 AM Page 134
the Assembly of Ladies, Sir Richard Roos’s translation of La Belle Dame sans
Merci, and a number of short poems by Lydgate and Chaucer. It contains
blank pages for later additions. Manly and Rickert term the text “a con-
glomerate of booklets of various sizes,” and its soiled collection of quires
is labeled with the actual page numbers of a previous incarnation.36 In that
it anthologizes the Chaucerian tradition through booklet construction,
Trinity College MS R.3.19 recalls Fairfax 16 to demonstrate, perhaps
somewhat more clearly than the b-group as a whole, the logic of manu-
script production: for here is the anthology as an intellectual and physical
assembly of texts and forms, a manuscript partially copied from print, and
assembled from booklets that were once part of another manuscript. Its
physical composition illustrates an economy of reproduction that funda-
mentally conflates what appear to us the fixed categories of manuscript
and print, production and consumption, into a unified whole. Indeed,
many of Caxton’s editions remain in what are now known as Sammelbände,
composite volumes of texts assembled from independent units.37 Paul
Needham records evidence for thirty-seven such volumes, and brows-
ing through his catalog provides a window into individual readers’ pri-
vate collections from the fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries: the
Bishop Moore Sammelband collects eight of Caxton’s Chaucerian quartos
of 1476 and 1477; the Thorney Sammelband presents Caxton’s folios of
the Canterbury Tales, Troilus and Criseyde, and the Quattuor sermones, with
a handwritten copy of the Siege of Thebes; Ripon Cathedral combines Cax-
ton’s editions of Chaucer’s translation of the Consolation of Philosophy with
his 1480 Doctrine to Learn French and English for an edition that suggests
the power of translation in its metaphysical as well as earthly modes.38
Caxton and the printers after him seem to have produced specifically for
this kind of consumption: Caxton’s Chaucer and Lydgate quartos, as well
as those of de Worde and Notary after him, his folio editions of Chaucer
in 1483, and Pynson’s of 1526 all lend themselves to compilation through
standard sizes, shape, and appearance. Needham points out two “natural
pair[s]” of Caxton’s texts that are consistently bound together in Sammel-
bände format, the Chronicles of England and Description of Britain (itself an
extract from the larger Polychronicon), and John Mirk’s Festial and the
Quattuor sermones.39 Disbound in modern libraries and rebound as dis-
crete units, these composite volumes appear curious, the odd uses of other-
wise normal books. They also make us recall that the printed book is not
Kuskin Ch 3 11/15/07 9:31 AM Page 135
fixed; ink is fixed on paper, but the printed book itself remains as idio-
syncratic and flexible as its manuscript counterparts, specific appropri-
ations of a greater authority that they only partially embody.40 In each
case, the individual text, whether it is manuscript, print, or some combi-
nation therein, participates in the larger imagination of a literary totality,
a canon.
The significant di±erence of print lies, then, not in that it fixes the
imaginative relationship between the individual book and the literary
structures of appropriation and consolidation—these characteristics pre-
date the medium—but in its productive capacity. Many of the costs asso-
ciated with manuscript and printed books are the same: Caxton used the
same paper sources as many manuscript producers, and skilled labor
had to be paid, whether scribes or pressmen.41 The advantage of print
over manuscript production lies in its ability to o±set these costs through
volume, to allow the printer to buy supplies in bulk, and to reproduce
pages cheaply once composition has been done. For manuscript pro-
duction, labor remains a fixed rate in relation to materials and output. In
contrast, Caxton can e±ectively lower his production costs by printing
more copies, his pressmen not having to reset entire pages, only re-ink
and make additional pulls. Caxton’s profit margin comes from adjust-
ing the relationship between these forms of capital per book: as Philip
Gaskell observes, “There were powerful economic reasons for print-
ing no more than about 2,000 copies, just as there were for printing at
least 500.”42 The incentive, then, was for Caxton to produce a quantity of
books, and this explains his investment in the two-pull press around the
time of his first Chaucerian series: anything that would let him increase
the volume of production and therefore minimize the price of labor in re-
lation to the individual product was in his best interest. The volume at
which print works asserts a transformation interior to the mode of pro-
duction overall, altering the relationship of the various determinant
forces within the reproduction cycle. Thus, however unified the printed
book appears, the relationships behind it are uneven and purposely so, for
it is this unevenness that not only connects print to its manuscript context
but also allows Caxton to exploit the relationship between human labor
and mechanized production to his advantage.
The Canterbury Tales therefore embodies capital investment not
simply because of its technological novelty or its literary history but
Kuskin Ch 3 11/15/07 9:31 AM Page 136
because it condenses multiple forms of authority—the financial authority

necessary to run the press, the literary authority vested in the Chaucerian
canon, and the authority over labor itself—into a tangible object. This
defines the book as symbolic of a series of appropriations and correspon-
ding alienations: Chaucer’s appropriation of ecclesiastical authority to-
ward vernacular poetry, his scribes’ appropriation of his various texts
toward the single-author edition, Caxton’s appropriation of labor toward
profit, and the reader’s appropriation of the book toward his or her in-
dividual uses, whatever these might be. These appropriations may involve
some degree of friction, expressed as visible marks within the book or as
intellectual contradiction within the work, but overall the results are self-
explanatory: the book-as-a-symbolic-object, or, what Michel Foucault has
called “an object of appropriation.” As such an object, the book presents
the imaginary structures of authorship and canon in a material form, giv-
ing them place in the world: hence Guillory argues that the “real social
process [of canon formation] is the reproduction not of values but of social
relations.”43 As much as Caxton’s profit margin is premised on the trans-
formation of labor into a physical object, then, it is not anachronistic to
say that the incunable embodies class struggle within textual production.
Profitable Impressions: Literary Reproduction as Social Reproduction
Caxton capitalizes the literary economy of the late fifteenth century,

shaping it according to the commercial requirements of the press into
a form of social reproduction. In part, this is Caxton’s discrete strategy,
in part it is native to the terms of authority that he inherits, and, in part,
it is generated by the mechanical di±erences introduced by print pro-
duction, the machine’s emphasis on volume. We can read this combi-
nation of forces through Caxton’s epilogue to the 1478 Consolation of
Philosophy,44 a piece that leads us back to Caxton’s source, the Book of Cour-
tesy, an anonymous conduct book written by a self-proclaimed student of
Lydgate, which Caxton printed in 1477.45 The two texts demonstrate the
way Caxton’s writing facilitates commercial book production by discover-
ing within the Chaucerian inheritance a language of consumption, which
it extends to a group of readers as interested in literary discourse for its
evocation of authority as for its intellectual argument or aesthetic pleas-
Kuskin Ch 3 11/15/07 9:31 AM Page 137
ures. “Production thus creates the consumers,” writes Marx,46 and this is
true for Caxton’s relationship to his audience: for rather than simply mar-
keting literature for a free-standing bourgeoisie, Caxton’s books actively
produce a coherent merchant class from an otherwise indeterminate
group of people. Thus Caxton brings Chaucer to market as both a tang-
ible commodity and an intellectual abstraction, an embodiment of capital
investment that can be appropriated by his readers. In doing so he trans-
forms that culture by teaching a new generation of readers how to profit
from literary authority. If the press is a physical machine, the book is
no less a symbolic one, and it produces its readers according to the very
mechanics by which it was produced: by making appear coherent what is
actually fragmentary and disjointed.
Caxton’s epilogue to the Consolation opens with a short introduction
to Boethius’s life and works, followed by a brief paraphrase of the text,
and, in turn, by his famous tribute to Chaucer:47
And for asmoche as the stile of it [the Consolation of Philosophy] / is

harde & di¤cile to be vnderstonde of simple persones Therfore the
worshipful fader & first foundeur & enbelissher of ornate eloquence
in our englissh + I mene / Maister Ge±rey Chaucer hath translated
this sayd werke oute of latyn in to oure vsual and moder tonge +
Folowyng the latyn as neygh as possible to be vnderstande +
Wherein in myne oppynyon he hath deseruid a perpetuell lawde and
thanke of al this noble Royame of Englond / And in especiall of
them that shall rede & understande it (unsigned, 93r –v)
Caxton draws the themes of passage—literary paternity, readership, tex-

tual production—from the Book of Courtesy. Ostensibly written for “Lytel
John,” who “syth [his] tendre enfancye / Stondeth as yet vnder / in di±er-
ence / To vice or vertu to meuyn or applye” (unsigned, 1), the Book of
Courtesy is part of a larger English interest in conduct literature, one that
includes the 1475 The Babees Book and Lydgate’s “Dietary,” as well as a
number of Caxton’s prints during this period: Caxton’s two quartos of
Lydgate’s The Horse, the Sheep and the Goose contain advice on good man-
ners (STC 17019 and STC 17018); Cato’s Disticha (STC 4850) is a school-
book of Latin moral couplets; Lydgate’s Stans puer ad mensam (STC
17030) is a version of Robert Grosseteste’s book of table manners for
Kuskin Ch 3 11/15/07 9:31 AM Page 138
boys; and the 1477 Infancia salvatoris (STC 14551) tells the early life of
Christ. Such literature went hand-in-hand with the Chaucerian tradi-
tion. For example, the two subjects are thematically linked within Cax-
ton’s editions and physically associated in the remaining Sammelbände:
Caxton’s quarto miscellany featuring the Parlement of Fowls also contains
Henry Scogan’s “Moral Ballad,” a poem of counsel to his sons that in-
cludes within it both a tribute to Chaucer and an interpolated version of
Chaucer’s short poem “Gentilesse”; in turn, the Bishop Moore Sammel-
band anthologizes the Disticha and the Book of Courtesy with Caxton’s 1477
editions of Lydgate and Chaucer.
The Book of Courtesy takes part in this association of childhood in-
struction with the Chaucerian tradition by announcing to Little John the
value of reading English authors. It too knits together its advice from a
series of large- and small-scale literary allusions: for example, recalling
the Prioress’s description in the General Prologue, the Book of Courtesy
instructs Little John to wipe his lips and keep grease from his cup (un-
signed, 5); and as Madame Eglentyne’s table manners are of a piece with
her linguistic training, these instructions lead into an extended discussion
of the literature Little John should consume: “Excersise your self also in
redyng / Of bookes enorned with eloquence” (unsigned, 8), commands
the book; read Gower, Chaucer, Hoccleve, and Lydgate. Although the
Book of Courtesy is unique in its inclusion of Hoccleve, authorial lists are
not uncommon in late fifteenth-century literature; Caxton specifically
draws upon its discussion of Chaucer for his epilogue.
O fader and founder of ornate eloquence

That enlumened hast alle our bretayne
To soone we loste / thy laureate scyence
O lusty lyquour / of that fulsom fontayne
O cursid deth / why hast thou we poete slayne
I mene fader chaucer / maister galfryde
Alas the whyle / that euer he from vs dyde.
(unsigned, 8v )
The passage presents a web of associations involving paternity and prece-

dence (“O fader and founder”), as well as loss and praise (“To soone
we loste / thy laureate scyence”), themselves woven from Chaucerian
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verse.48 For instance, Caxton’s 1476/77 Canterbury Tales records the Clerk
in the Prologue to the Clerk’s Tale as announcing:
I wol you telle a tale whiche that I

Lernyd at Padow of a worthy clerk
As preuyd is he his wordis and his work
He is now ded and leyd in cheste
I pray to God yeve hys soule goode reste
Fraunceys petrark the laureat poete
Highte this clerk whoos rethorike swete
Enlumyned al Jtayle of poetrie
(unsigned, 170r –v )49
Petrarch “enlumyned al Jtayle”; illumination suggests a harmony between

“his wordes and his werk” in which laureate rhetoric gilds the country-
side much as an artisan works on a manuscript page. The metaphor comes
to the Book of Courtesy from this passage of Chaucer, but more immedi-
ately from Lydgate’s own tribute in his prologue to the Siege of Thebes,
where Chaucer is “Floure of Poetes / thorghout al breteyne,” his words
“Enlumynyng / we trewe piked greyn / Be crafty writinge of his sawes
swete.”50 As Lerer has demonstrated, the language looks back through
Lydgate and Chaucer to the humanist praise of laureate authority and
constitutes what he calls a “vocabulary of impression,” evoking poetic elo-
quence as possessing an almost tangible quality, as if the poet’s excellence
alone impressed and ornamented the page.51 Still, as much as the Clerk
proclaims Petrarch a most tangible model of poetic eloquence, he never-
theless insists upon his mortality, “now ded and leyd in cheste,” and so
constitutes Petrarch’s authority to seize it, produces it only to consume it.
The phrasing of Caxton’s 1476 /77 edition, cited above, mutes the aggres-
siveness of what is now taken to be Chaucer’s “now deed and nayled in his
cheste,” but in any form the lines distill the process of appropriation and
consolidation into a single gesture. Thus the address in “Myn Hert ys
Set” to Chaucer recalls “Syth thou art dede and buryde in thy grave.”
Thus Caxton, too, appropriates the Clerk’s description of Petrarch for his
own description of Chaucer’s “body and corps lieth buried in thabbay of
westmestre beside london to fore the chapele of seynte benet” at the end
of his epilogue (unsigned, 93v). Allusion has long been recognized as a
Kuskin Ch 3 11/15/07 9:31 AM Page 140
defining feature of Caxton’s prose, and it is usually considered a sign that

he simply had nothing to add to what he read; nevertheless, appropri-
ation goes hand-in-hand with poetic composition throughout the period:
Chaucer borrows wholesale from his sources, and his contemporaries,
Henry Scogan, John Clanvowe, and Thomas Usk borrow from him.
Caxton states this rule baldly when he remarks at the end of his edition of
the House of Fame that Chaucer “he wrytteth no voyde wordes / but alle
hys mater is ful of hye and quycke sentence / to whom ought to be gyuen
laude and preysyng for hys noble makyng and wrytyng / For of hym alle
other haue borowed syth and taken / in alle theyr welsayeng and wrytyng” (STC
5087; d.iii; italics mine). In the fifteenth century alluding to authority is a
mode of participating in it; Caxton’s allusions to authority always contain
an appropriative edge.
The nature of appropriation involves lifting language from one
context and placing it in another. “I wol yow telle a tale whiche that I /
Lerned at Padowe of a worthy clerk,” proclaims the Clerk; Chaucer
“folow[s Boethius’s] latyn as neygh as possible to be vnderstande,” writes
Caxton; both imagine composition as a process of translation, of repro-
ducing what has come before with a di±erence. Chaucer’s poetry recog-
nizes this appropriative quality as essential to vernacular poetics but
fraught with problems. One particularly prominent illustration of his
thinking lies at the end of the General Prologue, in a passage Caxton’s 1483
edition dramatically sets apart from the rest of the text (fig. 3.2). This
page layout seems to owe to the placement of the woodcut on the follow-
ing page, but such a mechanical explanation should not distract us from
the obvious: the passage is an important statement on vernacular poetics
and the page layout highlights it as a freestanding unit. For here Chaucer
sets out a hierarchy of writing in which vernacular poetics are embedded
in social class:
But fyrst I you praye of your curtesye

That ye ne arette nat my Vylonye
Though that I playnly speke in this matere
To telle you here wordys and hyr chere
And though J speke here wordys propyrly
For this ye knowe as wel as J
Who shal a tale telle aftir a man
Kuskin Ch 3 11/15/07 9:31 AM Page 141
Figure 3.2. The General Prologue. Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, C3v.
Printed by William Caxton, Westminster, 1483 (STC 5083 ). IB.55094.
Kuskin Ch 3 11/15/07 9:31 AM Page 142
He moste reherse as nere as he can

Euery word yf it be in hys charge
Al speke he neuer so rudely and so large
Or ellys he muste telle hys tale untrewe
Or see thingis or feyne wordis newe
He may not spare al thouh he were his broder
He moot as wel say o word as another
Cryst spak hym self ful brode in holy wryt
And well ye woot no vylany is it
Eke plato sayth who so can it rede
The word muste be cosyn to the dede
Also J pray yow foryeue it me
Al though I sette not folk in hir degre
Here in thyse tales as that they sholde stonde
My wit is short ye may wel understonde
(unsigned folio, 13r–v )
Christ’s speech, absolutely clear in holy writ, transcends both the texts
that bear it and its social context; neither rude nor bound to social class,
it is “no vylany.” Plato’s writing is keyed back one degree: his words are
accessible only to those who can read them, and their meanings are less
palpable; shrouded in allegory, they are only cousins to the deeds they
represent. Chaucer’s language occurs at a further remove still: he is dull,
and his language is a figuration, not of truth but of prior conversation.
Hedged by contextual issues as he is, Chaucer must beg his readers’ cour-
tesy, so he promises early on in the General Prologue to set folk out accord-
ing to their degree, but here admits he cannot even do that. Christ speaks
with no villainy, but villainy—a social category—is a problem Chaucer
can’t escape: as much as he follows Christ’s model and speaks plainly, he is
doomed to run afoul of social mores; as much as he fictionalizes, he
moves away from Christ’s example. Ultimately, Chaucer has no choice
but to speak rudely and largely, to speak like a villain. The passage there-
fore presents a theory of literary epistemology as a movement from
Christ’s literal truth, to Plato’s figuration in which words and mean-
ings are related, to a kind of vernacular literary production that cannot
help turning against his brother. Violation is a theme Chaucer probes
throughout his writing, from Troilus and Criseyde, through the Canterbury
Kuskin Ch 3 11/15/07 9:31 AM Page 143
Tales, to his short poem on textual production, “Adam Scriveyn.”52 For

Chaucer, vernacular literary production verges on vulgarity, and this
marks its claim to truth and its di±erence: its vernacular nature is poten-
tially o±ensive to existing social categories even as it strives toward faith-
fulness.
Late fifteenth-century writers applied this paradigm to writing after
Chaucer, appropriating his language in order to appropriate his authority,
but not occupying his place. The Book of Courtesy contains an exception-
ally clear discussion of just such a pattern of appropriation. After listing
o± Gower, Chaucer, Hoccleve, and Lydgate as suitable for study, the
anonymous writer continues:
Loo my child / these faders auncyente

Repen the feldes fresshe of fulsomnes
The flours fresh they gaderd vp & hente
Of siluer langage / the grete riches
Who wil it haue my lityl childe doutles
Muste of hem begge / ther is nomore to saye
For of our tunge / they were both lok & kaye
Ther can noman now her werkis disteyne

The enbamed tunge / and aureate sentence
Men gete it now / by cantelmele & gleyne
Here and there by besy diligence
And fayne wold reche / her craft of eloquence
And by the gleyne / it is ful oft sene
In whos felde / the gleyners haue bene
(unsigned, 10 r – v )
The harvest is over. What was possible in the aureate fields of the past—
the easy, pastoral process of illumination in which poets are like flowers
to be picked by other poets—is impossible in the fifteenth century.
Chaucer, Gower, Hoccleve, and Lydgate have reaped the literary fields;
all Little John can do now is beg from them. Instead of a flowing forth of
poetic eloquence—Chaucer’s e±usion of “lusty lyquour”—Little John is
instructed to “sewe,” pursue, those who have “connyng.” This “besy dili-
gence” replaces the picking of “flours fresh” with the hard work of read-
ing. Yet this stanza too is an appropriation of canonical material filtered
Kuskin Ch 3 11/15/07 9:31 AM Page 144
through the Chaucerian tradition; as A. C. Spearing points out, “Even

this acknowledgment of indebtedness could not be made without in-
curring a further debt, for the image of precursors as reapers who have
already gathered the harvest of poetry, derived originally from chapter 2
of the Book of Ruth, is itself borrowed from Chaucer’s Prologue to The
Legend of Good Women.”53 This process of reading and begging forms
a study in itself, as “by the gleyne / it is ful oft sene / In whos felde / the
gleyners haue bene.” Who watches for this information, and why it is im-
portant is left unsaid: what is sure is that as with table manners, reading
can betray the individual, tell, perhaps, of his or her villainy. The world
the Book of Courtesy sketches for Little John is a series of appropriations
in which no statement is made innocently: each has a twisted lineage of
borrowing and taking, acknowledged debt and concealed appropriation.
The point is both a lament for the past and a comment on the present. At
the end of the section the author tells Little John that historical change
from the days of the “faders auncyente” also reflects the practices of their
fifteenth-century sons, their “fetis newe founden by foolis vnprouf-
fitable / That make we world so plainly transformate / That men semen
almoste enfemynate” (unsigned, 12). These new “fetis,” fashions of dress,
are unprofitable; in contrast to the lusty appropriations of “these fa-
ders auncyente,” they make men seem, almost, e±eminate. And even here
the anonymous author of the Book of Courtesy has made a silent appropri-
ation, this time not from Chaucer or Lydgate but from Hoccleve, whose
Regement of Princes presents a similar critique of contemporary fashion,
“In swych a cas he nys but a womman; he may nat stand hym in stide of a
man.”54 Borrowing from the Prioress’s and Clerk’s Tales, from the Legend of
Good Women, from Lydgate’s The Horse, the Sheep and the Goose in general,
as well as from his praise of Chaucer in the Siege of Thebes, from Hoc-
cleve’s in the Regement of Princes, and from the Regement itself, the anony-
mous Book of Courtesy rhetorically assembles the very Chaucerian canon it
instructs Little John to read.
Like “Myn Hert ys Set,” the Book of Courtesy o±ers an object les-
son in literary production as appropriation. “Excersise your self also
in redynge / Of bookes enorned with eloquence / Ther shal ye fynde /
bothe plesir & lernyng” (unsigned, 8), its author tells Little John, because
reading o±ers the individual a way to appropriate the imaginary past of
the aureate fields of laureate poets for contemporary uses. Books o±er a
Kuskin Ch 3 11/15/07 9:31 AM Page 145
similar solution in Caxton’s epilogue to the Consolation. In the very open-

ing of the epilogue Caxton paraphrases the Consolation as “Rehercing
in the sayde boke howe Philosophie appiered to him [ Boethius] shew-
yng the mutabilite of this transitorie lyfe / and also enformyng howe for-
tune and happe shold bee vnderstonden / with the predestynacion and
prescience of God as moche as maye and ys possible to be knowen na-
turelly / as a fore ys sayd in this sayd boke” (unsigned folio 93). At this
moment of authorization—“enformying”—Caxton argues that God’s
authority is only understood “as moche as maye and ys possible to be
knowen naturelly.” The line recalls Caxton’s characterization of Chaucer
following Boethius’s Latin as “neygh as possible to be vnderstande,” and
Caxton constructs a similar parallel between Philosophy’s lessons on
mutability and contemporary London:
For in the sayd boke they may see what this transitorie & mutable
world is And wherto euery mann liuyng in hit / ought to entende +
Thenne for as moche as this sayd boke so translated is rare & not
spred ne knowen as it is digne and worthy + For the erudicion and
lernyng of suche as ben Ignoraunt & not knowyng of it / Atte re-
queste of a singuler frende & gossib of myne + I william Caxton haue
done my debuoir & payne tenprynte it in fourme as is here afore
made / In hopyng that it shal prou¤te moche peple to the wele &
helth of theire soules / & for to lerne to haue and kepe the better pa-
cience in aduersitees. (unsigned, 93v)
Where the Book of Courtesy promises “plesir & lernyng,” Caxton presents
the Consolation for “erudicion and lernyng”; where the Book of Courtesy
finds the world transformed, Caxton sees it as “transitorie & mutable.”
Both imagine an immutable source of authority in this world—God,
“these faders auncyente”—as just beyond human reach. Little John, the
subject of such a world, “stondeth as yet vnder in di±erence / To vice or
vertu to meuyn or applye.” Neither moving nor applying himself to vice
or virtue, he exists in a paralysis of indeterminacy. The problem speaks to
Caxton’s audience in general: for example, it has been repeatedly sug-
gested that Caxton’s “gossib” was William Pratt, a mercer whom Caxton
identifies as his friend in his prologue to the 1487 Book of Good Manners.
Regardless of this identification, or even the actuality of the gossip, Cax-
Kuskin Ch 3 11/15/07 9:31 AM Page 146
ton does not name a person here but rather selects a term suggesting
intimacy. In contrast, his readers appear a public audience, one that is un-
informed and distanced, di±use—everything the gossip is not. The dis-
tinction between the gossip and the audience runs throughout the
epilogue in a silent juxtaposition of known individuals—the gossip (“a
singuler frende”), Chaucer (“the worshipful fader”), and Boethius (“an
excellente auctour”)—and a community desperate for authority but de-
fined by its very lack: “them that shall rede & understande it,” “suche as
ben Ignoraunt & not knowyng of it,” and “euery mann liuyng.”
The vagaries of Caxton’s language point to the greater indetermi-
nacy of the class he is addressing, for like Little John, the class is inde-
terminate. The reproduction of authority was an essential issue to the
merchant class that Caxton and his gossip knew. As Sylvia Thrupp points
out, “Over the [fifteenth century] as a whole the merchant class was
barely reproducing its numbers.”55 Caxton himself laments this problem
in Caton, a work he dedicates “vnto the cyte of London,” and in which he
writes, “And by cause I see that the children that ben borne within the
sayd cyte encreace / and prou±yte not lyke theyr faders and olders / but
for the moost parte after that they ben comen to theyr parfight yeres of
discrecion / and rypenes of age / how wel that theyre faders have left to
them grete quantite of goodes / yet scarcely amonge ten two thryve”
(STC 4853; iir–v ). This is a problem of family structure, of sons not fol-
lowing fathers into business, and of guild structure, of a large proportion
of apprentices failing to become freemen.56 There is clear evidence that it
was recognized as such: the Mercers’ Company, for example, developed a
system of admission by patrimony in the late fifteenth century, grandfa-
thering the 20s. entry fee to the pre-1448–49 level of 2s. for the sons of
mercers. This solution does not seem to have been tremendously e¤ca-
cious. J. M. Imray records that of seventeen freemen’s sons enrolled be-
tween 1459 and 1464, only seven became freemen themselves.57 Though
the guild system provides a structure of patriarchal hierarchy, it seems,
then, to have been insu¤cient. Instead, fifteenth-century urban mer-
chant relations appear to have been entrepreneurial, involving women in
the workforce and based on temporary allegiances rather than on stable
lines of inheritance. This dynamic environment encouraged experimen-
tation of the sort we see Caxton himself engaging in throughout the pe-
riod, breaking away from his family and community in search of oppor-
Kuskin Ch 3 11/15/07 9:31 AM Page 147
tunity; conversely, it also suggests the di¤culty, if not impossibility,

for this class of defining itself coherently. Though fathers are everywhere
in fifteenth-century culture—in the masters of the guilds and in the
literature of the times—the little workshop of the patriarchal master is
exactly what the sons could not or would not reproduce.58 For the prob-
lem of this class of readers is that it has no name; it cannot reproduce
itself as the bourgeoisie because it does not know itself by that collec-
tive term.
The Book of Courtesy speaks to this indistinct class in a language it
understands. Its advice is chiefly nostalgic and conservative: submit to
“these faders auncyente,” it announces to Little John, and assume their
social system. So, it places the blame for Little John’s indi±erence on so-
cial change and o±ers its connection between childhood instruction and
the Chaucerian tradition as a paternal inheritance capable of recalling,
if not restoring, the proper ways of the past. For Caxton, then, literary
appropriation for social “prou¤te” is accomplished through the ma-
nipulation of “fourmes”: Philosophy’s “enformyng” of Boethius and the
“fourmes” of print both facilitate the appropriation of authority. The
specificity of Caxton’s claims, let alone his language, should not be un-
derestimated: again, one need only look as far as the Book of Courtesy
to see the same economy of appropriation for profit, and the same double
sense of textual production. The Book of Courtesy’s anonymous author
uses just such a metaphor to discuss Little John’s self-construction, first in
the opening stanza, “but as waxe resseyueth prynte or fygure / So chil-
dren ben disposid of nature” (unsigned, 1), and later in his discussion
of table manners, “prynte ye trewly your memorie” (unsigned, 4v ) and
“prynte in your mynde / clerly the sentence” (unsigned, 7v). Forming, en-
forming, printing: the reproduction of books stands for the successful
transformation of authority. In the context of the printed book, they
bring together named authorities with an anonymous audience, o±ering
an unnamed class the commodities of material culture as a means of
imagining a coherent identity.
With this advice, however, the Book of Courtesy does not simply rec-
ommend that Little John wait for his paternal inheritance; instead it ad-
vises him to proceed “by cantelmele & gleyne” to improvise with what
he finds and consume at every turn. The Book of Courtesy’s comments on
social mores continually orbit around the issue of proper consumption,
Kuskin Ch 3 11/15/07 9:31 AM Page 148
of food, of fashions, and of books. Proper consumption, it argues, is

like profitable reading, both lead to the successful reproduction of au-
thority: “And doubte not my childe / withoute drede / It wil prou¤te
to see suche thingis & red” (unsigned, 10v ). In contrast, improper con-
sumption, the “fetis newe founden by foolis vnprou¤table,” confounds
men and women, implicitly making all reproduction impossible. In this
way the Book of Courtesy actively participates in the social change it con-
demns, for it is no less a commodity newly found than the fashionable
but e±eminate outfits it scorns. A commodity about the consumption of
commodities, the Book of Courtesy decries any change from the past even
as its material form contributes to that change. Still, the Book of Courtesy
is contradictory, paradoxical even, but nevertheless convincing: hence, the
alchemy of print—of a reduction to the essence of authority and a corre-
sponding multiplication of the forms of authority available—is projected
onto the internal contradictions of fifteenth-century literary culture,
doubled over with the problems inherent in the Chaucerian tradition to
create an uneven mode of production, one at odds with its own mode of
dissemination but nevertheless symbolically unified as an object of appro-
priation for anonymous consumption.
Caxton’s 1483 Prologue to Chaucer and the History of the Book
Commodities, books, mediate the gap between public identity and the
private self. We can see this played out in Caxton’s prologue to the 1483
Canterbury Tales, a milestone of fifteenth-century prose. Beginning with
Caxton’s praise of past “clerkes / poetes / and historiographs” who have
produced historical writings (a2), the prologue goes on to describe their
texts as “monumentis wreton,” physical markers of history. In this it re-
calls Caxton’s enduring interest in books as transcendent in his prologues
to the Mirrour of the World and the Polychronicon. And so the prologue
continues to Caxton’s famous tribute to Chaucer which observes Chau-
cer’s eloquence in his “beauteuous volumes and aournate writynges.”
This passage is built on a series of allusions: to the Clerk’s Tale, to Lyd-
gate’s Troy Book, and to two discrete sections of the Siege of Thebes. In this
last poem, the Siege of Thebes, Caxton finds a history of poetry to comple-
ment his history of the book, one in which Amphyon, the poet-king,
Kuskin Ch 3 11/15/07 9:31 AM Page 149
sings the walls of Thebes into being in an ideal demonstration of the

political power of poetic eloquence. In the Siege of Thebes, this scene
comes directly after Lydgate’s praise of Chaucer, and the link between
the two exemplary poets is made clear in marginalia of William and Alice
de la Pole’s manuscript, Arundel 119, which is itself so highly inter-
ested in authorship: after noting Chaucer, the manuscript marks the “¶
Ensample of kyng Amphion” and Lydgate’s source, “¶ The exposition of
John Bochas upon we derk posey.” Amphyon’s is indeed a “dark poesy,”
for when Lydgate moralizes over Oedipus by underscoring that “of Cur-
sid stok / cometh vnkynde blood,” the obvious suggestion is that Oedi-
pus’s “stock” is tainted from the start (1014). Lydgate insists that Am-
phyon escapes this history without being butchered by his sons, but it is
in this escape that Amphyon’s meaning becomes di¤cult, for should he
fall with the rest of his clan he could be read as a negative exemplum of
Fortune, another tragedy for the Monk’s collection. Instead he remains
the one redeemed character in the history of Thebes. The result sets the
origin of poetry against its legacy, and by implication the same holds true
for the fifteenth-century inheritance of the Chaucerian mode. Lydgate
may pass over Amphyon, but that dark poetic, with its vague proximity
to Chaucer’s own making, hangs over that text like a nightmare. Caxton
learns from Lydgate not merely a collection of tropes, then, but a frame-
work for understanding the Chaucerian inheritance. Readers such as
William de la Pole, perhaps finding in such texts an allegory for their
own political situations, had it marked in their manuscripts, and the gen-
eration after them moved around it cautiously. Caxton’s publications rec-
ognize this as a complicity in corruption, for by the mid-1480s the rivalry
of the Wars of the Roses had produced a literary culture of contrivance
and paranoia, and with the usurpation crisis of 1483, the sense of For-
tune’s return had settled on the English court. We can read English liter-
ary polity so turning in upon itself, attempting to find its way through
Amphyon’s legacy of poetic language as the men killed and caused their
siblings to disappear and the women brokered secret marriages and re-
bellions. But the Chaucerian mode is not romance, and so we should not
expect to find Caxton or his contemporaries kneeling like Bedivere at
a dying Arthur’s feet: the message of the Chaucerian inheritance is to es-
tablish authority through appropriation and participation, and this de-
fines fifteenth-century polity.
Kuskin Ch 3 11/15/07 9:31 AM Page 150
Caxton’s prologue to the Canterbury Tales tells a story, then, not

simply of Chaucer’s genius but of complicity in a textual culture of cor-
ruption. After the section praising Chaucer, Caxton goes on to tell of his
revision of his first edition, an autobiographical narrative that is usually
taken at face value. Caxton did, in fact, revise his earlier edition exten-
sively, editing his b-group version against another manuscript, perhaps
from the a-group, reordering the tales, revising and eliminating lines, as
well as adding running titles, clarifying the relationship of the links to the
tales through the page layout, and including his famous set of woodcuts.59
While Caxton’s narrative does suggest a sense of realism, it is a highly
crafted reality at best. It begins where the passage of allusions ends, at the
reading of the Canterbury Tales:
And after theyr tales whyche ben of noblesse / wysedom / gentylesse /

myrthe / and also of veray holynesse and Vertue / wherin he fynys-
shyth thys sayd booke / whyche book I haue dylygently ouersen and
duly examyned to thende that it be made acordyng vnto his owne
making. (a2)
The narrative reads as if Chaucer finishes his book and straightaway

Caxton takes it up. This e±ect is created by Caxton’s use of the passive—
“to thend that it be made acordyng vnto his owen makyng”—which
mutes his own role and heightens the immediacy of Chaucer’s intention,
suggesting that Chaucer’s authority is immanent. Thus, the only acts in-
volved in reproducing the texts are the vaguely administrative “finishing”
and “overseeing.” Here is poetic composition without labor, printing
without pressmen, imposition without composition. Books without his-
tory: this is bookmaking as transcendence.
Striking about Caxton’s narrative, however, is that while it appears
to progress linearly, it actually works through the repetition of a funda-
mental action: Caxton’s examination of a version of the Canterbury Tales.
At times, this return describes a new narrative event, but at other times it
is a reflective backtracking that occurs outside the storyline. For example,
in the very next passage, Caxton repeats the action of “dylygently ouer-
sen[ing]” Chaucer’s book:
For I fynde many of the sayd bookes / whyche wryters haue abry-
dgyd it and many thynges left out / And in somme place haue sette
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certayn Versys / that he neuer made ne sette in hys booke / of why-

che bookes so incorrecte was one brought to me vi yere passyd / why-
che I supposed had ben veray true & correcte / And accordyng to the
same I dyde do enprynte a certayn nombre of them / whyche anon
were sold to many and dyuerse gentyl men / of whome one gentyl-
man cam to me / and said that this book was not accordyng in many
places vnto the book that Ge±erey chaucer had made. (a2r–v)
The passage begins with an abstraction deriving from Caxton’s ex-

perience (“For I fynde . . .”), and so it moves away from the narrative line,
retelling the action of delivery in a didactic mode. Yet ultimately the
scene is the same: Caxton reviews his copytext for his 1476/77 edition of
the Canterbury Tales. Where his first telling compressed time to suggest a
singular book passed from Chaucer’s hands to his own, here passive ob-
servance is replaced with editorial action; rather than an out-of-time sin-
gularity, this telling presents reproduction (“I dyde do enprynte”),
dissemination (“whyche anon were sold”), and realization (“this book was
not accordyng in many places vnto the book that Ge±erey chaucer had
made,” a2v). Both time and labor are central to this version of bookmak-
ing: six years separate Caxton from his first review of Chaucer’s Canter-
bury Tales, as do the work of many “writers”; these variables conspire to
add verses to Chaucer’s work, exactly the “superfluyte” that Chaucer’s po-
etry supposedly transcended. This corruption is palpable: it denigrates
Chaucer’s “beauteuous volumes and aournate writynges” to the “rude
speche 7 Incongrue” of the “olde Bookes.”
Though Caxton’s story involves only two manuscripts, the 1476 and
1483 copytexts, the narrative continues to repeat the delivery, discussion,
and examination of texts. The fundamental action—Caxton receives a
Canterbury Tales—is more or less repeated three times over the course of
the prologue: once in Caxton’s first discussion of overseeing Chaucer’s
book, once again in the above passage, and lastly, when the gentleman
brings him a new manuscript. The result is that error is realized and wor-
ried over through a recursive narrative style. What is surprising about the
prologue is that this structure does not blur the narrative’s progressive
sense; indeed, one of the marks of the narrative’s success is that the repe-
tition never strikes the reader as excessive, but instead creates an increas-
ingly pervasive sense of discovery that culminates in the last telling:
Kuskin Ch 3 11/15/07 9:31 AM Page 152
Caxton’s initial concern is to avoid implicating himself in this corrup-

tion, and he meets the gentleman’s accusation with excuses (“To whom
I answerd that I had made it accordyng to my copye / and by me was
nothyng added ne mynusshyd”), but these fall aside as the recognition of
corruption becomes its confession:
Yet I wold ones endeuoyre me to enprynte it agayn / for to satysfye

thauctour / where as to fore by ygnouraunce I erryd in hurtyng and
dy±amyng his book in dyuerce places in settyng in somme thynges
that he neuer sayd ne made / and leuyng out many thynges that he
made whyche ben requysite to be sette in it. (a2v )
Caxton hurts and defames Chaucer “in ignorance”; Lydgate’s Oedipus

errs against his father “ignorant, shortly, how it stode” (784): both de-
scribe the impossibility of any easy paternal inheritance. Driven by this
realization, Caxton embarks on the second edition of the Canterbury Tales
in order to replace the first without corruption, but even in this goal of
replacement the narrative is condemned to repetition, for the one thing
Caxton’s narrative cannot do is strike out its corruption because cor-
ruption organizes it at a fundamental level: the crime has already been
committed, the books have already been disseminated, the errors have al-
ready been pointed out. Although the narrative strives toward a pattern
of progressive improvement, then, its structure testifies to the funda-
mental level at which corruption is woven into its conception of history.
In a sense then, Caxton could not have written the prologue’s opening re-
marks—the praise of the makers of enduring books—without already
having come to the realization of his own complicity in the history of
the book.
To help rectify this corruption, the gentleman provides Caxton with
his father’s copy of the Canterbury Tales. The father is a peculiar figure in
Caxton’s narrative: while the narrative casts Caxton and the unnamed
“gentylman” as characters within its thread—they walk its streets, inhabit
its shops, read its texts, and confer over its problems—the father is an in-
explicable figure apparently beyond its capacity for detail. Associated
with the past through his age, he is never in the narrative foreground;
connected to Chaucer through the trope of paternity, he is always in its
background. The father is unknowable and unquestionable, linked to the
Kuskin Ch 3 11/15/07 9:31 AM Page 153
past, but without presence. Indeed, his presence is only testified to by his
book, and thus he figures a paternal authority just outside the narrative
line. His copy of the Canterbury Tales provides exactly the authority that
Caxton’s lacks: “Thenne [the gentleman] sayd he knewe a book whyche
hys fader had and moche louyd / that was very trewe / and accordyng
vnto hys owen first book by hym made” (a2v). In that the father’s manu-
script has a pedigree of being made from “hys owen first book” which
was “by hym made,” it seems to hark back to some earlier source. The
lines are ambiguous; what is clear is the authority the father stakes in this
manuscript: the son remarks, “wyst wel / that hys fader wold not gladly
departe fro it.” If Caxton’s narrative pits the representation of Chaucer
against the structure of history, the father solves this problem by provid-
ing an authority that is both literary and social. Less than an embodiment
of authority, he is an imaginary figure, a positive influence within a fallen
world. Without eloquence of his own, he inspires Caxton and the son to
deal between themselves, to strike a bargain of social gestures around the
text. Perhaps the most succinct line in all Caxton’s writing, “And thus we
fyll at accord,” marks a social relationship mediated by the book. Thus,
Caxton repeats the delivery of a manuscript to his shop once again: “and
he ful gentylly gate of hys fader the said book / and delyuerd it to me / by
whiche I haue corrected my book.” Caxton tells his story of correcting
the 1476 edition as a history of the book, an Oedipal drama, and a prob-
lem of textual reproduction in which books provide a vehicle for the re-
production of social relations.
The Chaucerian inheritance is the material and intellectual

structure for the reproduction of authority as evoked by an English lit-
erary tradition of consolidation and appropriation. From the middle of
the fifteenth century, with the end of the Hundred Years War and the ad-
vent of the Wars of the Roses, as well as the death of Lydgate in 1449, the
organizing themes of this reproduction process underwent a significant
shift from paternity within a fixed Chaucerian tradition, to sibling rivalry.
One consistent thread within this change, carried within the aesthetic
and generic principles of Chaucerian writing, is the strategy of appro-
priation from pre-existing literary sources and sanctioned institutions.
As the shift worked its way out in the last quarter of the century, the ap-
pearance of print, and its mechanical dependence upon volume to turn
Kuskin Ch 3 11/15/07 9:31 AM Page 154
an economic profit, extended this appropriation strategy to widening

bodies of readers. Recognizing this, William Caxton facilitated it in a
variety of ways: by presenting the book as a marketable commodity, by
emphasizing works that announced the e¤cacy of appropriation for per-
sonal profit, by working with readers similarly interested in using literary
culture toward the appropriation of authority. Thus print asserted a uni-
fying function over literary and political culture not because it appeared
as a force external to that culture, but because it expanded its terms, al-
lowing various communities to appropriate authority and identify their
social place in new ways. Still, as much as the press developed the book as
a commodity capable of symbolizing authority, it also served, to some ex-
tent, to lay bare the commodification of human relations in general. This
too is latent in the Chaucerian inheritance, however, for from the start
Chaucer defines vernacular production as vulgar.
Kuskin Ch 4 11/15/07 9:32 AM Page 155
Chapter Four
Uninhabitable Chaucer
Patronage and the Commerce in the Self
By the late 1470s Chaucer was entombed, as Caxton tells it in

his epilogue to The Consolation of Philosophy (STC 3199), his authority po-
etically described “on a table hongyng on a pylere.”1 We can read in this
the central problem of the Chaucerian inheritance, for if the imagery of
the tomb set in motion Chaucer’s literary legacy as the father of English
poetry, it also depicts him as a model for writing sealed o± from the pres-
ent, and to some degree uninhabitable by contemporary writers. That
paternity provides the terms for authority is by no means exclusive to po-
etics; indeed, the Wars of the Roses can be understood as an attempt by
the English nobility to inherit a fraught paternal legacy; thus, J. R. Lan-
der writes that after Richard of York’s death, the peers “at the beginning
of March 1461 made Edward king because there seemed to be no other
way out of a desperate political situation; no other way of cutting free
from the disasters into which his father’s ambitions had led them.”2 For
Caxton studies the connection between literary and political authority
has been understood through the concept of patronage. Considered
simply as an exchange of art for money, patronage appears as a system of
manners divorced from the combative manipulation of authority that
characterized the period as a whole. Rather than viewing patronage as a
system of exchange, I define it as a structure for symbolic production,
one that combines seemingly heterogeneous modes—chivalric, spiritual,
commercial, and bibliographic—toward the construction of a public
155
Kuskin Ch 4 11/15/07 9:32 AM Page 156
identity. Chaucer’s writing remains central to this production process be-

cause he so clearly sets out a rhetoric of humility in the service of author-
ship; however, as his status became increasingly canonical over the course
of the century, it fell out of reach of courtiers eager to define themselves
as writers. As much as these writers have simply been labeled “patrons,”
their place in literary history has been ignored. Involved in literary pro-
duction in both manuscript and print, the minor writers of the English
fifteenth century solidify the social authority of contemporary vernacu-
lar writing.
Caxton names five people as clearly financing the press: Margaret of
York, who he states in the Recuyell gave him a yearly fee; Anthony
Woodville, who he claims in the Cordyal provided him with “manifolde
benefetes and large rewardes” (STC 5758; unsigned, 77v ), and for whom
he printed three texts; William Fitzalan, Earl of Arundel, who gave him
“a yerely fee / that is to wete a bucke in the sommer / 7 a doo in wynter”
for producing the 1483 Golden Legend (STC 24873–74; p2); Hugh Brice, a
mercer who paid for the 1481 Mirrour of the World, “entendyng to present
the same vnto the vertuous noble and puissaunt lord / wylliam lord
hastynges” (STC 24762; a4v); and John de Vere, Earl of Oxford, who is as-
sociated with three separate texts, and whom Caxton chides in the 1490
Foure Sonnes of Aymon (STC 1007) for not paying in a timely fashion. Cax-
ton’s text remains only in a fragment at Cambridge University Library,
but his prologue is reprinted by William Copland in 1554:
I haue endeuorde me to accomplyshe and to reduce it into our en-

glysshe, to my great coste and charges as in the translatinge as in en-
prynting of the same, hopyng 7 not doubtyng but that hys good
grace shall rewarde me in such wise that I shal haue cause to pray for
his good and prosperus welfare. (STC 1010; A.ii)
Caxton also names Henry VII, Queen Elizabeth, Margaret Beaufort, and
two gentlemen, William Pratt and William Daubeney, as issuing “com-
mandments” and “requests,” which are not explicitly attached to costs or
fees. The problem with recent definitions of patronage is that they re-
main static.3 If we look to Caxton’s productions the situation is much
more complex. For example, during the usurpation crisis of 1483, Caxton
printed an unusual edition: the 1483 Curial, a pamphlet of one folio con-
Kuskin Ch 4 11/15/07 9:32 AM Page 157
taining a prose epistle by Alain Chartier (STC 5057), followed by a poem,

“Ther ne is danger / but of vylayn.” The text begins with a short pro-
logue by Caxton:
Here foloweth the copye of a lettre whyche maistre Alayn Charetier

wrote to hys brother / whyche desired to come dwelle in Court / in
whyche he reherseth many myseryes & wretchydnesses therin vsed /
for taduyse hym not to entre in to it / leste he after repente / like as
heir after folowe / and late translated out of frensshe in to englysshe /
whyche Copye was delyuerid to me by a noble and vertuous Erle / At
whos Instance & requste I haue reduced it in to Englyssh. (i)4
In its mention of a noble and virtuous earl, the prologue makes a trans-
parent reference to Anthony Woodville, the Earl Rivers, Caxton’s long-
time associate executed by the Earl of Northumberland at Richard’s
proxy. N. F. Blake uses this text as grounds for his claim of “anonymous
patronage.” Dating the pamphlet at 1484, Blake goes on to suggest that
Woodville’s patronage was “a liability” at this time, evidence that Cax-
ton’s operations ran into trouble during the Ricardian period with
Woodville’s death.5 Thus to accept the notion of patronage in Caxton
studies is to lay aside the literary tradition and understand Woodville as
the guiding hand behind his most ambitious projects. In the 1479 Cordyal
Caxton names three texts he printed for Woodville—the Dictes and Say-
ings of the Philosophers (1477; STC 6826), the Morale Prouerbes (1478; STC
7273), and the Cordyal itself—and also mentions some “diuerse balades
ayenst the seuen dedely synnes.”6 Woodville may well have been involved
with more than Caxton’s three printed editions and some lost ballads, but
it is too much of a simplification of fifteenth-century patronage and of
Caxton’s own agency to argue that his a¤liation with any single patron
so completely defined his work with the press. More interesting about the
Curial is that it is possible to attribute it to Woodville at all, for as Blake
recognizes, Caxton is capable of excluding mention of the nobility when
it suits him; for example, in 1474 he dedicated his second printed text, the
Game and Play of the Chess (STC 4920) to George, Duke of Clarence,
amidst Edward the IV’s resumption, playing into the political context of
the time, yet he revises any mention of Clarence out of his 1483 reissue of
the edition (STC 4921). Caxton’s allusion to Woodville in the Curial asks
u n i n h a b i t a b l e c h a u c e r 157
Kuskin Ch 4 11/15/07 9:32 AM Page 158
the question, in what sense is Woodville his patron? I suggest that Cax-
ton’s presentation of the Curial as a Woodville text is not secretive; it is
strategic.
If we turn to the Curial itself, we find it entirely cynical about life at
court, and this is both its warning and its thrill. For Chartier repeatedly
implores his brother to remain at home: “Beholde thenne brother be-
holde / how moche thy lytyl hous gyueth the liberte and franchyse / And
thanke it that it hath receyuyd the as only lorde / And after that thy dore
is shette and closed ther entreth none other but suche as pleseth the” (ivv).
Chartier’s rendition of “thy lytyl hous” evokes notions of private space,
of self-mastery, and of autonomy. In contrast, he depicts the court as a
marketplace:
The courte to thende that thou vnderstande it / is a couente of peple

that vnder fayntyse of Comyn wele assemble hem to gydre for to de-
cyue eche other / For ther be not many of them but that they selle
bye / or eschange somtyme theyr rentes or propre vestementis / For
emonge vs of the courte / we be meschaunt and newfangle / that we
bye the other peple / And sommtyme for theyr money we selle them
our humanyte precyous / we bye other / And other bye vs / But we
can moche better selle our self to them that haue to doo wyth vs /
how moche thenne mayst thou gete / that it be certayn / or what
sewrte / that it be wythout doubte and wythout peryll / wylt thou
goo to the court for to selle or lese / the goodnes of vertues whyche
thou haste goten wythoute the courte / I saye to the whan thou en-
forcest the to entre / thenne begynnest thou to lese the seygnorye of
thy self. (v)
Striking about Chartier’s depiction is that courtly patronage appears en-

trepreneurial rather than underwritten by a stable system of authority.
Indeed, Chartier’s court is less a three-dimensional place than a tempo-
rary social agreement, a covenant of people, an assembly gathered to-
gether for the purpose of trade. What is cultivated at home—the lib-
erty and franchise associated with one’s private domain, “our humanyte
precyous,” or “the seygnorye of thy self”—is put on sale. So within
the court, the terms of exchange—selling, buying, exchanging, renting,
leasing—pile up in a world of pimping and prostitution. Strikingly, ac-
Kuskin Ch 4 11/15/07 9:32 AM Page 159
cording to Chartier, this system is fundamentally about language; he

states, “And allewaye emonge vs courtyours enfayned / we folowe more
the names of tho±yces / than the droytes and ryghtes / we be verbal / or
ful of wordes / and desyre more the wordes than the thynges” (iv). We
are verbal and our desire fixates not on things but on the linguistic repre-
sentation of things. And so the goodness and virtue cultivated at home
are bought and sold, the individual reduced to the name of his or her
o¤ce. Chartier’s Curial sketches a world in which representation replaces
being, a world circulating not so much people as the signifiers of their
public selves, not so much Anthony and William, as the manner and
fourme of the earl and printer.
This is what Caxton does well: he produces things that are verbal,
that represent people, identities, and places. Books put intangibles—
labor, history, precious humanity—into circulation and match the desire
for ownership with a symbolic object. So, Chartier begs his brother not
to come to court, telling him that “thou sechest the way to lese they self”
(iv) and itemizes the ways courtly life transforms the self into a mere rep-
resentation. His advice may be genuine, but behind it is the lingering sus-
picion that he is already too far gone to o±er his brother legitimate
counsel, already too much part and product of the system he denounces.
Perhaps Chartier truly does wish for his brother’s well-being. Perhaps
he dreads another rival. Perhaps he is enamored of his own cynical evoca-
tion of the world around him. Regardless, the only thing that the reader
can say for sure is that the speaker of this epistle is already a component
part of the larger economy. The same is true for Caxton. For by now it
should be clear that though Caxton may play the monkey, he is as much a
courtier as anyone else, and his oddly shadowy tribute to Woodville op-
erates according to the same codes as Chartier’s advice: surely Caxton
lamented Woodville’s loss and would decry the excesses of Richard’s
court, but just so, he continues to participate in it. When the local popu-
lace threatened his shop some years later, Richard Pynson picked it up
and moved out; Caxton, in contrast, remains at Westminster through
thick and thin. That we are verbal and desire words suggests the power of
language to appropriate people, and Caxton’s Curial does exactly that
to Woodville: it appropriates his persona in its representation of some
now-lost relationship and in doing so uses him to underwrite its com-
mentary on life at court; in turn, its knowing condemnation of courtly
Kuskin Ch 4 11/15/07 9:32 AM Page 160
behavior proves the validity of its representation and extends this knowl-
edge to the interested reader. That is, he has reduced Woodville’s indi-
viduality to a representation—“a noble and vertuous Erle”—which he has
attached to an object and brought to market. Caxton’s intentions are like
Chartier’s: they may or may not be sincere, but they nevertheless partici-
pate in an economy that has much less to do with clearly defined roles
than with opportunism and exploitation. Rather than reading the Curial
as cloaking some deep and abiding loyalty to a lost patron, we should see
it as a strategic exploitation of that loyalty. By o±ering a pointed state-
ment of fact in an elegiac mode, Caxton legitimizes his own appropri-
ation of rhetorical manipulation. The Curial operates by a strategy for
reproduction that is simultaneously a strategy for legitimization, and in
this it provides an important reminder for any definition of patronage:
the authority of a work, or a patron, does not stand apart from the pa-
tronage relationship (as might an artistic gift to a noble patron or a cash
reward to a courtly poet), rather it is generated through it. Patronage is a
social relationship premised on the joint production of authority.
The current narrative of fifteenth-century literary culture finds little
place for such an interest in linguistic representation and even less for the
poetic amateurs who populate its court, courtier-poets like de la Pole who
identified themselves through an association with canonical authors,
courtier-translators such as Anthony Woodville who defined themselves
through books, and, more loosely, aristocratic reading communities such
as the group of writers associated with Sir John Fastolf, known as the
Caister circle. As long as this group is ignored, the courtly poet of the six-
teenth century appears sui generis. Thus, this chapter asks, if Lydgate is to
occupy Chaucer’s place, where do these writers fit? It begins to answer
this question by reading Anthony Woodville’s translation of the Dictes
and Sayings of the Philosophers (STC 6826) toward a definition of patron-
age that allows room for a more dynamic consideration of the construc-
tion of literary authority. “Myn Hert ys Set” lends a useful reminder
here: as much as the Chaucerian inheritance of poetic authority was rec-
ognized as having a coherent legacy, it was also understood as partially
uninhabitable by lesser writers, who nevertheless defined themselves in re-
lation to Chaucer by strategizing ways of participating in and appropriat-
ing the canon without making a direct claim to his authority. In a fur-
ther likeness to “Myn Hert ys Set,” their strategy is premised on a discus-
Kuskin Ch 4 11/15/07 9:32 AM Page 161
sion of antifeminism. Jennifer Summit has pointed out that Christine de

Pizan’s works appealed to various reading groups within England, for
“the concept of ‘the woman writer,’” she argues, “became a major corner-
stone around which fundamental notions of authorship, writing, and lit-
erary tradition were first constructed.”7 Thus, in the second part of this
chapter I read Woodville’s 1478 translation of Christine de Pizan’s Morale
Prouerbes (STC 7273) and Caxton’s 1489 translation of her Fayts of Arms
(STC 7269) for John de Vere as providing a model for authorship usable
to the courtly writer. That the simple opposition between male and fe-
male writing does not account for the production of literary authority
in the last quarter of the century suggests how the forms of authority
are interwoven throughout a number of discourses. It also points to the
interest men and women had in reading about gender identities. Patron-
age conflates other categories as well, and in the chapter’s third section
I argue that Margaret Beaufort’s involvement in a series of printed litur-
gical works and vernacular sermons demonstrates how it operates as a
structure for the large-scale commercial production of spiritual litera-
ture. Conceived of romantically, patronage frames Caxton’s work through
a series of complacent categories: servile poets and arrogant nobles,
dowagers and matrons, chivalric feudal knights and pious laywomen read-
ers. In doing so it obscures the importance of late fifteenth-century liter-
ary culture in the history of English writing, reading, and authorship.
Reconceived as intertwining a number of discourses—the production of
persona, feminism and antifeminism, commercial production and lay
spirituality—the question of patronage becomes, in fact, a question of
social authority.
Anthony Woodville and the Problem with Patronage
One way into the problem of patronage is through Caxton’s relationship

with Anthony Woodville, a relationship suggestive of both a collabora-
tive writing process and the precise distinctions between manuscript and
print forms available in late fifteenth-century England. Woodville’s
works are all accompanied by original writing by both men, and they re-
main in manuscript and print: Woodville’s source text for Christine de
Pizan’s Morale Prouerbes, printed by Caxton and later by Pynson, remains
Kuskin Ch 4 11/15/07 9:32 AM Page 162
in Harley 4431; versions of Woodville’s Dictes and Sayings of the Philoso-

phers were copied into Lambeth Palace Library, MS 265, Additional MS
22718, and Newberry MS Ry.20; and the 1479 Cordyal was copied into
Sloane MS 779.8 Ultimately, there can be no question that Caxton’s liter-
ary experience overlapped with Woodville’s, and that their relationship
hits on the intersection between the noble and non-noble classes. Still,
any inquiry must recognize that fifteenth-century nobility did not simply
dictate to the wealthier sections of the merchant class but took advantage
of that class’s role in cultural production. I argue, then, that Caxton’s
work with Woodville responds to the problems of paternity latent in the
Chaucerian inheritance and obvious in the Wars of the Roses, to the
twinned di¤culties of literary and political reproduction of authority
that so dominated late fifteenth-century culture, with a process similar to
feudalism itself: patronage provides a framework for the production of
authority, and in the case of Caxton and Woodville it responds to the
problems of paternity with the construction of a specifically literary per-
sona.
Born the second son in a Lancastrian family, Anthony Woodville had
few direct sources of income. His father, Richard, himself a second son,
was knighted by Henry VI in 1426, and he accompanied William and
Alice de la Pole to France for Margaret of Anjou’s marriage. With Eliza-
beth Woodville’s marriage to Edward IV on May 1, 1464, Anthony be-
came the scion of the Yorkist court, jousting in Bruges and in Smithfield,
adopting his father’s title upon his death at Towton field in 1469, sailing
with Edward IV and Richard when they fled Warwick in 1471, and lead-
ing the resistance against Lord Fauconbourg’s rebellion upon Edward’s
return. Still, Woodville’s position at the end of the Wars of the Roses was
by no means guaranteed: in July 1471 Edward revoked his control of
Calais and forced him to surrender the constableship of England; further,
Edward denied support to Anthony’s projected crusade to Portugal, re-
portedly calling him a coward for even considering it.
Woodville consolidated his position through royal patronage. In
1471 Edward named his first son Prince of Wales, Duke of Cornwall,
and Earl of Chester, granting him the estates behind these titles but, ini-
tially at least, withholding the income, and delegating administrative re-
sponsibility to a bureaucratic council headed by John Alcock and packed
with royal councillors. Over the next two years Edward developed the
Kuskin Ch 4 11/15/07 9:32 AM Page 163
prince’s authority as an instrument of control over Wales, first by grant-

ing the prince the income of his estates, then by authorizing him to re-
cruit retainers, and subsequently by moving him to Ludlow with
Woodville as his governor. By late 1472 the queen and Woodville domi-
nated the prince’s royal council, operating the signet and controlling his
finances themselves. The movement of power here is significant: Edward,
motivated to police Wales, sets out his son as a titular figurehead; once
in place, this structure opens up an arena in which individuals can appro-
priate authority for themselves. The result is that Edward’s extension
of authority infuses Woodville’s and the queen’s authority to such an ex-
tent that Woodville is able to blur his with the prince’s. For instance,
Woodville appears to have drawn o± the prince’s treasury freely and, in
turn, paid royals bills from his own accounts.9 Woodville was able to de-
velop this power base over the next decade, so by 1482–83 he could raise
upwards of five thousand men from Wales, Lancashire, and Cheshire.10
This political mechanism parallels the process of the Chaucerian inheri-
tance: just as the consolidation of Chaucer’s authority allows fifteenth-
century writers to formulate their own authority by appropriating it, so
the consolidation of the prince’s authority a±ords Woodville the oppor-
tunity to appropriate authority for himself.
We can see this parallel played out in Woodville’s literary pro-
ductions, which consistently align him with the prince to define him as
pious and chivalric, capable with books and weapons alike.11 Indeed, the
Woodville family as a whole cultivated an interest in books. Anthony’s
father, Sir Richard Woodville, was the second husband to Jacquetta
of Luxembourg, widow of John, Duke of Bedford, English custodian
of Charles V’s royal library. A number of books from the royal library
passed from Bedford, through Jacquetta, to Anthony, such as the holo-
graph manuscript of Christine de Pizan, Harley 4431, made for Isabeau
of Bavaria, which bears Woodville’s signature, and de Pizan’s Livre du
corps de policie, which remains in a single English translation, CUL MS
Kk.1.5, as the Bodye of Polyce, perhaps owned by Woodville.12 Woodville
is unique among his clan in that, with Caxton, he pressed this interest
into the creation of a literary persona. For example, his 1477 translation
of the Dictes and Sayings of the Philosophers opens with a first-person pro-
logue (unsigned, 1–2) identifying him—“I Antoine wydeuille Erle Ryuy-
eres / lord Scales & c”—and describing the occasion on which he
Kuskin Ch 4 11/15/07 9:32 AM Page 164
discovered the book. After reflecting on worldly mutability, “the stormes

of fortune” to which every human creature is subject, he narrates his
pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela in the jubilee year of 1473, a
point he emphasizes in the Cordyal too. While in the Spanish sea, he re-
counts, he found himself in a “grete acqueyntaunce” of “worshipful
folkes,” and
for a recreacoin & a passyng of tyme I had delyte & axed to rede
somme good historye And among other ther was that season in
my companye a worshipful gentylmann callid lowys de Bretaylles /
whiche gretly delited hym in alle vertuouse and honest thynges /
that sayd to me / he hath there a book that he trusted I shuld lyke
it right wele / and brought it to me / whyche book I had neuer seen
before + and is called the saynges or dictis of the Philosophers.
(unsigned, 1r–v )
Examining the book, Woodville discovers it to be a Fürstenspiegel, “a glo-

rious fayr myrrour to alle good cristen people,” which “speketh also vni-
uersally to thexample + weel and doctryne of alle kynges prynces and to
people of euery estate” (unsigned, 1v). He reflects that he “coude not at
that season ner in al that pilgremage tyme haue leyzer to ouersee it,” but
as the “kynges grace comaunde me to gyue myn attendaunce upon my
lorde the Prince,” he decides to obtain a manuscript of his own (“other of
the same bookes”) and “translate it in to thenglyssh tonge.” The narrative
is carefully crafted to place Woodville in a number of contexts. So, the
occasion of the pilgrimage not only defines his humility (Woodville made
further pilgrimages to Rome, Salerno, and Bari in 1475–76; he wore a
hairshirt),13 but positions him as a pilgrim among a group of pilgrims:
Louis de Bretailles was one of the knight-bibliophiles of the Burgundian
court, which included Louis of Bruges, Oliver de la Marche, Antoine de
la Roche (the Bastard of Burgundy), and Charles the Bold. Woodville
cultivated his connection to these men in martial ways as well: in 1467
he jousted against de la Roche and Bretailles at Smithfield, and in 1468 he
participated with de la Roche in the spectacular tournament celebrating
Margaret of York’s wedding to Charles, the pas de l’arbre d’or.14 Though
the narrative styles him as an initiate into this Burgundian community,
Kuskin Ch 4 11/15/07 9:32 AM Page 165
Woodville’s prose quietly phrases him as an English reader, specifically, as

a reader of Chaucer: not merely a pilgrim among Burgundian knights,
he finds himself in “that season” among a “company” of “folkes.” As in
Caxton’s Recuyell and Canterbury Tales, the prefatory material o±ers tex-
tual history as personal history, occasioning an autobiographical recollec-
tion that is both generic—imagining Woodville as the fifteenth-century
chivalric hero—and specific, placing him in the context of the Burgun-
dian nobility, but also suggesting his Englishness. In this, it participates in
the promotion of a form of propaganda that overlays Woodville’s liti-
gious and commercial career (from 1471 he was involved in four suits to
entail manors; and he is recorded as trading in wheat, timber, and Welsh
sheep for London sale)15 to identify him as a man who values culture over
cash, fitting a prince’s governor and guardian. Knight-reader: Woodville’s
persona combines chivalry with books.
The text of the Dictes follows out this process by telling the his-
tory of bibliographical authority. The Dictes and Sayings of the Philosophers
is a compendium of authorized statements: it assembles the biographies
of twenty-two philosophers, each with a list of sentence-long sayings be-
ginning “¶ And saide.” The original version, the Mokhtâr el-Hikam, was
compiled by Abul’l Wefa Mubeschschir ben Fatik in Damascus around
1053, translated into Spanish as the Bocados de oro in the thirteenth cen-
tury, into Latin in around 1250 as the Liber moralium philosophorum (per-
haps by Emperor Frederick II’s physician Johannes de Prodica), and then
into French in 1400 by Guillaume de Tignonville, royal chamberlain, as
the Dits des philosophes. De Tignonville’s translation shows some influence
of Guillaume de Conches’ Moralis philosophia and, as Curtis Bühler points
out, is considerably shorter than the Latin.16 Caxton’s partner in Bruges,
Colard Mansion, printed a version of this text. Woodville knew of Cax-
ton’s early work with Mansion and based his translation of the Cordyal on
their 1475 French edition.17 Caxton explains his relationship to
Woodville in his epilogue (unsigned, 74–76v ):
It is so that at suche tyme as he had accomplysshid this sayd werke /

it liked him to sende it to me in certayn quayers to oversee / whiche
ferthwith I sawe & fonde therin many grete + notable+ and wyse
sayengis of the philosphres Acordyng vnto the bookes made in fren-
Kuskin Ch 4 11/15/07 9:32 AM Page 166
she whiche I had ofte afore redd / But certaynly I had seen none in
englissh til that tyme.
The passage recalls Caxton’s relationship with his first patron, Margaret of
York. Here, however, it is Caxton who is master of the text, and Woodville,
his social superior, the intellectual disciple. Caxton goes on to recount that
after reading the manuscript, he visited Woodville, praising him for his
work. When pressed to “ouersee” the text, Caxton recounts, “I coude not
amende it / But if I sholde so presume I might apaire it.” And so he notes
a number of minor passages Woodville has edited out, most of which, he
reports, “were lityl appertinent,” except for the “dyctes and sayengys of
Socrates,” which, Caxton marvels, Woodville has passed over completely.
The problem is that Socrates’ edicts are antifeminist. Caxton ponders the
possibilities: perhaps “som fayr lady” desired Woodville to leave the passage
out because of its o±ensive nature. Perhaps Woodville “was amerous on
somme noble lady.” Perhaps his love of all women forbade him to include it.
He rationalizes: Socrates was a Greek, and Greek men and women are of an
“other nature than they ben here in this contre For I wote wel + of what
someuer condicion women ben in Grece.” If Socrates had known English
women, he muses, “I dar plainly saye that he wold haue reserued them in-
especiall in his sayd dictes.” Finally, he reflects on the nature of books them-
selves: maybe the passage wasn’t in Woodville’s copy, “or ellis perauenture
that the wynde had blowe ouer the leef / at the tyme of translacion of his
booke.” And so Caxton “apaire[s]” Woodville’s translation by adding
Socrates’ edicts on women.
We can read shape into the Dictes’ many atomized statements by follow-
ing Caxton’s lead back to the Socrates section. Woodville translates part of
the Socrates section (24v–34v) as unifying philosophical knowledge, but
denying the validity of writing. In fact, this section begins a narrative of
Socrates’ “disciples and disciples of his disciples” which, in turn, tells a his-
tory of literary authority, giving temporary shape to this sprawling work.
For Socrates’ biography sets out a problem about the relationship between
authority and books, drawing a parallel between the passage of his lineage
and his wisdom. In both cases, Socrates’ choices are disastrous. His mar-
riage is apparently a failure of historical proportions (“he wedded the worst
woman that was in all the lande”; unsigned, 24v), and though he would keep
his wisdom pure by setting it only in his mind, this plan operates at a total
Kuskin Ch 4 11/15/07 9:32 AM Page 167
loss: “it was a great hinderaunce to all his successours / for he wold not
su±re his science to be writtenn” (unsigned, 24v). Hitting on concerns ap-
parent throughout his publications (the importance of setting textual
meaning in the mind is reminiscent of Little John, and the problems
of manuscript transmission are apparent in the codices of the Canter-
bury Tales), this is a position clearly in opposition to Caxton’s own think-
ing on the durability of the written record, as Caxton points out: “I can
not thinke that so trewe aman & so noble a Phylosophre as Socrates was
shold wryte other wyse than trouthe,” he writes, “for If he had made
fawte in wryting of women + He ought not ne shold not be beleuyd in
hys other dyctes and sayings.” More broadly, though, the problems of So-
cratic philosophy are also the problems of Chaucerian poetry: Soc-
rates imagines philosophy as a “science [. . .] pure and clene / wherfore it
was couenable / she shulde be onely sette in mynde and corrage and not
in skynnes of dede bestes nor in no suche corrupte thingis” (unsigned,
24v), and this recalls Chaucer’s own depiction of Christ’s transcendental
plain speech in the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales. Thus, just as
Socrates is the acknowledged father of a long line of philosophers who is
unwilling to set his teaching in writing, Chaucer is a lost father who sets
in motion a patrimony di¤cult, if not impossible, to inherit.
The Socrates section thus begins a genealogical narrative within
Dictes and Sayings of the Philosophers which focuses on the inheritance of
literary authority. Plato’s section proceeds from Socrates’ by redress-
ing the problem of books. In contrast to Socrates, Plato’s biography is
bookish—he reads and writes—but just so, his words are veiled in alle-
gory, the obscure cousins to his meanings: “the sayd Platon dide teche his
sapyance by allegorye / to thentent that hyt shuld not be vnderstande but
by wytty men + And he lerened hit of Tymeo and of Socrates / he made
+ vj / bookis / & preched and taught the people that they shulde yeue
graces and thankes to god for his goodenesses & mercy” (unsigned 34v).
Following him, Aristotle is increasingly textual, and his section recounts
his defense of grammar, rhetoric, and poetry, concluding,
And therfore it is good to compose and make bookis by the whiche

science shalbe lerned / & whan our memorie shal fayle it shalbe re-
couered by meane of bookis for he that hateth science shal not
pro¤te in hit though it be so that he se the bookis & biholde hem yet
Kuskin Ch 4 11/15/07 9:32 AM Page 168
shal he sette not by it / but departe wors & lesse wyse than he was a
fore+ & I have made and ordeigned my bookis in suche forme that the
wyse men shal lightly & aisely vnderstande hem but the ignoraunt
man shal haue but litil auayle by hem. (unsigned, 41r –v)
It is good to make books. The passage both emphasizes the narrative line
across the philosophers and buttresses a general argument for the logic
and authority of books themselves, even allowing Aristotle to reflect
on this, marking the temporal movement from his predecessor, Plato.
Woodville’s translation terms Aristotle “asouuerain clerk” (unsigned,
40v), and the identification is clear: the defense of poetry o±ered here is a
defense of the Dictes and Sayings themselves, of Woodville’s role as gover-
nor to the princes, as courtier, but also as clerk. In this, the text illustrates
the paradox of fifteenth-century literary culture: on the one hand, we can
see the Dictes as the most medieval of Caxton’s imprints, a compendium
of vaguely recognized names attached to a generalized set of autho-
rized, if sometimes platitudinous, maxims worked over by Muslim and
Christian compilers through the course of history; on the other hand, we
find within it a cogent argument for the political e¤cacy of literary au-
thority put to immediate and pragmatic ends, a justification for the liter-
ary courtier-councillor. Indeed, in this regard, the work seems tremen-
dously modern in that it casts a long view back across history precisely to
search out and justify its own sense of literary authority. If the Dictes and
Sayings encounters the same problems as the Chaucerian inheritance—
the di¤culty of inheriting a paternal legacy; the relationship between
material and intellectual forms of literary production—it resolves them
by narrating a history of the book. Like the anonymous poet of “Myn
Hert ys Set,” Woodville fashions himself as a reader of Chaucer; in con-
trast to that poet, however, he e±ectively asserts his name in print, not as
inheriting the Chaucerian legacy but by becoming, as he defines Aris-
totle, a “sovereign clerk.”
That the Yorkist court was aware of the connection between liter-
ary and political authority is clear at the end of the Wars of the Roses.18
In January 1478 Edward married his second son, the four-year-old
Richard, Duke of York, to the five-year-old Anne Mowbray, heiress to
that family’s estates. Again, Edward set up a council managing his son’s
estates, and again this council was dominated by Queen Elizabeth and
Kuskin Ch 4 11/15/07 9:32 AM Page 169
Woodville, fitting as young Richard already resided with them at Lud-

low. The wedding was celebrated on January 15 in St. Stephen’s Chapel
by an assembly of families: the Yorks—the Duchess of York, the Duke of
Gloucester, the crown prince, the queen—and the Woodvilles—the Mar-
quis of Dorset and Lord Grey, Anthony Woodville, Lord Richard Grey,
and the Duke of Buckingham. This was followed by the trial of Clarence
for treason in January 1478, and his execution on February 18. On Janu-
ary 22, 1478, just after the marriage but before the execution, Woodville
jousted in the great tournament in the palace yard dressed as a white her-
mit in a portable black velvet hermitage, consecrating the events in the
spectacle of performance that asserted his combined role as a chivalric
hero. Marriage, trial, and pageant consolidate Yorkist authority by shap-
ing the family tree, grafting the once-Lancastrian-now-Yorkist Wood-
villes onto its trunk and paring away possibly unruly branches. They
eliminate the claimants to the Yorks’ throne by setting Edward above his
brothers, asserting him as a father capable of bestowing a bride and met-
ing out punishment among his children dispassionately.
Books participate in this construction of authority. Specifically,
around Christmas 1477 Woodville presented the king with a manuscript
version of his translation of the Dictes and Sayings of the Philosophers, Lam-
beth Palace Library, MS 265, finished on the twenty-fourth of Decem-
ber of that year.19 A deluxe presentation manuscript, Lambeth Palace 265
seems to have been copied from some prototype manuscript of Caxton’s
second edition, perhaps Woodville’s working revision.20 It includes Cax-
ton’s epilogue and famously memorializes its own presentation on the
verso of leaf I (fig. 4.1). Imagining the presentation before it happened,
the illustration stages in advance the very reality in which the book par-
ticipates, providing a tableau of the drama of patronage. In it, Edward’s
chamber—perhaps the chapel in which he married his son and con-
demned his brother—becomes a theatrical space: bound by three walls
and a ceiling it is a diorama of noble events and royal participants. Our
voyeurism is encouraged by a number of details: the entire scene is
framed out for the manuscript’s reader by a thick border, and onlookers
peer in through a doorway that is itself a window. The architectural fea-
tures set the stage as well: the floor slants at a convenient angle, the rear
wall is punctuated by windows to suggest a backdrop of viewing, and the
background screen tightens the playing space on the main participants,
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Figure 4.1. Miniature, Dictes and Sayings of the Philosophers, Lambeth Palace Li-
brary, MS 265, 1v. By permission of Lambeth Palace Library, London /Bridgeman
Art Library.
who are choreographed in a triangular arrangement. The royal family,

sitting on a carpeted dais, is framed by a filigree border above their heads;
Woodville and the manuscript’s scribe, Heywarde, kneel before them as a
second unit; a group of nobles and tonsured clerics stand between them.
The stability o±ered by this arrangement is furthered in subtle ways. The
units are organized by number (two are kneeling, the royal family is a
group of three, and, because one member of the standing group is ob-
scured, four are standing) and by their roles: Woodville is depicted as a
chivalric hero; Heywarde, tonsured and robed in black, appears as his
clerical alter ego, the bookish and pious shadow to his martial persona.
The group of four figures in the middle of the illustration is a mixture of
Kuskin Ch 4 11/15/07 9:32 AM Page 171
estates: one, perhaps Gloucester, is clearly part of the royal family but not
directly associated with them, two appear to be tonsured, and one is in-
determinate, perhaps a wealthy commoner.
The diorama proposes that in looking in on the Yorkists in 1478 we
see a unified court. Everything in the scene argues for balance and con-
nection: the group of four looks both ways, three looking to the king, one
down at Woodville; Woodville’s and Heywarde’s hands point toward the
royal family, and, in turn, the royal family’s hands point back at them. The
two main figures in the middle cluster of people each raise one hand to-
ward the royal family, and lower one hand toward Woodville and Hey-
warde. In contrast to Caxton’s copperplate engraving in the Recuyell, the
main event of the presentation is clearly depicted: the book is an object
of connection between courtier and the king. The scene draws a smooth
passage between Woodville’s petition and the king’s authority, illustrating
an image of concord centered around the book. If Edward is much larger
than the other figures, it can only be to suggest that his authority natu-
rally dominates the entire picture as king, rather than as Yorkist usurper
or fratricide. He is a patriarch, head of his family and the court.
In this, however, the illustration constructs a scene still to be fulfilled
by reality, for the production of the manuscript predates Edward’s de-
cisions of January and February. By 1478 paternity was absent from
the English court: Richard of York—father of the three most powerful
men in England by Caxton’s return, Edward, Clarence, and Gloucester—
and Richard, Earl of Salisbury—father of Richard Neville, the king-
maker—were both dead almost twenty years, executed after the battle
of Wakefield in 1460; the Lord Rivers, Richard Woodville, was executed
by Warwick and Clarence at Bristol in 1469, leaving the queen and
her brother, Anthony, fatherless; the Lancastrian male line was entirely
eliminated after 1471, as was its acting patriarch, Richard Neville, Earl of
Warwick; even Owen Tudor was killed in 1460. The main figures sur-
rounding the Yorkist court, Edward, Clarence, Richard, Margaret of
York, Elizabeth, and Anthony Woodville, were all born within ten years
of each other, and of them, only Elizabeth and Anthony had known their
father into their twenties. To this courtly culture paternity was a dis-
tant form of authority compared with immediate rivalry. Witness the
1486 continuation of the Croyland Chronicle, which remarks of Edward,
Clarence, and Richard that “these three brothers, the king and the two
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dukes, were possessed of such surpassing talents, that, if they had been
able to live without dissensions, such a threefold cord could never have
been broken without the utmost di¤culty.”21 What the chronicle pro-
poses is not the rivalry of father against son, but a generation set against
itself. If Lancastrian poetry is in some fundamental way about the inheri-
tance of fathers to sons—from Henry IV to Henry, Prince of Wales, and
Henry VI, from Chaucer to Hoccleve and Lydgate—Caxton’s editions of
the Chaucerian poets are about a generation of sons and daughters sort-
ing this inheritance out. To this generation the Lambeth Palace illustra-
tion, like the Book of Courtesy printed so close on it, teaches that paternity
is a symbolic construction of public self-fashioning. Edward’s court fol-
lows this out in a variety of ways, to assert—through marriage, execution,
and books—that he is the patriarch over a social collective, not of broth-
ers and sisters but of fathers, sons, and daughters. “We be verbal / or ful
of wordes / and desyre more the wordes than the thynges,” reminds the
Curial, and so Lambeth Palace, MS 265, works as a tangible thing passed
between individuals which contains what amount to instructions for its
use: the staging suggested by the miniature, the discussions within Cax-
ton’s prologues and epilogues of authority, and the history of the book
within its covers. The book’s function is less to commemorate a fixed
patronage relationship than to reproduce the social relations involved in
its production according to one possible depiction of authority; in doing
so it also serves to legitimize itself.
Print and manuscript production are related, yet they operate in
slightly di±erent ways. The Lambeth Palace manuscript is tailored to
make a specific statement about the performance of authority in the York-
ist court. The printed Dictes belongs to a much wider reading commu-
nity.22 Caxton claims that in producing the Dictes he had not seen it
elsewhere, but in fact the work was frequently copied in England: it was
first translated from French around 1450 by Stephen Scrope, stepson to
the English knight John Fastolf. This translation remains in five manu-
scripts and gave rise to an abbreviated version (Bodleian, MS, Rawlin-
son Poet.32), and a full revision by William Worcester (Scrope’s colleague
in the service of Fastolf ), testified to by the colophon to CUL MS
Dd.IX.19, which tells that Worcester revised Scrope’s edition in March
1472. A separate anonymous translation of the Dictes also exists, dated
from the 1450s and remaining in one manuscript. George Ashby wrote a
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verse paraphrase of the work in 1473 as well. Though Caxton claims not
to have known of these versions, the Woodville faction and Fastolf ’s Cais-
ter circle were well aware of one another: Richard Woodville and John
Fastolf both fought in France, and Anthony Woodville was involved in an
extended legal bid to seize Caister Castle.23 Caxton and Woodville’s pub-
lications match the Caister’s circle’s point for point: both translate a ver-
sion of the Dictes, texts by Christine de Pizan ( Woodville translates the
Morale Prouerbes; Scrope, the L’Epitre d’Othéa à Hector, and Worcester, se-
lections of Le livre des faits d’armes et de chevalerie), and Chartier (Scrope,
La Belle Dame sans Merci; Caxton, the Curial ). Caxton revisits the issue of
how much he knows in 1481 in his prologue to the three-part translation
of Cicero, Of Old Age; Of Friendship; Of Nobility, where, in the prologue
to Of Old Age, he tells that the book “was translated and thystores openly
declared by + the ordenaunce & desire of the noble Auncyent knight
Syr johan fastolf” (STC 5293; 1.2), and goes on to give some account
of Fastolf ’s military prowess. Yet Caxton seems at some pains to elide the
work of Scrope and Worcester here, passing over their actual e±orts and
going on to attribute the next two books to an equally martial figure,
Sir John Tiptoft, Earl of Worcester. Tiptoft was a book collector who
studied at Oxford, Ferrara, and Padua; his early humanist learning is
well documented.24 And like Fastolf, Tiptoft also patronized men of let-
ters, notably the English humanist John Free. Scrope was Tiptoft’s cou-
sin.25 In this way Caxton suggests that his literary circle is distinct from
Fastolf’s, London based, inspired by Woodville, and open to anonymous
participation. In historical fact, however, the Caister circle defines a manu-
script precedent for Caxton’s strategy for print. As with the Chaucer-
ian tradition, print reproduces manuscript culture with a significant
di±erence: it changes social relationships surrounding literary produc-
tion, reducing the book down to a clear authority—Chaucer, Woodville,
Caxton—and multiplying it outward, abstracted from one particular
reading community and disseminated for retail sale.
Christine de Pizan and the Demand for Gender
Caxton’s prologue to the Dictes frames Socrates’ misogyny as a central

way into the text. “And he sawe a Iong mayde that lerned to wryte / of
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whom he sayde + that me multiplied euyl upon euyll” (unsigned, 75v)—it

invites his readers to discover that women cannot write. Caxton brackets
this sentiment with a variety of qualifications—it is not Woodville’s,
it does not apply to English women—but the message is clear: the Dictes
and Sayings, a book that contains within it a history and justification of
books, closes with an antifeminist coda. Yet Woodville’s portfolio clearly
recognizes women’s writing: for example, two months after presenting
the Lambeth Palace manuscript, Caxton produced a folio pamphlet of
Woodville’s translation of Christine de Pizan’s Dits moraux, titled The
Morale Prouerbes of Cristyne (STC 7273).26 The Morale Prouerbes, a collec-
tion of 101 couplets that de Pizan wrote for the benefit of her son, Jean
Castel, who served the Earl of Salisbury, fits well with the Dictes’ peda-
gogical focus.27 Caxton’s edition ends with two rhyme-royal stanzas that
frame Woodville’s authority in relation to de Pizan’s:
Of these say ynges Christyne was aucteuresse

Whiche in makyng hadde suche Intelligence
That therof she was mireur & maistresse
Hire werkes testifie thexperience
In frenssh languaige was writenn this sentence
And thus Englished dooth hit rehers
Antoin wideuylle therl Ryuers
Go thou litil quayer / and recommaund me

Vnto the good grace / of my special lorde
Therle Ryueris . for I haue enprinted the
At his commandement . folowyng eury worde
His copye / as his secretaire can recorde
At Westmestre . of feuerer the . xx . daye
And of kyng Edward / the . xvii . yere vraye
Enprinted by Caxton
In feuerer the colde season 28
The passage defines de Pizan as an “aucteuresse” who makes with intel-

ligence. It grounds her authority in the experience of making books and
sets her out as both mirror for and “maistresse” over Woodville. The ac-
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tual manuscript that Woodville used, Harley MS 4431, is a large folio,

dated between 1410 and 1415, which collects de Pizan’s poems and bears
Jacquetta of Luxembourg’s and Anthony Woodville’s signatures. De
Pizan wrote and oversaw the production of this codex for Isabeau of
Bavaria, and it passed from her to Jacquetta, who was married first to
the English regent of France, John, Duke of Bedford, and then to Sir
Richard Woodville, Anthony’s father. De Pizan o±ers a significant ex-
ample of an author, one who, unlike Chaucer, maintained control over
her writings through the production cycle, shepherding their passage
from work to text. Woodville’s first printed texts play out feminist and
antifeminist positions, and in doing so move in di±erent directions: one
excludes women from the history of the book; the other makes a woman
writer central to his ongoing construction of a literary identity.
Women cannot write; women are authorities. The contradiction
frames a question: if female authority is surrounded by misogynist
claims, why does it appear so prominently in the early history of print?
Jennifer Summit refers to de Pizan’s larger literary history as a “troubling
paradox: at the very zenith of her works’ influence among English read-
ers, Christine’s status as an author of these works was thrown into ques-
tion.”29 For example, as Summit has demonstrated, in his translation of
L’Epitre d’Othéa, Scrope avoids de Pizan’s authorial identity by creating
a biography for her in which she is a less an authority and more a patron
of “famous doctours of . . . the nobyl Vniuersyte o± Paris.”30 Similarly,
the French imprints of Le livre des faits d’armes, including Antoine
Vérard’s of 1488 and Philippe le Noir’s of 1527, completely eliminate any
reference to her name or gender.31 Caxton printed his own translation of
this work in 1489 as the Fayts of Arms (STC 7269) for John de Vere, the
Earl of Oxford, who, Caxton explains, delivered a French manuscript
to him on behalf of Henry VII. As with Woodville, Caxton produced a
series of texts for de Vere: in addition to the Fayts of Arms, he translated
a now lost life of Robert, Earl of Oxford, and, in 1490, an edition of the
Four Sonnes of Amyon (STC 1007). Caxton’s edition of the Fayts of Arms
not only maintains de Pizan’s name but recognizes her in its organiza-
tional framework: announcing her authorial role apart from the text in the
opening “table of rubryshys” (p1), the rubric to chapter 1 (a1), the open-
ing rubric of the third and fourth books (L4, P1r), and the rubrics to the
first chapters of those books (L4, P3), in addition to her prologue (a1–a2)
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and his epilogue (S5r–v). For the courtiers connected to Caxton’s shop,
de Pizan is a sovereign clerk of the highest order, a mirror for the rhe-
torical production of authority. In charge of her own scriptorium, she is a
unique authorial model. For the readers of Caxton’s texts, her authority
thus frames a larger debate, an English querelle des dames stripped of its
literary specificity, reduced to its sensational essence, and multiplied out-
ward. This suggests that women participated in fifteenth-century literary
production in manifold ways: as literary models, as patrons, as translators
and producers, and as consumers.32 Traditionally, Woodville and Oxford
have been understood as defining two distinct phases of patronage in
Caxton’s career, Yorkist and early Tudor. I suggest that this view over-
looks the common denominator: both courtiers promote their identities
in print through texts by Christine de Pizan. In the face of the lost father,
late fifteenth-century English courtiers, translators, and printers turn to
Christine de Pizan; in doing so, they find an authority not monumental
but accessible, and write a literary history not just of paternity but of fe-
male authors and readers.
Le livre des faits d’armes can be dated to after 1408 and is a compi-
lation based mainly on Flavius Vegetius Renatus’s Instituta rei militaris
and the fourth part of Honoré Bonet’s L’arbre des batailles. To this, de
Pizan added sections from Sextus Iulius Frontinus’s Strategemata, Va-
lerius Maximus’s Facta et dicta memorabilia, an original prologue featur-
ing Minerva, a dream vision introducing Bonet, as well as various smaller
allusions to contemporary events and military techniques.33 De Pizan’s
initial prologue sets out a simile likening writing to siege warfare, which
a±ords her a way of talking about literary production. Here, as in the last
stanzas of the Morale Prouerbes, de Pizan’s authority comes from her prior
experience with books: “after myne other escriptures passed / lyke as
he that hath to forn beten doun many stronge edyfices / is more hardy
to charge hym self defye or to bete doun a castell or forteresse whan he
feleth hym self garnysshed of couenable stu±e thererto necesarye” (A1).
There is some irony invested in this simile for the reader familiar with de
Pizan’s writings, for in La cité des dames she fashions herself as a construc-
tor of buildings, while here she assails them. Still, as in that work, the
governing simile allows de Pizan to discuss the di¤culty of being a fe-
male writer, and as the prologue continues she remarks that writing a
book of martial arts “is thyng not accustomed & out of vsage to wymen /
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whiche comynly do not entremete but to spynne on the distaf & ocupie
theim in thynges of houshold” (A1v), and though she suggests that she
will proceed “by fayt of dyligence & witte / [rather] than by subtyltees of
wordes polisshed” (A1), she cannot help becoming a rhetorician. As the
prologue proceeds she invokes Minerva as her muse. The skill Minerva
promises is exactly that of polishing: “aboue alle other wymen fondest &
institutest emonge thother noble artes & sciences whiche of the toke their
begynnyng thusage to forge of yron & steel / armours & harnois propice
& couenable to couure & targe the body of man” (A1v). Further, Minerva
not only allows de Pizan to elaborate her role as a rhetorician, she also fa-
cilitates de Pizan’s autobiography. The prologue concludes:
Of whiche fyrst in the said renomed contree of grece thou gauest

thusage / And in so moche it may plaise the to be to me faourable /
that I may be somwhat consonaunt in the nacyon where thou was
born whiche as thenne as named the grete grece / the contree beyond
we alpes or montaygnes / whiche now is sayd puylle & calabre in ytalye
where w u were born / & I am as w u were / a woman ytalien. (A2)
In this final section of the invocation de Pizan shifts the register from
simile to direct representation: “like” and “as” become “am” and “is.”
What begins as a humility trope is transformed over the course of the
prologue into a construction of autobiography. Thus the prologue not
only operates according to the very terms of dullness (the poor fit be-
tween the performer and the task which characterizes the fifteenth-
century poet) and eloquence (the lexicon of “wordes polisshed” that Lerer
aptly names a “vocabulary of impression”) which the Chaucerian poets
deploy, it pursues these terms to the very results—the construction of a
named identity in writing—that eluded English writers of the middle of
the century. Minerva provides de Pizan, and she in turn provides the En-
glish fifteenth century, with a model for being dull and polished at the
same time, one that maintains deference while nevertheless aggressively
asserting an authorial identity. For readers of Chaucer and Lydgate such
as Caxton the passage must have seemed simultaneously subtle and
brazen.
De Pizan’s prologue thus introduces a cluster of thematic interests
one might not expect in a field guide to the martial arts: feminism, rheto-
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ric, and authorial self-fashioning. The main part of the Fayts of Arms is
more pragmatic. It relates instructions such as the proper age to train
young people (B4), the benefits of swimming for the soldier (B6v), the
proper dimensions of ditches (C3v), battle formations such as the “hors
shoo” (E5), the technicalities of fealty ( book 3, chapters 5 and 6),
“whether an english scoler or of som other enemyes lande were founde
stydyeng atte the scoles in parys myght be taken prysoner or not” (O1v),
the “manere of werre called marque” (P8r), the “champ of batill” (Q3),
and so forth. Still, as in the prologue, de Pizan places these pragmatic
issues of warfare in relation to literary production. She does this most
dramatically in her juxtaposition of antique and contemporary examples.
At times, such as in her reflections upon the abilities of English arch-
ers, these juxtapositions are simply relevant asides. In some cases, how-
ever, the inclusion of modern instances forces a historical problem. This
occurs most clearly in her discussion of military technology, which, in
book 2, chapter 20, she theorizes—amazingly—in terms of Scripture:
¶ Where the scrypture in bokes is a thynge perpetual as to the

worlde / it semeth me goode to adde in thys oure sayde werke more
partyculerly thoo thinges that be goode and propyce to assaylle Cy-
tees Castelles and Townes after the manere and waye of the tyme
present for to gyue therof a more Intellygyble exsample / And ryght
so and semblably that in the thynges sayde and to be sayde we haue
holpen us of the saynges of the boke of vegece and other Auctoures /
We shal in thys helpe vs of the counseyll of the wyse knyghtes that
be expert in the sayde thynges of armes. ( I3r–v)
De Pizan’s point is that technology asserts a significant di±erence in the

history of warfare, one demanding some accommodation from received
authority. Caxton encountered a similar problem with his addition con-
cerning the invention of the printing press to the Chronicles of England
(STC 9991), but the problem suggests to de Pizan a larger, indeed a cate-
gorical, definition: books of Scripture are absolute in relation to history,
but the sayings of the book of Vegetius and other authors of “the tyme
present” are fundamentally temporal. What is important is that, for
de Pizan, this temporality does not undermine their validity. Indeed, it
actually seems to necessitate their inclusion as “intellygyble exsamples.”
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Thus, in the case of vernacular knowledge, exemplarity is based less

on the claim to transhistorical truth (“a thynge perpetual”) than to the
immediate authority. Rather than moving away from doctrinal truth
as knowledge becomes vernacular, as in Chaucer’s General Prologue, de
Pizan imagines a vernacular knowledge on par with doctrine. The section
thus serves to introduce fourteen chapters on ordinance, and de Pizan
goes on to detail the “gonnes and engyns / That is to wyte two grete
engyns and the other mydelbare flyghynge garnysshed and redy of al
thynges for to caste,” such as “Coyllardes,” “gonnes that [are] called
Garyte . . . rose . . . Senecque . . . Maye . . . Mountfort . . . a brasyn gonne
called Artycke . . . small gonnes castyng pillettes . . . [and] grete bom-
bardes” ( I2v–I4v). In chapter 21 she lists the equipment necessary to fur-
nish these weapons, “gonne pouldre . . . and of other stu±e” ( I4v); in 22,
their coverings and hoists ( I4v); in 23, the wood necessary to portage
them from their transport ships; in 24, the construction of “bastylles and
bolwerkes” ( I5) to entrench the weapons; in 25, the crossbows necessary
to defend these entrenchments; in 26 the “paueyses . . . fyre panes . . .
other fyre pannes . . . touteauls or pitched ropes . . . axes . . . picoses . . .
shouels . . . scowpes . . . bakpaners . . . lanterns . . . pinnes . . . barrelles full
of nailes” ( I5v); and, in chapter 30, the “carpenters . . . and constables and
vynteners . . . labourers . . . knyghtes and esquyers . . . helpers . . . folke . . .
[and] rewlers [that] shal be there commytted for to rewel them / And they
shal haue theyre owne cartes by them self” ( I6v–I7v) necessary for using
artillery in siege warfare. Though she may defray some of this authority
to a group of anonymous “wise knights,” the ultimate responsibility for
the work is clearly her own. De Pizan’s logic is defined in the prologue:
writing is like siege warfare, for the technologies both of artillery and of
authorship involve the assertion of authority in the vernacular.
“War could be made to pay,” writes K. B. McFarlane, and knights
such as Tiptoft and Fastolf made themselves wealthy through the Hun-
dred Years War. 34 Fastolf in particular plowed his capital back into inter-
est-bearing loans, a minor commercial fleet, buildings, furniture, jewelry,
and most of all, land.35 As much as Fastolf’s investments are in land, ship-
ping, and plate, however, they are also in books and libraries. In this way,
it was possible for men such as Woodville—a second son of a family with
thirteen children—to emerge into power through the spectacle of liter-
ary, as well as military, economic, and political, performance. Gentleman
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bureaucrats like Scrope and Worcester developed around these knights

as a kind of managerial class, insulating themselves within guild mo-
nopolies and manorial positions.36 So, Scrope, Worcester, Free, and Cax-
ton all constitute a literary axis for the larger military and economic
apparatus run by the nobility. Their writing defines Fastolf, Tiptoft, and
Woodville as landed and learned. But Woodville and Tiptoft, if not Fas-
tolf, are also writers, and work hard to cultivate a connection with clerkly
authority as well; Aristotle’s model as a “sovereign clerk” ratifies their au-
thority as much as it does the gentlemen bureaucrats they employ. Thus,
it is not enough to imagine a literary patronage according to a social hier-
archy of giving and receiving because each party is interested in foster-
ing an identification with the next. Thus Woodville is willing to let Cax-
ton “apaire” his text and reverse the hierarchical relationship so that he
can appear more dull, and hence more clerkly, more like Aristotle the
“sovereign clerk.” Patronage is dynamic and mutually beneficial, a com-
plex process of social production in which both client and patron formu-
late a shared authority. War can be made to pay. It paid for Fastolf in the
formation of a literary identity, and it pays for de Pizan and the readers of
the Fayts of Arms by constructing vernacular authority.
Patronage as Mass Production
That women should prove a central venue for the appropriation of au-
thority in England is a political fact of the last third of the fifteenth cen-
tury. For example, in a final attempt to fold the Nevilles into the Yorkist
party Edward proposed giving his eldest daughter, Elizabeth, to John
Neville’s son, George. M. A. Hicks writes,
By settling the crown on his daughter Edward was repudiating

charges made in the summer against the legitimacy of himself and
his children. The reference to rebellion and Edward’s desire to allay
discord alluded to the summer rebellion and to Clarence’s alternative
claim, which was explicitly rejected. The house of York had inherited
the crown through the female line and so it would descend in future,
to Edward’s daughter in preference to any collateral male relative. All
these points were clarified and publicly confirmed by the great coun-
cil. No doubts or ambiguities remained.37
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As it happened, the crown did move through Elizabeth, and this too can
be attributed to female labor: Susan Powell points out that Lady Margaret
Beaufort “masterminded the conspiracy to overthrow Richard III and
bring Henry to the throne . . . she was responsible for the union of Lan-
caster and York through Henry’s marriage to Elizabeth of York.”38 These
women owned books and were an active part of the literary culture. John
Fisher, Lady Margaret’s confessor after 1498, reports that she was an avid
collector, owning books “in grete nombre bothe in Englysshe & in
Frensshe.”39 Her book buying spans a range of interests: liturgical, ro-
mance, and courtly books all find their place in her library. Among the last
class are a copy of de Pizan’s L’Epitre d’Othéa that she inherited from
Anne Vere; “a great volume of velom of the siege of Troye yn English,”
which she left to her son; “a book of velomm of Gowere in Englishe,”
for one Alice Parker, a women in her service; and “a book of velom
of Canterbury tales in English,” left to another household servant, John
St. John. Household records also report that she purchased a second
paper copy of the Canterbury Tales in 1508.40 If we view book ownership as
a static process of holding books, then this record is little more than
ornamental; if we follow the arguments within Caxton’s editions, how-
ever, we can see that books are enmeshed in the social production of
authority, and are therefore part of a larger reproduction network in-
volving technology, commerce, and gender. Patronage brings together
heterogeneous modes of production, and in doing so it blurs categories
of producer and consumer so as to extend literary authority to each par-
ticipant.
Lady Margaret’s involvement in book buying overlaps production
and consumption so tightly as to make them indistinguishable. Caxton
reports that Lady Margaret requested him to print the 1490 Blanchardin
and Eglantine (STC 3124), a book that he “had longe to fore solde to my
sayd lady,” and recommends the book “for gentyl yonge ladyes and
damoysellys.”41 Here her consumption of the book in manuscript fosters
its production in print. Caxton also reports that with the queen, she com-
missioned the 1491 Fifteen Oes (STC 20195), and her household records
show her purchase of quite a number of his imprints.42 Lady Margaret
seems to have understood the press’s productive capacity early on, for
as Powell points out, her household account books record large-scale
transactions: for example, on November 20, 1503, “Item paid the same
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tyme to Lenard of the vestry for byndyng of lxxvj bokys of Master John
Gersons pryntyng at jd.ob [a penny halfpenny] the boke. Ixs iiijd.”; for
December 27, 1503, “Item paid to the same [ Hugh Ashton, her receiver-
general] for cariage of a hundreth of printed bokes with other of my ladys
stuf from London. xviijd.”; for June 2, 1505, “Item to Richard Pynson for
c prynted bookes price xs”; and on June 20, 1505, the canceled entry
“Item to Richard Pynson at Syon by Mr. Chaunceller [ Henry Hornby]
for a c printed bookes. nihil.”43 Powell identifies these books as Thomas à
Kempis’s Imitatio Christi, attributed to Jean Gerson, the first three books
of which were translated from Latin into English by William Atkinson as
Imytacyon and Folowynge the Blessed Lyfe of our Sauyour Cryste and printed
by Pynson; the fourth book was translated by Lady Margaret herself.
All four books were printed by Pynson (STC 23954.7).44 The payments
seem to refer to a larger process of dissemination that included ship-
ping the books from London to Lady’s Margaret’s palace at Colyweston
in Northhamptonshire, specifically for distribution at the Bridgettine
monastery at Syon, a double order that housed monks and nuns, and that
also seems to have been a dispersal point for literature to the surrounding
lay public.45
Margaret’s records demonstrate how patronage combines literary
production (the translation, authorization, shipping, binding, and distri-
bution of books) and consumption. Her particular involvement in the
Imytacyon is part of a much larger program of vernacular religious pro-
duction. Pynson also printed her translation of The Mirroure of Golde
for the Synfulle Soule (1506, STC 6894.5), and she was directly involved in
de Worde’s printing of John Fisher’s vernacular sermons, The Fruytfull
Saynges of Dauyd (1508, STC 10902; 1509, STC 10903a) and his sermon on
the death of Henry VII (1509, STC 10900), as well as a number of mys-
tical works such as an edition of Walter Hylton’s Scale of Perfection and
Epistle on the Mixed Life, which de Worde printed for her in 1494 and,
again, part of which she translated (STC 14042), and his editions of the
1509 Lyf of Saynt Vrsula (STC 24541.3) and The Shyppe of Fooles (STC
3547). Caxton too produced overtly religious vernacular material, for
example, Speculum vitae Christi 1484 (STC 3259), reprinted again in 1490
(STC 3260), then by de Worde in 1494 (STC 3261), and by Pynson in 1506
(STC 3263). Lady Margaret is a patron, but she is also a translator and,
more generally, a distributor of books.
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This joint role of producer and consumer demonstrates how the

strict categorical definitions of literary production can hinder our under-
standing of fifteenth-century literary figures. This is as true for our
assessment of the culture as it is for the individuals who participated in
that culture. For example, as fifteenth-century English poetic writing has
been seen as a narrowing of Chaucer’s artistic range, so its vernacular
spiritual productions have been understood as a retreat from fourteenth-
century theological investigations after Thomas Arundel’s Constitu-
tions.46 Both Margaret and Caxton were also involved in printing and
disseminating orthodox material. George D. Painter argues that Caxton
printed a Sarum Horae (STC 15872) as a companion piece for the Fifteen
Oes; Powell suggests that Lady Margaret was involved in Pynson’s 1493
edition of the o¤ce and proper of the Mass for the feast of the Holy
Name (STC 15851); and Mary C. Erler, that de Worde’s first Horae in
1494 (STC 15875) was printed at her request.47 In 1505 and 1507 Lady
Margaret had two breviaries printed, one for Hereford Use by de la
Hughe (STC 15793), whom she ended up suing for one hundred shillings,
and one for Salisbury Use by Pynson (STC 15806).48 Speculum vitae Christi
is particularly illustrative of this case because, translated by Nicholas
Love, it was submitted to and approved by Arundel for its vernacular re-
sponse to the Lollard heresy. In this case, Caxton and Margaret appear of
a piece with an orthodox fifteenth century, generally resistant to hetero-
dox views.
Though the market for books of hours was intense, it was over-
whelmed by the market for vernacular religious material. Again, Erler
provides some useful statistics: “During the last quarter of the fifteenth
century when English printing began,” she writes, “printed vernacu-
lar religious texts outnumbered books of hours by almost 3 to 1.”49 Obvi-
ously, many of these book users could not read their books of hours; for
instance, John Fisher writes that Lady Margaret herself did not read
Latin (“ful often she complained that in her youthe she had not gyuen her
to the vnderstondynge of latyn wherin she had a lytell perceyuynge”),50
but she still owned Latin books. Indeed, it is important to recognize that
even overtly orthodox material can take on a heterodox function as it be-
comes a personalized object, even if it is not overtly so. For book owner-
ship gives individuals a purchase on their spiritual lives, and books of
hours make the liturgy a personal possession held in the secular world.51
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Just so, judged by the terms of the beginning of the century, a num-
ber of Caxton’s publications appear heretical. For example, Caxton’s ver-
sion of the Polychronicon (STC 13438) contains within it Trevisa’s Dialogue
Between a Lord and a Clerk,52 in which a lord defends scriptural translation
to his clerk:
And yet for to make a sermone of holy wrytte al in latyn to men that
can Englysshe and no laytn / it were a lewd dede / for they be neuer
the wyser / ±or the latyn but it be told hem in Englysshe what it is to
mene / ¶ And it maye not be. told in englysshe what the latyn is to
mene without translacion out of latyn in to Englysshe / Thenne it
nedeth to haue an englysshe translacion (i.3)
Couched as a dialogue as it is, the scene imagines a relationship of pa-

tronage (perhaps fictionalizing its author, John of Trevisa, and his own
Lord Berkeley), which it folds into a much larger argument for vernacu-
lar literary authority. In e±ect, the lord, by triumphing the project of
such translation against the clerk, takes on the authority of both roles to
become, almost by definition, a “sovereign clerk.” Arundel’s Constitu-
tions of 1409 expressly forbade the translation of Scripture, yet here is a
full blown-argument supporting such a project, and by the sixteenth cen-
tury a number of other printers produced overtly heterodox material,
for example, de Worde’s 1501 quarto featuring extracts from the Book of
Margery Kempe, A Short Treatyse of Contemplacyon . . . taken out of the Boke
of Margerie Kempe of Lynn (STC 14924). Many of these texts are greatly
reduced from the original works, but by the same token they are also
multiplied: that is, they put a range of previously censored ideas into cir-
culation as commodities. Counting the titles of texts overlooks the ex-
pansion of volume in liturgical material available, the uses these books
were put to, and the theological discussion contained in overtly secular
books such as the Polychronicon. Though certain aesthetic and generic
forms may be abandoned by the late fifteenth century, the larger cultural
scene involves an opening outward with print: an expansion of vernacular
culture that includes heterodox as well as orthodox material.
We can view Lady Margaret’s engagement with book culture
through a series of mutually exclusive oppositions: pious women’s reading
opposed to Chaucerian courtly writing, noble patronage versus anony-
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mous marketing, timeless liturgical potboilers set against engaged politi-

cal writings, Church power and vernacular transgression, and orthodox
closure countering heterodox originality. This ossifies the dynamic na-
ture of vernacular literary production, which, I argue, is better under-
stood as reproductive and transformative. Certainly piety, propaganda,
community, and a love of literature are intense parts of Lady Margaret’s
relationship to books, but so too is literary authority, a common denomi-
nator linking her interest in printing and politics. Indeed, print and poli-
tics form a circuit that produces and reflects her authority. For example,
Colyweston was the center of Lady Margaret’s court, which included
Richmond and Beaufort estates in Lincolnshire, Devon, Somerset, and
Northamptonshire, as well as separate grants for houses in Hertfordshire
and London. Lady Margaret held these lands, in part, because of a grant
of legal rights to a single woman, and further because, though Henry’s
policy was to limit private retinues overall, she was specifically licensed
to hold her own, ostensibly in the service of the state but clearly au-
tonomous within its own jurisdiction: witness the house for hearing civil
cases at Colyweston and the special prison.53 Lady Margaret exerted
influence beyond these territorial holdings, issuing commands to the City
of Coventry and apparently holding permanent residences at the bishop
of Ely’s palace at Hatfield and at Croydon Palace, the manor of the arch-
bishops of Canterbury. Just as her political authority works as an active
extension of Henry’s, one that both supports him but also grants her au-
tonomy (the very autonomy that helped get Henry into power in the first
place), her involvement in books of piety underwrites her identity overall,
giving her a tangible purchase on Church buildings. In a further simi-
larity to Woodville, she used her finances to make these realms indistin-
guishable, paying for repairs on the buildings out of her own account.
Lady Margaret’s example demonstrates the interwoven nature of forms of
appropriation. A. S. G. Edwards and Carol M. Meale have argued that
Lady Margaret’s connection to the London printers demonstrates “sym-
biotic relations” between printers and patrons, and they point out that all
the printers Lady Margaret patroned after Caxton—Inghelbert de la
Hughe of Rouen, Pynson, and de Worde—incorporate her portcullis gate
into their printer’s marks; de Worde goes so far as to name himself the
“printer vnto the moost excellent Pryncesse my lady the Kynges mother”
in his 1508 and 1509 editions.54 Rather than some sort of glossy overlay
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to pre-existing publication strategies, Lady Margaret’s publications de-

scribe literary innovation, not as original composition but as strategic re-
production, the dissemination of texts once censored from vernacular
culture refitted through translation and reissued as within Margaret’s au-
thority. “It is good to compose and make bookis”; as with the Chaucerian
tradition, this production process is based in a reproduction sequence in
which established authority is paradoxically reduced—appropriated and
emphasized—and then multiplied outward.
To return to the Chaucerian inheritance more directly, then, what
I am arguing is that late fifteenth-century courtly literary production
works through a material and intellectual reproduction sequence prem-
ised on the consolidation and appropriation of authority. As with the in-
tertwined nature of manuscript production in which a single manuscript
can be finished product and component part in the bibliographic history
of another text, the patterning of this sequence parallels the construc-
tion of persona for both readers and writers so closely that the categories
become blurred. This implies that, with the exception of a select group of
canonical authors (Chaucer, Gower, Hoccleve, Lydgate, and, as we shall
see, Skelton, for the early Tudor period), the distinction among trans-
lator, literary historian, author, patron, and printer was somewhat thin be-
cause all engaged the same intellectual mechanism of consolidation and
appropriation of authority. Feminism and antifeminism play into this
constellation of issues because they ask about access to literary authority:
in a culture in which literary production is constituted by literary con-
sumption, the question, can women read? is the same as, can they write?
By extension, in a literary culture in which canonical examples routinely
devote large passages to justifying their vernacular e±orts in the face of a
virtual clerical monopoly on exegesis, the twin questions are not far from
a third: can anyone write in the vernacular with authority at all?
De Pizan is clear about this constellation of issues and, returning to
the Fayts of Arms for a moment, we find that she addresses it in the transi-
tion between her two main sources, Vegetius and Bonet, in the beginning
of book 3. Here she presents herself in bed recuperating from her lit-
erary labor and passively waiting to enter into labor again: “As I dyde
awayte for to entre in to the thirde partye of this present boke / & that
my wyt / as almost wery of the peasunt weyght of the labour concernyng
the two other partyes precedent / & as surprysed with slepe lyenge vpon
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my bed appeired byfore me the semblaunce of a creature hauyng the

fourme of a stately man of habyte of chere & of maynten / & lyke to
awyse & ryght auctorised iuge” (L4v). Her labor is extreme and physical.
Unlike smithing or spinning, it seems almost beyond her conscious con-
trol, like childbirth. The image invites the reader to recall her gender,
and with this Bonet comes to her and tells her, “¶ It is good that thou
take and gadre of the tree of bataylles that is in my gardyn somme fruytes
of whiche thou shalt vse / So shall vygoure and strengthe the bettre
growe wythyn thy self therfore for to make an ende of thy pesaunte
worke” (L4v). Her work grows within her, he remarks, introducing a
metaphor in which his book is likened to a garden. The image of de
Pizan in the garden, picking the fruits of Bonet’s knowledge is implicitly
allegorical, and so she asks about moral censure: “I pray the to telle me yf
eny rebuke shal mowe be caste to the regarde of my werke for this that
thou hast counseylled me for to vse of the sayde fruyte” (L5). Her ques-
tion is about how she is to reproduce Bonet’s book, but more broadly
it is figurally about the role of female labor in relation to production
of knowledge. Bonet replies: “Dere love to thys I ansuere the / that the
more that a werke is wytnessed and approved of more folke / the more it
is auctorysed and more auctentyke.” Here authority is produced through
a social circuit in which the reader’s consumption of a text produces its
authority. This circuit is premised upon the social use of books: Bonet
continues, “Therfore yf eny doo murmure after the gyse of euyll spekers
sayieng that thou beggest in other places I ansuere them that it is a comon
vse emonge my dyscyples to gyue and departe one to other of the floures
that they take dyuersely out of my gardyns.” Bonet underscores that this
passing of flowers from one person to the next is simultaneously a pro-
cess of consolidation and appropriation: “And al thoo that help hem
self with all they were not the fyrst that haue gadred them.” Originality
is the wrong measure by which to judge such a literary culture, and as
proof, de Pizan has Bonet o±er up no less canonical an example than
Jean de Muen himself: “Dyde not mayster John de Mowen help hym self
with in hys boke of the rose of the sayinges of Lorrys / and semblably
of other / It is thenne noo rebuke / but it is lawde & praysynge whan
wel & proprely they be applycked and sette by ordre / and there lyeth
the maystrye therof ” (L5). In justifying her reproduction of the work
through Jean de Meun’s elaboration of Guillaume de Lorris, de Pizan
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e±ectively underwrites her authority through the very author she used
that authority against in the Querelle du Roman de la Rose. De Pizan likens
writing to warfare, and here the point is clear: the Querelle’s public, almost
legalist nature highlights the way writing is combative. Whether she
has read Socrates’ sayings in the Dictes or not, she knows the genre well
enough, and here she puts a defense of women’s writing in Bonet’s mouth.
Broadly, his argument returns us to Woodville’s translation of de Pizan’s
Morale Prouerbes by describing her as achieving “maystrye.” He describes
a circuit of production and consumption, consolidation and appropri-
ation that is also a circuit of patronage. Taken out of the original context
and read in the late English fifteenth century, it fits in among the culture
of appropriation, matching Little John’s gatherings from the masculine
gardens of his “faders auncyente” with a similar, perhaps even more
definitive, mode of female reproduction.
The English interest in de Pizan is part of a larger interest in and
demand for discussions of female authority. Chartier’s Belle Dame sans
Merci, the Morale Prouerbes, the Fayts of Arms, the Dictes—all take part in
a querelle des femmes: the Belle Dame inspired an exchange in Charles VII’s
court, the Morale Prouerbes and the Dictes stage one between themselves,
the Fayts obliquely references de Pizan’s earlier exchange with Jean de
Meun.55 “Myn Hert ys Set” contains this same theme in its condemna-
tion of Lydgate’s antifeminist writing. Chaucer too used antifeminism to
stage questions about authority and interpretation, and returning to the
Dictes and Sayings we can see how Caxton merges Woodville’s translation
with Chaucer’s own ways of suggesting a gendered readership. For in his
epilogue he writes:
Wherfore in satisfyeng of all parties & also for excuse of the saide
socrates I haue sette these saide dyctes and sayengis a parte in thende
of this book / to thentente that yf my sayd lord or ony other persone
what someuer he or she be that shal rede or here it / that If they
be not wel plesyd wyth all that they wyth a penne race it out or ellys
rente the leef out of the booke. (unsigned, 76r–v)
Caxton reorders the book to highlight Socrates’ sayings, but in doing so

he also provides the reader a way of manipulating it. “Caxton is at his
most Chaucerian here,” writes Jennifer R. Goodman. “He is inviting us,
Kuskin Ch 4 11/15/07 9:32 AM Page 189
or Anthony Woodville, to become the Wife of Bath. Having provided his

own ‘book of wicked wives,’ he can expect no less.” 56 This is, too, Cax-
ton’s strategy as a writer: Caxton continually defines himself as a reader
who writes: we see this when he evokes his chamber for his readers, we
see it when he takes on the subservient position in relationship to Mar-
garet of York, and we see it in the very way he “apires” Socrates’ sayings.
If de Pizan demonstrates the centrality of Chaucerian rhetoric and pro-
vides the English Courtier with a purchase on that rhetoric for his own
writing, Caxton’s prologue to the Dictes follows this out by providing a
model for reading. Chaucerian literary history has been told as a passage
from fathers to sons; I suggest that this simplifies a complex situation.
Like monarchical authority, the Chaucerian inheritance moves through
female lines.
William de la Pole’s wife, Alice Chaucer, serves as a worthwhile final
example. Alice lived until 1475, owned more than twenty books, and was
concerned about them enough to write William, the “Cok of Bylton,”
about their safekeeping: “William Bylton,” she writes, “I grete you wele.
And pray you / my good William yef my books be in myther closette //
by grounde, wat ye woll put them in some other place. for taking of
harme. And God kepe you. Writin // in my Inne the xxiiij day of Ianyver.
Alice.”57 Alice’s collection included “a frensh boke of le Citee de dames
couered with rede lethere clased with latoun newe,” and “a frensh boke of
the tales of philisphers couerd in black damask bosed and clapsed with
siluer and gilt.” As these manuscripts are no longer extant, there is no way
of knowing if Alice appreciated the juxtaposition of de Pizan’s argument
in “le Citee de dames” and Socrates’ misogyny in her copy of “tales of
philisphers.” One would think, though, that someone so worried about
her books as to write from afar that they be lifted o± the ground, valued
them as symbolic objects, elegant possessions that contained meaning
within them. Women consumed books in a number of ways: they pur-
chased and collected them, they read them and were read to from them,
they wrote in them. These forms of consumption constitute the produc-
tion of literary culture in ways that we can itemize: women produced lit-
erary culture through specific acts of patronage and purchase, such as
Alice Chaucer’s patronage of Lydgate and Margaret of York’s patronage
of Caxton; they invested in institutions, such as Lady Margaret’s involve-
ment in the libraries at Syon and Cambridge; they also formed a market.
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Margaret Beaufort’s vellum manuscripts and Alice Chaucer’s editions

clasped in their special bindings signify these women’s financial participa-
tion in this market.
The literary productions of the late fifteenth century have

largely been overlooked. Scholarship on the first half of the fifteenth
century has begun to recognize that that period’s understanding of
Chaucer’s legacy is tied in with the political relations dominating the
Lancastrian court, yet little attention has been given to the ways this
legacy was worked out at the end of the century. I suggest a Yorkist lit-
erary culture of rivalry, one that enacts a very Chaucerian sense of
courtly manipulation, one embodied by Chaucer’s Pandarus in Troilus and
Criseyde, but finding Chaucer’s role uninhabitable, also developed au-
thorial roles of its own, such as the courtier-clerk, the female author, and
the pious reader. Thus, late fifteenth-century writing internalized four-
teenth-century terms to constitute a sense of vernacular production that
combined courtly writing with spiritual material and that distinguished
manuscript from print forms of literature. Viewed as such, we can see
that the forms of capital in the fifteenth century are not simply limited to
a middle or merchant class. Rather, the nobility engaged in (and profited
from) the speculative manipulation of capital in its production of iden-
tity. If this involved the nobility in authorship, it no less involved it in
commerce.
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PA R T I I I
PRINT AND SOCIAL

O R G A N I Z AT I O N
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Chapter Five
Caxton’s Worthies Series

Fifteenth-Century Imagined Communities
The common wisdom on Caxton’s prose romances is that they

are intellectually derivative. Indeed, most scholars argue that Caxton
simply reproduces texts he encountered in Burgundian libraries for a cu-
rious English bourgeoisie.1 Yet Caxton remains central to our under-
standing of the fifteenth century precisely because its literary culture is
notoriously di¤cult to define, and as I argued in chapter 3, even the ex-
tent to which the non-noble community imagined itself with the co-
herency implied by the term bourgeoisie is far from clear.2 Caxton is use-
ful to us because he gives shape to an English literary culture otherwise
vaguely understood, and, I suggest, his romances provided a similar ser-
vice to his original readers. In reproducing a selection of works as texts
within a broader critical program, Caxton articulates canon, authority,
and audience as cogent and interrelated concerns, thereby producing a
comprehensive intellectual framework for the physical products rolling
o± his presses. Caxton’s interest in romance is part of his production
process, and should be viewed as a sign not of intellectual simplicity but
of the ideological complexity involved in unifying English identity.3
To see this complexity at work, we need to understand Caxton’s criti-
cal program as synthetic. That Caxton frequently discusses the mechan-
ics of printing in his writing is widely recognized; that he also uses his
prologues and epilogues to map a series of bibliographical, thematic,
and political connections among his texts is less so. For not only his
193
Kuskin Ch 5 11/15/07 9:33 AM Page 194
Chaucerian texts are grouped in series: in his 1477 prologue to the His-
tory of Jason (STC 15383), Caxton refers his readers to his earlier Recuyell
of the Histories of Troye (STC 15375) on the grounds that both stem from
the Burgundian court; as I discussed in chapter 4, his epilogue to the 1479
Cordyal (STC 5758) emphasizes his printing of Anthony Woodville’s
translations; his Fayts of Arms (STC 7269) names John de Vere, for whom
he also translated the 1490 Foure Sonnes of Aymon (STC 1007) and an ap-
parently lost Robert Erle of Oxeforde; he links his 1482 Polychronicon (STC
13438) and 1484 Golden Legend (STC 24873–74) as “noble historyes”;
and he groups his 1481 Godfrey of Boloyne (STC 13175), 1485 Le Morte
D’Arthur (STC 801) and 1485 Charles the Grete (STC 5013) around the
conceit of the Nine Worthies. Illustrating a critical program capable of
presenting various works as unified around common themes, these series
are essential to our reading of Caxton’s production techniques, and I
o±er the last, the Worthies Series, as a test case demonstrating how these
techniques imagine community.4
As a structural device, the Nine Worthies allows Caxton to reach an
expanded body of readers. Yet the importance of the Worthies Series is
more profound than a notion of marketing allows, for rather than just ap-
pealing to this audience, Caxton’s editions actively produce it as fractured
but nevertheless coherent, unified in a history of common behavior. This
occurs, in part, through Caxton’s cogent political program, and in part
through the romance genre’s implicit imagination of social relations. The
interaction between explicit and implicit messages is layered: Caxton uses
the Nine Worthies to call for a fifteenth-century crusade while printing
indulgences for just such an excursion. These indulgences produce the
very capital that underwrites more long-term literary projects such as
Le Morte D’Arthur; just so, the romances’ questing narratives of violence
and xenophobia suggest a rationale for contributing.5 Romance fiction
and crusade propaganda work together, and thus I argue that Caxton’s
critical program should not be understood simply as a marketing strategy
so much as an imaginative system connecting material things—bodies,
books, cash, and weapons—with intangible qualities—identity, desire,
hatred—within the larger political economy. Caxton’s print program is
ideological, therefore, because it promotes a material program of texts
that allows its readers to participate in a larger imaginative structure,
which is implied but never fully articulated, never so rigid that each indi-
194 p r i n t a n d s o c i a l o r g a n i z at i o n
Kuskin Ch 5 11/15/07 9:33 AM Page 195
vidual reader cannot interpret it to find his or her own place in the larger
whole. Caxton’s critical program shapes the cultural imagination: tran-
scending marketing and propaganda, it is productive of an ideology for
English nationalism.6
That in 1486, the year after Caxton published the Worthies Series,
the three competing printing houses in England—the St. Albans School-
master printer, William de Machlinia, and Theodoric Rood—vanished,
suggests the power of his strategy.7 Taken in the abstract, this argues that
his model is the exception to the rule, his agenda unique among fifteenth-
century printers and uncharacteristic of the culture at large. Thus in his
influential history of nationalism, Imagined Communities, Benedict An-
derson observes that though the development of nationalism is funda-
mentally tied to what he terms print-capitalism, “nothing suggests that
any deep-seated ideological, let alone proto-national, impulses underlay
this vernacularization where it occurred” before the sixteenth century.8
The view fits nicely with, and no doubt derives from, the sense in literary
studies that the fifteenth century is backward looking, derivative in its
taste, doctrinal in its interpretive strategies, and hierarchical in its politi-
cal organization. I argue that fifteenth-century printers were well aware
of the powerful linkage between print and vernacular identity and that,
more specifically, Caxton and his competition appreciated almost imme-
diately the utility of the press for disseminating political documents: one
of Caxton’s first publications in England, the 1476 Propositio (STC 21458),
is a tract disseminating John Russell’s Latin oration on Charles the Bold’s
admittance to the Order of the Garter. In 1481 John Lettou and William
de Machlinia printed an abridged lawbook, the Abbreuiamentum statu-
torum (STC 9513) with an alphabetical index, which they followed in 1482
with Sir Thomas Littleton’s student primer for land law, Tenures (STC
15719). They also produced a series of lawbooks at this time, printing
yearbooks for Henry VI 35, 36, and 38 (STC 9742, 9749, and 9731). By
1483 de Machlinia, working alone, printed The Promisse of Matrimonie
(STC 9176), an English propaganda piece regarding Elizabeth of York,
and in 1484 he printed the yearbook for Henry VI 34 (STC 9737), and the
statutes for Richard III’s Parliament (STC 9347). E. Gordon Du± records
undated yearbooks for Henry VI 37. In 1485 de Machlinia printed the
Noua statuta (STC 9264) and in 1486, Innocent VIII’s papal dispensation
granting Henry VII’s marriage to Elizabeth of York (STC 14096). Like
c a x t o n ’ s wo rt h i e s s e r i e s 195
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Caxton, Lettou and de Machlinia printed indulgences along with a cru-

sade text, poet laureate John Kay’s Siege of Rhodes (STC 4594). Caxton be-
gins to experiment in political material immediately upon returning to
England, and both he and de Machlinia promote propagandistic, bureau-
cratic, and literary texts during the Yorkist period; the observation that
print is ideological is not unique to Caxton. If printing presses other than
Caxton’s failed during this period, this should suggest neither their ir-
relevance to the development of print nor the absolutely unique nature of
Caxton’s fundamental insight, but the di¤culty of the task overall.
The Structure of Spontaneity
The Worthies Series begins with Caxton’s lengthy review of the Nine
Worthies in the prologue to Godfrey and ends with a short list of his three
printed editions in the prologue to Charles the Grete. Standing between
these two texts, Caxton’s prologue to Le Morte D’Arthur contains some-
thing of both: on the one hand it discusses the Nine Worthies; on the
other it builds towards Charles’s list of texts by mentioning Caxton’s pre-
vious publication of Godfrey. At the same time, the prologue presents
Caxton’s anecdote of “many noble and dyuers gentylmen,” interrupting
the steady development of his program by formulating his readers’ de-
mand for an Arthurian work as a direct critique of his printing agenda:
The sayd noble ientylmen instantly requyred me temprynte thysto-

rye of the sayd noble kyng and conquerour kyng Arthur / and of his
knyghtes wyth thystorye of the Saynt greal / and of the deth and en-
dyng of the sayd Arthur / A±ermyng that I ougt rather tenprynte his
actes and noble feates / than of godefroye of boloyne or ony of the
other eyght (2r–v)9
However ill defined, Caxton’s label of a group of “noble ientylmen” al-

ready suggests a more cohesive group than the “dyuerce men ben of
dyuerce desyers” of the epilogue to book 2 of the Recuyell. The “noble
ientylmen[’s]” critique is that in printing Godfrey before Arthur, Caxton
has wrongfully neglected a national hero. Claiming that Caxton’s read-
ers are mutually concerned with English identity, it also emphasizes the
Kuskin Ch 5 11/15/07 9:33 AM Page 197
unity possible in the role of audience. By the same token, Caxton’s use of
“noble” unifies this group across class by flatteringly joining his “dyuers
gentylmen” readers with the nobility—with Arthur himself—while still
insisting on the term’s privilege. Yet Le Morte D’Arthur is no casual pro-
duction: the third largest of all Caxton’s texts ( led only by the Polychroni-
con and the Golden Legend), it represents a significant investment of time
and money on Caxton’s part, one reflected in his emphasis on Arthur in
his earlier production of Godfrey. In phrasing the critique as a unified re-
action to his previous publication of Godfrey, Caxton seems to juxtapose
two modes of production: if the prologue is evidence of a critical pro-
gram spanning some five years, it also suggests that Caxton is driven by
his audience’s spontaneous demands. The Nine Worthies contains this
juxtaposition as well: a popular trope used in examples ranging from
courtly poetry to playing cards to public pageants, it describes royal au-
thority as a governmental structure underwritten by the spontaneous par-
ticipation of a broad section of English society. Caxton reproduces this
relationship in terms of textual production to recognize that structure
and spontaneity are, in fact, parts of one another. By incorporating this
quality of English culture into his critical program, Caxton presents his
selection of works to his audience in terms they implicitly understand.
The Nine Worthies are three pagan kings, Hector, Alexander, and
Caesar; three Jewish heroes, Joshua, David, and Judas Maccabaeus; and
three Christian kings, Arthur, Charles, and Godfrey of Bouillon. This
structure of three sets of three first appears in Jacques Longuyon’s Les
Voeux du Paon (ca. 1310 –12), where he inserts it into Alexander’s battle
with King Clarus, and with some exceptions it remains the standard de-
piction of the Worthies into the sixteenth century.10 Where Caxton first
encountered the motif is unknown; the works he promotes through it,
however, reflect the literary culture of the Burgundian court, and as
Diane Bornstein points out, versions of the Livre d’Eracles (the French
source for Caxton’s Godfrey), Fierabras (the source for part 2 of Charles the
Grete), and the Arthurian romances could all be found in the libraries of
Philip the Good and Louis de Bruges while Caxton was in Burgundy.
Derek Pearsall further argues that the style of Caxton’s romances stems
from the Burgundian court as well: “In Burgundy it was the age of the re-
cueil, and the aim was to give the whole history of, say, Charlemagne or
Guillaume d’Orange by assembling the scattered materials of the court
Kuskin Ch 5 11/15/07 9:33 AM Page 198
and rewriting them in the fashionable prose of the age.”11 Given these ob-
servations, what is unique to Caxton is not so much his selection of works
as his use of the Nine Worthies as a structural device for importing this
Burgundian aesthetic into English culture.
Modern critics have read the Worthies’ structure as implying a nega-
tive exemplum collection, one that, like the Monk’s Tale, reduces his-
torical di±erence to broad categorical divisions repeating the tragic con-
sequences of Fortune’s instability.12 This reading neglects the trope’s
structural flexibility. In Gower’s Mirour de l’Omme, the alliterative Morte
Arthure, and Lydgate’s “Timor Mortis Conturbat Me,” for instance, the
Worthies do collectively illustrate history as tragedy. Often, though, their
exemplary meanings change with the categories of pagan, Jew, and
Christian, so that the pagan Worthies tell of bad fortune—“Lo, ho may
trust fortune any throwe” underscores Caesar in the poem in Harley
2259—while the Jewish and Christian Worthies are positive examples.13
Conversely, the categorical identities may bear no relation to their exem-
plary status, as in Les Voeux du Paon itself, where Hector and Alexander
fall but Caesar does not. Rather than insisting upon a unified meaning for
history, an overall sententia, the Worthies’ structure is capable of present-
ing separate readings of history. This is obviously useful to Caxton be-
cause it allows him to link his selection of particular works without
necessarily demanding that they come to the same interpretive conclu-
sions. More importantly, it suggests a certain looseness in the Worthies’
capacity to arrange narrative material. Used in works as disparate as
Gower’s “In Praise of Peace” and the Scots “Ballet of the Nine Nobles,”
this quality allows them to cross genre distinctions. That the Worthies
appear in paintings, statues, woodblocks, murals, tapestries, playing cards,
mummings, and pageants suggests their structure grants them a certain
freedom from formal requirements as well.14 Even the number of nine
kings is at times altered through the addition and subtraction of various
historical figures.15 Paradoxically, then, the Worthies’ rigidity creates a
corresponding flexibility, one capable of moving the same narrative mate-
rial from one medium to the next: T. F. S. Turville-Petre argues that the
poem in MS 2 Tennyson D’Eyncourt K /1 that appears beneath a genea-
logical tree of English kings began as lines in a pageant script; similarly,
R. S. Loomis suggests that the first-person stanzas in two woodcuts and a
set of sixteenth-century tapestries were originally composed for recita-
Kuskin Ch 5 11/15/07 9:33 AM Page 199
tion in pageants.16 The Worthies’ structure is able, therefore, to pass its

narrative component—the stanzaic speeches of the individual heroes—
from pageant to poem, woodcut, and tapestry precisely because narrative
depth is its least concern. Rather than describing Fortune, what the Wor-
thies seem most concerned with is presenting the spectacle of royal au-
thority to as broad an audience as possible.
Given the Worthies’ relationship to spectacle, it should not surprise
us to find pageantry as the common denominator among their various ap-
pearances. The Coventry corporation’s use of the Nine Worthies to greet
Queen Margaret serves as a useful example:17 on August 28, 1456, the
mayor of Coventry, Richard Braytoft, ordered the collection of 100
marks for gifts to Queen Margaret and Prince Edward. Fifty of these
were given to the queen on September14; the rest were returned to the
collectors to be held for the prince. The queen’s visit was fairly elabo-
rately prepared for, with an additional £10 10s. 1d. spent on special pre-
sentation cups, £8 4d. on wine, 20s. on gratuities to “diuerse persones
of the kynges house,” and 2s. “for a glasse of Rose water that my lord
Ryvers had.” Braytoft also commissioned John Wedurby of Leicester
“for we provicion and makyng on these premisses of the welcomyng of
oure Souerayn lady the quene & for his labour Inne & out” at the cost of
25s. The preparations included a tree of Jesse over the gate at Bablake
where Isaiah and Jeremiah appeared, a pageant at the gate at the east end
of the church portraying Saints Edward and John the Evangelist, another
at “the Cundit yn the Smythforde strete” containing the four cardinal
virtues, and “at the Crosse yn the Croschepyng, there were ordeyned di-
uerse angels sensyng a-high on the Crosse, & there ranne out wyne at
mony places a long whyle.” The event concluded with St. Margaret’s slay-
ing of the dragon, but just before that, “betwix the seyde Crosse & the
Cundit benewe that, were sette ix Pagentes right well arayed & yn euery
Pagent was shewed a speche of the ix Conqueroures.” In explicit contrast
to the other figures, who prophesied good fortune for the noble person-
ages, each Worthy swore an oath of loyalty to the queen. Evoking, par-
taking in, and ultimately deferring to monarchical authority, the Worth-
ies articulate the very relationship the Coventry corporation enacts by
paying its tribute. That is, they organize the social body by visibly locat-
ing authority in the royal figure, while simultaneously demonstrating
that this authority is constructed through the participation of the entire
Kuskin Ch 5 11/15/07 9:33 AM Page 200
community. Thus, the Worthies not only reinforce royal authority by

making it tangible, they also evidence and di±erentiate the various mem-
bers of the community who make that authority possible.18
In “Political Society and the Growth of Government in Late Me-
dieval England,” G. L. Harriss characterizes this participatory quality as
indicative of larger political systems between central and local authorities.
I quote Harriss at length to capture his sense of the kind and number of
regional agents involved in English polity in the late fifteenth century:
Free society had evolved into an elaborately structured élite of earls,

barons, knights, esquires and gentlemen, with yeomen and husband-
men below. All ranks of this society came to be involved in the ac-
tivity of governing. The country gentry monopolized the shire of-
fices as sheri±s, parliamentary representatives, J.P.s, escheators and
commissioners of many kinds, while parish gentry served as coro-
ners, hundred baili±s, tax collectors and purveyors, with husbandmen
performing duties as constables and jurymen which brought social
recognition and were stepping-stones to gentry status. If we add to
this landed society the gentlemen bureaucrats who serviced it with
legal and administrative skills—local attorneys, solicitors and plead-
ers, land agents, stewards, baili±s and household o¤cers—and if we
further add the richer clergy and their o¤cials, and the urban mer-
chants and substantial citizens, and even, in the capital, the small but
influential group of royal bureaucrats and lawyers, we have an élite
of greatly diversified interests and skills, many of whom were pro-
fessionally articulate. This was the political society which had to be
governed, and these men were themselves the channels along which
government had to flow.19
Harriss’s argument here can be distilled to two interrelated points: au-

thority and organization. Instead of imagining central government as ex-
tending an absolute authority through a rigid social hierarchy, Harriss
argues that “all ranks of this society came to be involved in the activity of
governing,” not simply due to civic obligation or unwavering loyalty to
their patron but because of self-interest. Just as the landed classes execute
royal authority in the process of fulfilling their own “greatly diversified
interests,” the hierarchically lower levels use their franchise on authority
Kuskin Ch 5 11/15/07 9:33 AM Page 201
to advance themselves in turn. This suggests that if political authority is

premised on hierarchy, it is equally dependent upon a friction within this
hierarchy as each layer’s participation in authority appropriates it for its
own uses. When Harriss concludes, “This was the political society which
had to be governed, and these men were themselves the channels along
which government had to flow,” he points out that such participation ac-
tively constitutes “men” as “channels” within a structure of authority, or
to put it more overtly, that individuals only take on subject positions as
they are traversed by authority.
Harriss’s emphasis on participation and appropriation presents
fifteenth-century community as organized less according to static social
distinctions, such as the bourgeoisie, than to a latticework of temporary
positions defined by the individual subject’s immediate relation to au-
thority. As much as the sheri±s, J.P.s, tax collectors, and bureaucrats Har-
riss mentions inherit their authority from a central body, they are also
“channels” in more self-contained local administrative systems. Their au-
thority is thus dependent upon the monarch and also—when in its own
locality—independent, capable of conducting business without commu-
nicating back to the center. If royal authority is enacted through friction,
it is also dependent on a communication network that, to a certain de-
gree, excludes it. Rather than a hierarchical arrangement, or even a cir-
cuit of radial connections to and from the center, fifteenth-century polity
is organized according to a complex shape in which partially independent
spheres are arranged about a centralized hierarchy but are not continually
linked to it. Central authority allowing its own appropriation in exchange
for active participation, local authority constantly asserting its power irre-
spective of the center, the structure of English polity does not seem to
exclude spontaneous action so much as to provide a framework for con-
tinual consolidation and appropriation.
One of the few contemporary historical records from the Wars of the
Roses, the Historie of the Arrivall of Edward IV in England, illustrates how
this sequence produces individuals as political subjects. Written only days
after the events it narrates, the Arrivall tells of Edward’s return to En-
gland in 1471. Rebu±ed from an initial landing in Norfolk and scattered
by storm, Edward, Gloucester, Woodville, and “the resydewe that were
comen in his shipe” collected on the north side of the mouth of the
Humber in Yorkshire at Ravenspur, on March 14:
Kuskin Ch 5 11/15/07 9:33 AM Page 202
As to the folks of the countrye there came but right few to hym, or
almost none, for, by the scuringe of suche persons as for that cawse
were, by his said rebells, sent afore into thos partes for to move them
to be agains his highnes, the people were sore endwsed to be contrary
to hym, and not to receyve, ne accepe hym, as for theyr Kynge;
natwithstondynge, for the love and favour that before they had borne
to the prince of fulnoble memorye, his father, Duke of Yorke, the
people bare hym right great favowr to be also Duke of Yorke, and to
have that of right apartayned unto hym, by the right of the sayde
noble prince his fathar.20
Warwick is able to hamper Edward’s landing through the “scuringe of

suche persons as for that cawse were”—by extending his influence
through local “channels” of communication. Insofar as Warwick’s power
is franchised from the king, this extension represents an appropriation
of royal authority put to independent uses; insofar as it is based on War-
wick’s own position as a magnate, it represents an autonomous power op-
erating in a communication network outside the structure of monarchical
authority. In turn, Warwick’s presence in Yorkshire sets up a chain of par-
ticipations and appropriations on the part of the “persons” and the “folks
of the countrye” he involves. As “persons” and “folks,” these groups are
tremendously ill defined, but by participating in Warwick’s “cawse” they
become unified as “the people.” With this change in status they are able
to act with enough coherence to subvert Edward’s authority; in partici-
pating in Warwick’s authority, however, they also appropriate it toward
their own ends: this is demonstrated by their ability to interpret histori-
cal precedent independently, to argue that Edward should proceed as
“Duke of Yorke,” though not as king. If they were completely under War-
wick’s control, their interpretation would be constrained to his pur-
poses; that they interpret Edward’s lineage based on their loyalty to his
father demonstrates a subversion of Warwick’s authority, one that spon-
taneously and crucially reinstalls Edward in a more mediated position.
Thus, Warwick’s and Edward’s interest in the Yorkshire populace creates
them as a political body—what P. R. Coss terms an “additional plane of
authority”—intertwined with, and also independent from the nobility.21
In using the Nine Worthies as a structural device, then, Caxton’s
critical program draws on the way medieval polity constitutes authority
Kuskin Ch 5 11/15/07 9:33 AM Page 203
through a sequence of consolidation and appropriation involving a broad

section of the literate population. In the Arrivall and in the prologue to
Le Morte D’Arthur this sequence is marked or signaled by the seemingly
spontaneous production of an original interpretation: just as the Ar-
rivall ’s “people” are able to interpret Edward’s authority through partici-
pating in and appropriating Warwick’s, Caxton’s “dyuers gentylmen”
gain their interpretive voice within his project through participating in—
buying, reading, and commenting upon—his texts.
We can see this in the plot of Le Morte D’Arthur as well. Book 21,
chapter 1 of Le Morte D’Arthur—the chapter Caxton titles “How Syr
Mordred presumed & toke on hym to be kyng of englond / & wold haue
maryed the quene his faders wyf ” (3p2v )—narrates Arthur’s return to
England from his unsuccessful siege on Lancelot in terms remarkably
similar to the Arrivall’s discussion of Edward’s landing at Ravenspur:
Than came worde to syr Mordred that kyng Arthur had araysed the
syege / For Syr Launcelot & he was comyng homeward wyth a grete
hoost to be auenged vpon syr Mordred wherfore syr Modred maad
wryte wryttes to al the barowny of thys londe and moche peple
drewe to hym For than was the comyn voys emonge them that wyth
Arthur was none other lyf but warre and stry±e / And wyth Syr Mor-
dred was grete ioye and blysse / Thus was syr Arthur depraued and
euyl sayd of . And many ther were that kyng Arthur had made vp
of nought and gyuen them landes myght not than say hym a good
worde. (dd3v )
In both texts, the standing monarch’s landing is frustrated by the no-

bility’s control over the local “channels” of government: where Warwick
operates “by the scuringe of suche persons,” Mordred “maad wryte
wryttes to al the barowny”; where the people “were sore endwsed to be
contrary to” Edward, here the “comyn voys” rises up against Arthur;
where the Arrivall’s narrator insists this is “natwithstondynge, for the
love and favour that before they had borne to the prince of fulnoble
memorye,” Malory points out a similar contradiction: “many ther were
that kyng Arthur had made vp of nought and gyuen them landes myght
not than say hym a good worde.” Further, both texts discuss the popu-
lace’s independence from royal authority through their ability to interpret
Kuskin Ch 5 11/15/07 9:33 AM Page 204
recent history on their own terms. Further still, both authors use this in-
terpretation as grounds for a second: in the Arrivall this is to brand the
Yorkshiremen “rebells”; in Malory it is a broader claim to precedent: “Lo
ye al englissh men see ye not what a myschyef here was / for he that was
the moost kyng and knyght of the world and moost loued the felyshyp of
noble knyghtes / and by hym they were al vpholden / Now myght not this
englyssh men holde them contente wyth hym” (dd3v). Malory locates
political instability in the movement from a unified nobility—a “felyshyp
of noble knyghtes”—to a generalized “englyssh men,” arguing that the
subversion of class-based social definitions toward more open-ended and
temporary groupings is a move away from Arthur’s historical precedent
of stability. Yet immediately after insisting Arthurian history o±ers a
precedent for stability, Malory finds within it a precedent for instability
as well: “Loo,” he writes, “thus was the olde custome and vsage of this
londe / And also men saye that we of thys londe haue not yet loste ne
foryeten that custome & vsage / Alas thys is a grete defaulte of vs en-
glysshe men / For there may nothynge plese vs noo terme” (dd3v). This
second precedent reads the populace’s break with the past as an a¤rma-
tion of a more fundamental rule of English behavior. Describing histori-
cal instability as “the olde custome and vsage of this londe,” Malory
writes the subversive quality of English character in the English geogra-
phy; thus, in claiming historical precedent for political stability and insta-
bility both, Malory condemns the English soil to a double bind in which
the source and structure of feudal authority contains the impetus for its
subversion; hence Malory’s reading iterates a system similar to Harriss’s
but claims it as a historical rule.
Malory ends his critique of English history and politics with a final
verdict: “and the moost party of alle Englond helde with sire mordred /
the people were soo newe fangle” (dd4). On one level, “newe fangle” sug-
gests the newness of the political scene, one in which the noble and non-
noble classes enter into a dialogue about historical authority. In this, it
seems to refocus us expressly on the politics of the late fifteenth century,
revitalizing the logic of precedent by suggesting the possibility of an
original historical moment. Yet the term “newe fangle” is not unique to
Malory: Chaucer, Gower, and Lydgate all use it to describe sexual in-
constancy, and Caxton’s translation of the Curial applies it to a world of
human exchange akin to prostitution.22 In his reading of Anelida and
Kuskin Ch 5 11/15/07 9:33 AM Page 205
Arcite, Lee Patterson argues that this sexual sense contains a “Boethian
subtext” that implies a recursive structure for history:
Chaucer’s depiction of the “newefangelnesse” of Arcite’s erotic rest-

lessness invokes this kind of Boethian critique. Willfully rejecting
Anelida’s chaste love, Arcite rejects as well a fully human nature that
ineluctably tends toward the true end of things, aligning himself
instead with a less than human self that “delyte[th] / In thing that
straunge is.”23
On a second level, then, newfangledness reads the tension in Arthurian

history as not merely a question of precedent, but as a skepticism stem-
ming from an understanding of human nature as motivated by physical
desire. In describing the common voice as newfangled, Malory pairs the
newness of class-based social change with the “olde custome” buried
deeply in the psychology of the English subject and landscape. For Mal-
ory, social ambition and sexual aggression are inextricably linked to one
another, and nowhere is this more clear than in Mordred’s desire for
Guenevere, a desire that presents his attempt to win the throne as a pro-
fane sexual urge that initiates Arthur’s final fall. “And soo he thoughte
to bete his owne fader from his landes”: Mordred’s rebellion epitomizes
the subversive nature of the sequence of participation and appropriation
in English polity by connecting Arthurian history to a series of negative
exempla—the fall of Satan, the expulsion from the Garden, the Oedipal
drama—in which the patriarch is driven from the material source of his
authority: the land.
To clarify: my argument is neither that the Arrivall is a gloss on Mal-
ory’s work nor that Malory used that text in some way. Rather, I suggest a
dynamic and imaginative process of cultural production, so that as much
as the two texts are reflective of an overall culture, they appropriate their
own authority from that culture and are thus spontaneous interpretations
themselves. So, the Arrivall and Le Morte D’Arthur reflect the ongoing
cultural patterns of consolidation and appropriation of authority which
we also see in the Chaucerian inheritance, and in doing so reproduce
these patterns anew. Texts are self-reflective artifacts and are enmeshed in
the very processes they describe, and Caxton’s printed version is no differ-
ent. Thus, his title, which directs his readers toward the sexual nature of
Kuskin Ch 5 11/15/07 9:33 AM Page 206
Mordred’s bid for the throne—“wold haue maryed the quene his fad-
ers wyf ”—suggests this link occurs at the outer limits of sexual and so-
cial conduct, limits clearly marked by taboo. So, as much as Caxton’s
Le Morte D’Arthur endorses Malory’s condemnation of politicking, it
also encourages a certain nostalgia for the Arthurian past as a positive ex-
ample of stability and a caution against extreme moral decadence. Cax-
ton’s newfangledness is thus a much more ambivalent one than Malory’s,
and containing both ends of the term—the unique way a print technology
physically and symbolically enables the reader’s identification as a col-
lective, an audience, but still relies on past textual traditions to do so—
this ambivalence serves to describe the composition of Caxton’s products
as well.
The importance of the Worthies, then, is that they provide an overall
framework for the production of interpretation that occurs in the litera-
ture which models political action. We see this process clearly in Caxton’s
prologue to the first work of the series, Godfrey of Boloyne, when he calls
upon his readers to participate in a Christian crusade against the Turks:
Thenne for thexhortacion of alle Cristen prynces / Lordes / Barons /

Knyghtes / Gentilmen / Marchanntes / and all the comyn peple of
this noble Royamme Walys & yrlond I haue emprysed to translate
this book of the conquest of Iherusalem out of ±renssh in to our ma-
ternal tongue / to thentente tencourage them by the redyng and
heeryng of the merueyllous historyes herin comprysed and of the
holy myracles shewyd / that euery man in his partye endeuoyre
theym vnto the resistence a fore sayd / And recuperacion of the sayd
holy londe (a3v)24
Caxton can claim a degree of authority for Godfrey because it demon-

strates “holy myracles.” As translator and presenter of these “merueyllous
historyes,” he participates in their authority, and in doing so can ap-
propriate such authority for his own interpretative statement, his “en-
tente” to encourage a new “recuperacion of the sayd holy londe.” Cax-
ton’s exhortation therefore foregrounds the way English polity relies on
structured and spontaneous participation; indeed, his “entente” seems as
much “tencourage” unity among his readers as to inspire an actual call to
arms. By insisting “that euery man in his partye endeuoyre,” Caxton pre-
sents English polity as bound to a linear hierarchy running from “Cristen
Kuskin Ch 5 11/15/07 9:33 AM Page 207
prynces” through to “comyn peple,” while also dependent upon each

group’s mutual commitment to political action. To my mind, this does
not lessen the earnestness of Caxton’s appeal for crusade, but doubles
it over with the more ideological goal of articulating the complexity
of fifteenth-century polity. Godfrey gives Caxton the authority for this
twofold political interpretation of current events, and in his prologue
he casts this interpretation as a specifically literary reading of the Nine
Worthies:
And for to deserue the tenthe place . I beseche almyghty God to

graunte and ottroye to our sayd souerayn lord . or to one of his noble
progenye / I meane my lord Prynce / and my lord Rychard duc of
yorke and norfolke . to whom I humbly beseche / at theyr leyzer and
playsyr to see & here redde this symple book . by which they may be
encoraged to deserue lawde and honour and that their name and
renomme may encreace and remayne perpetuel. (a4)
In arguing that a repetition of Godfrey’s example will ensure that Ed-

ward’s, Richard’s, or the little prince’s “renomme may encreace and re-
mayne perpetuel,” Caxton casts the work’s exemplary value as allowing a
reproduction of the past that enables a lasting future. Installing a tenth
Worthy into the list of kings, he also insists that contemporary political
action changes the structure of literary history. Thus, Caxton’s use of the
Worthies parallels a relationship between subjects and authority with one
between readers and works. Operating across a series of works and dis-
seminated in quantity, Caxton’s critical program does something new:
it produces a vernacular literary authority capable of placing his contem-
porary secular readers within community and literary history. In any
case, Caxton’s interpretation here should not be written o± as a mere bid
to promote Godfrey to the nobility so much as a complex interweaving of
economic, textual, and historical authority toward a discrete political
statement.
The Production of Literary Authority
Caxton’s prologues to his Worthies texts elaborate upon the production

of this interpretive stance by modulating the Worthies’ representation of
Kuskin Ch 5 11/15/07 9:33 AM Page 208
political authority toward an understanding of the individual based in

literary authority. This is apparent in his discussion of the meaning of Le
Morte D’Arthur: “And for to passe the tyme thys book shal be plesaunte
to rede in / but for to gyue fayth and byleue that al is trewe that is con-
teyned herin / ye be at your lyberte but al is wryton for our doctryne /
and for to beware that we falle not to vyce ne synne” (3r–v). Caxton di-
rects his audience’s encounter with the work, neither by referring to Mal-
ory’s authorial control nor by simply insisting on the validity of the
Arthurian legend, but by applying St. Paul’s Romans 15:4—“for whatever
was written in former days was written for our instruction”—to vernacu-
lar interpretation.25 Romans 15:4 is a repeated trope in Caxton’s writing,
one he investigates further in the prologue to Charles the Grete, where he
uses it to illustrate how the participation in and appropriation of doctri-
nal literary authority constructs the secular subject. While Caxton uses
the Nine Worthies to frame his critical program in terms of English
polity, he uses Romans 15:4 to solidify its purchase on literary authority
and Benedict Anderson’s very terminology—the imagination—to explain
the utility of reading for a secular purpose. Thus, just as Harriss points
out that the process of participating in a larger communication network
produces the individual as a “channel,” Caxton’s critical program con-
structs the many classes participating in English polity—his “prynces /
Lordes / Barons / Knyghtes / Gentilmen / Marchanntes / and all the
comyn peple”—as a unified readership in relation to the vernacular texts
he presents as authoritative.
Caxton’s discussion of Paul in the prologue to Charles the Grete is
largely a close translation of the prologue to his French source, “Saint
Pol docteur de verite,” now lost but remaining in versions such as Gar-
bin’s 1483 edition of Fierabras.26 Caxton’s reliance on his sources has gen-
erally been read as a weakness in his abilities as a writer, his particular
translation of “Saint Pol docteur de verite” a “confusion.”27 As a rhetori-
cal technique, however, these borrowings enable Caxton to apply an ex-
isting field of contemporary writing to his own ends, and in this case
Caxton is able to appropriate what turns out to be a much larger discus-
sion of appropriation in general. Caxton’s version opens: “Saynt Poul
doctour of veryte sayth to vs that al thynges that ben reduced by wry-
tyng / ben wryton to our doctryne / And Boece maketh mencion that the
helthe of euery persone procedeth dyuercely” (a2). Caxton’s use of Paul
Kuskin Ch 5 11/15/07 9:33 AM Page 209
and Boethius, both readers of the Old Testament, places the vernacular
work in an exegetical context. Caxton is more than willing to acknowl-
edge that this theoretical apparatus gives his text over to the service of
Christian authority; in fact, his translation belabors the obvious: “Thenne
sythe it is soo that the cristen feyth is a±ermed and corrobered by the
doctours of holy chyrche / Neuertheles the thynges passed dyuersley re-
duced to remembraunce / engendre in vs correction of vnlauful lyf.”
Rather than suggesting that his use of Paul appropriates scriptural au-
thority, Caxton initially claims just the opposite: that Paul and Boethius
a¤rm and corroborate Christian faith—that an exegetical method of
reading appropriates his texts for the Church. Yet no sooner does Caxton
establish this movement toward doctrinal authority than he enacts a sec-
ond appropriation back toward the secular: Caxton’s argument is that the
ability to interpret the text simultaneously proceeds from (“thenne sythe
it is soo”) and in spite of (“neuertheles”) the fact that the doctors of
the Holy Church a¤rm and corroborate Christian faith. Because Paul
and Boethius read for a doctrinal sentence, the first-person plural audi-
ence of Caxton’s prologue can read at a more literal level—the level of
things and texts—and still obtain a purchase on a figural meaning beyond
the text. In this lies a claim for secular interpretation: “For the werkes of
the auncient and olde peple ben for to gyue to vs ensaumple to lyue in
good & vertuous operacions digne & worthy of helth in folowyng the
good / and eschewyng the euyl.” Though Caxton acknowledges that all
works are written for doctrinal authority, he simultaneously suggests that
the “werkes of the auncient and olde peple” are for secular benefit. As
with Chaucer’s Retraction, the very act of giving the vernacular text over
to Christian exegesis, of acknowledging that its meaning is appropriated
by a larger doctrinal authority, authorizes a reading that is not necessarily
doctrinal. Rather than a singular movement of authority from the secular
and literal to the ecclesiastical and spiritual, the most powerful aspect of
Romans 15:4 is its ability to engage in a double appropriation that holds
these categories in tension.28
We see this tension played out repeatedly in the Worthies Series.
In Godfrey Caxton presents the siege of Jerusalem as a doctrinal exem-
plum—“for to moeue and tenflawme the hertes of the Redars and hier-
ers . for teschewe and flee werkes vycious, dishonnest and vytuperable”—
capable of legitimizing very tangible benefits: “enterpryses honnestes and
Kuskin Ch 5 11/15/07 9:33 AM Page 210
werkes of gloryous meryte to lyue in remembraunce perpetuel” (a2).

Caxton turns Paul’s double appropriation into a double profitability for
the secular reader which o±ers two distinct lessons, one benefiting the
readers’ “hertes,” the other suggesting “enterpryses” for greater glory.
Thus, by telling his readers “to doo as this noble prynce Gode±roy of
boloyne dyde,” Caxton is able to present a Christian moral while arguing
for specific political actions (a3v). Similarly, in the prologue to Le Morte
D’Arthur Caxton has no trouble listing the literal facts behind the
Arthurian legend—the Round Table at Winchester, Gawain’s skull at
Dover, and so forth—but wavers over the truth of Arthur’s existence—
“but for to gyue fayth and byleue that al is trewe that is conteyned herin /
ye be at your lyberte” (3)—not from some sort of fuzziness in his ability
to distinguish between the factual and the verisimilar, history and ro-
mance, truth and propaganda, but because his ideological agenda for sec-
ular interpretation depends upon the tension between monarchical and
independent political authority within the structure of polity, and doc-
trinal and secular literary authority within the structure of exegesis.
The crucial point is that instead of constructing static poles of value, the
doubly appropriative mechanism of Romans 15:4 applies the dynamic re-
lationship of structure and subversion to a literary context, thus authoriz-
ing the secular reading of a vernacular text by aligning it with a previously
established doctrinal authority.
In claiming such a relationship, Caxton is able to leverage authority
for his entire Worthies Series simply by insisting on its place in a larger
canon. For example, in Godfrey and Le Morte D’Arthur, Caxton specifi-
cally identifies the Worthies with textual sources. In Godfrey he finds the
Jewish heroes in Scripture, Hector in “Ouyde / Homer Virgyle / Dares .
Dyctes and other dyuerse [writers],” Caesar in “poetes as lucan / stace
and other,” Arthur in “large volumes and books grete plente and many,”
“Charlemayn . . . in large volumes,” and Godfrey “in Latyn and ±rensshe
in large and grete volumes” (a2v–a3). In Le Morte D’Arthur he finds Hec-
tor “bothe in balade and in prose,” Caesar in “thystoryes ben wel kno and
had,” that “the byble reherceth al [the Jews’] noble hystoryes 7 actes,”
Godfrey in his own edition, and Charles “in many places bothe in
Frensshe and Englysshe” (2).29 In both of these prologues the Bible is
one of a string of historically authorized works; as much as Caxton can
apply his Pauline doctrine to each of them, he can assert that their cul-
Kuskin Ch 5 11/15/07 9:33 AM Page 211
tural authority comes not from their associations with particular libraries,
but from their participation in a sequence stemming from this doctrinal
authority. The result is that in Le Morte D’Arthur, for example, Caxton
can make claims for the validity of incorporating the Arthurian legends
into the English canon even though they lack an established auctor. Find-
ing versions of Arthur in “duche ytalyen spaynysshe and grekysshe” (2v ),
he remarks that
many noble volumes be made of hym & of his noble knygtes in

frensshe which I haue seen & redde beyonde the see / which been
not had in our maternal tongue / but in walsshe ben many & also
in frensshe / & somme in englysshe but nowher nygh alle / wherfore
suche as haue late ben drawen oute bryefly in to englysshe / I haue
after the symple connyng that god hath sente to me / vnder the fau-
our and correctyon of al noble lordes and gentylmen enprysed to en-
prynte a book of the noble hystoryes of the sayd kynge Arthur. (3)
Given the Arthuriad’s presence in so many foreign “noble volumes,” Mal-

ory’s role as a translator, important though it may be, becomes less crucial
than Caxton’s own act of dissemination. The result is that Caxton can
commute Malory to something of a conduit in the appropriation of the
works’ authority as they are “drawen oute bryefly in to englysshe,” and
materialized as individual texts. Ultimately, Malory too takes on au-
thority only through his structural role in participating in a greater au-
thority, be that as translator-compiler for a definitive collection of tales,
the recueil, or as Lancastrian and Yorkist operative.30 Malory is a “chan-
nel” in the transmission process, an individual taking on identity as a po-
litical subject as he participates and appropriates in the larger economy
of literary authority.
While Paul underwrites the entire Worthies Series, Caxton’s transla-
tion of “Saint Pol docteur de verite” is unique in its specific articulation
of how literary authority constructs the individual as a subject. The sec-
tion in Charles the Grete on Paul concludes: “and also in recountyng of
hye hystoryes / the comune vnderstondyng is better content to the yma-
gnacion local than to symple auctoryte to which it is submysed” (a2).
“Ymagnacion” appears in a number of Caxton’s texts in the modern sense
of the imaginary. Here, this imagination is “local,” and like the “comune
Kuskin Ch 5 11/15/07 9:33 AM Page 212
vnderstondyng” it exists within the jurisdiction of a greater authority.

Just as Caxton’s submission of his text to Paul and Boethius defines it as
within Christian doctrine, his definition of his readers as having “comune
vnderstondyng” submits (OED, “submise”) them to unadorned (OED,
“simple,” 1–3) authority. Within this process of subjection lies a choice,
though, and the “comune vnderstondyng” is “better content” with the
“ymagnacion local.” The act of reading for “ymagnacion local” therefore
repeats Paul’s double appropriation while giving it a specifically ideologi-
cal edge: it folds the secular reader into the field of a greater authority by
suggesting a reconciliation with this authority in the imaginary.31 For
Caxton, the individual is symbolically born as a subject out of the partic-
ipation and appropriation of literary authority, and this process of partic-
ipation and appropriation is no less than the process of interpretation
itself.
Thus, Caxton’s claim in Le Morte D’Arthur that his audience is
composed of “many noble and dyuers gentylmen” can be read in two
ways: literally as a reference to the many di±erent literate groups in
the fifteenth century that take an active part in English polity—the “Cris-
ten prynces / Lordes / Barons / Knyghtes / Gentilmen / Marchanntes /
and all the comyn peple of this noble Royamme” Caxton addresses in
Godfrey—and symbolically as a gloss for the way his discursive apparatus
unifies this group as an audience in the intangible but no less political
realm of the imagination. This apparatus does not imply that Caxton cre-
ated readers where none previously existed. The physical construction of
the Winchester manuscript of Le Morte D’Arthur argues that the wealth-
ier members of the non-noble classes were buying Arthurian romance be-
fore Caxton began his Worthies Series.32 Caxton’s task in the 1480s was to
find a way to channel the press’s capacity for volume, and he did this by
making his vernacular canon relevant to all those participating in English
polity, allowing them to participate in the imagination of a vernacular au-
thority common to all. Physically, the press allows him to price his texts at
a fraction of the manuscript’s: the Worthies Series, printed in folio, ranges
in size from the Charles the Grete at only 96 leaves to Le Morte D’Arthur’s
432 leaves. As we have seen, the Legenda ad usum Sarum, a mass book of
372 leaves folio with red printed rubrics, was priced at 5s. and 13s. 4d.
apiece. Given the discrepancy in the records, the additional importation
costs, the di±erence in folio pages and printing style, the Legenda can sug-
Kuskin Ch 5 11/15/07 9:33 AM Page 213
gest only a very rough approximation of Caxton’s prices. In comparison,

however, Carol M. Meale estimates the cost of the Winchester manu-
script at £4. 15s.33 Thus, if the press physically enables Caxton to place his
products within financial reach of an expanded clientele, his critical pro-
gram—in this case the Worthies and Paul—allows him to make Le Morte
D’Arthur and his Burgundian imports intellectually recognizable and use-
ful to this audience despite the text’s lack of a broadly recognized auctor
such as Chaucer. Caxton’s critical program therefore organizes his dis-
parate and shifting population of readers into a coherent body through
the very social tensions that make an exclusive appeal to any one group of
readers confining. Material and symbolic, physical and intellectual, Cax-
ton’s production of his readers as “dyuers gentylmen” constructs them as
unified subjects engaged with a vernacular canon.
Reading the Subject of Desire
One central function of literature is to articulate an imaginary relation-

ship between the individual and the world in which he or she lives. Cax-
ton’s Worthies participates in this relationship on a number of levels. His
prologues accomplish it through the framework of the Nine Worthies,
which organizes his diverse readership as an audience, and his Pauline
rhetoric provides an intellectual apparatus for appropriating literary au-
thority. The series engages its readers in other ways as well. Beyond the
covers of the individual texts the call for a crusade in Godfrey finds its
complement in Caxton’s indulgences, which invite the reader to under-
write just such a crusade financially. Within the books’ covers, the plots
of the series not only dramatize the action of a crusade but illustrate the
symbolic power of material goods for a secular readership. In short, the
Worthies Series presents a vision of history in which the romance past is
directly connected to the lived present. Caxton’s critical program synthe-
sizes various modes of production without resolving them; thus it implies
a connection between indulgence sales and English literature that is never
made explicit; indeed, the program is stronger for its vagary because ar-
ticulating any link between these variegated items would make brittle the
fragile connection between them. The strength of Caxton’s critical pro-
gram is that it is suggestive of imaginary relations between literal action
Kuskin Ch 5 11/15/07 9:33 AM Page 214
and a greater symbolic meaning that it never rationalizes. In this, it not

only speaks to Caxton’s readers, but provides a platform for contem-
porary printers, such as John Lettou and William de Machlinia, who
followed a similar strategy by printing a set of indulgences with the ac-
companying 1482 edition of John Kay’s Siege of Rhodes.
Translated between March and June 1481, Godfrey of Boloyne or The
Siege and Conquest of Jerusalem is Caxton’s version of a French continu-
ation of William of Tyre’s history of the first crusade. Composed in
Palestine between 1163 and 1183, William of Tyre’s text was left incom-
plete at his death and continued in a number of separate chronicles, even-
tually combined into one work by Bernardus Thesaurius in 1232. Further
chroniclers added to the text, and Caxton’s translation is from the 1275
continuation.34 Beginning with a short history of the Turkish conquest of
Jerusalem, the narrative takes shape with Peter the Hermit’s delivery of
letters from the Christians of Jerusalem to Pope Urban. The first major
section of Caxton’s text is largely concerned with the crusading armies’
chaotic progress across Hungary and ends with their capture of Nicaea,
which they deliver to the emperor of Constantinople on June 20, 1097.
The second section focuses on the siege of Antioch, which, with the help
of the Christian allies within the city, the crusaders take on June 6, 1098.
The third and last part of the text describes the siege of Jerusalem, God-
frey’s election as king of Jerusalem, his refusal to be crowned where
Christ himself was crowned, and his death on July 18, 1100.
Caxton was committed to a new crusade even though King Edward
appears not to have been, and he printed at least ten indulgences, at least
eight of which were aimed at raising money to aid in defense against
Turkish advances in the Mediterranean.35 Such indulgences were com-
missioned by licensed individuals in the name of the pope and seem to
have been relatively common in the fifteenth century; Gutenberg and
Fust printed indulgences in Mainz quite soon after the invention of the
press itself.36 Jobbing work was clearly important to Caxton, and he began
to experiment with it close to his return to England, at the same time as
his early Chaucerian quartos. In 1476 he printed an indulgence extending
the 1475 Jubilee Indulgence to England in order to raise money for a
Christian fleet. This indulgence (STC 14077c.106) was commissioned by
Abbot John Sant in the name of Pope Sixtus IV and granted to Henry
Langley and his wife, Catherine. As Caxton’s prologue to Godfrey reports,
Kuskin Ch 5 11/15/07 9:33 AM Page 215
in August of 1480 Otranto was captured by the Turks, and in 1480 Cax-
ton issued two single-issue indulgences for John Kendale and the Knights
of Rhodes (STC 14077c.107 and 140777c.110 /A), one plural issue (STC
14077c.110), and a plural issue letter of confraternity for the Hospital of
St. Mary Rounceval, Charing Cross, commissioned by Edward Ponyngs,
John Kendale, and John Lynton (STC 14077c.55B). Caxton’s promotion
of indulgences continued into 1481 with indulgences also associated with
the Knights of Rhodes but commissioned by Johannes de Gigliis (in a
single issue, STC 14077c.113, and plural issue, STC 14077c.112).
The relationship between these short-term, commissioned, single-
sheet printed items and the more ambitious literary editions is not ob-
vious. David R. Carlson writes,
Jobbing has been imagined to be a potboiler for the early printers—

something with which they could keep plant and capital occupied in
the interstices between their employment at their proper work, the
reproduction of books, as if book-production was naturally, in-
evitably paramount. Speculative book-publication turns out to have
been essential to the ability of an early printer like Caxton to gener-
ate sustained profit from the productive capacity of his machinery. In
the short term, however, book-production seems more likely to have
been the potboiler, keeping the machinery busy at intervals between
its employment at jobs that would certainly have paid, and paid im-
mediately. The logic of profit allots pride of place to jobbing in the
development of early English printing.37
Carlson’s point reverses the traditional emphasis on Caxton’s literary pro-

ductions as the significant mark of his press to recognize the role of
ephemera in “the logic of profit.” Within this, he underscores how both
large-scale book production and short-term jobbing must be interrelated
to keep the machinery busy. In a text such as Godfrey, one about the cru-
sade in its plot, the relationship between these print forms—between the
speculative book publishing of “merueyllous histories” and the jobbing of
indulgences—is actually doubled over, so not only does the jobbing work
maintain the productive capacity of the machines but the longer works’
topicality feeds demand for the jobbed items. Further, it is the nature of
the Worthies Series to unify, to tie otherwise unrelated themes together,
Kuskin Ch 5 11/15/07 9:33 AM Page 216
in this case bringing texts that are not overtly about the crusades, such as
Le Morte D’Arthur, to the same agenda. Indeed, Caxton printed an indul-
gence for the Dominican priory of Arundel (STC 14077c.25A) close on
his publication of Le Morte D’Arthur in 1485, and two against the Turks
in 1489, both for Johannes de Gigliis and Perseus de Malviciis, a single
issue (STC 14077c.115) and a plural issue (STC 14077c.114). This con-
nection broadens the scope of Caxton’s critical program significantly for
it suggests his thinking spans what to us seems like discrete print-genres,
using content to connect large-scale publications to the lucrative business
of consignment jobbing.
The texts of the Worthies Series are involved in smoothing out
this imaginary connection. Godfrey, in particular, does this through an in-
vestigation of secular readership, opposing doctrinal and secular readings
of material circumstances, particularly of the body. For example, during
the siege of Antioch, provisions become so scarce that famine threatens
the Christian camp. Latyns, a spy planted in the host by the emperor
of Constantinople, uses this as an opportunity to demoralize the troops:
“by the wordes that he had sowen / and by thensample of his departyng .
began many men to departe fro thoost” (s3v). The bishop of Puy, the
highest-ranking cleric among the lords, reads this exodus as a sign of
divine displeasure and sets out a regime of fasting and penance in which
“alle the comyn wymmen of euil lyf shold be voyded. . . [and those] who
that after that were taken in adulterye or in fornycacion shood haue his
heed smeton of / [and the] Incontinent the droncardys of the tauernes the
players of dyse” punished likewise (s3v–s4). Positing a depth beyond the
physical, the bishop treats the problem of famine as a shadow of a larger
spiritual malaise and purges the corporate body through the individual
pilgrims’ bodies. His reading equates the material lack of food with a
spiritual lack, and sets its limits in a spiritual depth beyond physical re-
ality. Though this regimen results in a change—Godfrey recovers from a
previously unmentioned illness—it is insu¤cient in its explanatory force
to resolve the problems at hand, and just as the text presented the cause
of the problems—Latyns’s treasonous words—to be secular and discur-
sive, it o±ers a second interpretation of the events to resolve the scene.
After the bishop pronounces his reading, the leaders of the crusade hold
a council in which one of their number, Bohemond, proposes to answer
physical lack with physical excess:
Kuskin Ch 5 11/15/07 9:33 AM Page 217
Buymont forgate not this that he had promysed / whan tyme of

soupper cam / he disposed and ordeyned hym for to souppe / he
made the knyghtes of his contre to take out somme turkes that he
had in prison . And made theyr throtes to be cutte / And after smote
them in pyeces and arrayed them for to be rosted. (s4v )
Where the bishop’s reading matched spiritual failings with physical absti-
nence, Bohemond’s responds to famine by using the body as nourishment.
This is not Bohemond’s endgame, though. Ultimately, he is interested in
the symbolic impact of his reading, in creating a discourse of terror: his
reading is phrased as a “promise,” and though he does kill some prisoners,
his physical actions primarily serve to generate further oaths—“thenne
Buymont sayd to his men / And bad his men also to saye to other / that
alle the barons had thus ordeyned and sworn that alle the espyes that
myght be taken in thost shold be rosted and seruyd at the tables of the
barons / And the barons shold ete them by their oth”—and to spread
rumor in the camp: “thyse tidynges were anon spred thurgh out thoost /
that suche Iustyce was don in the lodgys of buymont.” If the bishop of
Puy’s reading argues that significance lies in a profound spiritual depth,
Bohemond’s is nonetheless symbolic but instead remains superficial and
literal, skimming the surface of the material world to discover meaning
entirely within the secular discourse it combats. To the extent that the
text o±ers both readings but only Bohemond’s resolves the mass defec-
tions, his is the stronger of the two.
The text’s endorsement of this sort of secular interpretation of the
material world does not eliminate the sense that spiritual depth resides in
Godfrey of Boloyne so much as emphasize its inaccessibility. Just as Caxton
insists in his prologue that the text contains “holy myracles,” the narrator
also remarks upon its spiritual significance: for example, after Godfrey
crosses from his siege engines to the walls of Jerusalem and opens the
gates to his forces, the narrator pauses to underscore the event’s scriptural
resonance:
This was vpon a frydaye aboute None / It is a thynge for to be

byleuyd . that oure lord dyde this by grete sygnefyaunce . ±or on this
daye and about that hour su±red he deth on the crosse right cruel in
the same place . for the Redempcion of man . Therfore wold the
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swete lord that the peple of his trewe pylgryms shold gete this toun
and delyuer it oute of the seruage and thraldom of the hethen men .
and make it free vnto Cristen men that his seruyse myght be had
therin and encreced. (15.3v–15.4)
By temporally and geographically aligning Godfrey with Christ the nar-

rator implies an allegorical parallel between the “grete sygnefyaunce” of
Godfrey’s physical conquest of Jerusalem and Christ’s crucifixion. Sus-
pending Godfrey’s body between siege tower and wall, between physical
being and spiritual meaning, the narrator constructs it as an allegorical
sign capable of bridging the distance between literal and figural sentence.
Though this alignment strives for allegorical depth within a secular his-
tory, the story itself reveals a stunning lack of the grace implied by the
“Redempcion of man”: immediately after taking Jerusalem the crusaders
annihilate the populace, killing ten thousand women and children who
seek salvation in the temple of Jerusalem. Remarking, “myght no prayers
ne cryeng of mercy auaylle,” the narrator himself seems sympathetic to
the Muslims’ plight (15.4). If the “grete sygnefyaunce” of Christ’s death
is, in part, mercy, this is a lesson that the narrator recognizes but the story
itself does not support. Though Jerusalem is achieved, though the narra-
tor tries to force an allegorical reading, though the entire crusade pro-
ceeds linearly to the site of the major Christian event, the moment at
which the temporal and the spiritual should be most compressed is the
moment of the work’s greatest violence. In Godfrey the literal and spiritual
never come together; Godfrey may pass over the walls to Jerusalem, but
his physical arrival remains fractured from spiritual depth, implied by
proximity but never fully rationalized.
The distance between the material and doctrinal is not unique to
one or two of Godfrey’s scenes but characterizes its progress overall. As
much as Godfrey brings its Christians to a series of biblical locations,
it is also defined by an obsession with secular “enterpryses”: the barons’
continual bickering and treasonous infighting over conquered territory,
their unwillingness to proceed on to Jerusalem when the foraging is good
elsewhere, their grotesque bargaining with the few surviving citizens
of Jerusalem, their quarrel over the possession of the Tower of David,
and the fraudulent election of the patriarch of Jerusalem all attest to
the work’s interest in earthly politics. Like Bohemond’s reading of the
famine, these events are presented less as negative exempla—the secular
Kuskin Ch 5 11/15/07 9:33 AM Page 219
failings of a great spiritual mission—than as simple truths of the cru-

sade. Even Godfrey’s coronation, the work’s great moment of humility, is
contested by “somme men that wyll not accompte him . emong the kyn-
ges of Iherusalem” (16.4v). Though the narrator initially disregards these
voices to insist Godfrey’s is a Christian gesture, his final analysis concedes
the di¤culty of ascertaining any figural meaning for it at all: “wherfore
thenne I saye not only that he was not kynge . but he was gretter than ony
kynge that holdeth ony Royamme syth that the holy londe of Iherusalem
was conquered.” Godfrey’s significance never comes together in an alle-
gorical structure in which the literal reflects a doctrinal figural truth. In-
stead, even at its most emphatic, the literal and the spiritual remain in
contradiction, in Godfrey’s paradoxical state of being “not kynge” and
“gretter than ony kynge.”
Godfrey’s paradox presents the exemplum of Godfrey of Bouillon as a
narrative in which secular brutality is evoked as evidence that spiritual
truth is beyond the body, demonstrating that the subject remains en-
meshed in material violence even when placed in a biblical topography.
The participants within the storyline may attempt, like the bishop of Puy,
to attribute spiritual depth to their experience, to sink into the meaning
latent in the biblical landscape, but they only act according to the require-
ments of material power. Interpretation in Godfrey of Boloyne stands, like
Godfrey upon the walls of Jerusalem, suspended between the physical de-
mands of being and the apparent, but still inaccessible, claims of spiritual
signification. To cover this inaccessibility, the work imagines the physical
body as the absolute limit of secular interpretation, and the ideological
limit of power. Subsequently, the most basic restraints on power are those
that act upon the body itself: violence, famine, drought, and pestilence.
Hunger is a persistent problem throughout the narrative, and just as it
is part of the exodus at Antioch, it also plays a major role in the jour-
ney across Hungary, the march from Nicaea, the holding of Antioch, the
pilgrimage across the desert, and the siege of Jerusalem itself. The pric-
ing of food is continually remarked upon as “resonable chepe,” “good
chepe,” “better chepe,” and even “grete chepe.” So interpretation in God-
frey discovers a symbolic nature to the text, but this symbolism is ac-
cessed through, and limited to, materialism itself.
Le Morte D’Arthur conceives of these limits in historical terms, and
it also insists that the physical body marks the limits of interpretation
but grants greater spiritual authority to secular subjects. We can see this
Kuskin Ch 5 11/15/07 9:33 AM Page 220
clearly in the juxtaposition between two versions of this text, Caxton’s

printed edition and the Winchester manuscript (now B.L. Add MS.
59678). Caxton’s version of the Roman War episode is so much tighter
than the Winchester’s that it is almost unanimously regarded as an aes-
thetic improvement. This assessment has led to a long-standing debate as
to whether Caxton or Malory revised the text.38 Eliminating many of the
stylistic traces of its source, the alliterative Morte Arthure, the printed ver-
sion of Le Morte D’Arthur emphasizes the crusadelike aspect of Arthur’s
journey to Rome, so that as Arthur achieves power as a Christian em-
peror he also establishes a new period of history, one in which secular and
ecclesiastical power are aligned in the figure of the monarch. This brings
the early section of the Le Morte D’Arthur in line with the series’ overall
interest in interpretation, crusade, and the history of the Nine Worthies,
providing a thematic continuity that suggests Caxton did, in fact, revise
the War with Lucius.39
In the Winchester manuscript the War with Lucius initiates a con-
test for secular authority between Christian kings. This is illustrated by
Lucius’s ambassadors’ visit to Arthur’s court, the specifics of his demand,
and the reactions of Arthur’s knights. Initially, Lucius’s ambassadors are
cowed by Arthur’s anger: “Sir seyde one of the senatoures so cryste me
helpe I was so a frede whan I loked In thy face that myne herte wolde
nat serue for to sey my message.”40 Swearing on Christ, the ambassador’s
reaction is as a Christian carrying out secular politics. In turn, Lucius’s
demand is based entirely in political precedent: the ambassadors tell
Arthur, “The gretis welle Lucius the Emperour of Roome and com-
maundis the vppon payne that woll falle to sende hym the trewage of this
Realme that thy fadir Vther Pendragon payde other ellys he woll be reve
the all thy Realmys that thou weldyst” (875). Lucius makes no claims to
spiritual authority, and later his complaint that “ony kynge crystynde”
should obey him fixes his demand as a secular action within a Christian
framework (877). In turn, Arthur’s councillors also note, rather less com-
fortably, that Lucius operates in political collusion with the pope; the lord
of West Wales recalls that while passing through Tuscany on a pilgrim-
age, his knights were captured and ransomed: “And than I complayned
me to the Potestate [ruler] the Pope hym self but I had no thynge ellys
but pleasunte wordys other reson at Roome myght I none haue and so
I yode my way sore rebuked” (876). In the Winchester manuscript the
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War with Lucius is just that: a war between Christian kings for politi-
cal authority.
The opening to Caxton’s book 5 frames the War with Lucius along
much di±erent lines. In Caxton, Lucius is “Dictatour or procutour of the
publyke wele of Rome” (h7v ) and has no clear relationship to the pope.
His ambassadors cite only secular law, the “statutes and decrees maade by
the noble and worthy Iulius Cezar conquerour of this Royame / and fyrst
Emperour of Rome,” and make no reference to Christ. The basis for Lu-
cius’s authority is not his right over “ony kynge crystynde,” but his rule
over “the vnyuersal world” inherited from the last of the pagan Worthies,
Caesar. The ambassadors threaten to brand Arthur a “rebelle” to Caesar’s
law but not to Christian history, and when Arthur calls a council there are
no complaints about the pope’s political a¤nities. Although in both texts
the Romans are aligned with non-Christian forces, the printed version
heightens this alignment by eliminating their relationship to Christianity
almost entirely. In the Winchester manuscript, Lucius is a Christian and
his demands appeal to lineage but not to history; in Caxton, his authority
comes from a history of pagan kings, a pre-Christian historical narra-
tive, and in this context, since Arthur is the first Christian Worthy, there
is no way of imagining history otherwise. This makes Arthur’s War with
Lucius more like a Christian crusade; more importantly, it changes the
war’s implications from a conflict over political authority to a defining
event in Christian history in which a monarch’s political acts are also acts
of Christian service.
Caxton’s Arthur is like his Godfrey in that he attempts to carry secu-
lar “enterpryses” toward a Christian end. Fittingly, the methods of expli-
cation in book 5 gravitate toward allegory. In both the Winchester
manuscript and Caxton’s printed edition, Arthur’s dream of the dragon
and the boar is explicated by a “wyse philosopher” as presaging his battle
with “some tyraunt” (i2v). In the short term this reading looks ahead to
Arthur’s battle with the Giant of Mont St. Michel who, like the boar in
Arthur’s dream, is explicitly referred to as a tyrant.41 In this context the
Giant’s crimes—his vanquishing “xv kynges and . . . [his] cote ful of pre-
cious stones enbrowdred with theyre berdes,” his gluttonous eating of
children, and that “fowle lust of lechery” (i3v), his murderous rape of the
Duchess of Brittany—are the tyrannical excesses of limitless power (i2v).
In Caxton the scene concludes with a melee between Arthur and the
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Giant, pared down to two blows, each castrating the other: the Giant
enacts his political threat by knocking the crown o± Arthur’s head—
castrating him metaphorically—and Arthur ends the Giant’s rapacious
sexual gluttony by castrating him physically. The dream thus finds its
signification in the contest for local authority, which in turn looks ahead
to the larger contest between Arthur and Lucius. In that the philoso-
pher’s reading sets up a relationship between Arthur’s dream and two
levels of secular events, it is reminiscent of Bohemond’s reading of
Latyns’s treachery; however, where Bohemond reads the subject in the
physical body, Caxton’s book 5 is no less physical but focuses on the body
of the monarch.
As in Godfrey, one reading of events suggests the possibility of a sec-
ond, spiritual interpretation. So both versions present this possibility by
referring to the battle between Arthur and the Giant as a pilgrimage to
“Saynt Mychels Mounte.” The Winchester manuscript develops this sec-
ond reading through Sir Bedivere’s caricature of St. Michael as the Giant:
“And there he seyde I haue mykyll wondir and Mychael be of suche a
makyng that euer god wolde su¤r hym to a byde in hevyn. And if seyn-
tis be suche that servys Ihesu I woll neuer seke for none be the fayth of
my body. The kynge than lough at Bedwers wordis and seyde this seynte
haue I sought nyghe vnto grete daungere.”42 Bedivere reads the Giant as
St. Michael specifically to reject a spiritual reading; like Godfrey his read-
ing raises the possibility of spiritual allegory only to dismiss it and return
to the body. This is in line with the Winchester manuscript as a whole in
that it acknowledges the presence of Christian authority, but carries out
its business entirely in secular politics. In Caxton’s text this second read-
ing is edited out. Where the Winchester manuscript continually includes
the Christian to the point of suggesting that Arthur’s Christianity makes
no di±erence, Caxton’s revisions reduce these internal tensions between
the literal and figural to contrast Lucius and Arthur and to move the
Worthies Series away from Godfrey.43
Though the Winchester manuscript recreates Godfrey’s tension in
reading styles, then, Malory in general presents the body as capable of
figuring spiritual meaning. This is most readily illustrated by Gawain’s
encounter with Priamus, an event that also introduces Malory’s most di-
rect discussion of the Nine Worthies. Similar in the printed and hand-
written versions, this episode begins firmly grounded in the secular and
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the material: lacking “vytaylle,” Arthur orders a party to go foraging (i7).

Wandering o± alone, Gawain encounters a Tuscan knight and they fight.
Gawain cuts open Sir Priamus’s side “that men myghte see bothe lyuer
and long” (i7v), and Priamus gives Gawain a mortal wound: “For who
someuer is hurte with this blade he shalle neuer be staunched of bledyng”
(i7v –i8). The two knights parley and Sir Priamus presents himself: “Syre
he sayd my name is Pryamus / and a grete prynce is my fader / and he
hath ben rebelle vnto Rome and ouer ryden many of theyr londes / My
fader is lyneally descended of Alysaunder and of hector by ryght lygne /
and duke Iosue and Machabeus were of oure lygnage” (i8). Descended
from four of the six non-Christian Worthies, Priamus’s father has spe-
cifically broken with Lucius, who inherited his own power from Caesar.
Describing a break in the Worthies’ history just before Arthur, Priamus’s
genealogy enacts a sort of historical précis without its final Christian
chapter. Possessing vials of holy water from Paradise capable of healing
their wounds, Priamus already has a material purchase on Christian his-
tory. Thus the test of martial arms, a secular a±air, gives way to the reve-
lation and forging of spiritual identity in Christian history.
From this point on the episode looks to codify Priamus’s relationship
to Christianity through conversion. The actual act of conversion is be-
yond Gawain, who brings Priamus to Arthur, reporting:
He hath matched me / but he is yolden vnto god and to me for to by-

come Crysten . had not he haue be we shold neuer haue retorned /
whefore I pray yow that he may be baptysed / for ther lyueth not a
nobler man ne better knyght of his handes / thenne the kyng lete
hym anon be crystned / and dyd doo calle hym his fyrste name Prya-
mus / and made hym a duke and knyghte of the table round. (k1v)
Descended from the Jewish and pagan Worthies, Priamus embodies two
of the Worthies’ historical categories. His conversion presents the shift
from pagan to Christian history as an entrance into knighthood.44
Through it, Arthur not only names Priamus, he names him knight and
Christian as well. Priamus’s conversion combines baptism with knight-
hood to reveal the problem with Lucius’s authority as not simply its secu-
larity but its inability to relate the secular to the spiritual. If Lucius’s
authority stems only from his secular inheritance from history, Arthur’s
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stems from his control over identity, his ability to codify the Christian re-
ligion into secular practices. In this, Arthur contains pagan history within
his authority as a monarch. Both Godfrey and Le Morte D’Arthur therefore
establish the Worthy as a Christian hero in the material conditions of the
body. Godfrey encountered this as a split between material being and
spiritual meaning epitomized in his entrance to Jerusalem. Arthur over-
comes this division in book 5, advancing Godfrey’s assertion of material
power as a means of consolidating community through an ideology that
figures spirituality through secular authority.
After Priamus’s conversion, Arthur proceeds to Rome and is crowned
emperor. Anointed “with creme as it bylongeth to so hyhe astate” (k2v),
his spiritual authority is evoked on his body; however, this is merely a
formal confirmation of what his sanctioning of Priamus’s baptism al-
ready demonstrated: that Arthur’s authority has an ecclesiastical fran-
chise. Where Godfrey remained “not kynge” and “gretter than ony
kynge,” Arthur’s anointment specifically salves over this rupture; he is a
king who commands ecclesiastical as well as secular authority. This unity
is expressed in his knights’ relationship to desire and their performance
of law. Immediately after Arthur’s coronation, his knights beg him to
allow them to return to their wives: “wherfore we byseche you to retorne
homeward / and gyue vs lycence to goo home to oure wyues / fro whome
we haue ben longe / and to reste vs / for your iourney is fynsshed with
honour & worship” ( k2v). Arthur reads this as their resistance to tempta-
tion, “thenne sayd the kyng / ye saye trouthe / and for to tempte god it
is no wysedome / And therfore make you redy and retorne we into En-
glond,” but it seems just as much an expression of an internal change re-
flecting the unity between secular and spiritual law, which Arthur makes
plain in a proclamation: “And after lycene gyuen he retorned and com-
maunded that noo man in payne of dethe shold not robbe ne take vy-
taylle / ne other thynge by the way but that he shold paye therfore” ( k2v).
Where Godfrey’s crusaders rarely restrain themselves in the lands they
traverse, Arthur’s law specifically sets a restraint on pillaging. In Godfrey
the physical body allowed an unbridling of moral law; for Arthur, it
grants an appropriation of ecclesiastical sanction to the monarch.
The themes of interpretation and conversion o±er a way into the
final work in Caxton’s Worthies Series, The Lyf of the Noble and Crysten
Prynce, Charles the Grete. Originally compiled by Jean Bagnyon of Lau-
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sanne, Charles the Grete, in Caxton’s version, is composed of three books.

The first and the last are drawn from the Mireur historial, a French ver-
sion of Vincent of Beauvais’ Speculum historiale; these bracket the second
book with a history of France beginning with Troy and ending with
Charles’s death. A prose version of the twelfth- or thirteenth-century
chanson de geste, Fierabras, this second book is itself composed of three
parts, each of which contains a conversion scene. Conversion brings the
literal and spiritual together in ways that evaded Godfrey, and in Charles
the Grete these conversions trace an exploration of the secular subject
across its plot, for like the two other texts Charles the Grete is also engaged
with reading the body; it is less interested, however, in using allegory
to describe the male and female secular subject than it is in romance. In
a sense, this exchange announces the work’s conclusion: in order to de-
scribe the individual subject in secular terms that account for doctrine as
well as politics, Charles the Grete argues that social relations must be imag-
ined through chivalric heroes rather than generated from an abstract al-
legorical engagement, however historicized. Ultimately, Charles the Grete
defines the individual through a hegemonic and univocal form of desire
rooted in the masculine gaze. “Homosociality appears here as a genera-
tive phenomenon, working through time as well as through the living to
make networks of power, knowledge, and pleasure,” write Louise Fra-
denburg and Carla Freccero, concluding, “Caxton’s work thus suggests
that the interweaving of past, present, and future is crucial to the memo-
rialization and reproduction of bonds between men.”45 If Charles the Grete
achieves greater closure regarding the individual subject’s relationship to
doctrinal and political authority than either Godfrey of Boloyne or Le Morte
D’Arthur, it does so by being more rigid, leaving less imaginary space
separate from an ideal of secular, masculine, and noble authority.
In part one of the Fierabras section, Fierabras, a Saracen prince,
arrives in France and challenges Charles’s peers to combat. While this
challenge would seem to a¤rm the boundaries between Christian self
and Saracen other, it instead reveals fissures within the French court.
Rather than pulling the peers together in the service of their king, for ex-
ample, the challenge initially inspires a violent division between Charles
and Roland, one in which Roland finally announces he would rather see
Charles “confused and dysmembred” than represent him in combat
(c1v ). Eventually Oliver takes up the challenge and, ill and wounded from
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previous battles, he is a hero reflecting this debilitated corporate body.

As the battle between Oliver and Fierabras commences, Charles rails
against the churches of France, promising to burn them to the ground
if Oliver loses, “for I swere by the soule of my fader / that yf he be now
slayn of thys paynym / that neuer in fraunce in ony chirche shal clerke ne
preest be reuseted ne enhabyted / but I shal do brenne monasteryes
chyrches / aulters & crucyfyxes” (d1v–d2), echoing the Saracen leader’s
later threats against his own gods. Fierabras’s challenge exposes how the
male body is defined—and divided—by age, strength, and institutional
power struggles.
If Fierabras’s challenge brings out the ruptures within Charles’s
court, the first conversion scene suggests that the prerogatives of this
court are limited to brute force. This scene is actually the source—
through the alliterative Morte Arthure—for Caxton’s version of Gawain’s
encounter with Priamus; here, however, it ends with much less closure.46
During the melee, Fierabras disarms Oliver and o±ers him his sister
Floripas’s hand in marriage if he will renounce Christianity. Oliver re-
sponds by taking Fierabras’s sword “named baptesme / whyche had the
blade moche large and shone meruayllously” ( D5v). “Baptesme” seems to
present an allegorical signifier capable of reasserting Christian spiritu-
ality over the foreign interloper, but like Charles’s court, Baptesme is lim-
ited to a physical dimension: though bearing an allegorical name, it has
no special purchase on figural depth and, threatened with such, Fierabras
undergoes only a physical change: “thenne whan Fyerabras sawe it / and
had herde hym so speke / anone began to chaunge colour” ( D5v). When
Oliver applies Baptesme, the blow causes a conversion entirely limited to
Fierabras’s body: “Thus was Fyerabras hurte in suche manere / that al-
moost hys bowellys yssued oute of his bely” ( D6v). As in Godfrey, allegor-
ical signification only produces a lack of spiritual resonance; here,
however, Baptesme inspires in Fierabras such an awareness of this lack
that he now demands spiritual conversion where he previously refused it:
“For I shal byleue in the crysten fayth / & shal yelde the relyques for why-
che ye be assemblyd and haue taken soo moche payne / And I swere to the
that yf by thy defaute I dye sarasyn / I make the culpable of my damp-
nacyon” ( D6v). Godfrey’s violence could not access spiritual depth, and so
figured the symbolic realm as entirely material. In turn, Fierabras charges
Oliver to address this problem directly. Though the French court is not
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entirely neglectful of their faith—both Charles and Oliver make long

prayers, Oliver repeatedly entreats Fierabras to convert before the battle,
and an angel even reassures Charles of Oliver’s victory—it seems to have
no way of discussing authority beyond physical strength. The end result
is a confusion of identity that hits upon the common humanity between
Muslim and Christian that the characters in Godfrey refused to acknowl-
edge. Indeed, in many ways Fierabras has a more extensive relationship
to Christianity than the French peers: not only does he possess Baptesme,
he also has “two flagons” of the holy “bawme . . . whyche your god was
enbawmed wyth whan he was taken doun fro the crosse” (C6v), and,
though arrogant, he is far less so than Roland, and graciously shares these
waters with Oliver. This similarity between Christian and Muslim is fur-
thered by a sudden plot twist in which Oliver dons Fierabras’s armor and,
with a handful of French peers, is captured by thousands of invading
Saracen troops. Thus the very problem that suspends Fierabras’s conver-
sion blurs Oliver’s appearance and thrusts him into the Saracen world.
One mortally wounded, the other ambiguously attired, neither able to ap-
proach the spiritual aspect of baptism, Fierabras and Oliver are caught in
a disjointed secular realm defined by its physicality. Fierabras is a story
of the limits of the corporal, limits at which heroes stand for fractioned
political systems, swords personify religious practices without a spiri-
tual dimension, and secular Christian is indistinguishable from Saracen.
Part 1 of Charles the Grete cannot achieve its own resolution because it
is, as Roland wished Charles, “confused and dysmembred” by its physical
trappings.
Part 2 opens with Fierabras’s baptism by the archbishop of Turpin
and Naimes. Resolving a loose end from part 1, this conversion sets the
remainder of the work the task of providing a similar closure for the sec-
ular subject in general, a closure that is explored through two similar de-
scriptions of the only female character in Charles the Grete, Floripas. After
she rescues the peers from her father’s dungeon, Floripas is described in
minute detail:
This dougter was yonge & not maryed was wel comprysed of
body / resonable of lengthe whyt & rody as rose in maye / hyr heyre
was shynyng as the fyne golde/ & hir vysage termyned in lytel of
lengthe / and hyr chere lawhyng / hyr eyen clere as fawcon mued / &
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sparklyng lyke ij sterres / the vysage had she deuysed moche egally /
her nose strayt whiche was wel seemly / the ij browes whiche were
aboue the eyen appyeryng made shadowe / hyr chekys rounde whyt
as the flour delys a lytel tyssued with reed / & Vnder the nose was her
mouth roundette enhaunced in competent space fro the chynne al
wel proporcyoned to the remenaunte of the hede / with litel sholdres
strayte & egalle / & tofore aboue the gyrdle hir pappes were reysed
after the facyon of ij apples rounde and euen as the coppe of a litel
montayn. (e3r–v)
The passage exaggerates part 1’s emphasis on the physical by portraying

Floripas entirely through objects.47 That it uses these objects to suggest
desire pushes the French court’s problematic reliance on physical defini-
tion to its sinful implications of sexual promiscuity. The result is that
in Floripas the desire for food and sexual desire are interchangeable: “her
pappes were reysed after the facyon of ij apples” is a description that
not only focuses the reader’s attention on her body as sexualized, but also
describes her as a living embodiment of desire for food. This relationship
can only be so because both are carnal and material. Further, Floripas not
only embodies this desire, but her representation of it is satisfying it-
self: “florypes was so fayre wyth hyr abyllements / that yf a persone had
fasted iij or iiij dayes with out etyng / & he myght see hyr he shold be re-
plenysshed & fylled” (e3v); the first thing she does for the knights after
freeing them is feed them and, having fed them, suggests, “Loo here [are]
vj maydens of grete noblesse / Eche of you take one for hys owne / for the
better to passe wyth the tyme” (e5v). In Godfrey food is di¤cult to come
by: it must either be paid for or taken by force, and its scarcity is occasion
for Bohemond’s most profane secular reading. In Charles, Floripas’s rela-
tionship to the physical is continually enabling, which the plot goes out
of its way to demonstrate: driven by her love for Guy of Burgundy
she frees the peers from prison by clubbing a porter to death, and masks
their escape by heaving her own governess out a window. Later, in part 3,
Floripas and the peers are besieged in the tower by Balan; during the
height of their starvation she suggests, “I can not say at thys tyme none
other thynge / but that we lede the moost Ioyous lyf that we may, as
longe as we shal mowe edure. Ye haue here fayre maydens, eche of you
take one at hys playsyr” (g7v). Where the French court is embroiled in in-
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ternal factionalism that the material manifestations of authority cannot

resolve, Floripas presents an escape from these problems through the
physical. Embodying and satisfying desire, she describes the secular sub-
ject as organized by the carnal; taken with Caxton’s use of the French
prologue, her characterization suggests that the secular individual need
not be subject to any authority beyond the body, that such a person can be
“better content” in a world without doctrine at all.
Soon after the initial description of Floripas, Bagnyon enters the
work and tries to interpret her behavior in a way that will maintain some
semblance of doctrinal authority. First, he appeals to gender: “alle this
toucheth wel the desyre & wylle of wymmen for to knowe newe thynges
and tydynges” (e5v). Mystifying Floripas’s willingness to facilitate and
satisfy as an expression of the “wylle of wymmen,” of feminine curiosity,
this explanation brings him little closer to doctrinal meaning. He then
turns to the larger requirements of his narrative, its truth value as “the
werke of a man wel approued” (e6), and its claims to spirituality: “and
wyth good ryght he that fyghteth for the fayth / and it happe that he
be deteyned / the mercy of god is nyghe for to delyuer hym” (e6). Yet
Christianity is part of the problem in this work, one the Fierabras story
has failed to incorporate adequately since its opening, and the narrative’s
fantasy of indulgence can hardly be seen as a demonstration of faith. Fi-
nally, Bagnyon attempts to contain Floripas’s desire as a performance
of law: “The cause wherfore they were delyuerd fro pryson was come
fro ferre/ that was of rome for guy of bourgoyne [who is now among
the French peers] whome she had in loue / and was contente for to be
baptysed and byleue in god for to haue the sayd guy in maryage to hyr
husbond” (e6). But Floripas continually o±ers satisfaction prior to institu-
tional sanction; her promise is to fulfill desire without the consequences
of doctrinal law, and so Bagnyon throws up his hands: “wherfore it may
not wel be comprysed how loue in thys damoysel was fyxed and com-
prysed of longe a±ectyon” (e6).
Though Bagnyon presents Floripas’s “longe a±ectyon” as a sort
of frustrating crux, he finds this frustration worth repeating in the third
part of Caxton’s text. In chapter 9, he lingers over the inexplicable na-
ture of female desire: “¶But it is grete scyence for to eschewe the wylle
of a woman / whan by e±ecte she putteth hyr entente to a thynge that
her hert dyrectly draweth / and taketh no regarde to the ende of her
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entente / but onely that she may achyeue hyr enterpryse and determy-
nacyon” (f4r–v). In this second reading Bagnyon returns to his first
and most mystified explanation—gender—because it locates discursive
complexity—this “grete scyence”—in the bedrock of materiality, answer-
ing the complex implications of subjective depth in the most superficial
way. Thus Bagnyon simultaneously denies Floripas conscious intention-
ality (“her hert dyrectly draweth, and taketh no regarde to the ende of her
entente”), yet insists she has a sort of physical agency that allows her
to accomplish her “enterpryse and determynacyon.” If this reading of
Floripas merely repeats the emphasis on her physicality, it also argues
that a woman can be read completely through her body without a more
complex theoretical apparatus, and that this too demonstrates a form of
subjection to a greater authority, the authority of male desire.
Presented at the end of part 3, the second description of Floripas’s
body elaborates this process of reading through her conversion to Chris-
tianity. By this point, Charles has finally arrived in Spain, rescued his
peers, and o±ered to let Balan, the Saracen ruler and the father of Flo-
ripas and Fierabras, live if he agrees to convert. Balan responds by spit-
ting in the baptismal font and attempting to drown the archbishop,
who is only narrowly saved by one of the peers. The scene thus replays
Fierabras’s second conversion to emphasize the nobility’s role as enabling
a representative of the Church in the completion of an ecclesiastical prac-
tice. Balan refuses conversion and, after being condemned to death by
Floripas, is killed. With this, the narrative attention shifts from Balan
to Floripas, who agrees to be converted in order to marry Guy of Bur-
gundy. It is here that the work repeats her description, beginning, “she
beyng there al naked shewed hyr beaute whyche was ryght whyte and wel
formed so playsaunt and amerouse for the formosyte of hyr persone that
euery man merueylled” (k3v). Gazing at Floripas’s nakedness, the French
nobility engage in a reading of her body. On one level, they marvel be-
cause the baptism represents Floripas’s turn away from her own family
and faith as a turn toward Christianity. On this level Floripas’s baptism
marks the division between Christian and Saracen in ways the brute force
represented by Baptesme could not; this contrast is highlighted by the fact
that although Baptesme “shone meruayllously” when Oliver first wielded
it, it still failed to complete the process of conversion. On a second level,
they marvel because Floripas’s submergence in the baptismal waters not
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only enacts her subjection to them, it also immerses them in their own de-
sire. The description ends, “And so wel was she made and so amerouse /
that she smote the hertes of many / and enflammed theyr entencyon wyth
concupyscence / and specyally of charles the Emperour / how wel that he
was auncyen & olde” ( k4). As in Bagnyon’s own interpretation, desire ap-
pears to emanate from a mystified female source and moves outward,
overcoming the heart and enflaming male intention. The result is that the
peers lose control of their own bodies. Yet this loss of control is less an
abandonment of power than a demonstration of it, a demonstration that
presents the male subject’s desire as an external force—indeed a force
within Floripas. If the subjection to concupiscence is the work’s continual
theme, the peers read it here as evidence that all individuals are subjected
to forces outside their own control, thus delineating the limits of the
secular subject in the demonstration of masculine power and authority.
Reading Floripas figures sexuality as a symbolic layer of the material
world that emerges through a Christian event, the conversion.
Ultimately, Floripas’s baptism is marvelous because it constructs her
turn toward Christianity as a simultaneous turn toward an erotic read-
ing of the material world. This addresses the problems of part 1 in se-
quence: it resolves Fierabras’s initial threat by placing the other, both the
Saracen and the female, within the male gaze; it specifically relaxes the
tension between age and youth by testifying to Charles’s virility beyond
his “auncyen & olde” age; it incorporates ecclesiastical practice into secu-
lar organization by setting it as a staging area for erotic desire; finally, it
casts this overwhelmingly carnal moment as a precursor to marriage, ex-
hibiting it but also containing it. Thus the work’s interests in political fac-
tionalism, in cultural and religious di±erence, in gender, telescope toward
an ideology that equates a specific form of male desire with the natural
disposition of the material world. It describes the individual as the subject
of desire, and as carnal as this may seem, it is also a point of doctrine: in
Romans, the work so important to Caxton’s prologue to Charles the Grete,
Paul discusses the body as a site of contest between literal allegiances to
sin and spiritual allegiances to God: “For I delight in the law of God in
my inmost self, but I see in my members another law at war with the law
of my mind, making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my mem-
bers” (7:22–23). Law makes sin recognizable but in doing so also brings
death: “I was once alive apart from the law, but when the commandment
Kuskin Ch 5 11/15/07 9:33 AM Page 232
came, sin revived and I died, and the very commandment that prom-
ised life proved to be death to me” (7:9–10). Limiting and killing, law ac-
knowledges desire in a supplementary relationship that restructures
definitions between life and death based on physicality. Including the de-
scription of Floripas as a main feature, Caxton’s newfangled text encour-
ages his readers to marvel at the evidence of masculine desire and power.
Thus Charles brings the Worthies Series to a close by resolving the prob-
lems of Godfrey—the obsession with food that stands in for a larger spiri-
tual hunger—through the noble and heterosexual male, in ways that are
much more insistent on the place of the secular subject than Le Morte
D’Arthur’s somewhat ambivalent newfangledness.
Caxton pioneered and carried out a powerful critical program for
linking printed material with a social imaginary. He was not alone in this
work. Indeed, the logic of his critical program, its reliance on partici-
pation and appropriation, would suggest that once in place it could oper-
ate as a structure for other printers as well. And so it did: John Lettou
issued a number of indulgences for a crusade in the 1480s, all commis-
sioned by John Kendale.48 These were followed in 1482 by The Siege of
Rhodes, a fifteenth-century work by Guillaume Caoursin and translated
by the poet laureate John Kay which was, by best estimates, printed by
Lettou during his partnership with William de Machlinia. This edition is
fronted by Kay’s original prologue, which stakes Kay’s authority as poet
laureate and calls for a renewed crusade. In this last point, Kay’s preface
echoes Caxton’s prologue to Godfrey: “whiche thyng ys token to all crys-
ten prynces here after to recouer the partyes crysten” (unsigned 1v). In a
further similarity to Godfrey, The Siege of Rhodes is a historical siege narra-
tive. It too emphasizes the provisioning of besieged cities, the entrench-
ment of guns, the gathering of victuals, and the duplicitousness of trai-
tors. And in the city’s towers and castles named after saints, it too creates
a topography laden with biblical reference. And it is also a “merueyllous
history,” for though much of Kay’s energies are spent detailing Muslim
siege engines and Christian countermeasures, he finds the siege’s reso-
lution in the miraculous:
And anon after the turkes saw properly in the myddest of the clene
and bryght eyer / a crosse all of shynyng gold : & also sawe a bryght
vyrgyne : whiche had in her hande agaynes the oste of the turkes a
Kuskin Ch 5 11/15/07 9:33 AM Page 233
spere and a shylde :and in that syght also apired a man clothed in
pouer and vyle araye : which was accompanyed wyth grete nombre of
fayr and welbesene men in armes : as yf they wold haue comen downe
to the helpe of Rhodes . (unsigned, 21v–22)
Significantly, Kay moves directly from the description of the visionary to

its explication. The passages continues,
By the crosse of golde we may justely understande oure saueour

Ihesu cryste . And by the vyrgyne we may understande / oure lady
the blessed marie . And by the man pouerly clothed we may vnder-
sande the holy seynte Iohn baptyste Patron and auowre of the order
of Rhodes (unsigned, 22)
Here everything is carefully parsed for the reader: the cross represents
Christ; the virgin, Mary; and the man, John the Baptist. The emphasis on
the imaginary in Caxton’s prologue to Charles the Grete, the tentativeness
about deciding upon history in Le Morte D’Arthur, the allegorical in God-
frey of Boloyne, and the visionary in the Siege of Rhodes are all methods
of appealing to a level of explanation beyond the literal in order to un-
derwrite secular “enterprises.” Yet as much as the preface to The Siege
of Rhodes is so clearly a political statement, it is also involved in the broad
assertion of vernacular literary authority, which it makes though Kay’s
presentation of himself. It opens, “[ T]o the moste excellente / moste
redoubted and moste crysten kyng:Kyng Edward the fourth John kay
hys humble poete lawreate / and moste lowly seruant:knelyng vnto the
ground sayth salute” (unsigned, 1). Further, Kay’s preface makes the same
linkage between reading and pleasure as Charles the Grete: “wherfor what
so euer frute or pleasur your peple shal in thys my studies finde they shal
yelde glorye to god” (unsigned, 1v). Vernacular literacy here operates as
a complex expression: it is capable of bringing joy and of recognizing
spiritual power. The preface thus joins these two lines of authority—the
political and the literary—together within Kay’s identity as a poet lau-
reate. Though Lettou and de Machlinia’s printing operations, as well as
Kay’s output, are largely considered minor in comparison with Caxton’s
work, The Siege of Rhodes is important in its own right, for Kay’s address
is directly to the king. Taken with the remaining evidence pointing to
Kuskin Ch 5 11/15/07 9:33 AM Page 234
Caxton’s role as the king’s printer and to Lettou and de Machlinia’s vari-
ous jobs for the royal house, Kay’s Siege of Rhodes moves the development
of a vernacular political apparatus associated with print up to the end of
the Yorkist period, clearly complicating any clean-cut sense of a break
with the Tudor ascension.
One challenge that faced Caxton in installing print was to make plain
the symbolic meaning within the secular text. His overall critical program
responds to this challenge by paralleling texts that call for overt political
action with romances that demonstrate the urgency of such action in
their plots. The plots of these texts themselves demonstrate modes of
secular interpretation that reach toward symbolic meaning. This process
by definition impinges on the nature of interpretative authority; in e±ect
it asks who has possession over textual interpretation. And so the Wor-
thies texts enact a process of secular reading in which kings and emper-
ors, warlords and poet laureates prove themselves canny readers of the
material world. Speaking to a social body unified by their complicit in-
volvement in English polity, these texts address them as readers, and tell
them that their complicity creates a dangerous type of political instability
that is nevertheless natural and unavoidable. Thus the texts connect the
material and immaterial and, by implication, argue for a symbolic system
that they never make overt.
Caxton inherited much from Burgundian, French, and English

literary culture. This statement of fact, however, neglects his careful dis-
cursive presentation of his works. For Caxton’s Worthies Series, as well
as John Lettou and William de Machlinia’s print operations, demon-
strates that various genres of print production could be productively in-
tertwined within a particularly English sense of identity. Thus the series
thematically ties the lucrative market for indulgence printing to the more
ambitious undertaking of printing prose romances. This marriage of lit-
erature and politics is a particular form of propaganda that organizes sec-
ular enterprises by appealing to the imagination. The Worthies Series
presents this imaginary logic as tied up in self-reflection; thus Caxton’s
prologues and the very plots of his series continually revisit the process of
reading and interpreting. Premised on his audience’s participation in the
construction of authority—their seemingly spontaneous demand for an-
other Worthy text—Caxton’s production of literature is not merely me-
Kuskin Ch 5 11/15/07 9:33 AM Page 235
chanical and technological; it is carefully strategized to define his readers

as an audience. In this, Caxton’s critical program constructs a unified lit-
erary culture so appropriate to the social conditions of the late fifteenth
century as to appear inseparable from those conditions, while simultane-
ously being productive in itself, developing a symbolic space in which to
define individuals as participating in a larger imaginary community as
secular subjects. This observation questions two powerfully entrenched
clichés about the development of the English state: that the Tudor dy-
nasty alone instigated an understanding of print propaganda, and that
late fifteenth-century literary culture was entirely decentralized.
Kuskin Ch 6 11/15/07 9:35 AM Page 236
Chapter Six
Vernacular Humanism
Fifteenth-Century Self-Fashioning
and the State-Crowned Laureates
The late development of English humanism is taken to be a

marker of cultural insularity. Caxton produces two texts that superfici-
ally illustrate this view, the 1480 Methamorphose and 1490 Eneydos (STC
24796). Rather than presenting a philological return to the classical past,
Caxton prints existing redactions, the Ovide Moralisé and the Livre des
Eneydes, and in contrast to printers such as Conrad Sweynheym and Ar-
nold Pannartz, Johannes Mentelin, Nicolas Jenson, and Aldus Manutius,
who recovered classical works, developed roman type, and used unique
book sizes to evoke physically the intellectual nature of humanism,
Caxton presents his texts according to his established standard aesthetic.
And so Caxton appears irredeemably medieval, of a piece with a culture
that, as J. B. Trapp has recently written, “was still sunk in the darkness of
scholasticism.”1 Yet Caxton is profoundly interested in humanist scholar-
ship, and if his texts recall his style overall, they also actively place Virgil
and Ovid in the context of the English poetry of Chaucer, Lydgate,
and Skelton. I term this link between the classical past and the English
present vernacular humanism and argue that it is no less paradoxical than
the rest of Caxton’s literary culture: sixteenth-century English humanism
would look for moral direction in an educational program based in clas-
sical Latin; in contrast, fifteenth-century vernacular humanism con-
tains a deep ambivalence about the solace inherent in such good forms. If
236
Kuskin Ch 6 11/15/07 9:35 AM Page 237
fifteenth-century humanism appears less assured than the sixteenth-

century derivation, this is not because it is unselfconsciously sunk in dark-
ness so much as it is because of the haze of self-knowing that charac-
terizes the literary culture overall.2 Caxton and his peers seek to make the
classical vulgar, to articulate methods of appropriating the authority of
the past toward a public and political application in the present, a laureate
system.
One example of vernacular humanism in England before the Tudor
period is readily available in the English statesman John Russell.3 A doc-
tor of civil law from New College, Russell was promoted through a se-
ries of positions to bishop of Lincoln and chancellor of Oxford Univer-
sity. Able to withstand the changes in rule across this decade, he became
a significant adviser to Henry VII.4 Russell’s interest in humanist books
throughout his career is well documented: in 1467 he acted, with Caxton,
as a diplomat in the Burgundian negotiations discussed in chapter 2, and
during this trip he bought a Sammelband of Fust and Schoe±er’s 1466 edi-
tions of Cicero’s De officiis and Paradoxa, one of the first known English
acquisitions of printed books. During this trip he also purchased a manu-
script copy of Cicero’s Epistolae ad familiars, London Lambeth Palace Li-
brary, MS 765,5 and he owned at least ten manuscripts and nine printed
volumes overall, including copies of Mentelin’s edition of Virgil and
Johannes Herbort’s five-volume edition of Baldus’s commentaries. Fur-
ther, he seems to have been particularly aware of print: his 1470 speech
on Charles the Bold’s entrance to the Order of the Garter was one of the
first texts Caxton printed in England, the Propositio (STC 21458), and as
Richard III’s chancellor he was apparently involved in appending the
famous proviso concerning the book trade to the 1484 act against the Ital-
ians, an act presented in the first-ever printed statute in England, pro-
duced by William de Machlinia.6
Russell’s writing suggests he read his books and applied their knowl-
edge to his current situation. Specifically, after Edward IV ’s death, Rus-
sell became protector of Edward V and as such was to open the new king’s
first Parliament with a coronation address.7 Apparently not foreseeing
the events of the very near future, Russell finished a speech for an event
that never came. Preserved in two manuscripts, Cotton Vitellius E.x. and
Cotton Cleopatra E.III, Russell’s drafts demonstrate his reading: Martin
Lowry points out a 1478 edition of Plutarch’s Lives printed by Jenson
v e r n a c u l a r h u m a n i s m 237
Kuskin Ch 6 11/15/07 9:35 AM Page 238
that contains Russell’s notes for the address,8 and Russell also cites “the
booke of Boccase De casibus,” which he owned in Oxford, New College
MS 263.9 Overall, the speech is learned and bookish, one of occasion and
allusion, a hybrid of biblical, contemporary, and classical references
which shows Russell applying literary authority to English polity. Thus,
his interest in books is neither sudden nor superficial; rather it is part of
a larger literary culture of international manuscript and printed book
buying and reading.10
This literary culture was deeply engaged with political self-fashion-
ing, and we can see this too in Russell’s coronation address. The center-
piece of Russell’s first speech, borrowed from his volume of Plutarch, is
the likening of the English Parliament to the Roman Senate. On June 26,
however, Richard occupied the King’s Bench at Westminster, and thus
Russell’s original speech lost its motivating occasion. During this time
Richard’s party engaged in a powerful propaganda campaign, fielding
speeches by Buckingham at the Guildhall, by Ralph Sha ( brother of the
mayor of London, Edmund Sha) at St. Paul’s Cross, and by others
throughout the city which insisted that Edward IV’s marriage to Eliza-
beth Woodville was invalid due to a precontract with Eleanor Buttler,
that Edward V was a bastard, that Elizabeth was a concubine and a sorcer-
ess, and that, since Clarence’s death, only Richard could rightly claim the
throne.11 Richard’s first Parliament was convened on January 23, 1484,
and Russell, still chancellor, was again responsible for an opening address.
And so he revised. Contained only in MS Cotton Vitellius E.x., the re-
visions are disordered, constituting two or three drafts of a speech in two
hands.12 Punctuated by lacunae and halting, the new version sets out to
talk about the body politic, but weaves into this theme the consequences
of the fall, which “we see by experience that the usualle brusere of bodyes
[com]ythe by falling, and that the person ys yn most danger to falle,
which ys blynd, or walkethe yn derkenesse” ( lii). Thus Russell adopts the
new party line, accusing Edward IV of leading England into darkness.
As chancellor Russell oversaw the charges against Edward entered
into public record as the Act for the Settlement of the Crown.13 Recorded
in the parliamentary rolls, this act itemizes Edward’s sins, concluding,
“the ordre of all poletique Rule was perverted” in an e±ort “into re-
movyng the occasion of doubtes and ambiguitees, and to all other laufull
efect that shal mowe therof ensue.”14 Where the act blatantly asserts Ed-
ward’s perversion and openly seeks to eliminate ambiguity, Russell’s draft
Kuskin Ch 6 11/15/07 9:35 AM Page 239
enters into “the depe serche of mannys conscience” to ask “what ys thys
light?” This, in turn, leads him through questions of blindness and lack of
sight into a somewhat obscure discussion of the spherical nature of the
human eye (“the fyguracion of the ie ys sperik and rownde”). The right
and left eyes, according to Russell, illustrate the relationship between un-
derstanding and a±ection, symmetry and monstrosity, light and darkness,
but this distinction only leads him straight into a discussion of the rheto-
ric of hypocrisy:
It were no longe a digression, and yet peraventure hyt were to the

purpose, to shew by alle the fetes of them that hath most guydynge
of thys grete body of Englonde, howe their ie, be hyt the ie of
undirstondynge or elles of a±eccion, ys wykked and double. Lat yt
su¤ce, besyd the causes that be yn honed, where of at thys tyme noo
man ys ygnoraunte, that undir the colour of administracion of jus-
tice, by favour of syche o±ycers as make the panell, ofte tymes there
ys more vengeable wronge committed thorowe fals informacion sene
accepted theyn y± the swerde were drawen. Thus ie may wele be
called a double ie, pursuing openly yn apparence for justice, and
undir that convertly of purpensed entent doynge that us most un-
justice. ( lv–vi)
Applied to the charge that Edward perverted the realm, the passage is
straightforward enough in that it argues the former king guided the great
body of England falsely, by a±ection and not by understanding. Yet where
the act of Parliament dispels “doubts and ambiguities,” Russell’s argu-
ment is that regardless of which eye guides (“be hit the ye of understand-
ing or else of a±ection”), guidance is susceptible to “false information.”
And so he defines the double eye as a marker of sight and blindness, of
hypocrisy, and plunges his audience into this predicament.
Russell’s is a quality of self-reflection endemic to fifteenth-century
letters. His strength, indeed his moral clarity, is, ironically, to recognize
how human complicity leads to ambiguity but at the same time to use his
international reading to suggest a way out of blindness. Here he draws, as
he tells us, from the Gospel of Luke:
But nowe a remedie. This remedie agaynste derkenesse ys no thinge

ellys but a provision of lyghte, be hyt that abody wollde passe surely
Kuskin Ch 6 11/15/07 9:35 AM Page 240
yn hys journey, or ellys bye goode and diligent serche attende to

fynde that that he hathe loste. We who have somwhat touched the
derke way that menne have walked yn; late us see whethyr we have
ony thyng loste that wolde be soughte and fownde agayne. ( lxii)
Russell imagines an England that has fallen into blindness and empha-
sizes a mutual complicity in this error: “at this time no man is ignorant,”
he announced in the earlier passage, and here it is “we” who have erred.
In Russell’s drafts, then, darkness is not the stereotyped notion of me-
dieval ignorance characteristic of some sort of “dark ages.” Rather, it is
the darkness of self-knowledge. In a moment of rhetorical clarity amidst
courtly eloquence—“but nowe a remedie”— Russell proposes a passage
through this “derke way,” but this is only to probe further into the prob-
lem (“diligent serche attende to fynde that that he hathe loste”). Thus, I
read Russell’s question “what ys thys lyghte?” as in inquiry into human
hypocrisy, a public moral reflection projected onto a view of history that
would reach for the Roman past as a model for the English present and
rationalize moral perception with the physical perception of light. Yet—
“Hypocrite lecteur—mon semblable,—mon frére!”—the passage partici-
pates in exactly the rhetorical manipulations that it decries. For if Russell
styles himself a naïf, a man honestly grappling with the traumatic events
of a monarchy in flux, he is no less a career bureaucrat—and a survivor at
that—and so his urgency cannot be read as transparent; rather it pulls us
back to Caxton’s pamphlet edition of the Curial published the same year
to realize the same double bind of recognition and complicity in a more
political setting. We may not like Russell’s prose and—finding in it an odd
mixture of pedantic density and righteous furor—we may ultimately
choose to pass it by, but if we label it easily moralized and insular, un-
calculated and unlearned, we have failed to read it at all.
The terms of Russell’s speech—its concern with darkness and light,
the interest in the eye as both clear and clouded, the presence of double-
ness in English culture—appear throughout Caxton’s Eneydos, and in this
chapter I argue that Caxton’s text presents such sensibilities in print to
apply literary authority outward to the contemporary political scene. I
read this process in two parts. First, I read the Eneydos as charting a his-
tory of writing through the character of Dido. “Dido presents a model of
working that reverses classical models of fame and tradition,” writes Jen-
nifer Summit, and it is in this sense that Dido reverses the humanist em-
Kuskin Ch 6 11/15/07 9:35 AM Page 241
phasis on writing as an ideal, to make it tangible, of a piece with Caxton’s

sense of the text as monumental, a material form capable of transcending
history.15 Caxton’s apparently unprinted Ovyde his booke of Methamorphose
presents a similar view of the pagan woman as a text to be edited, and by
reading the two texts against one another we are better able to see the
ambivalence contained in literary authority, as well as the cogency of
Caxton’s view. The second part of the chapter turns to Caxton’s prologue
to the Eneydos. Exploring the Troy myth, vernacular translation, and tex-
tual production, this prologue is in many ways a return to the themes of
his Recuyell. Printed at the end of his career, it makes this return in terms
that highlight the increasing English interest in a culture of scholarly ex-
pertise. Here Caxton parallels his translation of the text to John Skelton’s
search for a new poetic style through a reference to the young poet laure-
ate’s elegy on the Earl of Northumberland, killed during an uprising in
York. By referencing Skelton’s elegy Caxton places the Eneydos in the
context of Henry’s increasingly systematic deployment of literary au-
thority as a method of asserting monarchical power, the laureate system.
Rather than sunk in ignorant darkness, he recognizes his cultural situ-
ation as historical and social; against the threat of ignorance—a threat he
finds not in some sort of totality known as the “medieval” but, like Rus-
sell, in cultural crisis—he places scholarly authority and class structure.
Caxton’s Eneydos is therefore both retrospective, pulling together a num-
ber of his longtime interests—the history of the book, the relationship
between gender and literary production, and the crafting of persona—
and forward looking. Combining the two fundamental aspects of human-
ism—its scholarly claim to the past and its assertion of literary authority
in the political present—his work with the press, his promotion of classi-
cal authors, his familiarity with Continental scholars, his discussion of the
social value of reading, as well as the output of early English printers dur-
ing the 1470s, 1480s, and 1490s, demonstrates English vernacular human-
ism: a vibrant, international laureate system centered in the court and
moving outward to define English culture.
Dido Overdetermined
The traditional assessment of Caxton’s classical texts parallels that of

his romances. So, following N. F. Blake, Diane Bornstein, and Gordon
Kuskin Ch 6 11/15/07 9:35 AM Page 242
Kipling, modern scholars have attributed Caxton’s interest in Virgil to his

general importation of Burgundian culture. Viewed in this light, Caxton’s
Eneydos is entirely derivative, the static reproduction of a medieval liter-
ary tradition that is already being overtaken by new Continental trends.
That Caxton’s tenure in the Low Countries influenced his understand-
ing of classical themes is unquestionable: the Recuyell of the Histories of
Troye (STC 15375) and Jason (STC 15383) are among his earliest texts, and
he found them in Burgundy, printed them in French and English, and
used his prologues to link them to the Burgundian court; Caxton’s one-
time partner in Bruges, Colard Mansion, translated, printed, and was
apparently bankrupted by his 1484 edition of the Ovide Moralisé. By
the time Caxton turns to the Ovide Moralisé in 1480, however, he is no
longer referencing the Burgundian court, and that his source is to be
found in Burgundian libraries is not a fact he highlights. Indeed, the En-
glish print market of the late 1470s and 1480s is quite interested in hu-
manist printed books. For example, in 1478 Caxton printed the humanist
Stephano Surigonus’s epitaph to Chaucer at the end of the Consolation of
Philosophy (STC 3199), and he subsequently printed a number of Latin
texts prepared by Italian humanists living in England: Laurentius Traver-
sanus’s 1479 Nova rhetorica (STC 24188.5; reissued in an abridged version
as the 1480 Epitome, STC 24190.3); Petrus Carmelianus’s 1484 edition
of Pope Sixtus IV’s letters, the Sex epistolae (STC 22588); Antonius
Mancinellus’s 1487 revised version of the grammar, Donatus melior (STC
7013); and Johannes de Gigliis’s 1480, 1481, and 1489 indulgences (STC
14077c.112–15).16 The general wholesale attribution of fifteenth-century
English literary interests to Burgundy and France has the e±ect of fore-
stalling modernity, necessitating a claim to historical rupture to explain its
appearance in the sixteenth century. Reread in the context of an English
vernacular humanism, Caxton’s reproduction of the Eneydos takes on a
more powerful role in the construction of literary culture.
In fact, Caxton was not the only printer involved in the print market
for classical authors and humanist scholarship. In 1483 Theodoric Rood
and Thomas Hunte in Oxford printed Vulgaria quedam abs Terencio in An-
glica[m] linguam traducta (STC 23904 ), an interlinear translation of Ter-
ence for the English reader. With this text they seem to have hit upon a
solid product: de Machlinia printed a copy of the Vulgaria in 1483 (STC
23905) and reprinted it in 1485 (STC 23906); Gerard Leeu of Antwerp
Kuskin Ch 6 11/15/07 9:35 AM Page 243
printed an edition for importation to England in 1486 (STC 23907). The

Vulgaria is neither a unique text nor an anomalous project for Rood and
Hunte, and just as we saw de Machlinia building a specialty in law texts,
they committed to classical titles: in 1479 they produced an edition of
Aristotle’s Ethics (STC 752) and in 1485 an edition of Phalaris’s Epistolae
( Du± 348). Indeed, Rood and Hunte capitalized on the Vulgaria, for the
signatures in their edition suggest it was intended to be bound with their
edition of Magdalen schoolmaster John Anwykyll’s Compendium totius
grammaticae (STC 696). Like the Vulgaria, Anwykyll’s Compendium was
also picked up by Continental printers: by Richard Pa±roed in Deventer
in 1489 ( Du± 30), and Heinrich Quentell in Cologne in 1492 ( Du± 31).
Pynson too printed these titles, producing a more canonical collection
of six of Terence’s works in 1497, Comoediae sex Andria, Eunuchus, Heau-
ton timorumenos, Adelphoe, Phormio, Hecyra (STC 23885), and editions of
Anwykyll’s Compendium in 1489 (STC 696.1) and 1505 (STC 696.3).
Rood and Hunte also printed the Compendium with a separate register,
perhaps for sale as an independent unit (STC 695), but the combined edi-
tion makes an explicit connection around vernacular humanism: grammar
bound with text, Rood and Hunte deliver Terence with an apparatus for
vernacular study. Packaging the two texts in a format that allows them to
be sold separately or as a self-referential unit, they exploit the technology
of the book to serve the market in manifold ways. The patterns of the
English market tell neither of the simple importation of European texts
nor of the slavish imitation of Continental trends. Rather they sketch out
a coherent environment that features technologically complex products
geared toward producing their readers as consumers.
Caxton’s Eneydos accomplishes this same, autoexplanatory function
for the history of the book. The Eneydos is a close translation of a manu-
script version of the Livre des Eneydes. First printed in Lyons by Guil-
laume le Roys in 1483, the Livre des Eneydes draws its version of the Aeneid
from the Historie ancienne jusqu’à César, a compilation of Greek, Theban,
Trojan, and Roman histories recounted from creation, based on Virgil,
and augmented by the Roman d’Eneas.17 The Eneydos is dominated by the
Compiler’s sense of the contradiction between these sources, which he or
she underscores at various points: “And firste to shewe the dy±erence of
Iohn bochace and of vyrgyle. to putte in bryef the falle of the sayd dydo
recounted by bochace / and after by the sayd virgyle” (B7). The version of
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the story that the Compiler associates with Boccaccio develops from the
Greek historian Timaeus (ca. 356 –260 B.C.), and in it, Dido never meets
Aeneas but is a model of self-sacrifice for her state. This tradition enters
Justin’s Epitoma historiarum Philippicarum Pompei Trogi in the second or
third century B.C., and comes to the Livre des Eneydes through Laurent de
Premierfait’s French translation of Boccaccio’s De casibus, Des cas des nobles
hommes et femmes. The second Dido tradition represented in the Eneydos,
in which Dido kills herself after Aeneas abandons her, originates with
Aeneid IV.18 This focus on Dido as the turning point of the two traditions
links the text of the Eneydos to Caxton’s prologue to the Methamorphose,
which also presents a woman as a metaphor for the complexity of the text.
In what follows I read the Eneydos’s juxtaposition of Boccaccio and Virgil
in layers, moving through the text’s argument, to the model of interpre-
tation proposed in Caxton’s prologue to the Methamorphose, and finally
back to Dido’s transformation in order to trace a model for authorship,
editing, and reading that is also a history of the book. In short, the Eney-
dos, and before that the Ovide Moralisé are interested in translating and
appropriating classical authority in the larger consolidation of literary
authority in print.
The Eneydos’s comparison between its two Dido stories begins in
earnest in chapter 6 with the Compiler’s first-person discussion of Boc-
caccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium. After describing how “that other
daye in passing tyme I redde in the fall of noblys / of whom Johnnes
bochace hath spoken & in brief we aduentures of fortune” (B7), the Com-
piler critiques Boccaccio for including Dido in his collection at all: “I was
abasshed and had grete merueylle / how bochace whiche is an auctour so
gretly renommed hath transposed or atte leste dyuersifyed the falle and
caas otherwyse than vyrgyle hath in his fourth booke of Eneydos / In
whiche he hath not rendred the reason / or made ony decysion to ap-
proue better the his than that other” (B7 v). Rather than comparing the
two stories according to historical truth and poetic license, the Compiler
argues that Boccaccio has “transposed or atte leste dyuersifyed” Virgil’s
story and proceeds to argue that a feminist reading of Boccaccio’s Dido is
indefensible: “And yf ony wolde excuse hym and saye that he hadde doon
hit for better to kepe thonour of wymmen. And wolde not treate ne saye
thynge of theym dyshoneste. but that myghte be to theyr auauncemente
¶ This reason hath noo place” (B7v). Instead of abandoning Boccaccio’s
Kuskin Ch 6 11/15/07 9:35 AM Page 245
version, however, the Compiler continues to relate it, dilating on his ren-
dition of the Phoenicians’ invention of writing. In fact, the Compiler
finds the passage important enough to repeat it in both tellings of the
Dido tale. In the first, the Compiler relates that writing is both within
and beyond history: on the one hand, it simply makes the Phoenicians’
intentions known “to theyr frendis”; on the other, it records Phoeni-
cian history for “remembarunce perpetual” (B8). Thus, writing clarifies:
it does so epistemologically by making history known and by articulat-
ing intention (“how be it that thauctour putte not precysely dedycte
wythoute texte”), and it does so mechanically, in the way letters are
di±erentiated (“carecteris dy±erencyng that one fro that other. of whiche
were fourmed letters”). These two qualities are fused in the Phoenicians’
use of vermilion ink: “the fenyces fonde to note wyth rede colour or ynke
firste the sayd lettres / of whiche our bokes ben gretely decorate. so-
coured & made fayr. We wryte the grete and firste capytall lettres of our
volumes bookes and chapytres wyth the taynture of reed coloure” (B8).
This practice finds its contemporary expression in the decorated letters
of medieval manuscripts. In bearing a trace of the past in its mate-
rial form, writing fulfills its historical sense through its very production,
and in stressing the present’s participation in textual production (“our
bokes . . . we wryte . . . our volumes”), the Compiler adds a third dimen-
sion to the written letter: the Phoenician red letter insists that the present
writer’s textual production is an engagement with history, a reproduction
of the traditions of the past in the present. The power of writing is mani-
fold: on one layer it is a mechanical process of di±erentiation that fa-
cilitates the articulation of intention, on a second it is capable of com-
municating authorial intention to others across time, and on a third it
engages with the present, connecting the two moments in time through
the physical crafting of letters in ink. In this sense writing is never en-
tirely original, never a break from the past, but is instead transcendent.
So, the book is a symbolic object, not simply because it is constructed as
meaningful by contemporary culture, but because its very letters make
history manifest.
The Compiler’s second rendition of this history of writing is similar
to the first but pushes the argument so that Dido herself represents the
history of writing. In chapter 22, in the midst of the Virgilian section, the
Compiler retells the Phoenician origins of writing to include Cadmus,
Kuskin Ch 6 11/15/07 9:35 AM Page 246
whom he praises “to haue founde by subtyll artyfice suche a manere

of waye that men may doo knowe all his wille & notyfie it to whome
he will. by one symple lettre. be it nyghe or ferre. be it of peas or of were
of amyte. or of eny other thing” (F5v). Cadmus’s role is relentlessly self-
reflective, not only founding a process by which intentionality can be
articulated “by one symple lettre,” but consciously planning to do so.
The Compiler also reviews the Phoenicians’ use of color: “By cause that
in that countrey were the pourpre clothes fyrst made and the coloure
founde / We wryte yet in oure kalenders the hyghe festes wyth rede let-
tres of coloure of purpre / And the grete capitalle lettres of the bygyn-
nynge and princypal of the psalmes and chapytres wythin oure bookes,
ben alle mayde fayre ther wythalle” (F5v). Again, texts make the past im-
manent: ecclesiastical calendars, books of psalms, and more general lay
books connect the origins of writing to the texts of the Middle Ages.
This history is compressed into Dido’s very name, for “Dido,” the Com-
piler makes clear, is “otherwyse callyd or named Elysse or Fenyce” (B7v).
The point is that authorship—the articulation of intention—is embedded
in Dido’s identity and thus placed in relationship to gender.
The Dido sections thus pull together a series of themes into a single
representation. Initially, it suggests, as in “Myn Hert ys Set,” that femi-
nism is a measure of writing. More broadly, it follows out Caxton’s over-
all interest in books as capable of withstanding time. Within this interest
it specifically describes Dido as a figure representing such a history; she
is, like the philosophers in Woodville’s Dictes and Sayings of the Philosophers
or Amphyon of Lydgate’s Siege of Thebes, a human embodiment of writ-
ing. Amplified and repeated throughout the Eneydos, Dido is a sign for a
system of signs that finds its referents not only in intention but in a sym-
bolic history registered on the material page pointing back through time.
The notion of a pagan woman as a sign for the historical relationship
of signs also appears in the prologue to Caxton’s translation of the Ovide
Moralisé, Ovyde his booke of Methamorphose. Written between 1316 and
1328 by an anonymous Franciscan friar, the Ovide Moralisé includes ex-
egetical readings directly within its translation of Ovid’s work. The only
remaining version of Caxton’s text is the two-volume manuscript held at
the Pepys Library at Magdalene College, Cambridge ( MS 2124).19 Cax-
ton’s version is introduced by two prose pieces, a version of the original’s
preface and a preceding fifteenth-century proem similar to the one found
Kuskin Ch 6 11/15/07 9:35 AM Page 247
in the Ovide Moralisé in B.L. Royal 17.E.iv.20 Beginning with a version of

Romans 15:4, the original preface to the Ovide Moralisé emphasizes the
way Ovid’s work can be read toward Christian sentence. “Thus,” Rita
Copeland concludes, “a vernacular system of exegesis replaces its Latin
precedent; and in a radical move of appropriation, a vernacular transla-
tion substitutes itself for the Latin original as the object of exegetical in-
terest.”21 To the reader of the manuscript Ovid unfamiliar with Caxton’s
French source, “I purpose to translate this sayd book of methamorphose
in to Anglysshe tonge aftir the lytyl connyng wat god hath departed to me
to thenede that yt myght be the better 7 sonner understanden” is Caxton’s
voice, authorized by him as much as any of his writings. The Compiler’s
voice replaces the Latin precedent, Caxton’s appropriates his manuscript
copy—the Methamorphose presents a sequence of appropriations and dis-
placements. Based on the fourteenth-century reading of a classical work,
accompanied by a later French proem, and translated into fifteenth-
century English, it is therefore a palimpsest of texts, each editorial layer
shading the previous one to develop a complicated reading of the Ovidian
original. Taken separately, these individual layers a±ord a historically
specific analysis of what it means to read Ovid; taken together, they set an
important precedent for Caxton’s Eneydos by focusing his assessment of
the work’s literary authority specifically around the classical auctor. The
text thematizes this very process through its representation of textual
manipulation as the manipulation of a female pagan captive.
The Ovide Moralisé appropriates the Methamorphose, displacing Ovid
with an independent vernacular authority that reads according to Chris-
tian doctrine. This displacement is not entirely silent. After citing a num-
ber of Christian authorities it moves into a direct discussion of the pro-
cess of interpretation: “therfore it is necessarye to shewe bryefly how 7 in
what facon or in what ordre 7 maner Cristen men ought to rede 7 under-
stond the poetes and theyr subtyl werkes.” At its most articulate the
proem makes this explanation through a reading not of Romans 15:4 but
of Jerome’s Epistle 70, his letter to Flavius Magnus, professor of rhetoric
at Rome. Written in 397, Epistle 70 is Jerome’s defense for reading pagan
works and stands in distinct contrast to his earlier turn away from pagan
writers after his dream at Antioch in which Christ accused him, “Cicero-
nianus es, non Christianus.”22 Jerome cites Paul to demonstrate the uses
of pagan writing for a Christian writer, arguing that Paul “had learned
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from the true David to wrench the sword of the enemy out of his hand
and with his own blade to cut o± the head of the arrogant Goliath.” For
Jerome appropriation is a rhetorical weapon, and this understanding
structures the epistle even when he leaves Paul and goes on to discuss
other authors. Jerome even uses this technique on Flavius Magnus at the
start of his letter: in response to Flavius’s question that perhaps Jerome
spends too much time with the pagan authors, Jerome turns Flavius
against himself: “You would never have asked it, had not your mind been
wholly taken up with Tully; you would never have asked it had you made
it a practice instead of studying Volcatius to read the holy scriptures and
the commentators upon them.” Indeed, without this structure the letter
would only be a list of writers and Jerome’s argument simply the citation
of precedent.
Jerome’s main example, the one that is expanded in the proem to
Caxton’s Methamorphose, is taken from Deuteronomy 21:10 –13. This ex-
ample works through a similar notion of wresting the secular work from
its pagan auctor; however, it changes the terms from warfare to sexuality,
all the while maintaining the aggressive sense. Jerome argues that Paul
“had read in Deuteronomy the command given by the voice of the Lord
that when a captive woman had had her head shaved, her eyebrows and
all her hair cut o±, and her nails pared, she might then be taken to wife.”
As Jerome explains, Deuteronomy 21:10 –13 details the protocols for a
Jewish man to marry a gentile prisoner of war. These protocols convert
the prisoner into a member of the household by modifying her physical
appearance. In highlighting the physical, Moses admits the Jewish hus-
band’s desire is based on the captive’s visual beauty but also demands an
alteration of that beauty. Thus the visual a±ords a route to the bride’s
identity, her pagan past. So, in addition to the aspects Jerome mentions,
Moses stipulates that before the marriage the captive bride must be given
a month to mourn her family without her prisoner’s attire. Further, if the
husband is in some way dissatisfied with his conquest, Moses o±ers him
some recourse: “Then if you have no delight in her, you shall let her go
where she will; but you shall not sell her for money, you shall not treat
her as a slave, since you have humiliated her.”23 The husband may take
his new wife and, if disappointed, may still cast her aside; however this
recourse acknowledges that the bride is fundamentally transformed: she
is now part of the Jewish community, and she cannot be sold, is not a
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slave, and has pride. In Deuteronomy, the prisoner’s conversion is both

superficial and profound, so that while the marriage is still the patriarchal
victor’s prerogative, it also bears the symbolic weight of Jewish law.
Acknowledging the privileges of power (the choice of the captive, the tak-
ing of delight, the naming as wife, the ability to humiliate), Deuteronomy
places the final limit on that power at holy doctrine.
In Epistle 70 Jerome uses the passage from Deuteronomy to fig-
ure the captive woman as the appropriated pagan work, and in advanc-
ing Deuteronomy as an analogy for appropriation, he preserves its sense
of the pagan as erotic. “Is it surprising,” Jerome asks,
that I too, admiring the fairness of her form and the grace of her elo-
quence, desire to make that secular wisdom which is my captive and
my handmaid, a matron of the true Israel? Or that shaving o± and
cutting away all in her that is dead whether this be idolatry, pleasure,
error, or lust, I take her to myself clean and pure and beget by her
servants for the Lord of Sabbath? My e±orts promote the advantage
of Christ’s family, my so-called defilement with an alien increases the
number of my fellow-servants.
Like the Jewish patriarch, Jerome is motivated by what he imagines is a

pagan sensuality that survives the cutting away of vices. And so, the pro-
tocols of Jewish law (the shaving of the hair and paring of the nails) be-
come the equivalent to interpretation: both cut away the non-Christian
elements to accomplish a transformation of the pagan subject. Eugene
Rice points out that Jerome’s use of the text about the “lovely captive” is
in fact modeled directly on Origen’s In Leviticum homilia, VII (yet another
example of Jerome’s appropriative reading style).24 So, Jerome’s argument
suggests that a complete conversion is both impossible and unwanted: the
primary work’s “fairness of her form and the grace of her eloquence” in-
spire desire in Jerome before the conversion and drive him to “take her to
[him]self” afterward. Indeed, his “so-called defilement with an alien”—
his reading of the pagan text couched as sexual engagement—is exciting
because the new text maintains some sense of its original di±erence.
Rather than the possibility of the pagan subject becoming sexually dissat-
isfying, Jerome’s paradigm for translation demands it maintain its origi-
nal sense—“the fairness of her form and the grace of her eloquence”—to
Kuskin Ch 6 11/15/07 9:35 AM Page 250
remain intelligible and interesting, erotic. Thus, Jerome uses Paul to

work his way back to Samson and Deuteronomy. In Samson he imag-
ines appropriation as a rhetorical violence capable of crippling pagan au-
thority, and in Deuteronomy a rhetorical seduction in which the captive is
never fully converted but sustains, through the image of woman, the
pleasure and prerogatives of patriarchal power.
In that Caxton’s text acts as a palimpsest, layering a fifteenth-century
proem on top of a fourteenth-century preface, the proem focuses Je-
rome’s use of Deuteronomy around reading for authorial intention. For
having introduced Jerome’s Epistle 70, the proem o±ers less a discussion
of Jerome than a direct citation of Deuteronomy 21:10–13. In contrast to
both Deuteronomy and Jerome the proem mutes the sense of desire
evoked by the pagan captive. It contains no discussion of the pagan cap-
tive’s beauty, no possibility that the victorious husband might not be fully
satisfied with his captive bride, no mention of her family prior to cap-
tivity. Indeed, the wife’s previous life is represented entirely by her cap-
tivity and her physical conversion is, instead of a negotiation of patri-
archal and divine power, a spiritual liberation from her bonds. Thus, her
body is less a representation of physical desire, her captivity a fetish
of that desire, than of her abstract spiritual state. As if to stress this ab-
stract quality, the proem shifts the gender of its pronouns as it tightens its
focus so that the captive’s body represents Christ’s: “what meruayille
thenne yf the sapience or Wysedome seculer or Worldly / Whych is as
bonde or prysoner . for excellence of hys langage and of the beaulte of
his body / wat I myself wil cutte and take away that whych may hurte and
not auaylle.” Jerome’s captive represents secular wisdom as well, but in
Jerome power is always in the foreground: secular wisdom is a captive and
handmaid, whom her husband converts into “a matron of the true Israel.”
In the proem the element that makes the captive desirable is “sapience or
Wysedome seculer,” and her gender undergoes a conversion with its lib-
eration. In both readings her body stands in for the textual body and the
way of explicating it is to prune away its literal level and reveal its Chris-
tian sentence; but what Jerome puts forth as a model of appropriative rhet-
oric that works through the sensuality of eloquence, the proem translates
into a model for secular salvation from “that whych may hurte and not
auaylle,” suggesting a transformative e±ect capable of eliminating the ma-
terial trappings and reducing the captive to the very essence of secular
wisdom.
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Stemming from the same French literary culture as the Ovide Moral-
isé, the Eneydos shares its interest in writing as transformative and reading
as sexual. As in the Ovide Moralisé, the Eneydos-compiler creates Dido as a
representation of the pagan text and assumes for himself the role of reader-
become-writer interpreting out the secular wisdom. The result is that
although he initially draws a firm line between Boccaccio’s and Virgil’s
Dido stories, he ultimately renders them in much the same manner.
So, although Dido is not chaste in the Virgilian section, the Compiler
moves her exemplary role toward that of the Justinian section, maintain-
ing her as a positive example and leaving the reader with an image of her
as a beautiful woman. Caxton parallels the two chapters by titling them
similarly: the end of De casibus or Justinian section is “¶ A comendacyon
to dydo” (C6), the Virgilian is “of the beaulte of dydo” ( H3v). Like the
pagan captive’s, Dido’s beauty is part of her allure, and a constellation
of issues concerning beauty in outward form, language, and in writing
appears in the text. For example, chapter 10 presents Dido’s obsession
with Aeneas:
His grete beaulte & swete langage / whiche she enprynted in her re-
membraunce / that her membres refuseden the swete reste of slepe /
And kepte this thoughte in her selfe by ryght longe tyme in suche a
wyse / that in a mornynge / after that the lyghte of the daye rebouted
& putte a backe the shadowe of the nyghte aboute the lampe / and
the sonne rysen for to shyne on the erthe. (C8)
Aeneas’s language imprints itself on Dido without material trace, subject-

ing her to a desire that constrains her very body. If Cadmus’s “subtle ar-
tifice” reports a process by which writing is involved in the clarification of
intention, Aeneas’s unwritten “sweet language” produces a sensuality that
subjects Dido to a physical paralysis in which her body rejects her own in-
tention and leaves her trapped between dusk and dawn in a darkness
barely held at bay by the light of her lamp.
Both Cadmus’s and Aeneas’s are processes of impression, and both
impinge upon series of thematic relationships within the text concern-
ing intention and confusion, aesthetics and decadence, light and dark-
ness. For example, in both cases language alternately clarifies or sub-
verts intention so that the representative cities, Carthage and Troy,
are “enuyroned”— encircled, enveloped, or surrounded (OED, 1–3)—at
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various moments in the text. This occurs with opposite results. In the
first section the process of “enuyroning” articulates Carthage’s identity
as a city: Dido uses the ox hide to “enuyronne” the land on which she
intends to build her city (C3), as the city is built it is “enuyronned wyth
wallis autentyke” (C3v), and “enuyronned” is associated with its naming as
well, for “the toun was named biose taking his name of the hide of an oxe”
(C3v). In contrast, when Troy is “enuyronned” by siege at the very open-
ing of Eneydos (B1) it is at its darkest hour: “the noble cyte of Asye was
broylled and brente by the subtyl accyon of the fyre putte in to it by the
grekes,” producing a “thicke tenebrosite of the blacke smoke,” which
“enbrace[s]” Troy, throwing yet another circle of siege around the city
(B2v). The smoke blocks the stars’ “naturel lyghte,” leaving the Trojans
physically blind, unable to “perceyue ony thyng.” Like the imprint of Ae-
neas’s language on Dido’s imagination, the Greeks’ “subtyl accyon” sub-
jects the Trojans to a darkness that renders them helpless. Reminiscent of
Dido’s lamp, which does not illuminate her misery so much as emphasize
the bleakness of its surround, the Grecian fire casts its own “domageous
[destructive] clereness” that shows the “the fyre deuourynge the pompe
of Troye.” The Eneydos creates the building of Carthage and the fall of
Troy as opposite events, both intertwined with subjection to artistry. One
brings clarity—the delineation of intention through writing—the other
the darkness of smoke which is, paradoxically, a clarity as well, one that
burns away decadence.
As the narrative tells of the siege of Troy, it focuses in on the last
remaining gate, the gate “stex”: “Abydng onely one of the yates of the
same town. named in theyr langage the yate stex whiche was made soo
maysterly / that the Ingenyous subtylte of maistres of masonrye car-
pentrye / that of all we countreye of Aise it passed alle other in e±orte and
strengthe” (B2v ). Masterly, ingenious, and subtle, the gate epitomizes
artistry in material fabrication, an example not of natural beauty but a
further layer of the manmade artifice that constitutes the “pompe of
Troye.” That Troy is overly aestheticized is a point the Eneydos is consis-
tent on: Priam is recorded “after the fyctious poetyque” (B1); the Com-
piler explains its destruction is “lyke as the goddes and fortune hadde
enterprysed to destroye soo artyfycyall a werke” (B2v ), confounding “the
pompouse and proude noblenes of thynhabytants of Troye” (B3); and
even Creusa’s hair is described as “by manuel artyfyces hadde dyligently
be enryched” (B3). Bodies are imprinted and cities are encircled: in over-
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lapping imprinting and environing, the Compiler’s language suggests that

intention is produced through a process of subjection to the authority of
a particular aesthetic.
The relationship between intention and artifice, language and light,
the present and the past, is continued when Dido is overcome by a “grete
fransie” just before her death (G7v–G8). At the height of her misery,
Dido summons a previous remembrance that is “redy to be executed.”
This remembrance is so troubling that it changes her “wyttes to torne in
to a wyked kynde,” resulting in both a psychological change—a new
“mynde for to destroye the first composicion”—and a somewhat more
physiological one: the coagulation “in couenable proporcion for the en-
treteynynge of the spiryte vitall.” As with Phoenician writing, the com-
position of the mind is jointly material and intentional. This overlap also
bears a relationship to the perception of light:
Wherof her fayre eyen greue and lawghynge were incontynent

tourned in to a right hidouse lokynge mobyle & sangwynouse to
see / the swete balle of the eye whiche is the veraye receptacle in-
teryor of lyght visible / and Iuge of the colours by reflection ob-
gectyf whiche she bryngeth vnto the Impression cogytyue of the en-
tendement / wherof she maketh a present to the suppost indicatyf
discernynge without interualle the di±erences abstractyue adherynge
to theyr subgecte. was sone made obscure & her lyght empesched
from the Veraye Iugyng in parfyt knowlege. (G8)
Through the eye, “lyght visible” and “colours” are brought to the “Im-
pression cogytyue of the entendement.” This “entendement” is wrapped
in the linguistic constructs of the “indicatyf” and the “subgecte.” When
Dido loses control of “Iugyng in parfyt knowlege,” she also loses control
over her body: externally, her eyes change from fair, green, and laughing,
to hideous, wandering, and bloodshot; internally, her ability to perceive
“di±erences abstractyue adherynge to theyr subgecte” is “made obscure
& her lyght empesched,” defeating the “Impression cogytyue of the
entendement.” The end result is Dido’s complete physical transforma-
tion from beauty to wretch: “her tendre chykes and vysage that afore was
playsaunt & debonayre of sangwyne coloure tournyng vpon white /
becam alle pale sodaynly in hydouse manere & all mortyfied for the cru-
elle deth wherof the harde angwysshes had enuahyshed [invaded] her
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alredy” (G8). The passage ties together the themes that have run through
both Dido’s paralysis and the siege of Troy by insisting that the composi-
tion of intention proceeds according to the composition of letters. Thus
Dido’s passion has made it impossible for her to formulate her intention,
resulting in a metamorphosis in which she can no longer control her self-
presentation. Further, the passage connects this change to the Eneydos’s
emphasis on light in that the composition of intention proceeds accord-
ing to the visual di±erentiation of forms of light. The Trojans “enuy-
roned” at the siege parallel Dido “emprynted” with Aeneas’s visage be-
cause both are blinded to the “di±erences abstractyue adherynge to theyr
subgecte” and unable to form an “Impression cogytyue of the entende-
ment.” As in John Russell’s coronation oration, darkness can be internal
and external; it can be historical, but it is deeply textual. The salvation
from darkness lies in the recognition of the power of language, which is
strangely wrapped in the process of reading and writing that concerns the
very perception of light through the eye. Thus the Eneydos’s understand-
ing of intentionality can be folded back into the authority of Phoenician
writing because both work according to a sense of impression and subjec-
tion: the classical work has literary authority for present readers because,
in its reproduction in contemporary texts, the reader is subjected to its
articulation of aesthetics, history, and intentionality.
Reading and writing: both the Methamorphose and the Eneydos are
self-reflective, inward turning around the production and consumption of
authorial intention, orbiting back to their main themes as metaphors for
the process of reading. The power of metaphor is to hold things together,
and in this case the abstract—secular wisdom—is consistently linked to
the physical: for just as the pagan wife is a metaphor for secular wisdom,
Dido is a signifier for the subtle artistry of writing, for the vermillion ink
that permits the transmission of knowledge to the present. Rather than
isolated from the physical, abstracted to some pure essence, secular wis-
dom remains linked to its physical manifestation. The proem to the
Methamorphose flirts with the possibility of separating these two cate-
gories in its ensuing discussion of literary interpretation:
And wus thenne haue we the forme and the manere how we oughte to
take and rede the Poetes And other Auctours that is to wete / that / as
we gradryng rooses we slee the thorn as moche as we maye Right so
in the same maner beholdyng 7 seeyng the wrytynge of the Poetes /
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late us not take but only that whyche serueth to our pourpos and is
consonant unto trouthe . And suche thynges as may hurte and greve
late us leue.
The suggestion here is that certain aspects of the text can be pruned away,
as an editor separates authorial intention from textual inaccuracy or as an
exegete discerns the Christian sentence from pagan rhetoric. Through
this process, perhaps, the thorny texts of pagan poets can be converted—
like the pagan captive—to a purpose consonant with Christian truth. In-
deed the Compiler expands upon this image, describing himself as a “bee
that by fleyng from flour to flour hath travsuersyd & runne over the
bookes of the paynems / now here now there / gadryng to gudre the juse
of good odure.” As much as the Compiler searches for an appropriate
language, he gives himself away, for figured either as a gatherer of roses
or as a bee landing upon the redolent flower, reading is less an act of ab-
stinence than of indulgence. Instead of abandoning the image of the
female body as text, then, the proem transposes it, capturing Jerome’s
equation of sensuality and eloquence in a metaphor that distills the is-
sues of gender and power into a trope for the object of desire, the rose.
The language betrays the central tension of reading—it is a process of en-
gagement with the physical—which brings us closer to Caxton’s own lan-
guage, “the forme and the manere how we oughte to take and rede the
Poetes And other Auctours,” to demonstrate the ways in which the mate-
rial nature of texts—the vermillion letters, the forms of the print shop—
is continually connected to abstractions: Caxton’s persona, the pagan past,
secular wisdom.
My argument, then, is that Caxton’s Methamorphose and the Eneydos
are as concerned with establishing a theory for reading classical texts as
they are with the texts themselves. Both establish a history for reading—
the Methamorphose a Christian exegesis stemming from Paul and Jerome,
the Eneydos a history of writing following back to the Phoenicians—and
both use this history to analyze authorial intention. In the Eneydos this
analysis proceeds through the juxtaposition of modern and ancient, Boc-
caccio and Virgil; in the Methamorphose the Compiler finds the process of
exegesis at the very heart of Ovid’s title:
He imposed the name methamorphose / whiche is asmoche to say as

transmutacion of one fable in to anowor interpretacion of theym ±or
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he seeng as wel the latyn poetes as the poetes of Grece that hade ben
tofore hym and hys tyme had touched in wrytyng many fables and
them passed superfycyelly / without expressynge theyre knowlege or
entendement . The sayde Ovide hath opened vnto the latyns the way
as wel in the fables of Grekes as in other And hath them tyssued and
woven by so grete subtyltee of engyne charge 7 solicytude in suche
wyse that one by that other / that it myght be sayde very semblably
wat they depended one of another and that by such ordre that frome
the creacion of the world vnto hys tyme he had ordeyned hys
sayenge some by fable 7 some by hystorye only And other wyse tys-
sued 7 medled with fable and hystorye togidre which is a thyng ryght
subtil.
Fifteenth-century writers typically identify eloquence as following the

“short, quyck and hye sentences” of the aureate past. In contrast, Ovid’s
rhetoric is one of obscurity, of mingling history and poetry, of tissuing
over his sources with “grete subtyltee.” This di¤culty is, in Ovid, a ne-
cessity, for previous to him Greek and Latin poets passed over the fables
“superfycyelly / without expressynge theyre knowlege or entendement.”
Ovid’s intention is to make this writing intelligible, to appropriate its wis-
dom for the present. This process underwrites Metamorphoses itself.
Thus, the Compiler insists that the notion of a physical metamorphosis
should not be taken literally but within a Christian understanding of
moral behavior: “and they that haue su±red theyre passyons by sensualite
ben they that they calle foles insensyble lyke brute bestes And they in a
newe body transfourme theym self.” He also argues that Ovid’s use of
pagan gods is not disabling to its meaning: “And also that he argue not in
hyme pluralite of goddes / how wel that he a±ermeth many by name /
seen that in other hys bookes ryghte fynly he speketh of the unyte of
god.” More broadly, the history of writing is, therefore, a history of au-
thorial intention because here intention and writing are melded together.
Reading Ovid and the vermillion letters of a medieval manuscript are
much the same because they suggest a relationship for history which is
mediated by neither linearity nor break, but by a transformation in which
the past looms up in all its profundity for the present.
The Eneydos presents a history of writing in which intentionality is
its theme—the center of Dido’s story, the echo of her namesake, and the
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endpoint of her great frenzy—and its governing occasion: the juxtaposi-

tion between the authorial intentions of Boccaccio and Virgil. Intention-
ality operates similarly in the Methamorphose, where Ovid becomes a
metaphor for the central action of transformation. This, too, describes
the Compiler’s own methods: for having modified that text by appending
and commenting, the Compiler is a reader turned writer, a consumer
whose process of consumption has asserted his own intention over the
text. Similarly, by carrying her from her chaste Justinian role to Virgil’s
Dido undone by desire, and back the Eneydos Compiler performs a
twofold “methamorphose” of Dido, one that simultaneously revises and
reclaims Virgil’s authority. Exegetical touchstone around which the text is
organized and sympathetic persona of beauty within the text, Dido is,
like the wife-captive of Deuteronomy, the pagan embodiment of desire
which locates the Compiler’s interpretation of the text. Further, Caxton
uses both texts to elaborate the English canon. Translated between his
two runs of Chaucerian material, the Methamorphose reflects Caxton’s
reading during this period. In book 13 Caxton adds, “I can nomore saye
but I shold telle you alle the bataylle . whych ye may wel knowe of the
monke of Bury in ballade . and in the recueil of Troye whyche I trans-
lated in prose al alonge”; similarly he includes, “Wel wryteth Ge±rerey
Chawcer that noble man of discripcon of this hows in hys booke named
the book of Fame.” In turn, Caxton introduces the Eneydos with a ref-
erence to Skelton. In both cases, he associates the classical text with
contemporary English authors. It is to this contemporary scene that we
now turn.
The Laureate System
It is a minor point of bibliographical history that Caxton could not print

red rubrics successfully until the second edition of the Directorium sacer-
dotum (STC 17722) in 1489. In a metaphorical sense this is the subject of
his prologue to the Eneydos. Discussing the di¤culties of translating his
source into late fifteenth-century English, the prologue to the Eneydos re-
turns us to Caxton’s initial concerns in the Recuyell of the Histories of Troye
to suggest a literary language capable of making the authority of his-
tory immanent. Finding contemporary cultural codes embedded within
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vernacular language, Caxton makes a broad division between the rude

speech of the middle classes and an ornate eloquence of the elite; the lat-
ter, he suggests, is epitomized by the writings of Henry’s poet laureate,
John Skelton. Skelton, too, is concerned with finding a vernacular fitting
literary expression; thus the problem Caxton presents as unique to his
translation of the Livre des Eneydes is also one of the larger political cul-
ture engaged in a laureate system of literary production. We can see this
literary system at work by reading it against the events of the contempo-
rary social scene, such as the 1489 Yorkshire uprising. A relatively minor
disturbance in early Tudor political history, the uprising is interesting
less for the originality of Henry’s response—Henry simply suppressed it
through military force—than for the ways it allows Caxton and Skelton
to comment on the symbolic authority of English writing. Caxton’s pro-
logue to the Eneydos and Skelton’s elegy for the Earl of Northumberland,
killed during the uprising, explore the relationship between literary and
political authority in defining English identity. Both writers align au-
thority with the aristocracy, yet neither entirely divorces it from the cul-
tural tensions within the broader community; the result is an authority
unified enough to shape English nationalism, but still flexible enough to
speak to a population divided by class, distance, and dialect. As Skelton
and Caxton both exploit the title of the poet laureate, I term their sys-
tematic deployment of literary authority a state laureate system. Flexibility
is the system’s symbolic strength: disseminated through manuscript and
print, Caxton’s and Skelton’s writing speaks to a heterogeneous England
searching for modes of producing its identity. By recognizing the intel-
lectual and material ways literary authority participates in the consti-
tution of a national identity, we can better understand the process of
literary history overall.
Printed in 1490, the Eneydos comes late in Caxton’s career; in fact, it
is one of the last literary works he put to press before his death. His pro-
logue is fittingly retrospective and recalls his first literary prologue, that
of the Recuyell. Thus, he imagines translation as a recourse from idleness.
“Hauyng noo werke in hande,” he turns to “a lytyl booke in frenshe.
whiche late was translated oute of latyn by some noble clerke of fraunce”
(A1) and becomes stymied by the frustrations of the work: “and forth-
wyth toke a penne & ynke and wrote a leef or tweye / whyche I ouersawe
agayn to corecte it / And whan I sawe the fayr & straunge termes therin /
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I doubted that it sholde not please some gentylmen whiche late blamed
me sayeng wt in my translacyons. I had ouer curyous termes whiche coude
not be vnderstande of comyn peple / and desired me to vse olde and
homely termes in my translacyons. and fayn wolde I satysfye euery man”
(A1r –v). So Caxton thinks of some “euydences wryton in olde englysshe”
that the Abbott of Westminster brought him “that it was more lyke to
dutche than englysshe,” and this brings him to a story from his youth in
which two London merchants on a layover in Kent order eggs only to be
mistaken by the landlady as speaking French.25 Perhaps the most famous
passage in all of Caxton’s writing, the anecdote concludes:
Loo what sholde a man in thyse dayes now wryte. egges or eyren /
certaynly it is harde to playse euery man / by cause of dyuersite &
chaunge of langage. For in these dayes euery man that is in ony rep-
utacyon in his countre. wyll vtter his commynycacyon and maters in
suche maners & termes / that fewe men shall vnderstonde theym /
And som honest and grete clerkes haue ben wyth me and desired me
to wryte the moste curyous termes that I coude fynde / And thus
bytwene playn rude / & curyous I stande abasshed (A1v–A2)
The story has largely been taken to reveal Caxton’s editorial awareness
of linguistic variation, and it clearly does focus the reader on, as Caxton
puts it, “diversity and change” in English. Conceptually, however, Cax-
ton’s story moves from the linguistic problem of understanding “egges or
eyren” to a more politically minded discussion of “reputation.” Indeed,
Caxton’s example of a man outside his country “uttering” his message in
inscrutable and no doubt provincial “manners and terms” merges lan-
guage with regional politics explicitly. Into this juncture Caxton casts
questions of audience: Caxton would please every man, but honest and
great clerks desire him to translate into “curious” terms. Though he
readily asserts these clerks’ expertise, their desire strangely fails to per-
suade him, and instead of following their lead he describes himself as
standing abashed between plain rude and curious language.
The opposition between “plain rude” and “curious” places eloquence
against coarseness; taken with the man “uttering” his communication, it
revises Caxton’s discussion from the seemingly infinite ways dialect can
identify a speaker—the diverse ways of pronouncing “eggs”—to a clear
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division in which clerks speak in the curious language of the court and
academy, and the rude man, basing his authority on local reputation, at-
tempts to engage in political discourse, to “utter his communication,”
without these intellectual properties. If on one level, Caxton’s anecdote
invites us to read him at face value and notice changes in the vernacular, it
also asks us to note that he sees these changes as well, and thus to ac-
knowledge his association with the clerks of Henry VII’s court.26 On a
second level, it suggests Caxton’s concern with the symbolic power of
vernacular English to define its speakers as rude, curious, or abashed. Ul-
timately, the academic and aesthetic questions of language become quite
personal: it is Caxton himself who stands “abashed”—confounded—at
the intersection of language and class. Thus the prologue works on a
third level as well: as much as Caxton’s search for a proper language
chronicles his attempt to present his text appropriately, it also tells of his
e±orts to construct a literary persona fitting a translator of courtly texts
and a printer of English literature. So what begins as a question of trans-
lation becomes, over the course of the prologue, one of self-presentation,
and in this, too, it is a retrospective piece, a return to the Recuyell.
As the prologue continues, Caxton finds his voice enough to invite
“mayster Iohn Skelton late created poete laureate in the vnyuersite of ox-
enforde” to review his work. Caxton argues that Skelton has read “the
ix. Muses and vnderstande[s] theyr musicalle sciences. and to whom of
theym eche scyence is appropred” (A2v). He specifically points out “for
hym I knowe for su±ycyent to expowne and englysshe euery dy±yculte
that is therin / For he hath late translated the epystlys of Tulle / and the
boke of dyodorus syculus. And diuerse other werkes oute of laytn in to
englysshe not in rude and olde language. But in polysshed and orate
terms craftely” (A2r–v); what sets Skelton apart from the humanists Cax-
ton worked with throughout his career is that he writes in the vernacular.
Further, as in the Recuyell, when Caxton generalizes, he also becomes
more specific: these references to the muses, the musical sciences, and
“Elycons well” are generally taken to be allusions to two of Skelton’s early
works: his English poem “Upon the Dolorus Dethe and Muche Lamen-
table Chaunce of the Mooste Honorable Erle of Northumberlande,” an
elegy on Henry Percy, fourth Earl of Northumberland, killed during the
Yorkshire uprising of April 1489, and his translation of the Diodorus
Siculus’s Bibliotheca historica. In these works Skelton is interested in the
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translation of literary authority to fifteenth-century English in much the

same way as Caxton.
The poem in particular addresses the relationship among vernacular
composition, classical learning, the court, and social upheaval. Current
criticism on “Upon the Dolorus Dethe” attempts to categorize it as an ex-
ample of either medieval or Renaissance poetry.27 This di¤culty stems
largely from Skelton’s own construction of his persona, a persona that si-
multaneously asserts his continuity with and di±erence from the Chau-
cerian tradition. For example, in stanza 2, the stanza Caxton alludes to in
his prologue, Skelton invokes his muse:
Of hevenly poems, O Clyo, calde by name

In the college of musis goddes hystoriall,
Adres the to me, whiche am bothe halt and lame,
In elect uteraunce to make memoryall!
To the for succour, to the for helpe I kall,
Myne homely rudnes and drighnes to expelle
With the freshe waters of Elyconys welle.28
The dryness of Skelton’s poetic voice is surely a reference to the opening

of the Canterbury Tales where April brings its sweet showers to a land-
scape parched by March.29 Where Chaucer presents his reworking of the
traditions he inherits as the natural coming of spring, Skelton dilates over
the incongruity between his project and the language available to him.
He calls upon Clio, not to replenish but to expel the homely rudeness and
dryness of the vernacular. Skelton elaborates his rejection of Chaucer-
ian poetics later in the poem, in stanza 19, a stanza firmly grounded in
fifteenth-century humility tropes:
Mi wordis unpullysht be nakide and playne,

Of aureat poems they want ellumynynge;
Bot by them to knoulege ye may attayne
Of this lordis dethe and of his murdrynge.
(127–30)
Skelton’s discussion of polished words and aureate poems relies on ear-

lier fifteenth-century praise of Chaucer, on what Seth Lerer has called “a
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vocabulary of impression” established by Lydgate and polished over the

course of the century.30 Skelton claims his language is “unpolished,” that
it wants “illuminating”; nevertheless, he uses this lack to introduce his
classical muse, and, over the course of the poem, his familiarity with clas-
sical figures allows him to liken Northumberland to Aeneas and to Hec-
tor. It is because of his evocation of these figures, he tells us, that he is
able to bring men of rank to sorrowful weeping, completing the poem’s
function as an elegy. Nevertheless, Skelton’s strategy for introducing
these classical figures, for producing himself as a poet involved in the
New Learning, is grounded in the rhetoric of the Chaucerian tradition;
thus he cannot make his claim for originality independent of a simultane-
ous claim for the canonicity of the prior poetic tradition: rather than
find itself through oppositions—medieval and modern, humanist and
Chaucerian—Skelton’s poetic discovers itself in synthesis.
If Skelton’s erudition allows him to bring closure to the poem, his
skill in the vernacular moves it into more overtly political terrain. The
Yorkshire uprising of 1489 seems to have been sparked by the especially
heavy tax burden Henry VII used to finance his incursions into Brittany.
Sitting November 9, 1487, Henry’s second Parliament granted him a sub-
sidy of two-fifteenths and two-tenths to be paid June 24 and Novem-
ber 10, 1488, respectively. Claming the “greit povertie, ruyne, and decae
of this said cite” and “calling to mynde the common opynion of men
here,” the York council requested a partial pardon of the tax on the
grounds of the customary Yorkshire exemption.31 In petitioning the king
for remission of the tax, the York corporation was apparently appealing to
precedent and thus had reason to believe it would be granted. Letters
to the king and repeated visits to Westminster by representatives Sir
Richard Yorke and Sir William Todd pursued this remission in London
throughout 1488 without success (and no doubt they uttered their “com-
munications and matters in such manners and terms that few men shall
understand them” in the London courts). The Yorkshire exemption was
disallowed, and in January 1489 an additional £75,000 was granted to the
king, bringing the tax burden close to five-fifteenths in three years.32 By
February popular disorder in York had risen to such a level that the mayor
closed the gates of the city during the mayoral election and issued a
proclamation prohibiting the wearing of weapons, “harness or defensible
array.”33 News of these disturbances spread, and the king threatened to
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mount a commission of inquiry into their cause. With this threat the
York council took measures to complete their collection of the back taxes.
North of York the tax continued to go unpaid. On April 20 there was
an uprising at Ayton in Cleveland led by John à Chambre, an estate
o¤cer who operated in a district most recently overseen by Richard III.
His position was granted to him for life on September 22, 1485, as a re-
ward for service at Bosworth.34 Though sympathetic to his populace’s
demands, Earl Henry Percy’s position required him to extract the king’s
tax and, on April 24, he wrote from his manor at Seamer near Scar-
borough to Sir Robert Plumpton, steward of Knaresborough, requesting
that an armed force meet him on the following Monday night in the town
of Thirsk. On April 28 the earl and his men met with Chambre and seven
hundred protesters at South Kilvington near Thirsk, and the earl was
killed. Word spread by mouth, written proclamation, and bell ringing so
that the popular force grew, and was soon joined by the earl’s own nephew,
Sir John Egremont.35 Under Egremont’s control the protesters advanced
toward York. The mayor and council fortified the city; however, aided by
fletcher Hugh Bunting, Alderman Thomas Wrangwish, and other dis-
a±ected citizens, five thousand protesters entered York on May 15. The
outcome of this occupation is unclear, but while on their way to Rich-
mondshire on May 17, Egremont and the protesters were routed by a
force from the south composed of Sir Richard Tunstall and the earls of
Surrey, Oxford, Derby, and Shrewsbury. Overall, the only recorded fa-
tality of the uprising was Sir Henry Percy, fourth Earl of Northum-
berland.36
Central to Skelton’s assessment of the uprising is that Northum-
berland was slain “thorow treson, ageyn hym compassyd and wrought”
(6–7). Because the protesters at South Kilvington killed Northumberland
while he was serving the king’s business, they were indeed charged with
treason. This explanation certainly had currency in contemporary opin-
ion: writing to John Paston III two days after the event, the Earl of Ox-
ford reports, “Northumberland, havyng the auctorité to se the Kynges
money levied in the north parties, had knowleche that certeyne per-
sones of comvnes wer assembled at Topclif and at a nother lordship of his
nygh to the same.” The earl reports that because the commons “wer but
naked men,” Northumberland “addressed hym-self towardes theym with-
oute eny harneys in pesible maner, trustyng to have appeased theym.”37
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Oxford’s letter aligns Northumberland’s authority with the king and

identifies the threat to this authority as coming from “persones of
comvnes.” In e±ect, he reads the uprising as a friction between two es-
tates, the nobility and the commoners. To a large degree Skelton’s poem
supports this reading as he also o±ers “certeyne persones of comvnes” as
responsible for Northumberland’s death. Yet in stanza 5 Skelton suggests
problems within the classes as well as between them:
So noble a man, so valiaunt lorde and knyght

Fulfilled with honour, as all the world dothe ken,
At his commaundement whiche had both day and night
Knyghtis and squyers, at every season when
He calde upon them, as menyall houshold men:
Were not thes commones uncurteis karlis of kind
To slo ther owne lorde? God was not in ther mynde!
(29–35)
Historians and literary critics alike have been quick to situate Skelton’s
charge within the peculiarities of Northern politics. The collapse of
Neville power and the imprisonment of Northumberland during the
Wars of the Roses created a vacuum of influence in the North that Ed-
ward IV was able to exploit in 1474 by indenturing Northumberland to
Richard, then Duke of Gloucester, and thus stabilizing the North by
placing Northumberland’s authority within Richard’s overall control. The
result was that Richard and Northumberland worked together through-
out the 1470s, and because of this association, Northumberland even-
tually played a substantial part in Richard’s usurpation of the crown by
presiding over the trials of Woodville, Grey, and Vaughan and later sup-
pressing Buckingham’s rebellion. This relationship ultimately favored
Richard, for as king he could expand his influence by simply recruiting
from Northumberland’s men. Northumberland attempted to re-establish
his influence by shifting allegiances to Henry Tudor at Bosworth Field
and thereby drawing o± those disa±ected with Richard’s party, but after
his indenture to Richard he was never able to command the same level of
loyalty in the North as he had earlier. By the 1489 uprising almost half of
his men had at some point also been retained by Richard, and almost all
the uprising’s leading members—Chambre, Egremont, even Alderman
Wrangwish—had strong Yorkist ties. For example, of the twenty-eight
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men retained by Percy at the time of his death, thirteen had at some time
been retained by Richard as well. Men closely involved in the suppression
of the Yorkshire uprising such as Northumberland’s nephew Gascoigne
and Sheri± Marmaduke Constable were also at some time in Richard’s
employ. With the collapse of the rebellion, Egremont fled to Margaret of
Burgundy’s court. Further, because the city of York was a county unto it-
self, its defense against the protesters was complicated by regional rival-
ries for control: Sheri± Constable, Lord Cli±ord, and the corporation of
York all contested for the right to garrison and thereby control the city.
The divisions in power became even more splintered upon Northumber-
land’s death.38 Thus, Skelton’s charge of treason amongst the nobility
holds true in that the retained men seem to have been bound by indi-
vidual contract, first to Northumberland, then to Richard, rather than by
some sort of filial loyalty based in their estate.
Assessments of Skelton’s poem have been slower to recognize that
his central assertion of treason points to social ambiguities beyond issues
of loyalty among the noble class. Laying the charge of treason at the feet
of the “uncurteis karlis,” Skelton is at once specific and ambiguous in his
explanation of Northumberland’s death: though he identifies the com-
mons as treasonous, he is unclear as to whether he means “uncurteis karlis
of kind” as a satirical gloss on “commones” or whether his actual asser-
tion is that Northumberland’s knights and squires are, in fact, commons
“of kind.” “Upon the Dolorus Dethe” thus expands treason into a two-
tiered charge, one, following John Paston III, levied against the commons
for rising against the nobility, and a second that blends these estates to-
gether. Indeed, Skelton argues, “Bot men say thei wer lynked with a dou-
ble chayn / And held with the commons under a cloke” (75–77). Again,
Skelton’s use of “thei” here is purposely ambiguous, blurring the earl’s
forces into the commoners, linking them in what he calls a “double
chayn” that draws across English polity. On one hand the “double chayn”
emphasizes the treasonous nature of the bond between the nobility and
the commons. Skelton uses doubleness in this sense to contrast the earl’s
steadfastness—“Doublenes hatinge fals maters to compas / Treytory and
treson he bannesht ought of syght” (150–51)—and he advises the next
earl to be likewise: “Let double delinge in the have no place, / And be
not light of credence in no case” (174 –75). Maintaining the king’s quar-
rel, the earl stands against doubleness because, in the poem at least, he
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embodies an authority entirely aligned with the king. Skelton also uses
doubleness to describe Fortune, who plays with “double dyse” (140). Like
Malory’s “newfangleness,” at the center of Skelton’s charge of trea-
son, then, is a doubleness that links class-based political instability with
a larger sense of mutability. Again, the poem works less according to
simple oppositions than through a deeper intermingling of categories.
Rather than presenting the uprising in terms of an a±ront to noble au-
thority, then, Skelton’s poem doubles literary authority with political au-
thority: that is, just as he constructs his poetic voice through participating
in but also distancing himself from the Chaucerian canon, he mourns the
earl while simultaneously questioning the aristocracy’s separation from
the English political body.
The ambiguity inherent in Skelton’s “double chayn” is recognizable
in the various statements fielded by both sides of the uprising. The king’s
“Proclamation Against the Rebels” condemns the protesters as traitors
bent on “not only the distruccion of the kynges most noble person and of
alle the nobles and lordis of this realme, but also the subuersioun of the
poletique wele of the same.”39 Directed at Kent, it extends the Yorkshire
threat to “the southe parties of this his realme,” where it argues the rebels
next intend to “subdue and brynge to captiuite alle the people of the
same.” At its close it announces,
all shirri±es, maiers, bailli±es, constables of townes and villages, and

alle other o¤cers assigned for the conseruacioun of the kynges pease
putt theym sel± in deuour to represse, subdue, and make to seace alle
maner of insurreciouns riottes routtes, vnlawfulle assembles, and alle
othre mysdoers, vagabundis, fynders and makers of new rumours and
tydynges, to attach, arrest and ymprisone, and after ther dimerities to
correcte, and alle other thingis to doo that shalbe for the conserua-
cioun of the peas and gode rule and gouernaunce and defense of the
seid shire; and that they nor none of theym faile this to doo vppone
payne of forfaiture of alle that they may forfaite and their bodies at
the kynges wille.
Addressing local authorities—“all shirri±es, maiers, bailli±es, constables

of townes and villages, and alle other o¤cers”—the proclamation at once
demonstrates that the king’s authority is mediated and that this process of
Kuskin Ch 6 11/15/07 9:35 AM Page 267
mediation grants local authority as a franchised position. It assesses the

protesters in similar terms: they are “riottes routtes, vnlawfulle assem-
bles, and alle othre mysdoers, vagabundis, fynders and makers of new ru-
mours,” defined not by occupation and class so much as their relationship
to royal authority. The division between an authority franchised from the
king and one disenfranchised and subversive—broadly involved in what
John Russell terms “chargeable businesses”— contains within it an in-
herent ambiguity regarding class a¤liation: acting with the king the local
inhabitants are secure in their social positions; acting against him they are
defined as shiftless. Put more plainly, the basic di±erentiation between
the local authorities and Oxford’s “certeyne persones of comvnes” oper-
ates less according to class than to their immediate intention to maintain
centralized power. Thus, the king’s proclamation o±ers to make an
identification with his subjects along the lines of centralized power—they
are like the king and like Northumberland in their mutual role in protect-
ing the “poletique wele”—which reveals the tenuousness of his position:
if Henry were sure that there was no chance of his minor o¤cials blend-
ing with “riottes routtes, vnlawfulle assembles, and alle othre mysdoers,”
he would not need to end his proclamation with a threat.
The protesters also acknowledge this ambiguity as well. A version of
their proclamation remains copied out in one of William Paston’s letters.
According to the letter, the protesters speak from the authority of the
lower class in the proclamation’s concluding lines: “and thys [ procla-
mation] is in the name of Mayster Hobbe Hyrste, Robyn Godfelaws
brodyr he is, as I trow.”40 This position is their strength; their authority
comes from “suche unlawfull poyntes as Seynt Thomas of Cauntyrbery
dyed for; and thys to be fulfyllyd and kept by every ylke comenere upon
peyn of dethe.” Like the king’s proclamation, the Paston letter phrases
the authority for the uprising in terms of treason, not against king but
against Becket, martyred through the royal word. Popular and righteous,
this is an authority “ylke comenere” can adopt. Further, like the king,
the protesters contend for local authorities, threatening “every lorde,
knyght, esquyer, gentylmen, and yeman . . . upon peyne of losyng of
ther goodes and bodyes.” In focusing on treason, Henry and “Mayster
Hobbe Hyrste” both exploit the “double chayn” that aligns social iden-
tity through its relation to power beyond any simple bifurcation be-
tween commons and nobles. Case in point: while Henry condemned the
Kuskin Ch 6 11/15/07 9:35 AM Page 268
protesters as “mysdoers, vagabundis, fynders and makers of new rumours

and tydynges,”41 the oyer and terminer commission appointed to try the
protesters shows that, though fueled by the working poor, to a large ex-
tent the uprising was comprised by a much broader section of the popu-
lace. M. A. Hicks argues:
made up of chaplains, yeomen, husbandmen, labourers, and crafts-

men from York, Beverley, and the market towns—dyers, weavers,
shoemakers, a pedlar, a wright, a fletcher, a fisherman, a panier-
man, a baker, a draper, and tailors. Such occupations do not, how-
ever, encompass the lowest ranks of Yorkshire society. At York, where
Wrangwish and Bunting alone were of the freedom, only two of
those indicted were labourers, the others all being identified by a
trade. At Beverley three of those implicated were dyers, two already
and one yet to be a governor of the town. Most of the countrymen
were yeomen and husbandmen, although the occupation of the three
men of Acomb is not reported. As with other popular rebellions,
known rebels appear to be men of some property, men of fixed ad-
dress, probably householders with some standing in their local com-
munities and with much to lose by rebellion.42
As lawless, nomadic, and illicit, the protesters are entirely at odds with
authority, agents on the margins of English society. Yet, the extant docu-
ments from the King’s Bench reveal them to have none of these quali-
ties, and instead identify them as local laborers, guildsmen—dyers and
weavers, bakers and tailors, merchants—landowners, and even past and
future governors of Yorkshire towns, a broad cross section of the popula-
tion connected to the community on a number of levels. Skelton’s charge
of treason points not to a simple division between the noble and the com-
mon but to a spectrum of participants. Certainly lords and laborers were
both involved in the uprising, but so were relatively well-o± tradesmen.
We should recall that the leader of the group, John à Chambre, was an es-
tate o¤cer and that the earl’s own nephew led the band south from York.
The uprising’s real threat, one the nobility must have realized, was not
that it destablized social order by flauting authority, but that it revealed a
cohesive and independent Northern community operating in firm oppo-
sition to the London-based central authority of the Crown. Less a friction
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between estates within a fixed feudal contract, or even a breach of that

contract, the uprising demonstrates that feudal structure articulates a
constantly shifting and complex reality of social allegiances that defies
classification.43 Thus Skelton’s “double chayn” provides a model for social
structure that suggests when authority is drawn from any source other
than the king it is, in fact, dependent upon a principle of mutability.
Skelton develops his poetic voice from a similar ambiguity by min-
gling “homely rude” English with the “succour” of classical literary au-
thority. While the poem as a whole is not cast in Skeltonics, it is voiced in
a mixed language that never entirely leaves this alliterative undercurrent
for the ornate qualities possible in fifteenth-century verse. This poetic al-
lows Skelton to voice his own interiority in the poem’s opening line: “I
wayle, I wepe, I sobbe, I sigh ful sore” attains a halting rhythm suggestive
of his much more mature style. Initially, Skelton uses alliteration to sepa-
rate noble from commoner along class lines. Northumberland—“the no-
belnes of the northe, this valyant lorde and knyght” (85)—is identified
with light alliteration. The commons receive heavier alliteration: in
stanza 8 Skelton asks them, “what frantyk frensy fyll in youre brayne?”
(51). By stanza 12, he uses this alliterative line when he is at his most satir-
ical: “They buskt them on a bushment them selfe in baile to bringe /
Agayne the kingis plesure to wrastle or to wringe. / Bluntly as bestis withe
boste and with cry / They saide they forsede not nor carede not to dye”
(81– 84). As Skelton develops his theme of the “double chayn” he blurs
the knights and squires that serve Northumberland into this heavier allit-
erative line: the line that introduces the central ambiguity, “were not thes
commones uncurteis karlis of kind,” refers both to the commoners and
retainers ( 34). Ultimately in answer to his initial question of what
“froward entente, / Confetered togeder of commoun concente” (26 –27;
a question phrased though a heavy alliterative line itself ) is this allitera-
tive line, one that represents more than merely commons and lords, but
rather the way power moves through English society in ways that con-
found easy class division. Henry’s easy dismissal of the protesters’ identity
denies the connections between the classes of English society, which
their political action proves. Skelton, on the other hand, uses the uprising
to parallel literary and political traditions; both he and the protesters
are “makers of new rumours” in that they attempt to break into a new
vernacular authority but, unable to do so, are doubled over with what
Kuskin Ch 6 11/15/07 9:35 AM Page 270
they attempt to escape; thus they are complicit with and subversive to the
very authority that constitutes them as poetical and political subjects of
the English state. The observation contains the same point as John Rus-
sell’s “double ie”: the political system is fundamentally instable, ambiva-
lent in terms of its allegiances. What grounds it is not simply truth, but
pre-existing structures of authority. For Skelton and Russell these struc-
tures are literary; for Henry and Oxford they are monarchial.
This doubling, I suggest, is what makes Skelton’s political argument
attractive to the aristocracy even as he critiques their performance. The
only remaining manuscript containing the poem, B.L. MS Royal 18.D.ii,
gives us some sense of how it was received. This manuscript is a lavishly
decorated composite volume belonging to the earl’s family, the Percys,
and containing the famous illustrated versions of Lydgate’s Siege of Troy
and Siege of Thebes, among other pieces. By best estimation the manu-
script was begun around 1470, with Skelton’s poem added in later, per-
haps as late as 1500.44 Though Skelton focuses on friction within the earl’s
party and ostentatiously rejects Chaucerian polished verse, the manu-
script reveals him speaking to an aristocratic audience that seems to have
read him as complementary to the Chaucerian canon, indeed, which
placed his poem to the actual texts that established the terms polished and
illuminated. In fact, the very stanza in which Skelton claims to be unpol-
ished stands out from the rest of the poem for its especially polished red
and blue decoration (fig. 6.1). Thus, the illumination o±ers a reading of
Skelton’s poem attentive to his self-construction as a poet and consistent
with how Caxton presents him in the Eneydos prologue; taken in the con-
text of the manuscript overall, it suggests an appreciation of Skelton’s al-
most paradoxical attempt to stand out from the Chaucerian canon even as
he is engulfed in its terms. This lesson should not have been lost on a no-
bility that defined its own authority through its relationship to the
monarch: that is, like Skelton’s own construction of a literary persona,
fifteenth-century political identity is created less through the static terms
of the feudal system than through a juxtaposition of entrepreneurial au-
tonomy and allegiance to centralized power.
The poem’s physical presentation highlights its construction of
authority in other ways as well. By using “Upon the Dolorus Dethe”
to construct an “unpullysht” poetic, Skelton makes his entrance into an
aristocratic environment that combines the ornately polished verse of
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Figure 6.1. John Skelton, “Upon the Dolorus Dethe.” British Library MS Royal
18.D.ii., 166. By permission of the British Library.
Kuskin Ch 6 11/15/07 9:35 AM Page 272
the mid-fifteenth century with the scholarly tropes rapidly coming into
vogue at the turn of the sixteenth century. We see this at a number of
points in B.L. MS Royal 18.D.ii. For example, as the poem proceeds to-
ward its pious ending, its final page visually explodes with ornate decora-
tion (fig. 6.2). Rather than closing the poem with somber reflection, these
illuminations in their intensity dramatically underscore its connection to
impressive financial means and are particularly stunning after the re-
strained illustrations of the Lydgate poems. Indeed, the poem’s presenta-
tion as a whole seems geared to announce Skelton’s authority as a poet
laureate, and its opening banner showcases Skelton’s title, “Poeta Skelton
Laureatus” (fig. 6.3). This banner presents Skelton’s authority as stem-
ming from his academic credentials, yet even here we find him contained
by the Chaucerian canon: as Lerer points out, since James I of Scotland’s
Kingis Quair—a work, like Lydgate’s, written in the 1420s—Chaucer had
been identified with the title poet laureate. In fact, as I have argued in
chapter 3, the authority vested in the title is actually announced by
Chaucer in the prologue to the Clerk’s Tale. The passage sets the terms of
writing in the fifteenth century, and Skelton cannot evade them: though
he inserts a distance from the Chaucerian canon, his authority is still con-
structed through it, and this is true for both the poem’s intellectual pro-
duction of the poet laureate and its physical reproduction in the Percy
manuscript.
Be this as it may, I believe it is a mistake to see Skelton entirely as a
reader of Chaucer, writing only in that poet’s shadow. Skelton’s title of
the poet laureate in the late fifteenth century di±ers significantly from
Chaucer’s use of Petrarch, and Skelton goes well beyond courtly poet-
asters such as de la Pole and Woodville to inhabit the Chaucerian mantle
on his own terms. He accomplishes what the anonymous author of “Myn
Hert ys Set” could not, e±ectively presenting his distance from Chaucer
while also occupying his place. The di¤culty of this move is marked by
his alternating use and alienation of Chaucerian terms, and his success is
ratified by his formal assumption of the role of poet laureate. For Skelton
is the second Lydgate. Indeed, Skelton’s early career demonstrates that
the title of poet laureate is acknowledged by English universities and
sponsored by the court, and as Caxton reports in his prologue, by 1490
Skelton had been presented with his laureateship from the University of
Oxford. In 1493 this degree was also recognized by Cambridge, where
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18.D.ii., 166v. By permission of the British Library.
Kuskin Ch 6 11/15/07 9:35 AM Page 274
18.D.ii., 165. By permission of the British Library.
Henry himself granted Skelton a laureate’s gown. Later, Skelton received

the laureateship from Louvain as well. Further, between 1494 and 1495
he became tutor to Prince Henry, on November 11, 1497, he received 20s.
for his first Mass and, more speculatively, in December of that year he
was given a further £3 6s. 8d. as “my lady the Kinges moder poet.”45 Skel-
ton’s early assertion of his authority as a poet laureate is not unique to
“Upon the Dolorus Dethe,” but is also evident in his contemporary
translation of Poggio’s version of Diodorus Siculus’s Bibliotheca historica.
In book 4, Skelton refers to Helicon’s well, the nine muses, and their mu-
sical sciences—all points referenced in Caxton’s allusion. The Bibliotheca
also tells of a process of impression at the origins of literary authority:
“this famous Homere that so habundantly was enmoistured and plenarly
refresshed with the hevenly licour of Eliconyes well, whose hed Phebus
environd with the laurell victorious, was that poete which / all othere
surmounted among the Grekes in glorye of pullished termes and elect
vtteraunce.”46 Homer is “environd” by the laurel as his imagination is
subjected to Apollo’s rule. His initiation into the laureate ranks is thus a
Kuskin Ch 6 11/15/07 9:35 AM Page 275
conferment of authority from a still greater authority. Thus Skelton’s de-

piction of the passage of literary authority in the classical history of the
laureateship mirrors his own attainment of it in the fifteenth century. As
the passage continues, it moves even closer to the Eneydos by discussing
“how Cadmus out from Venicians brought the first lettres.” Skelton’s
translation of the Bibliotheca historica demonstrates that the Eneydos’s adap-
tation of Boccaccio’s history of writing is not just some random interpo-
lation but plays into the fifteenth century’s larger interest in classical
authority. Taken with “Upon the Dolorus Dethe,” it shows Skelton devel-
oping the laureate identity he relies on so heavily in his later poetry by
casting himself as reproducing the history of laureate authority for his
contemporary English audience. This authority at once allows Skelton to
resolve his poem and, more importantly, gives him authority aligned with
aristocratic power. Skelton’s poem achieves its durability—indeed, Skel-
ton achieves a persona that proves to stand him his entire career—by con-
structing Lydgate’s aureate language, his own laureate erudition, and
material opulence as a powerful union against mutability.
By 1489 a generation of men including Grey, Free, Tiptoft, Gun-
thorpe, Russell, and Shirwood—even Henry himself—had studied on the
Continent, written and translated texts, and returned to England to apply
what they learned.47 Continental and English universities began to grant
the laureateship as a scholarly degree, and Henry drew substantially on
such learning, assembling almost two-thirds of his bench of bishops from
lawyers trained in civil law rather than theologians, and employing a
number of such scholars in high-profile positions: Bernard André, the
blind poet laureate from Toulouse, was the “King’s Poet” and tutor to
Prince Arthur; Petrus Carmelianus was Henry’s Latin secretary; and Jo-
hannes de Gigliis the resident papal ambassador, who became, with his
brother Silvestro as proxy, bishop of Worcester. In 1485 Henry appointed
Peter Actors, a London and Oxford bookseller, his stationer, and in 1492
he appointed Quentin Poulet his royal librarian.48 André and Skelton
both wrote occasional poetry for Henry, for example their Latin fly-
tings for the French ambassador Gaguin in 1490. André was historian and
tutor to Prince Arthur from 1496 to 1500, and his major works include
“Les douze triomphes de Henry VII” (in which he likens Henry’s achieve-
ments to Hercules’) and his unfinished Vita Henrici Septimi, which chron-
icles Henry’s reign in verse episodes. He wrote on the Yorkshire uprising
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as well in a part of the Vita Henrici Septimi, De nortumbrorum comitis nece

and this work a±ords a useful contrast to Skelton’s because it also uses lit-
erary authority to stage its reading of the events but does so from the po-
sition of a Latinate poetic.49 De nortumbrorum is less interested in the
politics that inspired the event than with Henry’s role as king, and, with
the exception of the title, Henry entirely displaces Northumberland
within the poem.50 Ultimately, the entire uprising is enveloped in classical
literary tropes. So, rather than a chivalric hero, Henry is decked in the
laurel crown (“Lauriger princeps, placidusque, mitis”), and rather than
commoners, he faces furors (9–10). If De nortumbrorum makes its state-
ment without the specificity of “Upon the Dolorus Dethe,” it reminds us
that the occurrence of the Yorkshire uprising was hardly unique: before
1500 Henry had to contend with a number of rebellions, including Lionel
Simnel’s, Perkin Warbeck’s, the Ackworth Rebellion of 1492, the upris-
ings of 1489 and 1497, and innumerable smaller ones.51 André’s poem
di±ers from Skelton’s in terms of its analysis of the actual event—for
Skelton it is an opportunity for a specific critique, for André it has no
specificity—but not in terms of its insistence on literary authority as an
axis of social power.
As much as André filters the Yorkshire uprising through a screen of
classical motifs, he extracts its politics and transforms it into an occasion
to discuss the cultural importance of literary authority. This gives André
the opportunity to demarcate his own role in the political sphere. After
Henry has eliminated the immediate threat, André describes a Britain of
pastoral harmony (“Ut diuturna liceat Britannis / Vivere pace” [in order
that Britons are allowed to live in long-lived peace], 11–12) replete, in
stanza 11, with butting kids bounding through ruddy blooming clovers.
The pastoral imagery grants the poem a political stability absent from
Skelton’s “Upon the Dolorus Dethe,” yet this state remains threatened by
internal dangers that require constant vigilance: “Inter audaces lupus
erret agnos, Hoste subacto” (Between the bold lambs the wolf roams, the
enemy having been subdued; 43–44). So André, no noble warrior like
Henry, too works the fields: “Dure jam pratis vacuus maneto / Cum bove,
arator” (hardly free from labor I remain in the meadows with the bulls,
the ploughmen; 39–40). André’s inclusion of his own role insists on his
importance and, in doing so, allows Henry a channel through which to
appropriate literary authority for political service. Aligned with such au-
Kuskin Ch 6 11/15/07 9:35 AM Page 277
thority, Henry is able to extend his overall franchise on authority through

an additional social plane, and André’s career in particular demonstrates
Henry’s financial investment in such authority: in 1486 André was granted
a pension of ten marks “in consideration of the increase in virtue and
learning coming to many at Oxford and elsewhere from his teaching”;52
in 1498 he added Church preferments, the rewards of which were com-
muted to a pension of £24 a year upon his retirement; and from 1500 on
he received an annual new year’s gift of 100s. in return for his work on a
Tudor chronicle. Discursive, aestheticized, bookish, and self-conscious,
this laureate system produces literary authority in the service of the state.
Henry’s court therefore illustrates a system in which poetry and
scholarship—particularly humanist learning and vernacular writing—are
codified through institutional a¤liation, public rank, and royal patron-
age. Though Skelton’s vernacular construction of literary authority is
unique amongst Henry’s scholars, the assertion of laureate authority is
not, and it connects him to a much larger literary system—a laureate sys-
tem—in which poetry and persona are institutionally sponsored through
royal patronage. Presented in a manuscript like B.L. MS Royal 18.D.ii,
it enables the social groups possessing financial power to appropriate
physically the symbolic field. In his prologue to the Eneydos Caxton con-
sciously works to fashion himself as within this laureate system. As much
as Caxton’s allusion to Skelton’s poetry contextualizes his division be-
tween the rude Northern man and the honest clerk and noble gentleman
in the factional politics of the early Tudor government, it also solidifies
his persona in the context of a developing laureate system in which lit-
erary authority is put to political ends. This strikes an important contrast
to the Recuyell: there Caxton described himself as stymied by the process
of translation; here he also depicts himself as “sittyng in my studye where
as laye many dyuerse paunflettis and bookys” and somewhat frustrated,
but over the course of his discussion of language he reveals himself to be
a bibliographical authority the Abbot of Westminster regards highly
enough to consult on his Anglo-Saxon “euydences.” In the Eneydos, Cax-
ton appears as anecdotal and conversational but nevertheless an authority
among authorities, and this marks a shift in his positioning of print.
Further, the titles Caxton uses to assert Skelton’s authority are all texts
he translated or printed as well: not only did he both translate and print
versions of Ovid and Virgil, he also translated a portion of the “boke of
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dyodorus syculus”—a copy of which, Thomas E. Marston points out,

was in Johannes de Gigliis’s possession53—in the prologue to the Poly-
chronicon, and his three-part volume Of Old Age; Of Friendship; Of No-
bility contained translations of Cicero’s De senectute and De amicitia.
Further still, Caxton worked with the intellectuals at Henry’s court, and
we should not forget his connections to the nobility of the Tudor court,
notably, to the Earl of Oxford, John de Vere, who wrote John Paston III
of “certeyne persones of comvnes,” and to Margaret Beaufort. An Ex
Libris by William Purde in a single copy of Caxton’s 1482 Polychronicon
names Caxton regis impressore, King’s Printer.54
Read as within this laureate system, Caxton’s division between clerkly
and rude readers focuses his own voice as a writer. Returning to the pro-
logue, we see Caxton’s choice of language for his translation should be
clear: he should choose either a polished and curious language with which
to appeal to an aristocracy interested in English scholarship and familiar
with the Chaucerian tradition or a rude language aimed at a broader au-
dience. Rather than translating exclusively for either, Caxton concludes,
“Therfor in a meane bytwene bothe I have reduced & translated this sayd
booke in to our englysshe not ouer rude ne curyous but in suche termes as
shall be vnderstanden” (A2). Like Skelton, then, Caxton writes an English
that is at once learned but also unpolished, one that connects the Chau-
cerian canon to the New Learning, as well as to the diverse elements of
English polity. This middle vernacular grants both Caxton and Skelton a
persona that reflects their own experiences with the noble and common
classes. Both find conflict in this connection, conflict they articulate as a
mutability natural and traditional. Caxton tells, “For we englysshe men /
ben borne vnder the domynacyon of the mone. whiche is neuer stedfaste /
but euer wauerynge / wexynge one season / and waneth & dyscreaseth
another season” (A1v). Echoing both Skelton and Malory, the charge that
English culture waxes and wanes is not one of Caxton’s most original
claims; in the context of the printed text, however, I believe it stands out.
Skelton’s poem was disseminated within an elite literary circle. The most
cursory glance at a page of the Eneydos makes it clear that it is not in the
same financial realm as the handwritten Percy manuscript (fig. 6.4). At the
very least, Caxton’s text—printed with neither illuminations nor illus-
trations, in a thick black Burgundian-based type, and translated into a
“mean” somewhere between curious and rude—is geared for wider circu-
Kuskin Ch 6 11/15/07 9:35 AM Page 279
lation. Caxton thus opens English literature up to a broader audience,

o±ering it as a way for the rude and curious reader alike to conceptualize
their culture as composed of a range of subjects speaking in various di-
alects but still linked. Nevertheless, elements of Caxton’s prologue—his
references to “elycons well” and his deference to the sophisticated literary
language of clerks and courtly poets—point back to the exclusive circles
of manuscript culture inhabited by academic scholars and aristocratic
readers fully vested in literary authority. In this, Caxton’s Eneydos partici-
pates in the ideological program of Henry’s laureate system by maintain-
ing that a subscription to classical literature is also a subscription to
aristocratic authority. No books for Mayster Hobbe Hyrste; the Eneydos
operates by the same logic as Henry’s proclamation: stability lies in the as-
sertion of monarchial power and a unified, centralized state.
Although Caxton passes over any discussion of Dido in this pro-
logue, the issue of gender is not altogether absent from his prologue, and
it returns in his discussion of the mutability of language. Caxton inserts
his famous anecdote in the midst of his catalogue of linguistic change:
In my dayes happened that certayn marchauntes were in a shippe in

tamyse for to haue sayled ouer the see into zelande / and for lacke of
wynde thei taryed atte forlond. and wente to lande for to refreshe
them And one of theym named she±elde a mercer cam in to an hows
and axed for mete . and specyally he axyd after eggys And the goode
wyf answered . that she coude speke no frenshe . And the marchaunt
was angry . for he also coude speke no frenshe .but wolde haue hadde
egges / and she vnderstode hym not / And thenne at laste a nother
sayd that he wolde haue eyren / then the good wyf sayd that she vn-
derstod hym wel / Loo what sholde a man in thyse days now wryte .
egges or eyren / certaynly it is harde to playse euery man / by cause
of dyuersite & chaunge of langage. (A1v)
The anecdote recapitulates Caxton’s analysis of language, and all his lev-
els of change are present: temporal change is recorded in his emphasis
that the story comes from his youth, national di±erence in the wife’s mis-
taken belief that the mercer speaks French, and regional di±erence in its
overwhelming use of precise place names, a use carried over to the central
Mercer’s name, She¤eld.55 Within this structure, the “goode wyf ” re-
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Figure 6.4. The Eneydos, A1. Translated and printed by William Caxton, West-
minster, 1490 (STC 24796). British Library IB.55135. By permission of the British
Library.
Kuskin Ch 6 11/15/07 9:35 AM Page 281
produces the “rude vplondish man” as female, Southern, and domestic

rather than male, Northern, and political. An odd point surrounds this,
for though the story claims to emphasize the di¤culties of dialect, the
problems of understanding are entirely unidirectional: while ostensibly
regional di±erence colors all their discourse, She¤eld and his companion
have no trouble understanding the good wife; only she is obtuse (“and she
vnderstode hym not”). Where the rude man fails to make himself under-
stood, the good wife fails to understand. The result is that She¤eld’s com-
panion must act as an interpreter, translating his request into her dialect.
Thus, in the reappearance of gender in Caxton’s prologue translation is
given as a male prerogative in which the text—“eyren”—must be inter-
preted by masculine authority. Here then is vernacular humanism wa-
tered down to its most vulgar: instead of Jerome translating Cicero or the
compilers of Ovide Moralisé and the Livre des Eneydes trying to rationalize
a theory for the text, Mercers attempt to get a late dinner out of a good
wife. So, Caxton o±ers anecdotal experience as a way of conceiving of
language and its di±erence.
Caxton consciously parallels himself with Skelton, then, but his writ-
ing encompasses a di±erent reader than the poet laureate’s. Whether
Skelton’s poem was commissioned exclusively by the Percys, read aloud at
court, or existed in other manuscripts, British Library MS Royal 18.D.ii
testifies that by the early sixteenth century it was disseminated within the
elite social circle of nobility. This audience appears to have been relatively
closed to early printed books. For example, the few printed editions con-
tained in the Royal Library came from Antoine Vérard’s Parisian press, of
which Janet Backhouse writes:
The one class of book which the Tudor king can be shown to have
collected with what seems to have been a consistent personal enthusi-
asm over a long period [was] the illuminated versions of the printed
library books produced in the Paris workshops of Antoine Vérard . . .
The best of these books were never a poor man’s substitute for illumi-
nated manuscripts, but major acquisitions in their own right.56
Vérard sold these presentation copies at prices similar to those of manu-

scripts (Gordon Kipling records the price of £6 for a two-volume Le
jardin de santé ), many times over anything Caxton might charge for his
Kuskin Ch 6 11/15/07 9:35 AM Page 282
printed editions.57 In contrast, Skelton’s Bibliotheca historica remains in

Corpus Christi, Cambridge 357, a much less impressive paper and vellum
manuscript belonging to Robert Pen, a gentleman of the chapel under
Henry VII and Henry VIII.58 Yet as we have seen with the Winchester
Malory, even these less impressive manuscripts were substantially more
expensive than Caxton’s editions. Caxton thus resolves his search for an
appropriate language not in a vernacular shared by all classes but in a
double vernacular, one that like Skelton’s double chain recognizes the
complex tiering of medieval society but finds within it a sense of newfan-
gled duplicity, of mutability, and so claims sympathies with the nobility.
As a book, the Eneydos participates in his resolution by providing a mate-
rial form that is neither exactly the same as the illuminated manuscript
nor a close approximation. For the Eneydos is no more “a poor man’s sub-
stitute” for an illuminated manuscript than Vérard’s. It operates on a
di±erent register: if Skelton’s poem tells its aristocratic audience of
conflicts deep in English society, Caxton’s prologue exports this ideology
to his larger print audience. Caxton may o±er his middle class of readers
access to literary authority, but by referencing Skelton’s poem, paralleling
himself with laureate reading practices and announcing the pleasure of
ornate language, he aligns himself with an aristocratic audience of read-
ers, one fully vested in literary authority and fully aware of the linguistic
pleasure of literature, yet to whom his products would seem workaday.
And so, he o±ers this larger symbolic statement in a parallel material
form. Ultimately, this articulation of material and symbolic forms is what
is unique to late fifteenth-century literary culture.
The late fifteenth century occupies a foundational position

in the development of public authorial identity and the printing of po-
litical material. Caxton’s Eneydos demonstrates this in three ways. Chiefly,
it suggests a form of vernacular humanism involved in recovering textual
history, identifying classical authorial precedent for contemporary writ-
ing, and rationalizing a theory for the secular reading of the ancients. In
England, this vernacular humanism appears as deeply ambivalent, cross-
cut by a doubleness. Whether expressed as Russell’s “double ie,” Skel-
ton’s “double chayn,” or Caxton’s “wauerynge” and “wexynge” moon,
fifteenth-century vernacular humanism attempts to counter a fundamen-
Kuskin Ch 6 11/15/07 9:35 AM Page 283
tal sense of epistemological mutability with literary authority, but never

does so entirely and thus remains not only self-conscious but to a certain
extent self-condemning. Second, Henry’s financial investment in the poet
laureate underscores the profound interest fifteenth-century writers,
patrons, and readers had in using classical scholarship to create a pub-
lic identity. Finally, Caxton’s introduction of the press draws upon the
doubleness inherent in English culture as an essential part of his strategy,
for in order to transform the relatively exclusive manuscript into the
printed book without debasing his texts’ value, Caxton makes discursive
the literary authority that manuscripts evoke through their sumptuous
design. Such a strategy is both intellectual and material: by appealing to
established literary conventions of manuscript circulation Caxton creates
a relationship between the symbols of and audience for an English lit-
erary canon; by producing his texts as visibly di±erent from the pre-
sentation manuscripts the nobility actually commissioned, he makes this
authority available to a wide audience.
Kuskin Epilogue 11/15/07 9:37 AM Page 284
Epilogue
The Archival Imagination

(or What Goodes Has to Say)
I am to bryttell I may not endure.

—Goodes 1
Much of Symbolic Caxton has been concerned with death: with

the appearance of death that illustrates the first visual rendering of the
printing press, with the beheadings of various English courtiers, with the
romance of warfare in distant lands, with Dido’s suicide, with the trans-
formation of material substances from one state to the next: manuscript
to print and books to capital. Caxton printed a number of texts overtly
concerned with death, too, manuals on the steps necessary for preparing
oneself for salvation and indulgences that ensured one’s passage in the af-
terlife. Fittingly, though he printed these texts throughout his life, the
theme of death begins to weigh heavily in his portfolio in his last years.2
Death is a defining theme of fifteenth-century studies.3 This is true not
simply because the literature of the period is obsessed with notions of
death—surely all periods are so preoccupied—but because for modern
scholarship the fifteenth century must die in order for modernity to
emerge as markedly new.
More broadly, then, if the companion volume to this monograph,
Caxton’s Trace, is about the birth and adolescence of English print, Sym-
bolic Caxton has been about the interlocked nature of beginnings and end-
284
ings. Rather than tell a literary history of life and death, I suggest that
such binary relationships harden and loosen in a process of symbolic
transformation, one that permeates the chronological boundaries of liter-
ary history. So, Symbolic Caxton argues that the medieval is both discrete
from and forever part of the modern, and at its close I suggest that one
way out of these binaries is through the archival imagination, the intellec-
tual recognition that the self-reflective nature of the textual archive de-
mands a similarly reflective process of reading.
Scholarship has relied on a principle of historical separation in its
discussion of the late Middle Ages and the early modern period. This is
clearly identifiable in the major literary histories currently on the market.4
One particularly cogent example of this sense of the break between the
fifteenth- and sixteenth-century literary cultures comes near the end
of Lotte Hellinga and J. B. Trapp’s The Cambridge History of the Book in
Britain. In their chapter entitled “Literary Texts,” Julia Bo±ey and A.S.G.
Edwards conclude by drawing a line in the 1550s. I quote them at length,
because their argument is clear and definitive:
The 1550s, however, are an obvious watershed in the history of

English poetry, a decade of both retrospection and innovation.
These years saw the final reprintings—until the twentieth century—
of the major works of Lydgate and of his disciple Stephen Hawes,
and of Thynne’s first collected Chaucer. They also saw the first
printings of Tottel’s Miscellany and The Mirror for Magistrates, as well
as the first printing in England of Gavin Douglas’s Eneydos, the har-
binger of several later sixteenth-century translations of Virgil, the
manuscript of which is preserved in Trinity College Cambridge. The
decade is not a clear-cut point of transition. It does, however, see a
discernible shift, a reorientation of literary emphases and priorities
that adumbrates, in the history of the book, new developments that
are more appropriately the subject of the history of the Renaissance
book.5
Bo±ey and Edwards speak with authority, and their conclusion here is
firm: acknowledging that the 1550s are not “a clear-cut point of transi-
tion,” they argue for a decade of “retrospection and innovation” that her-
alds a discernable shift, a renaissance. The argument is of a piece with the
e p i l o g u e 285
plan of the volume as a whole, for Hellinga and Trapp begin with a clear
di±erentiation between fifteenth-century manuscript culture, which they
choose not to treat, and print culture, which they argue is “all but com-
plete by our terminal date of 1557.”6 Indeed, it is of a piece with the
larger story the Cambridge editions tell overall. Just as David Wallace’s
History of Medieval Literature comes to a close with the fifteenth century,
the Cambridge History of Early Modern English Literature dedicates a few
carefully researched pages of its section on the history of print to the
work of William Caxton and his contemporaries before moving on to
subsections boldly entitled “The Triumph of the Book” and “The Emer-
gence of the Author.”7 Oxford University Press o±ers a similar assess-
ment. Here James Simpson’s Oxford English Literary History, volume 2,
1350–1547 Reform and Cultural Revolution is far more sympathetic to the
writers of the fifteenth century, particularly Lydgate, but just as locked
into categorical definitions based on period and the importance of the
work over the text. So, literary production remains as occurring through
the scrim of periodization: “complex” in the medieval world and “sim-
plif[ied] and centraliz[ed]” in the early modern; the books themselves,
books that I argue are palimpsests, which are continually complex as they
move through time, are somewhat lost in the face of ideas.8 Each case re-
lies upon a principle of historical separation, a scholarship of category,
for the explanatory force of literary history.
But what of the evidence? The 1550s do not see the end of printing
of Lydgate, but, in fact, his transformation into a powerful authorial role.
From Thynne’s 1561 edition of Chaucer’s Workes (STC 5075), Lydgate’s
Siege of Thebes is included in the Chaucerian canon as a continuation to
the Canterbury Tales, reprinted with Lydgate’s name as part of the title
throughout the late sixteenth century. Lydgate is discussed in the literary
prefaces to Chaucer and in E. K.’s preface to Spenser’s Shephearde’s Calen-
der. Separate editions of his major works are published in the seventeenth
century, such as Thomas Purfoot’s 1614 Life and Death of Hector (STC
5581.5). The Mirror for Magistrates is itself a continuation of Lydgate’s
Fall of Princes. Lydgate lives: he continues in literary history as a named
author, one consistently associated with Chaucer but also identified with
a brand of vernacular humanism associated with Boccaccio’s retelling of
the Troy story.
It is worth pausing over this vernacular humanism, for it too com-
plicates any notion of break between the medieval past and the modern
286 s y m b o l i c c a x t o n
present. Bo±ey and Edwards suggest that Gavin Douglas’s Scottish Aeneid
begins a new tradition of direct translation of Virgil’s text. The claim ap-
pears undisputable. Yet the sixteenth-century reworkings of the Troy
story are quite conscious of fifteenth-century tellings: Gavin Douglas
may be a translator of Virgil, but he is also a careful reader of Chaucer
and Caxton. So, he may dismiss Caxton’s version as a “shameful perver-
sion” of Virgil’s story, but he studies it to stage his own.9 If Douglas her-
alds a new treatment of Virgil, he also testifies to the ongoing readership
of Caxton’s. Just so, Caxton’s first Troy story, the Recuyell, was reprinted
by de Worde in 1502 (STC 15376) and 1503 (STC 15377), by Copland in
1553 (STC 15378), and by one of Shakespeare’s own publishers, Thomas
Creede and Valentine Simmes, in 1597 (STC 15379). Caxton’s name ap-
pears in all of these editions. Overall, the Recuyell was reprinted no fewer
than twelve times through the seventeenth century, and Shakespeare in
fact drew on it for his Troilus and Cressida.10 Bo±ey and Edwards bracket
their claim in qualifiers—chronology is of course not convenient, noth-
ing is clear cut, the large-scale shift they suggest is merely adumbrated—
but their argument draws a thick dividing line in the 1550s. As a result it
tends toward categorical divisions—the Renaissance Book—that obscure
the complex give and take between the two periods.
If we look closer at the last text Bo±ey and Edwards present as de-
marking a dividing line, Sir Richard Tottel’s edition of poetry entitled
the Songes and Sonnettes (STC 13862), we can understand the connections
within the symbolic economy of books more closely. The notion of the
printed poetry collection is itself forecast by the composite anthology.
Given this observation, Tottel’s originality lies less in the format of his
volume than in his overall positioning of the Songes and Sonnettes, in his
public assertion of vernacular poetry as capable of conveying literary au-
thority. “Our tong is able in that kynde to do as praise worthely as the
rest,” he writes in his preface, concluding by placing it in relationship to
his audience:
If parhappes some mislike the statelyness of style remoued from the

rude skil of common eares : I aske help of the learned to defende
theyr learned frendes, the authors of this woorke: And I exhort the
unlearned, by reading to learne to be more skilful, and to purge that
swinelike grossenesse that maketh the sweete marjorame not to smel
to their delight. (A.i.v)
e p i l o g u e 287
Tottel presents his text as naturally aristocratic—sweet marjoram that the

swinelike common reader might fail to appreciate. He makes plain, too,
that by reading his text the categories of learned and unlearned can be
overcome, that in exchange for the admission of swinelike grossness,
readers can purge themselves of their debased state, and “be more skil-
ful.” Yet Caxton also put courtiers such as Woodville into print and cer-
tainly elaborated a courtly context for literature. He too discusses the
linguistic registers of class, juxtaposing the self-important rustic “utter-
ing his communication and matters in such manners and terms” with the
noble poet John Skelton who speaks “not in rude and old language, but
in polished and ornate terms.” Tottel is, perhaps, somewhat more bla-
tant than Caxton, who, as I read him at least, is both more cautious and
conflicted about plainly delineating the possibilities for the kind of
wholesale social climbing that he himself performed. This is an impor-
tant modulation, yet we should not exaggerate its originality: fifteenth-
century writers are highly self-conscious about the fashioning of literary
persona, culture, and history in relation to national identity; to neglect
their output is to imagine the end of history.
As a particular way of situating the archival imagination in terms of
such scholarship of category, I would like to turn to an important text of
the medieval period, one that appears strangely late in the day: the mo-
rality play Everyman. By common consent Everyman is a centerpiece in
the medieval dramatic canon: the Norton Anthology of English Literature
includes it under the category of “Middle English Literature” as “the best
surviving example of that kind of medieval drama that is known as the
morality play,” and the popular Bedford Introduction to Drama identifies it
as one of the chief examples of the period.11 David Bevington dates the
play around 1495 in his authoritative Medieval Drama and weaves it into a
story of fourteenth-century literary production. “The morality play had
virtually no precedents in earlier church drama,” he writes. “It was essen-
tially a new genre for the stage in the late fourteenth century.”12 By dating
Everyman at 1495 but still identifying its generic allegiance firmly with
the Middle Ages, Bevington sidesteps the central problem of its late ap-
pearance. In what follows I do not intend to prove Everyman a modern
play. Rather I probe the implications of period to suggest that literary
history has held to this scholarship of category—a way of thinking mar-
ried to the closure of periods and insu¤cient to explain the complex rela-
tionship between the medieval and the modern, the past and the present,
the literary and the material. Such material forms demand an imaginative
engagement from their readers.
There are no manuscripts of Everyman. The text remains in four
sixteenth-century printed editions: two partial versions by the printer
Richard Pynson, and two complete texts by John Skot.13 The survival
of four distinct print runs lead the text’s first major editor, W. W. Greg,
to posit at least ten editions overall, suggesting—given a conservative
average print run of five hundred copies—some five thousand copies of
Everyman in circulation before 1530.14 The figure is astounding on two
counts: foremost, it confounds the notion that early printing was small
scale; second, it raises a question—what were five thousand readers doing
with a medieval morality play in the first third of the sixteenth century?
The problem with five thousand copies of Everyman and with 20 million
premodern books is one and the same—it suggests a thriving literary in-
dustry before the modern period. How can Everyman be simultaneously
medieval and an artifact of large-scale commerce?
One answer to this question is that it doesn’t really exist. This is
suggested most clearly by Joseph Dane and Rosemary Roberts, who have
taken particular issue with Greg’s ten editions of Everyman, following out
their initial skepticism at his figures with an elaborate statistical rhetoric.
Writing with some candor, they conclude:
What is also interesting (and rather unnerving to one of us, who

began this study believing that Greg had overestimated the number
of early Everyman editions) is that relaxing some of Greg’s unstated
restrictions produces in many cases larger estimates of numbers of
editions—precisely the point Greg seemed to be trying to make! . . .
Are we to imagine dozens of lost editions of Everyman?15
Dane and Roberts maneuver. They argue that the remaining four copies
may reflect “specific external factors” such as the whims of collectors and
of book stock, that partial editions are not evidence of whole books,
and that such fragments may simply be “trial editions, aborted editions,
and proof-sheets.”16 To the larger issue of volume, Dane would restrict
Febvre and Martin’s 20 million books to perhaps 8 million.17 Dane’s point
is undeniable: the count of 20 million is hypothetical and speculative; it
e p i l o g u e 289
superimposes a modern notion of the book as an object governed by a

title and bound by covers over a fundamentally more flexible notion of
the textual object. Dane is right: it is simply impossible to assert a hard
and fast count of titles as separate books for a culture that largely sold its
books unbound, that freely made anthologies out of separate editions,
that left few quantitative production records. In place of Edwards and
Bo±ey’s scholarship of category, then, Dane might o±er a criticism of skep-
ticism in which the material archive leads only to a greater awareness of
history’s opacity.
With Dane, I agree that any discussion of a monolithic “print
culture” is misguided; but I would also suggest that it is possible to listen
to what these textual goods have to say. I would like to sketch a reading
of this paradoxical object, Everyman, by beginning at its end, on the last
page of the last of the four remaining editions, Skot’s 1535 edition of
Everyman. Here we find Skot’s printer’s mark (fig. E.1). Skot worked as a
printer for Caxton’s successor, Wynkyn de Worde, who commonly out-
sourced jobs to smaller printers. Skot’s editions thus initially appear under
a variation of Caxton’s mark. With his 1522 History of Jacob (STC 14324),
however, Skot presents his own sign, a variant of the mark we see here.
R. B. McKerrow records the actual mark we see on Everyman as appear-
ing on Skot’s 1521 edition of Christine de Pizan’s Bodye of Polyce (STC
7270), but I have not been able to reproduce this, and instead find it first
in the 1525 edition of Mayde Emyl (STC 7681). In any case, all of Skot’s
marks hold to the same basic triangular layout of two figures flanking
a shield capped by a helmet.18 This motif was a popular one and seems
to begin in the 1480s with Johannes Veldener.19 The design spread with
the technology of printing through the Low Countries, and then to
Paris where, in the early sixteenth century, it appears in various forms
with leopards, satyrs, unicorns, greyhounds, horses, sheep, bears, and
even rabbits. So, Skot’s mark is part of a much larger English importation
of the design into England in the first quarter of the sixteenth century,
when it was used by a number of printers. Thus, on the most superficial
layer, the mark is part of a visual lexicon identified with European print-
ing and taken up by the English.
More specifically, Skot’s mark is a twofold appropriation from
Richard Pynson, the earlier printer of Everyman and rival to Wynkyn
de Worde. Pynson first used a similar design in his 1496 edition of Man-
Figure E.1. John Skot’s device. Everyman, D4v. Printed by John Skot, London,
1535 (STC 10606.5). By permission of the British Library.
deville’s Travels (fig. E.2; STC 17246). Note the layers of appropriation
here: if Skot’s edition of Everyman follows on Pynson’s early edition—it
is an appropriation from his catalogue—just so, Skot fashions for himself
a mark that appropriates Pynson’s authority as a successful printer and
stamps the literary product—Everyman—with this as a sign of his own
e p i l o g u e 291
Figure E.2. Pynson’s device. The Boke of John Maunduyle, kivv. Printed by Richard
Pynson, London, 1496 (STC 17246). British Library G.6713. By permission of the
British Library.
name. Skot has actually appropriated Pynson’s familiar weaving as well,

cleverly inserting his own initials on the main shield of his mark in a way
actually reminiscent of Pynson’s first device (fig. 1.11). Text and design:
Skot’s 1535 Everyman contains a twofold appropriation from Pynson. As
we have seen, Pynson is not innocent of such appropriation himself.20
Again, if any one aspect of early English printing is paradoxical, it is the

way the superficial roughness of these printer’s marks suggests a kind of
naiveté, which belies a greater sophistication about the symbolic econ-
omy of the book.
Turning to the beginning of the text, the opening woodcut of Skot’s
edition shows Death hailing Everyman (fig. E.3). One reading of this hail
might emphasize it as an endpoint, so that Everyman’s turn to death
marks the end of a period as much as the end of his life. This is of a piece
with the scholarly tradition that reads the fifteenth century as a waning of
the Middle Ages, a death that allows modernity to be reborn. Rather than
dividing medieval from early modern around the advent of print, I sug-
gest a much larger symbolic truth about textual culture overall: books
o±er their readers a material purchase on symbolic meaning. Books are
special products in this way; they bear the names and notes of their own-
ers, and are thus commodities that gravitate to personal record and indi-
vidual biography. The di±erence of print lies not simply in the insertion
of a mechanized process of reproduction, but in the way printers
inflected the symbolic economy toward their own uses. So, I argue that
the object of the book is self-reflective and imbricates the reader in its
reproduction of meaning. I read the individual volumes of Everyman
as branded with signs of print exchange through the printer’s mark, and
I interpret the play’s plot as telling Everyman’s process of self-reflection
on the nature of this exchange. For within the play, the allegorical per-
sonification of commodities—“Goodes”—lies around (he is too de-
bauched to rise) and reflects on what it is to be a commodity. In e±ect,
Everyman is a commodity about the nature of commodities. Given this, I
think it is possible to return to the plot of Everyman and listen to what it
can tell us about the literary commodity.
Every aspect of Everyman argues against Goodes as any sort of
repository of knowledge. God himself remarks disparagingly on the
value of material things in the very beginning of the play, “In worldey
ryches is all theyr mynde” (A.ii.), and Goodes would heartily agree: “For
my loue is contrary / to the loue euerlastynge” (B.ii.v), he tells Everyman.
But unlike the other allegorical characters within the play who ultimately
abandon Everyman—Fellowship, Cousin and Kindred, Beauty and all its
friends—Goodes knows himself well enough not to promise anything in
advance—“I cannot stere / in packes low I lye” (B.ii.) —or to claim some
e p i l o g u e 293
Figure E.3. Everyman, πa.i. Printed by John Skot, London, 1535 (STC 10606.5).
benefit beyond immediate satisfaction—“Where of I am gladde I must

nedes laugh / I cannot be sad” (B.iii). Even the more improving allegori-
cal characters—Good Deeds, Knowledge, Confession—are problematic
and over the course of the play are proved weak, negligent, and pedantic.
Goodes, however, is entirely honest, and his honesty comes from his self-
reflection: Goodes knows himself and what he tells Everyman is this: “I
am to bryttell I may not endure” (B.iiv). This, in essence, is his commen-
tary on the nature of commodities: the material artifact of the book does
not last, it is brittle and its pages fray.
What I suggest, then, is that the literary archive is not just our reck-
oning of the fragmentary materials that remain to us, but the texts’ in-
ternal commentary on themselves. For Everyman announces that goods
are brittle in form and content. The connection between these two axes
of meaning—the arbitrary physicality of texts, and their intellectual
commentary—is entirely imaginative but nevertheless striking: indeed, in
this way Everyman speaks powerfully about its own status, and to ignore
this speech and define the text’s sensibilities only by its physicality is to
read it only by parts. To hear what Goodes has to say we have to be will-
ing to read the imaginative connection between material objects and
intellectual content. Thus, I define the archival imagination as the rec-
ognition of the self-reflective nature vested in the textual archive.
Read more imaginatively, Everyman o±ers a theology of reckoning
for extracting the figural from the literal. It announces this at its very
opening, its title page telling us that the play is about how every “creature
to come and gyue a counte.” Within the play Everyman himself is called
“to a generall rekenynge” (A.ii), and God, reasoning out loud, tells him-
self, “Therefore I wyll in all the haste / Haue a rekenynge of euery
mannes persone” (A.iiv). Death subsequently commands of Everyman “a
rekenynge” (A.iiiv). The play in fact uses not only an economic language
but a particularly bookish economics at that: for Death tells Everyman,
“Therfore thy boke of counte w the thou brynge” (A.iiiv). Books figure
throughout Everyman. For example, Everyman laments that he is not
ready to add up his tally:
¶ Alas shall I haue no longer respyte eueryman

I may saye deth geueth no warnynge
To thynke on the it maketh my herte secke
e p i l o g u e 295
For all unredy is my boke of rekenynge

But .xii. yere and I myght haue a bydynge
My countynge boke I wolde make so clere
That my rekenynge I sholde not need to fere
(A.iv)
Books in Everyman are directly connected to mercantile practice, and this

is doubled over as a spiritual metaphor for the state of the self. Overtly,
the rhetoric is not exceptional. Eamon Du±y suggests the play is part of a
larger “bourgeoisification” of the liturgy: “Certainly the emergence of
the morality plays in the later fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries
points to the growth of a type of religious sensibility orientated to moral
and religious generalities, rather than to the narrative and festive sweep
of the Corpus Christi cycles,” but this too appeals to pre-existing cate-
gories to explain the text.21 Literature is reproductive; it participates in
the conditions necessary to reproduce itself. In this case it comes not late
to the bourgeois market economy but speaks to it, constructing a sym-
bolic pathway through the detritus of material fragments that constitute
and crowd out figural meaning. We may not know how many editions of
Everyman lay unbound in stacks of paper in booksellers’ stalls and on con-
sumers’ shelves between the years of 1515 and 1535, but we do know that
this culture recognized that these books existed in a context of spiritual
meaning, one alive to the tension of brittle goods and meaningful ac-
count. We know, too, that this culture—deem it not a print culture but
a textual culture—thought deeply about how objects construct a depth
beyond their material dimension, to become symbolically potent.
What Goodes has to say is that books are brittle but nevertheless
reflect on themselves. So, thousands of editions of Everyman have been
lost to history. Goodes is right: the rule is that we don’t know even know what
we have lost. Nevertheless, the chance survivals—the tattered indulgence,
the few copies of Everyman—insist upon self-reflection. So Goodes,
lying before us, announces that consumer products are everywhere in the
late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, saturating the culture with
textual material. This is confirmed by the brittle scraps we know: as I
have discussed, Mary Erler counts a quarter million books of hours pub-
lished between 1485 and 1530, enough in English to equip one out of
every thirty-five Londoners; Mary Kay Duggan estimates that su¤cient
liturgical books were printed by 1500 to outfit each of the 3.3 million re-
ligious men and women throughout Europe with a brand new book and a
half.22 None of these works originates with print—indeed they are the
staples of medieval religion—but they become positioned as commodities
in the fifteenth century, and this form inflects them according to a new
register. So I suggest that Everyman is a commodity about the perils of
living in this context, a product from a world immersed in the consump-
tion of products. “I am a Bible,” announces the preface to Johann Amer-
bachs’s 1479 edition, continuing, “thoroughly corrected from Greek and
Hebrew sources, and I am also beautiful. I call upon the gods and the stars
as my witnesses: There is no printed Bible like me in the whole world.”23
So, too, Goodes speaks of the culture of the consumer, of a culture over-
whelmed by commodities but nevertheless imagining itself through
them, a culture that thought deeply about how objects construct a depth
beyond their material dimension, to become symbolically potent. This
culture is not distinct from the Middle Ages, rather it is the medieval
dream of modernity made real.
Is Everyman a medieval play? Is the fifteenth century part of the

Middle Ages? I have no clear answers to these dilemmas. I do know that
goods are brittle and they do not endure. To hear what these goods have
to say we have to be willing to read the imaginative connection between
material objects and intellectual content, to be willing to entertain a liter-
ary history of continuity and ambivalence, one of a dynamic circularity in
which medieval thinking remains available—paradoxically living because
it is dead—through the form of the book. So I argue that the distance be-
tween Everyman as fourteenth-century morality play and Everyman as
print commodity, between the medieval and the modern, is not explained
by a scholarship of category but by the reader’s return to the text and not
to the work. For few critics would argue that the first print edition of
Everyman represents the original work; hence, the texts’ originality is less
interesting than their material appearance as brittle goods that did en-
dure. The problem with dealing with such texts is that they seem un-
moored, and reading them situates us as attempting to see the fullness of
literature from its brittle traces. But these texts are art objects in them-
selves. This is particularly clear in dealing with medieval manuscripts, in
e p i l o g u e 297
which the page is a material register of historical practices far di±erent

from our own, but I believe the insight is true for printed books as well.
As such, I find that the text is a self-reflective vehicle for the work, one in
which material otherness is inseparable from its own interpretation. In
this formulation, I suggest that the text is not simply two-dimensional,
rather it is an archive containing both a material nature and the codes nec-
essary to interpret it. As such, each text exists as both form and content,
and needs to be read not according to a category harkening back to some
lost moment of origins but by the terms through which it circulates. This
process of reading, then, I term the archival imagination.
The fundamental di¤culty of Caxton’s legacy is that it questions
the nature of originality. Caxton reproduces past to produce the pres-
ent. This occurs on the level of text—the b-group manuscript edition of
Chaucer reproduced in print becomes an original witness to the text—
and of history: the culture of the Middle Ages is reproduced as the mod-
ern. To accommodate this di¤culty, readings of Caxton have accepted
unresolved oppositions—revolution or gradual change, a break from the
past into technology or a continuation of manuscript practices, Caxton as
a representative man or English hero, a bespoke industry that is also capi-
talist, and so forth—and merely reiterate established categories or are
unable to draw any observation from literature at all. Rather than such a
history of oppositions, Symbolic Caxton proposes a literary history of dy-
namic circularity in which medieval thinking remains available through
the form of the book. The relationship between the construction of
books and of the subject holds true for the Middle Ages and modernity
alike. For the unitary subject, let alone the literary object, is an imaginary
construction. Goods are brittle, but in some part they do endure, and it
is in this endurance that they call out to our imagination.
Kuskin Notes 11/15/07 9:38 AM Page 299
Notes
Introduction
1. Febvre and Martin, The Coming of the Book, 248; Hellinga and Trapp, “In-
troduction,” 17. On Febvre and Martin’s statistical analysis, see Dane, The Myth of
Print Culture, 51.
2. For the development of textual production see Blayney, The Stationer’s
Company, and four pieces by C. Paul Christianson: “The Rise of London’s Book
Trade,” Directory, “Evidence,” and “Community.” For Arundel’s Constitutions in
relation to literary production, see Nicholas Watson, “Censorship.” For the de-
velopment of English bureaucratic writing, see two articles by John H. Fisher,
“Language Policy” and “Standard Written English,” as well as Malcolm Richard-
son, “Chancery English.” For Chaucer’s status as an author in the fifteenth cen-
tury, see Seth Lerer, Chaucer and His Readers, and Ralph Hanna, Pursuing History.
3. See, for example, the historical accounts of canon construction from
René Wellek’s The Rise of English Literary History through John Guillory’s Poetic
Authority, Kevin Pask’s The Emergence of the English Author, and Jonathan Brody
Kramnick’s Making the English Canon: Print-Capitalism and the Cultural Past,
1700–1770 ( New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998). For a broader discus-
sion, more accurate for the fifteenth century, see Trevor Ross, The Making of the
English Literary Canon: From the Middle Ages to the Late Eighteenth Century ( Mon-
treal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1998). Most recently, consider Julia
Crick and Alexandra Walsham’s remarks in their introduction to The Uses of Script
and Print, 1300–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), “Script,
Print, and History,” where they remark, “Despite—even, perhaps, because of—
the vast body of scholarship devoted to Caxton, it is not always recognised that
early English print culture was relatively modest in scope, held back by a variety
of structural and economic barriers” (6).
4. For the argument that as Chaucer’s intellectual community passed away
the emerging fifteenth-century writers and readers were less interested in com-
plexity, see Strohm, “The Narrowing of the ‘Chaucer Tradition.’” For an argu-
ment for the blanket repressive atmosphere of the century, see A. C. Spearing’s
discussion of “the more restricted and repressive intellectual climate in which
[Chaucer’s] successors lived,” in Medieval to Renaissance, 89, and Paul Strohm’s
299
discussion of the “recipe for inevitable cognitive/aesthetic breakdown,” inherent

in Thomas Hoccleve and John Lydgate’s work, in England’s Empty Throne, 191. For
the Church apparatus, see Watson, “Censorship,” where he argues, “It was evi-
dently an inadvertent side e±ect of the Constitutions to help precipitate this cre-
ation of the canon of theological writing by simply sealing it up, making it so hard
for later writers to contribute further to this literature that it is fair to say that
original theological writing in English was, for a century, almost extinct” (835).
5. See, for example, Stephen Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self-Fashioning, Rich-
ard Helgerson’s Self-Crowned Laureates, A. F. Marotti’s Manuscript, Print, and the
English Renaissance Lyric, and David Lee Miller’s The Poem’s Two Bodies.
6. The notion that fifteenth-century printing is fundamentally transitional
is embedded in the very term by which it is recognized: the incunable. As a result,
discussion of the way early printing structures capitalism, canon construction,
and nationalism is often deferred to the sixteenth century. The two major at-
tempts to define print culture both overlook the fifteenth century almost com-
pletely. In The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, Elizabeth L. Eisenstein passes
over the fifteenth century swiftly, writing, “To account for the utilization of
moveable type . . . one must investigate the prior expansion of a literate laity and
a manuscript book-trade, account for the accumulation of capital required for in-
vestment in early plants, or try to explain why printing industries expanded so
rapidly in Western Europe during the late fifteenth century and why the inven-
tion of moveable type did not have similar consequences in the Far East” (31–32).
After posing such fascinating questions, Eisenstein simply places them aside—
“I am skipping over the perfection of a new process” (44)—because her interest
lies in modernity and its development of humanism.
In turn, Adrian Johns, in The Nature of the Book, completely denies not only
Eisenstein’s argument but also her topic, writing:
To put it brutally . . . Eisenstein’s print culture does not exist. . . . We may
adopt the principle that fixity exists only inasmuch as it is recognized and
acted upon by people — and not otherwise. The consequence of this change
in perspective is that print culture itself is immediately laid open to analysis.
It becomes a result of manifold representations, practices and conflicts, rather
than just the monolithic cause with which we are often presented. (19–20).
Johns strikes me as correct in calling into question any kind of monolithic notion
of print culture (whether that is Eisenstein’s point is another matter), but in The
Nature of the Book, this entails ignoring the early history of the book entirely. For
Johns, Caxton is an object of study only through modern writings.
Arguments more specifically linked to the history of technology are even
less careful about the material culture of the premodern period, even as they ap-
peal to the development of movable type for some notion of a historical dividing
line. For example, Benedict Anderson argues in Imagined Communities for a naive
fifteenth century, unaware of its own practices: “It remains only to emphasize
300 n o t e s t o p a g e 4
that in their origins, the fixing of print-languages and the di±erentiation of status
between them were largely unselfconscious processes resulting from the explo-
sive interaction between capitalism, technology and human linguistic diversity”
(45). More broadly, this bias is most evident in The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making
of Typographic Man, where, after naming his entire conceit after a fifteenth-
century thinker, Marshall McLuhan simply discounts the period as a whole: “In
1500 nobody knew how to market or distribute the mass-produced printed book.
It was handled in the old manuscript channels. And the manuscript, like any other
handicraft produce, was sold in the way in which new now handle ‘old masters.’
That is, the manuscript market was mainly a second-hand market” (1966; repr.,
Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), 130. I pursue this argument in more
depth in my introduction to Caxton’s Trace, 1–7.
7. For example, David Wallace’s Cambridge History of Medieval English Lit-
erature extends a line of scholarship coming from Spearing’s Medieval to Renais-
sance and Derek Pearsall’s John Lydgate, which presents the fifteenth century as a
“medievalization” of Chaucer’s legacy. Within this perspective a few studies, such
as Seth Lerer’s Courtly Letters in the Age of Henry VIII: Literary Culture and the Arts
of Deceit (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) and the essays collected
by Theresa M. Krier in Refiguring Chaucer in the Renaissance (Gainesville: Univer-
sity Press of Florida, 1998), subtly trace the development of Chaucer’s poetry
into the early modern period. In each case, however, the transition between the
medieval and modern remains a story about Chaucer; Hoccleve, Lydgate, Malory,
and Caxton disappear into the caesura between periods. The second overall ap-
proach is best articulated in James Simpson’s Oxford English Literary History.
Here, the fifteenth century is acknowledged as complex but nevertheless limited
in its reach, isolated to its own fascinatingly heterogeneous terms. For a more
subtle view of the intertwined relationship between manuscript and print, see
David McKitterick, Print, Manuscript and the Search for Order, 1450–1830 (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
8. The arguments for a narrowing of fifteenth-century literary culture
largely come down to the assessment that fifteenth-century writers simply didn’t
appreciate literary complexity. This is perhaps put most baldly by Paul Strohm
when he writes, “I am much attracted to this multivoiced Chaucer, who interests
himself in the perspectives of his characters, who respects their voices, who mul-
tiplies contradiction by creating for himself and his characters double-voiced or
even polyphonic utterance . . . I would feel more steady in my attraction [to
fifteenth-century writers] if I could find an historical basis in the contemporary
response to Chaucer’s texts,” in “Writers and Readers of Chaucer” (91); and by
Derek Pearsall, who finds in Lydgate a return to pre-Chaucerian writing: “The
dislocation of human and historical reality is complete and the attitude to the
story rather like that of biblical glossators to variant readings—it was di¤cult to
choose the right one, but it didn’t matter, because all had the same relation to uni-
versal truth” ( John Lydgate, 130).
n o t e s t o p a g e 4 301
Such a view is not limited to the study of English literature. For example, the
opening of the latest translation of Johan Huizinga’s monumental study of the
late Middle Ages emphasizes a childlike fifteenth century:
When the world was half a thousand years younger all events had much
sharper outlines than now. The distance between sadness and joy, between
good and bad fortune, seemed to be much greater than for us; every experi-
ence had that degree of directness and absoluteness that joy and sadness still
have in the mind of a child. (The Autumn of the Middle Ages, translation by
Rodney J. Payton and Ulrich Mammitzsch [Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1996], 1)
It is not too much to say that this book has shaped the perspective of generations
of readers, a legacy the new translation hopes to continue. The editors of this
translation point out that the older translation by Fritz Hopman and authorized
by Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages, in fact toned down the emotional na-
ture overall (xiv). So it is with the “Age of Brass” in general: defined as a period of
waning it is marginal to history, interesting only as it gives unity to the Middle
Ages and reveals modernity as self-generative. This point is put eloquently by
Lee Patterson in “On the Margin: Postmodernism, Ironic History, and Medieval
Studies”:
In fact, of course, these critics are not interested in historical change at all.
What they want to establish is the modernity of their enterprise, the claim
that in their chosen texts they descry the present condition in its initial, es-
sential form. And to that end the Middle Ages serves as a premodernity, the
other that must be rejected for the modern self to be and know itself. That
medieval texts do not figure in these discussions is precisely the point: the
Middle Ages is not a subject for discussion but the rejected object, not a pre-
history whose shape can be described but the history—historicity itself—
that modernity must reject in order to be itself. (Speculum 65 [1990]: 99)
Symbolic Caxton argues that such an approach has failed to encounter the com-
plexity of the late Middle Ages.
9. Reported by Dinitia Smith, in “Ideas,” New York Times, January 27, 2001.
The argument is reviewed in detail by Blaise Agüera y Arcas in “Temporary Ma-
trices and Elemental Punches in Gutenberg’s DK Type,” in Jensen, Incunabula,
1–12.
10. Translated from Needham’s “Johannes Gutenberg et l’invention de l’im-
primerie en Europe,” in Les trios revolutions du livre, ed. Françoise Demange and
Alain Mercier (Paris: CNAM, 2002):
Mais les premiers caractères étaient di±erénts . . . Nous sommes donc
amenés à en conclure que ces premiers caractères européens ne dérivaient
pas de matrices métalliques stables marquées au poinçon. Ils étaient réalisés
302 n o t e s t o p a g e 6
à l’aide d’un autre procédé ou les contours d’une letter étaient reconstitutés
dans une matière malléable come le sable fin. (184)
11. Ibid.
12. Blades, The Life and Typography of William Caxton, 2:xxiv and xxv. Need-
ham himself points out that the sand hypothesis was suggested as early as 1853 by
Auguste Bernard, “Johannes Gutenberg et l’invention de l’imprimerie en Eu-
rope,” 185.
13. This ambiguity is clearly lost by the Caxton Quincentenary Exhibition
at the British Library in 1976. For example, two scrupulous bibliographers, Nico-
las Barker and George D. Painter both assume that Gutenberg’s and Caxton’s
type is produced in punch-cast; see Barker, “Caxton’s Typography,” 118–19, and
Painter, William Caxton, 53.
14. See my introduction to Caxton’s Trace, 1–7.
15. Stephen Pratt, “The Myth of Identical Types: A Study of Printing Vari-
ations from Handcast Gutenberg Type,” Journal of the Printing Historical Society
n.s. 6 (2003): 15, 17.
16. This point is nicely put by Alexandra Gillespie in her “Introduction:
Bibliography and Early Tudor Texts,” Huntington Library Quarterly 67:2 (2004):
157–71.
17. See Needham, “The Customs Rolls,” and Blayney, The Stationers’ Com-
pany.
18. See Mary C. Erler, “Devotional Literature,” Kate Harris, “Evidence for
Ownership,” and Cristina Dondi, “Books of Hours: The Development of the
Texts in Printed Form,” in Jensen, Incunabula, 53–70.
19. The standard sources for dating Caxton’s publications, Lotte Hellinga’s
Caxton in Focus and Paul Needham’s The Printer and the Pardoner, disagree as to
where this book was produced; however, both assign it a very early date (compare
Hellinga, 59–61 and 83, to Needham, 84).
20. Erler, “Devotional Literature,” 500, 496; and David Rogers, “Johann
Hamman at Venice: A Survey of His Career. With a Note on the Sarum ‘Horae’
of 1494,” in Essays in Honour of Victor Scholderer , ed. Dennis E. Rhodes ( Mainz:
Karl Pressler, 1970), 366 n. 1. More broadly, Mary Kay Duggan records that
“about half a million liturgical books were printed by 1501,” in “Reading Liturgi-
cal Books,” and argues that in Europe, “su¤cient liturgical incunabula were
printed for each of the 3.3 million [clerics] to own on average 1.5 new liturgical
books” (72).
21. Erler, “Devotional Literature,” 506.
22. Watson, “Censorship,” 851–52 and 857–59.
23. Ibid., 835.
24. See Eamon Du±y, The Stripping of the Altars, 80.
25. The standard narrative of fifteenth-century printing is told in E. Gor-
don Du±’s The Printers, Stationers, and Bookbinders, H. S. Bennett’s English Books &
n o t e s t o p a g e s 7 – 12 303
Readers, and Graham Pollard’s “The English Market.” See also, A. S. G. Edwards
and Carol M. Meale’s “Marketing,” and Lotte Hellinga’s essay on printing in The
Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, as well as three useful articles by N. F.
Blake, “Wynkyn de Worde: The Early Years,” “Wynkyn de Worde: The Later
Years,” and “The Spread of Printing.” Du±’s Fifteenth Century Books remains the
unsurpassed desk reference.
26. In A Theory of Literary Production, Pierre Macherey o±ers a useful
methodological approach:
This must be taken in the plainest sense: the book does not produce its readers
by some mysterious power; the conditions that determine the production of
the book also determine the forms of its communication. These two
modifications are simultaneous and reciprocal. This question would cer-
tainly be worth a specific theoretical study, the guiding principle for which is
to be found in Marx’s statement “Not only the object of consumption but
also the mode of consumption is produced, not only in an objective way but
also subjectively.” ( Translation by Geo±rey Wall [1978; repr., London and
New York: Routledge, 1992], 70)
27. The main biographies are Painter’s William Caxton and Norman F.
Blake’s Caxton and His World, which has been significantly superseded by Blake’s
more recent biography of Caxton, Authors of the Middle Ages. Louise Gill has
pointed out that Caxton was a Stapler as well as a Mercer in “William Caxton and
the Rebellion of 1483,” which calls into question one of the guiding assumptions
of these biographies; see, too, Richard R. Gri¤th’s sustained discussion of the
implications of Caxton’s role as a Stapler and Mercer in “The Early Years of
William Caxton.”
28. Painter, William Caxton, 78.
29. See Painter’s discussion of Caxton’s will in William Caxton, 190, and the
records remaining from Richard Pynson’s lawsuits, recorded by Plomer, in “Pyn-
son’s Dealings.”
30. See my “Onely imagined,” in Caxton’s Trace.
31. See, for example, Needham’s “Appendix D: Checklist of Caxton’s Print-
ing,” in The Printer and the Pardoner.
32. Counted by A. S. G. Edwards in “Continental Influences,” 245. Edwards
and Meale note that over the courses of their careers “De Worde seems to have
produced about eight hundred and fifty separate surviving editions, and Pynson
about six hundred,” in “Marketing,” 98 n. 13. Lotte Hellinga reviews de Worde’s
career and revises the dating of his texts in “Tradition and Renewal.”
33. Robert Costomiris, “Sharing Chaucer’s Authority,” 1.
34. The impetus to print volume is accepted as standard practice: see Phillip
Gaskell, A New Introduction to Bibliography, 161, and David R. Carlson, “A Theory
of the Early English Printing Firm,” in Caxton’s Trace. For the sense of volume in
the fifteenth-century paper trade, see Paul Needham, “Res papirea: Sizes and
304 n o t e s t o p a g e s 13 – 18
Formats of the Late Medieval Book,” in Rationalisierung der Buchherstellung im

Mittelalter und in der frühen Neuzeit, ed. Peter Rück ( Marburg an der Lahn: Insti-
tut für historische Hilfswissenschaften, 1994), where he refers to the fifteenth
century as “the Age of the Paper Book,” continuing, “When this ‘triumph of
paper’ is joined with typography, and with the humanist hand transmuted into
types, we find brought together the constituent elements defining an era of book
culture that is still with us” (124).
35. W. J. B. Crotch points out that the prologues to the first edition of The
Game and Play of the Chess and the Golden Legend are both based on prologues by
Jean de Vignay, while the Mirrour of the World and the Ordre of Chyualry are also
based on the French originals; see The Prologues and Epilogues, 10, 50, 70, and 80.
Further, in “Versions by Skelton, Caxton and Berners of a Prologue by Diodorus
Siculus,” Samuel K. Workman reports that the first 1150 lines of Caxton’s pro-
logue to the Polychronicon are based on a version of the preface to Diodorus Sicu-
lus’s Bibliotheca historica. In Prose, Blake points out that Caxton’s prologue to the
Doctrinal of Sapience is also based on his original (156). Finally, Caxton’s writing
on Chaucer is all loosely based on Lydgate; see Blake’s “Lydgate and Caxton.”
Noting this, critics are routinely discouraged with Caxton as a thinker. See, for
example, J. A. W. Bennett’s discussion of Caxton’s Methamorphose in the preface to
Kathleen Scott’s The Caxton Master, xii.
36. Scanlon, Narrative, Authority, and Power, 39–40.
37. On cultural capital, see two useful articles by Pierre Bourdieu, “The
Forms of Capital,” trans. Richard Nice, in Handbook of Theory and Research for the
Sociology of Education, ed. John G. Richardson ( New York: Greenwood Press,
1986), 241–58, and “The Production of Belief: Contribution to an Economy of
Symbolic Goods,” trans. Richard Nice, Media, Culture and Society 2:3 (1980):
261–93. If we look to material production in the Middle Ages, we see that it is
quite complex. For instance, in “The Woollen Industry,” E. M. Carus-Wilson
writes, “In all these towns the structure of the industry was highly capitalistic and
essentially similar to that of Flanders. The Italian lanaiuolo, like the English
draper and the Flemish drapier, was an entrepreneur, supplying capital and skilled
direction, employing anything from a few only to many hundreds of craftsmen,
and joining together with his fellow lanaiuoli in the Arte della Lana which con-
trolled the production of the cloth as closely as did the merchant gilds of the
North [394] . . . The structure of the ‘great industry’ in England at the close of the
Middle Ages was inevitably capitalist, as that of the thirteenth century had been”
(The Cambridge Economic History of Europe, vol. 2: Trade and Industry in the Middle
Ages, ed. M. Postan and E. E. Rich [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1952], 421). More recently, Mark Addison Amos writes, “The Mercers and the
Merchant Adventurers . . . were both entrepreneurial and capitalist—that is, they
were organized in ways that tended to separate control of capital from the regu-
lar activities of the labor force” (“Violent Hierarchies: Disciplining Women and
Merchant Capitalists in The Book of the Knyght of the Towre,” in Kuskin, Caxton’s
n o t e s t o p a g e 19 305
Trace [73]). For a particularly interesting discussion of the critical history and a
useful bibliography, see Keith Tribe, Genealogies of Capitalism (Atlantic High-
lands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1981).
38. A Rationale for Textual Criticism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylva-
nia Press, 1989), 18–19, 32.
39. Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” 127–86.
Chapter One. Affixing Value
1. The history of Caxton studies as a field has always drawn from biogra-
phy and bibliography. It separated itself from more general bibliographical sur-
veys of early English printing in the middle of the nineteenth century with
Charles Knight’s The Old Printer and the Modern Press (London: W. Clowes and
Sons, 1854). Dedicated to Charles Dickens, Knight’s study is in part a biography
of Caxton, and in part a fiction, breaking into a first-person account of Wynkyn
de Worde’s discussion with Richard Pynson, William de Machlinia, and John
Lettou of how to direct the press after Caxton’s death (153–65). Caxton studies
begin more bibliographically, if not more earnestly, with William Blades’s two-
volume The Life and Typography of William Caxton: England’s First Printer. Blades
condensed this work into a single octavo volume for the 1877 Caxton celebration,
The Biography and Typography of William Caxton: England’s First Printer (London:
Trübner, 1877), revised for the second edition in 1882 ( New York: Scribner and
Welford, 1882). Though Blades’s work brought a new seriousness to Caxton stud-
ies —followed through by works rich in evidence such as E. Gordon Du± ’s
William Caxton (1905; repr., New York: Burt Franklin, 1970) and W. J. B. Crotch,
The Prologues and Epilogues of William Caxton—the urge to know Caxton as an in-
dividual and a hero, and to some extent to identify with him, remains a strong
current in Blades’s work:
As England’s Prototypographer a never-dying interest will always surround
him. But although nowhere, unless as a printer, does he shine pre-eminent;
although we cannot attribute to him those rare mental powers which can
grasp the hidden laws of nature, nor the still more rare genius which creates
for all time; we can claim for him a character which attracted the love and re-
spect of his associates—a character on which history has chronicled no stain,
and which, through a long period of civil war, while surrounded in Church
and State by the worse forms of cruelty, hypocrisy, and injustice, retained to
the last its native simplicity and truthfulness. ( I. 82)
The resulting stories of Caxton are of heroism and of human character. Henry R.
Plomer reflects on this nicely in William Caxton (1424–1491), writing, “It seems
to me that as a roadmaker William Caxton and his work make a strong appeal to
the imagination” ([1925; repr., New York: Ben Franklin, 1968], 11), and George
306 n o t e s t o p a g e s 25 – 29
Parker Winship begins his William Caxton & His Work (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1937), “The desire for better acquaintance with William Caxton
goes back to my junior year at college” (vii). At times, this appears as an objective
assessment, such as when Nellie Slayton Aurner purports to recognize in Caxton
“modesty, simplicity, and almost childlike absence of a±ectation,” in Caxton, Mir-
rour of Fifteenth-Century Letters: A Study of the Literature of the First English Press
([ Boston: Houghton Mi¬in, 1926], 205), but it is nevertheless a constant theme.
The two current biographies of William Caxton, N. F. Blake’s Caxton and
His World and George D. Painter’s William Caxton, follow this model as well.
Blake’s and Painter’s biographies take part in a revival of interest in Caxton at the
five-hundred-year anniversary, and these, too, become intimate with Caxton:
Painter presents himself as the one reader in history who knows him well enough
to recognize his humor (cf. 63, 88 n. 2, 161); in turn, Blake is his apologist: “Pos-
sibly the history of the English language and of English literature would have
been di±erent if our first printer had belonged to a di±erent class of society; but
that is mere speculation. Caxton should not be blamed for being the person he
was” (215).
In A Critique of Modern Textual Condition, Jerome McGann argues that “a
hypnotic fascination with the isolated author has served to foster an overdeter-
mined concept of authorship, but (reciprocally) an underdetermined concept of
literary work” ([1985; repr., Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992],
122). To borrow McGann’s terms, Caxton studies have created an overdetermined
reading of his character, but the symbolic nature of Caxton’s books—their rela-
tionship to literary authority, the social work they perform for fifteenth-century
culture—remains underdetermined, indeed ignored.
Blake’s most recent biography, William Caxton (published separately and
anthologized as Authors of the Middle Ages), modulates many of his earlier views,
and attributes to Caxton a much greater control over his press: “We should re-
member that Caxton had the financial muscle to adapt his plans to circumstances
as they arose; in this respect he was quite di±erent from most other printer-
publishers of the time” (22). This newer work o±ers an exceptional overview of
the documents and secondary sources relating to Caxton in its bibliography
(51–68), to which should be added three more recent discoveries: Gill, “William
Caxton and the Rebellion of 1483”; F. J. Bakker and J. Gerritsen, “Collecting
Ships from Holland and Zeeland: A Caxton Letter Discovered,” The Library ser.
5, 1 (2004): 3–11; and R. N. Swanson, “Caxton’s Indulgence for Rhodes,
1480–81,” The Library ser. v, 2 (2004): 195–201.
Two additional research tools useful to the study of Caxton are Blake,
William Caxton: A Bibliographical Guide, and Kiyokazu Mizobata, A Concordance to
Caxton’s Own Prose ( Tokyo: Shohakusha, 1990).
2. Robert Large is recorded as paying a 4s. fee for Caxton’s apprentice-
ship in the Wardens’ Account Book of the Mercers’ Company in 1437–38 and in
1441 is recorded as leaving Caxton twenty marks, and Blake uses these dates to
n o t e s t o p a g e 29 307
estimate Caxton’s age in “Some Observations on William Caxton and the Mer-
cers’ Company,” Book Collector 15 (1966): 283–95. The Bruges archives of January
2, 1450, record Caxton standing surety for a Stapler, John Granton, and Caxton
is recorded in such business in London and Bruges through to 1455. The next
archival record concerning Caxton is a suit between him and Pieter Willems in
Middelburg dated July 16, 1462; however, this period can be substantially filled in
if Caxton’s biography is expanded to include his role as a Stapler. For Caxton’s ac-
tivities as a Mercer in general see Anne F. Sutton, “Caxton Was a Mercer.”
3. The argument for Caxton’s exile appears throughout the major writing
on Caxton: Crotch suggests a “protective exile” (The Prologues and Epilogues, lxxxv);
Painter discusses Caxton’s “fall” and “broken career” (William Caxton, 43–44);
Lotte Hellinga begins her definitive essay on printing with Caxton’s “exile” in The
Cambridge History of the Book, 65; and Janet Backhouse, Mirjam Foot, John Barr,
and Nicolas Barker endorse it in their guide to the Caxton celebration of
1976/77, William Caxton: An Exhibition, 10. As Blake remarks in his more recent
biography, “This view has little to commend it” (Authors of the Middle Ages, 18).
4. For the sweeping attribution of Caxton’s portfolio to Woodville, see
Blake, Caxton and His World, 79–101, and “Investigations into the Prologues and
Epilogues by William Caxton,” BJRL 49 (1967): 17–46; Hilton Kelliher, “The
Early History of the Malory Manuscript”; Jennifer Goodman, “Malory and Cax-
ton’s Chivalric Series,” and Malory and William Caxton’s Prose Romances of 1485;
and Louise Gill, “William Caxton and the Rebellion of 1483.”
5. For this language see Painter (William Caxton, 152) and Gill (“William
Caxton and the Rebellion of 1483,” 114), respectively. Of course, 1483–86 is ar-
guably Caxton’s most productive period, and it is during this time that he prints
his second edition of the Canterbury Tales, Le Morte D’Arthur, the Golden Legend,
and the Polychronicon.
6. For useful discussion of the notion of an insular romantic England, see
Patricia Clare Ingham, Sovereign Fantasies (Philadelphia: University of Pennsyl-
vania Press, 2001), particularly the introduction, 1–17.
7. Mirrour of the World (STC 24762), a4v.
8. “Caxton in the Nineteenth Century,” in Kuskin, Caxton’s Trace, 330–31.
9. Polychronicon (STC 13438), a1.
10. Reported in Dalya Alberge, “Chaucer Fetches £4.6m,” The Times, July 9,
1998, 3. Blades counts nine copies known, including the Earl of Dysart’s copy, a
fragment (The Life and Typography, 2:46). Seymour de Ricci counts eleven known
copies, including Dysart (A Census of Caxtons [1909; repr., Mansfield Center,
Conn.: Martino Publishing, 2000], 25), and another nineteen untraced copies and
fragments. Robert J. D. Harding provides an updated list in The Wormsley Li-
brary: A Personal Selection by Sir Paul Getty, KBE, ed. George H. Fletcher (Lon-
don: Maggs Brothers, in cooperation with the Pierpont Morgan Library, 1999),
47, and excluding the Dysart, counts only ten. The Getty copy (Blades no. 6, de
Ricci no. 4) was owned by John Ratcli±e, and sold by Christie’s on April 3, 1776,
308 n o t e s t o p a g e s 29 – 31
for £6 to Walter Shropshire for Sir Charles Watson-Wentworth, Marquess of

Rockingham. It passed by inheritance through William Wentworth-Fitzwilliam
and William Charles de Meuron Wentworth-Fitzwilliam to Olive, Countess
Fitzwilliam, until it came to auction at Christie’s.
11. Paul Needham dates the first folio edition of the Canterbury Tales as
1477; see his “Appendix D: Checklist of Caxton’s Printing,” in The Printer and the
Pardoner, which revises the chronology of Caxton’s publications based on paper
stock evidence. Lotte Hellinga suggests between May 24, and December 13, 1476
(Caxton in Focus, 83). The Wormsley catalogue lists the edition as 1476/77. The
notion of Caxton’s Chaucer as the first English book is not new: Joseph Ames
suggests such a dating in his 1749 study of English printing, Typographical Antiq-
uities: Being an Historical Account of Printing in England with Some Memoirs of Our
Ancient Printers, and A Register of the Books Printed by Them, from the Year MCCC-
CLXXI to the Year MDC. With an Appendix Concerning Printing in Scotland and Ire-
land to the Same Time (London: W. Faden, 1749), 54 n.a.
12. De Ricci, English Collectors of Books and Manuscripts (1530–1930) (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1930), 69. On the Marquis of Blandford’s
winning bid for the Valdarfer Boccaccio, see David Matthews, The Making of
Middle English, 1756–1910 ( Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999),
chapter 4, especially pp. 85–88; William Younger Fletcher, English Book Collectors
(London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner and Co., 1902), 262; Edward Edwards,
Libraries and Founders of Libraries (London: Trübner, 1864), 406–7; and, more re-
cently, Philip Connell, “Bibliomania: Book Collecting, Cultural Politics, and the
Rise of Literary Heritage in Romantic Britain,” Representations 71 (2000): 24–47.
The sale price is recorded as £2,740 in Anthony Lister’s “George John, 2nd Earl
Spencer and his ‘Librarian,’ Thomas Frognall Dibdin,” in Bibliophily, ed. Robin
Myers and Michael Harris (Cambridge: Chadwyck-Healey, 1986), 90–117; I have
not been able to duplicate his figure in another source. De Ricci records the total
sale of the library at £23,341 (English Collectors, 72). E. Gordon Du± records the
Duke of Devonshire as buying Elizabeth of York’s copy of the Recuyell for £1,060
10s. at this same sale (William Caxton [1905; repr., New York: Burt Franklin,
1970], 28). This copy, now at the Huntington, contains the famous Flemish cop-
perplate engraving of Caxton presenting his book to Margaret of York (see de
Ricci, Census, 5). In his 1909 A Census of Caxtons, de Ricci provides a useful ap-
pendix of private libraries dispersed at auction and, too, discusses the remarkable
growth in Caxton prices from the Roxburghe sale, writing, “Whereas, in 1812 a
thousand guineas was deemed a ridiculous price for the ‘Recuyell,’ we have seen
since 1880 no fewer than six Caxtons, if I am right in my reckoning, fetch over
£1,800 in the auction-room, the highest price yet reached being the £2,225 paid
by Mr. Pierpont Morgan for the Bedford ‘Ryall Book’” (v). It is generally agreed
that the 1830s marked a change in the terms of bibliomania, with increasingly
high prices edging the private virtuoso out of the market. Book prices continued
to rise despite the so-called crash of 1826.
n o t e s t o p a g e 32 309
On bibliomania in general, see especially Seth Lerer, “Caxton in the Nine-

teenth Century,” in Caxton’s Trace, and Marvin J. Taylor, “The Anatomy of Bib-
liography: Book Collecting, Bibliography and Male Homosocial Discourse,”
Textual Practices 14 (2000): 457–77. See also Arnold Hunt, “Bibliotheca Heberi-
ana,” in Antiquaries, Book Collectors and the Circles of Learning, ed. Robin Myers
and Michael Harris ( Winchester: St. Paul’s Bibliographies, 1996), 98; Fletcher,
English Book Collectors, x; and John Suterland, “The British Book Trade and the
Crash of 1826,” The Library ser. vi, 9 (1978): 148–61. For the development of the
book auction from 1676 in individual libraries, in co±eehouses in the early eigh-
teenth century, and, by midcentury, to private auction rooms, see Frank Herr-
mann, “The Emergence of the Book Auctioneer as a Professional,” in Property of
a Gentleman: The Formation, Organisation and Dispersal of the Private Library,
1620–1920, ed. Robin Myers and Michael Harris ( Winchester: St. Paul’s Bibli-
ographies, 1991), 1–15.
13. Dibdin’s four-volume edition is the second revision of Joseph Ames’s
1749 Typographical Antiquities, following William Herbert’s; Bradshaw’s writings
are available in The Collected Papers of Henry Bradshaw (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1889), which presents essays written as early as 1862; on Brad-
shaw, see Paul Needham, The Bradshaw Method: Henry Bradshaw’s Contribution to
Bibliography (Chapel Hill: Hanes Foundation, 1988).
14. The Making of Middle English, 1765–1910; see especially chapters 4
and 5.
15. On country house libraries in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,
see Mark Girouard, Life in the English Country House: A Social and Architectural
History ( New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), chapter 6, especially 179–80
and 234–37; James Raven, “From Promotion to Proscription: Arrangements for
Reading and Eighteenth-Century Libraries,” in The Practice and Representation of
Reading in England, ed. James Raven, Helen Small, and Naomi Tadmor (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 175–201; Clive Wainwright, “The Li-
brary as Living Room,” in Myers and Harris, Property of a Gentleman, 15–25; and
T. A. Birrell, “Reading as Pastime” in the same volume, 112–33.
16. See Harding, The Wormsley Library, x–xi.
17. Edwards, Libraries, 404–5 and 426–27.
18. Thomas Frognall Dibdin, Aedes Althorpianae; or An Account of the Man-
sion, Books, and Pictures, At Althorp; The Residence of George John Earl Spencer, K. G.
to which is added A Supplement to the Bibliotheca Spenceriana (London: Shakespeare
Press, 1822), I, 20–31.
19. Raven, “From Promotion to Proscription,” 192–93.
20. Dibdin, Aedes Althorpianae, 32.
21. Harding, The Wormsley Library, x–xi.
22. Ibid., 47.
23. “Unpacking My Library: A Talk About the Book Collecting,” in Illumi-
nations, trans. Harry Zohn (1968; repr., New York: Schocken Books, 1985), 61.
310 n o t e s t o p a g e s 33 – 37
24. “Profile: Sir John Paul Getty II,” http://news.bbc.co.uk, viewed June 22,
2002; see also Wolfgang Saxon, “J. Paul Getty, Jr., Philanthropist, Dies at
70,” New York Times, April 18, 2003, and “Sir Paul Getty,” The Times, April 18,
2003, 35.
25. Edwards, Libraries, 406; Fletcher, English Book Collectors, 310. De Ricci
gives the amount as £918.15s., and though de Ricci is usually accurate, I cannot
find this figure reproduced (Collectors, 78).
26. Caxton printed the Mirrour of the World in 1481 (STC 24762) and again
in 1489/90 (STC 24763). The second edition is in Type 6 and ends with Caxton’s
device. Caxton translated the Mirrour from a prose version of the thirteenth-
century verse Image du Monde by Gossouin of Metz, deriving from Vincent of
Beauvais’ Speculum historiale, written in Bruges in 1464 for the bookseller Jehan
Le Clerc. Caxton made minor changes: he added Oxford and Cambridge to Paris
as seats of learning, omitted a passage that tells how English men are born with
tails for having tied fishtails to St. Augustine of Canterbury’s clothes, and added a
skeptical eyewitness account by the Bruges knight Sir John de Banste of the so-
called cave to purgatory.
Blake, following the text’s editor Oliver Prior (who apparently followed from
Dibdin’s remarks in Typographical Antiquities, i.109), suggests that this manuscript
was British Library MS Royal 19 A ix (“The ‘Mirror of the World’ and MS Royal
19 A ix”), but Painter points out that that manuscript lacks the illustrations Cax-
ton discusses in his prologue (William Caxton, 108), as Blades did for Dibdin (Life
and Typography, 2:83). De Ricci records thirty-three various copies extant of the
first edition, and nineteen of the second (de Ricci, Census, 97–98). See Blake,
A Bibliographical Guide, 40; Backhouse, et al., William Caxton: An Exhibition, 47.
27. English Woodcuts 1480–1535 with Additions and Corrections (Oxford: Ox-
ford University Press, 1973), 1–2.
28. See Caxton’s Mirrour of the World, ed. Oliver H. Prior, EETS ex.s. 110
(London: Oxford University Press, 1913; repr., Su±olk: Boydell & Brewer, 1999).
29. Hodnett, Woodcuts, nos. 7 and 8; 111–12.
30. Blake, Caxton and His World, 36.
31. Presented in Crotch, Prologues and Epilogues, 53.
32. See Lotte Hellinga, “Text and Press in the First Decades of Printing,” in
Libri, tipografi, biblioteche: Ricerhe storiche dedicate a Luigi Balsamo (Florence: Leo S.
Olscki Editore, 1997), 1–23.
33. Brice, an Irish goldsmith, accompanied Caxton on trade negotiations at
Bruges and was governor of the Royal Mint in the Tower. On Brice, see Painter,
William Caxton, 108; Prior, Mirrour, v–vii.
34. A. S. G. Edwards and Derek Pearsall, “The Manuscripts of the Major
English Poetic Texts,” in Gri¤ths and Pearsall, Book Production, 257.
35. Hellinga and Trapp, “Introduction,” 17.
36. See the unsigned description in Printing and the Mind of Man: Catalogue
of the Exhibitions at the British Museum and at Earls Court, London, 16–27 July 1963,
n o t e s t o p a g e s 37 – 4 4 311
ed. John Carter and Percy H. Muir, with Nicolas Barker, H. A. Feisenberger,
Howard Nixon, S. H. Steinberg, and Denys Hay (London: Bridges and Sons,
1963), 19.
37. On the danse macabre see Jane H. M. Taylor, “The Dialogues of the
Dance of Death and the Limits of Late-Medieval Theatre,” Fifteenth-Century
Studies (1990): 215–32; Edelgard Dubruck, The Theme of Death in French Poetry of
the Middle Ages and the Renaissance ( The Hague: Mouton, 1964); Leonard Paul
Kurtz, The Dance of Death and the Macabre Spirit in European Literature (1934;
repr., Ann Arbor: University Microfilms, 1969); and chapter 5, “The Vision of
Death,” in J. Huizinga, The Autumn of the Middle Ages, trans. Rodney J. Payton
and Ulrich Mammitzsch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 156–172.
On the English tradition, see James Simpson, The Oxford English Literary History,
55±., and Beatrice White’s introduction to The Dance of Death: Edited from MSS.
Ellesmere 26/A.13 and B. M. Lansdowne 699, collated with the other Extant MSS, ed.
Florence Warren, EETS o.s. 181 (1931; repr., New York: Kraus Reprints, 1971),
ix–xxxi. White records twelve manuscripts of the English version, and Tottel’s
1554 edition of Lydgate’s Fall of Princes (STC 3177), which contains the verses at
its end. See also Derek Pearsall, John Lydgate, 177–79; Eleanor Prescott Ham-
mond, “Latin Texts of the Dance of Death,” Modern Philology 8 (1911): 399–410;
David Lorenzo Boyd, “Reading Through the Regiment of Princes: Hoccleve’s
Series and Lydgate’s Dance of Death in Yale Beinecke MS 493,” Fifteenth-Century
Studies 20 (1993): 15–34; and R. D. Drexler, “Dunbar’s ‘Lament for the Makaris’
and the Dance of Death Tradition,” Studies in Scottish Literature 13 (1978): 144–58.
38. This figure comes from Phillip Gaskell, who remarks, “At 250 sheets an
hour, the whole cycle was repeated every 14–15 seconds,” A New Introduction to
Bibliography, 130.
39. Reproduced in Crotch, Prologues and Epilogues, 50.
40. Presented in parallel with his source text, MS Royal 19 A ix, in Crotch,
Prologues and Epilogues, 50–59, and with commentary in Blake, Caxton and His
World, 154–58.
41. Crotch, Prologues and Epilogues, 65.
42. See Samuel K. Workman, “Versions by Skelton, Caxton and Berners of
a Prologue by Diodorus Siculus,” 252–58.
44. Ibid., 107.
45. Ibid., 108.
46. For discussion of the Christine de Pizan illumination, see Jennifer Sum-
mit, Lost Property, 84, and A. E. B. Coldiron, “Taking Advice from a French-
woman,” in Kuskin, Caxton’s Trace, 127–66. For Lydgate, see Seth Lerer, Chaucer
and His Readers, 42.
47. The definitive works on printers’ marks are R. B. McKerrow, Print-
ers’ & Publishers’ Devices, and Hugh William Davies, Devices of the Early Printers.
George D. Painter’s “Michael Wenssler’s Devices and Their Predecessors” (1959;
312 n o t e s t o p a g e s 4 4 – 4 9
repr. in Studies in Fifteenth-Century Printing [London: Pindar Press, 1984],

70–78), provides a concise review of the early history of the printer’s mark. Edwin
Eliott Willoughby, Fifty Printers’ Marks (Berkeley: Book Arts Club, University of
California, 1947), discusses the printers’ marks he selected to adorn the covers of
Library Quarterly, continued in Howard W. Winger’s Printers’ Marks and Devices
(Chicago: Caxton Club, 1976). See also Douglas C. McMurtrie, Printers’ Marks
and Their Significance (Chicago: Eyncourt Press, 1930), which is largely reprinted
as chapter 20 of The Book: The Story of Printing & Bookmaking ( New York: Oxford
University Press, 1943).
48. Davies, Devices of the Early Printers, 113; McMurtrie suggests 1,500 de-
vices before 1500 (The Book, 294).
49. See George Painter and Paul Morgan, “The Caxton Legenda at St.
Mary’s, Warwick,” The Library ser. v, 12 (1957): 225–39. See Backhouse, et al.,
William Caxton: An Exhibition, for a solid summary of the book history, 79. The
Legenda was previously identified by E. Gordon Du± from twenty-nine leaves.
50. The device appears on ten of Caxton’s nineteen last editions: the 1489
Directorium sacerdotum, second edition (STC 17722); the 1489 Reynard the Fox,
second edition (STC 20920); the 1489 Dictes and Sayings, third edition (STC 6829);
the 1489 Doctrinal of Sapience (STC 21431); the 1489 Mirrour of the World, second
edition (STC 24763); the 1490 Speculum vitae Christi, second edition (STC 3260);
and the 1490 Eneydos (STC 24796).
51. Ames, Typographical Antiquities, 6. Ames’s subsequent editors, William
Herbert and Thomas Frognall Dibdin, demur from this reading. See also
Hellinga, Caxton in Focus, 32.
52. William Blades, The Life and Typography, 2:lvi. Blades progressively re-
treated from this reading in his two subsequent octavo revisions, The Biography
and Typography: in the 1877 edition commemorating the Caxton celebration, he
largely reiterated the reading, but in the final 1882 edition he backed away en-
tirely, citing Henry Bradshaw’s objection to numerical readings of the device, and
presenting the comparable trade mark of Caxton’s contemporary, the Mercer and
Stapler John Felde (139). For a detailed account of Blades’s revision of these edi-
tions, see Robin Myers, “William Blades’s Debt to Henry Bradshaw and G. I. F.
Tupper in His Caxton Studies: A Further Look at Unpublished Documents,” The
Library ser. v, 33 (1978): 265–83, and her “sequel” article, “George Issac Frederick
Tupper, Facsimilist, ‘Whose Ability in this Description of Work is Beyond
Praise’ (1820?–1911),” Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society 7 (1978):
113–34. Myers points out that in correspondence late in his life, Bradshaw ob-
jected to such readings of the device: “I wish most heartily that I could give you
such an emetic that you would no longer think about fours and sevens in this mat-
ter” (280). E. Gordon Du± also dismisses numerical readings of the device in
Caxton (70), and Plomer too reports Bradshaw’s opinion, remarking that the
question “must remain an open one” (William Caxton, 151). Painter terms Blades’s
work “an innovatory classic[, y]et it is also a dangerous book, full of seductive
n o t e s t o p a g e s 4 9 – 50 313
error, vitiated not only by the inevitable obsolescence of a century, but, it must be
said, by fatal gaps in the competence and judgment of its author” (“An Unbeliev-
able Landmark,” Times Literary Supplement, December 17, 1971; repr. in Studies,
144–46).
53. Painter, William Caxton, 160. A second tradition, stemming from
Crotch, discovers the device to be at once the seal of William Caston of Calais
and “a clean-line representation” of the heraldic charge, “an eagle’s head erased”
(xlvi). Finding this seal to belong to a Stapler named William Cresse, Painter dis-
missed Crotch’s suggestion. Janet Backhouse presents Painter’s reading as fact in
Backhouse, et al., William Caxton: An Exhibition, 78. In 1976 Painter used the
progressive disintegration of the device’s frame to date ten of Caxton’s later texts
and recorded this information in William Caxton, 163. Bradshaw suggested this
mode of dating to Blades in a letter of August 11, 1860, but Blades apparently ig-
nored the analysis ( Myers, “William Blades’s Debt,” 268–69). The point was also
noted by Plomer, Wynkyn de Worde & His Contemporaries from the Death of Caxton
to 1535 ([London: Grafton, 1925], 118), as well as Davies, Devices of the Early Print-
ers (574), but Painter was the first to pursue it analytically in his article with Paul
Morgan, “The Caxton Legenda.”
54. Davies writes that the four “was originally the sign of a merchant, a gen-
eral symbol of a calling, but not strictly that of a particular handicraft” (Devices of
the Early Printers, 33), concluding, “The earliest use of the simple 4 mark must be
looked for among those merchants from the 13th century onwards” (35). On
craftsmen’s marks, Edwin Eliott Willoughby notes, “Such marks were required
especially of goldsmiths, silversmiths, and other artisans who were under the un-
usual temptation to misrepresent the quality of their goods” (Fifty Printers’
Marks, 3).
55. Painter, “Michael Wenssler,” 73.
56. See David R. Carlson, “A Theory of the Early English Printing Firm,”
in Kuskin, Caxton’s Trace, 44. Hellinga also points to the importance of creating
demand; see Caxton in Focus, 102. It is important to distinguish this claim from
the much less specific claim that Caxton’s prologues and epilogues are “pu±s”
(Sutton, “Caxton Was a Mercer,” 121) or “blurbs” (Blake, Authors of the Middle
Ages, 8). The former implies an active engagement with the problem of supply
and demand; the latter terms, a simple application of a derived formula. What
separates the early printers is that they had to meet the problem of machine pro-
duction head-on; they could not fall back on the patterns of advertising to market
their wares.
57. In the verse epilogue to his 1495 edition of the De proprietatibus (STC
1536), Wynkyn de Worde explains that Caxton worked on that text in Cologne.
Needham argues that “there is adequate evidence that in 1472 this shop was
working exclusively for Caxton” and numbers the editions as Caxton’s first three
publications. See “Appendix D: Checklist of Caxton’s Printing,” in The Printer
and the Pardoner, 83.
314 n o t e s t o p a g e s 50 – 53
58. Severin Corsten, “Caxton in Cologne”; Lotte Hellinga and Wytze

Hellinga, “Caxton in the Low Countries,” Journal of the Printing Historical Society
11 (1976–77): 21. For the Venetian market, see two articles by Martin J. C. Lowry,
“The Arrival and Use of Continental Printed Books in Yorkist England,” and
“Venetian Capital, German Technology and Renaissance Culture in the Later
Fifteenth Century,” Renaissance Studies 2 (1988): 1–13.
59. Hellinga and Hellinga, “Caxton in the Low Countries,” 23; “Caxton’s
Typography,” The Journal of the Printing Historical Society 11 (1976–77): 118; and
Painter, William Caxton, 62.
60. Corsten, “Caxton in Cologne,” 15; Lotte Hellinga and Wytze Hellinga,
The Fifteenth-Century Printing Types of the Low Countries, trans. D. A. S. Reid
(Amsterdam: M. Hertzberger, 1966), 47.
61. Painter, William Caxton, 78.
62. Hellinga and Hellinga, “Caxton in the Low Countries,” 28.
63. Caxton and Colard Mansion apparently attempted a one-pull method of
printing red rubrics, which created a smudged page. Blades believed that accord-
ing to this method the form was inked and then the black ink was wiped away and
the red added with a finger, an observation that seems to come from G. I. F. Tup-
per’s notes (see Myers, “William Blades’s Debt,” 279). Painter argues that ink
balls must have been used or the form would have been cleaner, in “The Caxton
Legenda.” From this typographical anomaly, Blades argued for a connection be-
tween Caxton and Colard Mansion; it is now generally accepted that the two
printers worked together on Caxton’s French texts. Blades’s overall thesis has
fallen by the wayside, but the contrast is still useful. For Mansion, see Blades, The
Life and Typography, 1:54–61; L. A. Sheppard, “A New Light on Colard Mansion,”
Signature n.s. 15 (1952): 28–39; Painter, William Caxton, 72–81; Sheila Edmunds,
“From Schoe±er to Vérard: Concerning the Scribes Who Became Printers,” in
Printing the Written Word: The Social History of Books circa 1450–1520, ed. San-
dra L. Hindman ( Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 21–40; and Paul Saen-
ger, “Colard Mansion and the Evolution of the Printed Book,” Library Quarterly
45 (1975): 405–18.
64. The St. Albans Chronicle is also known as the Chronicles of England, a con-
fusing substitution because the two books are not identical. The date of this edi-
tion remains somewhat unclear. The British Library Public Catalogue gives the
date of 1483; however, Du± lists it as 1485 in Fifteenth Century English Books, as
does the STC. The Schoolmaster printer’s prologue reads: “Therfoor i the yeer of
our lorde .M. iiijc. lxxxiij. And in the xxiij. yeer of the regne of kyng Edward the
fourth at Saynt Albons so that all men may knaw the actys naemly of our nobull
kyngys of Englond is compylit to gether thys book” (aii), a date that is corrobo-
rated by Wynkyn de Worde’s 1497 reprint (STC 9996), which also supplies, in its
colophon, the Schoolmaster’s enigmatic title: “¶ Here endyth this present crony-
cle of Englonde wyth the frute of tymes: compiled in a booke /& also enprynted
by one somtyme scole mayster of saynt Albons. on whoos soule god haue mercy”
n o t e s t o p a g e s 53 – 5 6 315
( I4). As the Schoolmaster produced only three books after 1481, the Chronicle,
the Boke of St Albans, and the Scriptum super logica, regardless of the date it is
among the Schoolmaster’s very last texts.
The Schoolmaster printer did reprint one of Caxton’s editions, the 1480
edition of Laurentius Traversanus’s Nova rhetorica (STC 24190), an abbrevi-
ated grammar by a contemporary Italian humanist resident in England which
Caxton printed in 1478 (STC 24189). The Boke of St. Albans remains in about
seventeen copies; see Lotte Hellinga, “The Book of St. Albans, 1486,” in Fine
Books and Book Collecting, ed. Christopher De Hamel and Richard A. Linenthal
(Leamington Spa: Hall, 1981), 31–34; William Blades, The Boke of Saint Albans
by Dame Juliana Berners . . . reproduced in Facsimile (London: Elliot Stock,
1881); Rachel Hands, “Juliana Berners and The Boke of St. Albans,” Review of En-
glish Studies 18 (1967): 373–86; Norman F. Blake, “The Spread of Printing”;
and James G. Clark, “Print and Pre-Reformation Religion: The Benedictines and
the Press, c. 1470–c.1550,” in The Uses of Script and Print, 1300–1700, ed. Julia
Crick and Alexandra Walsham ( New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004),
82–83.
65. See Hands, “Juliana Berners,” 373, and 376 nn. 1 and 2, and 382.
66. “Practical Books for the Gentleman,” 488.
67. Thrupp, The Merchant Class of Medieval London, 296 n. 25.
68. Painter, “Michael Wenssler,” 74–76.
69. One might perhaps argue that any resemblance between the Schoolmas-
ter’s mark and Jenson’s is coincidental, that the English printers were simply too
insular to know of their Continental peers. Laying aside the overwhelming mer-
cantile evidence for a connection between England and Italy for a moment, we
have Theodoric Rood and Thomas Hunte’s colophon to the Epistolae testifying to
English knowledge of Jenson:
Hoc oposculuµ in alma vniuersitate Oxonie. A Natali christiano Duceµtesima
& nonagesia septima. Olimpiade foeliciter impressum eµ Hoc Teodericus
rood queµ collonia misit Saµg uµieµ gµmanus nobile pµssit opus Atq sibi socius
thomas fuit aµglicus hunte. Dii deµt vt venetos exuperare qµuant Quaµ ieµson
venetos decuit vir gallicus artem Ingenio didicit terra britanµa suµo. Celatos
veneti nob traµsmitteµ lib[r]os Cedite nos aliis veµdimus o veneti Que fuerat vob
ars pµmuµ nota latini Est edaeµ nob ipµa reperta preµs Quaµuis seoµtos toto canit
orbe britaµnos Virgilius placg his lıgµ ua latiaµ tameµ. ( Du±, Fifteenth Century
English Books, 97)
70. See Kuskin, “Onely imagined,” 203–4.
71. See E. Gordon Du±, The Printers, Stationers, and Bookbinders, 172–77,
and Christopher J. Werner’s Henry VIII’s Divorce: Literature and the Politics of the
Printing Press ( Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1998), especially 83–88.
72. The colophon to the Exposicio records “Explicit exposicio sancti Ieronimi
in simbolo apostolorum ad papam laureµcium Impressa Oxonie Et finita Anno do-
316 n o t e s t o p a g e s 5 6 – 7 4
mini .M.cccc.lxviij.xvij. die decembris”; however this date is now understood to

be a misprint for 1478. Further, neither Du± (Fifteenth Century English Books, 65)
nor the current STC attributes the Exposicio to Theodoric Rood. Du± and the
STC do attribute the next two books from the Oxford press to Rood; but as the
colophons do not bear his name, and they continue to use the same type, it seems
safer to assume they are anonymous and to recognize Rood with the introduction
of Oxford, Type 2.
73. See Hellinga, Caxton in Focus, 74–76; Painter, William Caxton, 140 n. 1.
74. See C. Paul Christianson’s “The Rise of London’s Book Trade,” 138–39;
Anne F. Sutton and Livia Visser-Fuchs have identified de Machlinia as William
Ravenswalde, in Richard III’s Books, 250.
75. “The Spread of Printing,” 27.
76. See Kuskin, “Onely imagined,” in Caxton’s Trace, 208–20.
77. In “The Customs Rolls as Documents for the Printed-Book Trade in
England,” Paul Needham points out that Caxton was, in fact, the only importer
of books during these years, in The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, 153.
Further, Needham’s review of the customs rolls suggests that book importation
overall was much greater than has previously been imagined—counting from
1460 to Caxton’s death, 23 merchants, and 58 book cargoes into London. The
texts Caxton uses to introduce his mark, the Missale and Legenda, are a part of this
trade overall, and a number of merchants imported such books into England
wholesale: for example, between 1480 and 1481 Henry Frankenberg and Peter
Actors alone imported nearly 1,500 volumes, and in 1488 Caxton himself im-
ported over 1,000 books and exported another 140.
78. Caxton’s Missale and Legenda are technically impressive. Painter points
out that Maynyal produced the first red-printed rubrics in Paris (William Caxton,
262). Maynyal appears to have begun as a partner in 1480 of Ulrich Gering, with
whom he printed five books in Paris. He went on to print the 1489/90 Statua syn-
odalia ecclesiae Carnotensis and the 1490 Manuale ecclesiae Carnotensis, both of which
he printed, like his work for Caxton, on commission, and which feature fine red
rubrics, which Painter speculates he learned to print at Lyons, Venice, or Basle.
On Maynyal, see Painter and Morgan, “The Caxton Legenda”; E. Gordon Du±,
William Caxton, 70; Curtis Bühler, “George Maynyal: A Parisian Printer of the
Fifteenth Century,” The Library ser. iv, 18 (1937): 84–88. Caxton went on to use
the two-pull process for color printing in three later works: his fourth edition of
the Sarum Hours (STC 15872) printed in 1490/91, his second edition of Clement
Maydeston’s Directorium sacerdotum (STC 17722) printed in 1488/89, and the Fes-
tum transfigurationis Jesu Christi (STC 15854), which Paul Needham dates at
1487, but Painter at 1490. Needham’s date is interesting because it suggests that
Caxton switched to the two-pull method shortly after seeing Maynyal’s results;
regardless of the date of the Festum, Painter’s date of 1488 for the second edition
of the Directorium suggests that Caxton experimented with the two-pull method
within a year of importing the Missale and Legenda.
n o t e s t o p a g e s 7 4 – 7 6 317
79. Medieval Merchant Venturers, 170. Dual guild membership was not espe-
cially unusual in the late Middle Ages: see J. M. Imray, “Les Bones Gentes de la
Mercerye de Londres”; Sutton, Caxton Was a Mercer, 121; and Heather Swanson,
“The Illusion of Economic Structure: Craft Guilds in Late Medieval English
Towns,” Past and Present 121 (1988): 33. On the statute demanding artisans restrict
themselves to one guild (“Artificers, Handicraft people, hold them every one to
one Mystery,” 37 Edward III c.6), see Heather Swanson, Medieval Artisans: An
Urban Class in Late Medieval England (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 4.
80. PRO, C 67/51. Caxton took this pardon out to exonerate himself from
any connection to the abortive gentry rebellion against Richard III in October
1483. Gill presents the document in an appendix to her article:
Willelmus Caxton civis et mercerus Londonie alias dictus Willelmus Cax-
ton nuper civis et mercerus Londonie alias dictus Wellelmus Caxton merca-
tor Stapule Calesie alias dictus Willelmus Caxton nuper Magister sive
Gubernator mercatorum Anglie residencium in partibus Brabancie Flandrie
Holandi et Zelandi seu et cetera. Teste Rege apud Westmonasterium xx die
Maii. (“Caxton and the Rebellion of 1483,” 118)
Caxton was not alone in requesting pardon: up to 1,100 people petitioned for
similar pardons. Though the pardon seems a pro forma maneuver, Caxton was
nevertheless close to the members of the rebellion, and his political associates,
particularly John Fogge and John Scott, were involved as leaders.
In general, Caxton’s biographers have chosen to stress exclusively Caxton’s
identity as a Mercer. The argument against conflating the early Caxtons is four-
fold: (1) Caxton is never connected with raw wool cloth; (2) a 1458 document for
a Stapler named William Caxton to travel to Bruges is redundant if Caxton the
printer is already in Bruges; (3) Caxton the printer claims never to have been in
France; (4) Crotch presents a seal as belonging to a Caxton-the-Stapler which
ultimately belongs to William Cresse (Painter, William Caxton, 162). Crotch
(Prologues and Epilogues, xlvi), and following him Richard R. Gri¤th (“The Early
Years of William Caxton,” 37), argued that Caxton could be both; indeed
Gri¤th followed the implications of reconsidering Caxton’s identity in a most
sustained investigation well before Gill’s discovery, and even points out that Cax-
ton’s master, Robert Large, became a Stapler the year after Caxton became his
apprentice. While one would want to be wary of conflating all the possible vari-
ations of the name Caxton into a single individual, Gri¤th’s analysis deserves
serious attention for those interested in understanding Caxton’s past in detail.
81. These documents are listed in Blake, Authors of the Middle Ages, 55.
82. Blake, Caxton and His World, 40
83. I am indebted to Peter Andersen for this last observation.
84. Bibliography, 13.
85. In “The Illusion of Economic Structure,” 29. See also Sylvia L. Thrupp,
“Medieval Gilds Reconsidered,” Journal of Economic History 2 (1943): 164– 73,
318 n o t e s t o p a g e s 7 7 – 7 8
and Gervase Rosser, “Crafts, Guilds and the Negotiation of Work in the Me-
dieval Town,” Past and Present 154 (1997): 3–31.
Chapter Two. Reading Caxton
1. As early as 1922 Henry Lathrop noted in “The First English Printers and
Their Patrons,” The Library ser. iv, 3 (1922): 69–96, that the categories of patron-
age and commerce had polarized Caxton studies. Lathrop attempted to bridge
these two camps by suggesting that Caxton was a man of letters, and though this
term has had some popularity, work since Lathrop’s continues to be phrased in
more absolute terms. For example, in the “The English Market,” Graham Pollard
writes, “Though Caxton liked to advertise the importance of his translations and
the noble patronage which he received, I suspect that he may sometimes have
liked to think of himself as a successful merchant and that his chief claim to com-
mercial fame was that he had introduced a brand new line in the small-wares
trade” (13). Currently, Caxton’s two leading biographers actually argue opposite
views: in William Caxton, George Painter reads Caxton as intimate with the no-
bility, while N. F. Blake states that Caxton was “essentially a businessman all his
life” in Caxton and His World (216) and made use of what he calls “anonymous pa-
tronage.” Russell Rutter takes issue with both Painter and Blake in “William
Caxton and Literary Patronage” to recognize that Caxton’s language in these
cases demands such a wide definition of patronage that it dilutes the term alto-
gether. Similarly, Anne F. Sutton, in “Caxton Was a Mercer” and her article with
Livia Visser-Fuchs, “Ramon Lull’s Order of Chivalry Translated by William
Caxton,” The Ricardian 9 (1993): 110–29, argues that Caxton’s commercial expert-
ise dominated the way he saw his press.
While Rutter, Sutton, and Visser-Fuchs provide an important correction to
Painter’s and Blake’s assessments, they accept a notion of marketing without dis-
cussing the ways Caxton intellectually produces the book as a marketable item.
2. “Marketing,” 95.
3. For background on the relationship between the Low Countries and
England, see Caroline Barron and Nigel Saul’s England and the Low Countries in
the Late Middle Ages ( New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995), particularly Barron’s
introduction, “England and the Low Countries, 1377–1477,” 1–28.
4. See H. L. Gray’s “English Foreign Trade from 1446 to 1482,” in Studies
in English Trade in the Fifteenth Century, ed. Eileen Power and M. M. Postan
(1933; repr., New York: Barnes & Noble, 1966), 1–38, especially 16–19. The de-
cline in wool exports at this time can also be attributed to disease, extreme
weather, the collapse of demesne farming, and the development of wool brokers.
In “Wool Yields in the Medieval Economy,” Economic History Review ser. ii, 41
(1988): 368–91, M. J. Stephenson writes that by the mid-fifteenth century, “the
combination of falling prices and wool yields had cut deeply into the profitability
n o t e s t o p a g e s 81 – 83 319
of wool production. The level of profitability was su¤ciently low to make large-
scale demesne wool production marginal. The di±erence between returns from
leasing the flocks out and managing them directly became too small to outweigh
the inherent risks of sheep farming on a grand scale” (389).
5. The term merchant adventurer develops only in the mid-fifteenth cen-
tury, and includes guilds such as the Drapers, Fishmongers, Grocers, Haberdash-
ers, Skinners, and Tailors, as well as the Mercers. It is only after 1486 that the
London Merchant Adventurers begin to take on the trappings of an independent
guild: livery and a separate court. See E. M. Carus-Wilson’s Medieval Merchant
Venturers, especially 160, 175–76, and her introduction, where she discusses Eng-
land’s fifteenth-century “transformation” from an exporter of raw materials to an
exporter of manufactured textiles (xx–xxi).
6. Maurice Keen, England in the Later Middle Ages, 461–74.
7. Carus-Wilson writes, “The Mercers dominated the London group [of
Merchant Adventurers] as the London group dominated the Netherlands group”
(Medieval Merchant Venturers, 150). This domination appears to have continued
until 1526, at which point it factionalized the company, which stopped meeting at
Mercers’ Hall. See also J. M. Imray, “The Merchant Adventurers and Their
Records,” Journal of the Society of Archivists 2 (1964): 457–67.
8. For Overey see Painter, William Caxton, 25–31, and Sutton, “Caxton
Was a Mercer,” 127–33.
9. Two articles useful toward a review of medieval finance are Harry A.
Miskimin’s “Monetary Movements and Market Structure—Forces for Con-
traction in Fourteenth- and Fifteenth-Century England,” Journal of Economic
History 24 (1964): 470–90, and, more recently, Pamela Nightingale’s “Monetary
Contraction and Mercantile Credit in Later Medieval England,” Economic History
Review ser. ii, 43 (1990): 560–75. Miskimin argues that the contraction in bullion
led to an increase in per capita wealth in the nonagricultural classes across the
fifteenth century, resulting in a greater consumption of luxury goods. Nightin-
gale traces the fluctuation of credit in relation to bullion from the control of the
Grocers’ Company in the early fifteenth century to the London Mercers and
Drapers to argue that the English credit system responded to the expansion and
contraction of bullion, allowing English merchants to continue to trade success-
fully.
10. Edited in William Blades’s The Life and Typography, 1:91. Blades repro-
duces an incorrect date for the letter, which should read October 1464. A. F. Sut-
ton and P. W. Hammond provide the correct reading in “The Problems of Dating
and the Dangers of Redating: The Acts of Court of the Mercers’ Company of
London, 1453–1527,” Journal of the Society of Archivists 6 (1978): 87–91. Painter
mistakenly follows Blades, William Caxton, 33–35. See also Blake, Caxton and His
World, 41–42.
11. The two seminal articles on medieval credit are M. M. Postan’s “Credit
in Medieval Trade” and “Private Financial Instruments in Medieval England,”
320 n o t e s t o p a g e s 83 – 87
both reprinted in his Medieval Trade and Finance (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 1973), 1–27 and 28–64 respectively. In these articles Postan argues
against an evolutionary model of capitalism by tracing the formal and informal
financial apparatuses from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries. Postan esti-
mates that 75 percent of English financing could have been done by credit.
12. On Caxton’s trade deals in the 1450s see Painter, William Caxton, 16–24;
Blake, Caxton and His World, 26–54; Gill, “William Caxton and the Rebellion of
1483,” 106–10; and Anne F. Sutton’s “Caxton Was a Mercer,” 122–32.
13. Blades, Life and Typography, 1:92.
14. Caxton does not provide a date for the final printing of the Recuyell.
Painter argues in William Caxton that the text should be dated 1475 on the
grounds that it was printed continuously with the Game and Play of the Chess,
the date of which he reads as 1475. This date has the advantage of providing a
time frame for Veldener to help Caxton set up his press at Bruges and manufac-
ture Caxton’s Type 1 (59–63). N. F. Blake refutes Painter in “Dating the First
Books Printed in English,” in William Caxton and English Literary Culture (Lon-
don: Hambledon Press, 1991), 75–87, by arguing that the date of the Game and
Play of the Chess should be read as modern 1474, moving the Recuyell back to late
1473 or early 1474. Blake suggests that during the remaining years Caxton is
known to have been in Bruges, where he printed his French texts. The more ac-
cepted date is 1473/74.
15. Traditionally, this period is associated with Caxton’s increasing connec-
tion to the court of Margaret, Duchess of York and wife of Charles the Bold, pos-
sibly as an adviser for her personal investments (Edward, in fact, granted
Margaret duty-free trading privileges). Further, Caxton also tells in the Recuyell
that he received a yearly fee from Margaret and that he worked on his translation
in Ghent, which, Painter notes, places him in her retinue at Ten Walle in January
1471, just before his move to Cologne. Exactly when Caxton resigned his posi-
tion as governor and why he left Margaret’s service is unknown: in William Cax-
ton, Painter argues that “Caxton’s governorship ended [between October 1470
and March 1471] as a direct consequence of the Lancastrian restoration, and
without his wish or intention,” that “broken” he underwent an “exile” when the
Yorkist crown was overturned (44–45). Yet given how quickly the Yorkist house
recuperated its position, that the similarly Yorkist governor John Pickering (who
both preceded and succeeded Caxton) went apparently undisturbed by the events
of 1470 and 1471, and that Caxton remained a high-profile Yorkist diplomat until
his return to England, the notion of “exile” implies a dramatic break to what is
perhaps a more progressive shift in Caxton’s interests and expertise.
16. For a discussion of Caxton’s use of Lydgate see N. F. Blake’s three arti-
cles “Caxton and Chaucer,” Leeds Studies in English n.s. 1 (1967): 19–36; “Caxton
and the Courtly Style,” Essays and Studies n.s. 21 (1968): 29–45; and “Lydgate and
Caxton.”
17. See “Dullness.”
n o t e s t o p a g e s 87 – 92 321
18. See Christine Weightman, Margaret of York, Duchess of Burgundy,

1446–1503 (Gloucester and New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989). For specific dis-
cussions of Margaret’s library see Muriel J. Hughes, “The Library of Margaret
of York, Duchess of Burgundy,” The Private Library 3rd ser., 7 (1984): 53–78,
and Thomas Kren, “The Library of Margaret of York and the Burgundian
Court,” in The Visions of Tondal from the Library of Margaret of York, ed. Thomas
Kren and Roger S. Wieck ( Malibu: J. Paul Getty Museum, 1990), 9–18. Lotte
Hellinga includes a list of fourteen manuscripts commissioned by Margaret be-
tween her marriage to Charles in 1468 and his death in 1477 in “Reading an En-
graving: William Caxton’s Dedication to Margaret of York, Duchess of
Burgundy,” in Across the Narrow Seas: Studies in the History and Bibliography of
Britain and the Low Countries, ed. Susan Roach (London: British Library, 1991),
1–15.
19. John Lydgate, The Troy Book, 4 vols., ed. H. Bergen, EETS e.s. 97, 103,
106, 126 (1906–35; repr., Millwood, N.Y.: Kraus Reprints, 1973), 5:3462–69.
20. Cited by Paul Needham, “Johann Gutenberg and the Catholicon Press,”
Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 76 (1982): 437 n. 1 (trans. Phyllis
Jestice). See the ensuing debate: W. J. Partridge, “The Type-Setting and Printing
of the Mainz Catholicon,” The Book Collector 35 (1986): 21–52; and Paul Needham,
“The Type-Setting of the Mainz Catholicon: A Reply to W. J. Partridge,” The
Book Collector 35 (1986): 293–304.
21. See Nicolas Barker, “Caxton’s Typography,” 120. Barker reviews the his-
tory of Caxton’s typefaces and reprints the illustrations of Caxton’s type found in
William Blades, Life and Typography. See also discussions in Painter, William Cax-
ton, 61–62, and Severin Corsten, “Caxton in Cologne.”
22. See Diane Bornstein, “Caxton’s Chivalric Romances”; N. F. Blake, Cax-
ton and His World, 64–78; Derek Pearsall, “The English Romance in the Fifteenth
Century,” 56–83; Margaret Kekewich, “Edward IV, William Caxton, and Liter-
ary Patronage in Yorkist England,” Modern Language Review 66 (1971): 481–87;
Gordon Kipling’s “John Skelton and Burgundian Letters,” and his The Triumph of
Honour.
23. See W. J. Partridge, “The Use of William Caxton’s Type 3 by John Let-
tou and William De Machlinia in the Printing of Their Yearbook 35 Henry VI, c.
1481–82,” British Library Journal 9 (1982): 56–65; and Lotte Hellinga, Caxton in
Focus, 72–76.
24. STC 15375. This edition belonged to Elizabeth Woodville, sister-in-law
to Margaret. The engraving was discovered by S. Montague Peartree and pre-
sented in “A Portrait of William Caxton,” Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs 7
(1905): 383–87; it is discussed by A. W. Pollard in “Recent Caxtoniana,” The
Library ser. ii, 6 (1905): 337–53. Books printed for presentation to noble pa-
trons were often hand-illuminated, or, as in the case for Earl Rivers’s presentation
copy of his translation of the Dictes and Sayings, entirely copied over into manu-
322 n o t e s t o p a g e s 92 – 9 7
script form. The most elaborately hand-decorated editions come from Antoine
Vérard’s shop, where Vérard would go so far as to add red rulings to his editions
to make them appear more like manuscripts. See Eleanor P. Spencer, “Antoine
Vérard’s Illuminated Vellum Incunables,” in Manuscripts in the Fifty Years After
the Invention of Printing: Some Papers Read at a Colloquium at the Warburg Institute
on 12–13 March 1982, ed. J. B. Trapp (London: Warburg Institute, University of
London, 1983), 62–65. For further discussion of manuscripts copied out of early
printed books, see Cora E. Lutz, “Manuscripts Copied from Printed Books,”
Yale University Library Gazette 49 (1975): 261–67; M. D. Reeve, “Manuscripts
Copied from Printed Books,” in Manuscripts in the Fifty Years After the Invention
of Printing, 12–20, and N. F. Blake, “Aftermath.” Even more workaday printed
texts were not exact duplicates in the sense of the modern book: Curtis Büh-
ler discusses variation within print runs of Caxton’s first edition of his Game
and Play of the Chess, his Caton, and his Eneydos in “Caxton Variants,” The Li-
brary ser. iv, 17 (1937): 62–69. See also Bühler, The Fifteenth-Century Book: The
Scribes, the Printers, the Decorators (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
1960).
25. See Hellinga, “Reading an Engraving,” 2, and 10 n. 6 in which she re-
ports, “Dr Paul Needham established that the leaf with the engraving, although
now tipped in, appears to be integral to the copy and kindly communicated this
finding to me.”
26. Two copies of the Advertisement exist: one at the Bodleian Library
( Douce frag.e.I.), and one at the John Rylands Library (announced with facsimile
in The Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 44 [1962]: 265). The Advertisement’s date
is contested: because records do not exist for Caxton’s shop at the Almonry at
Westminster until 1482, that date has traditionally been taken as the earliest one
possible. In “Caxton, His Contemporaries and Successors in the Book Trade
from Westminster Documents,” The Library ser. v, 31 (1976): 305–26, Howard
Nixon points out that Caxton may just as well have leased his shop from his ar-
rival in England in 1476. This earlier date for the Advertisement is favored by most
scholars; see Hellinga, Caxton in Focus, 43, and n. 29 below for a more complete
bibliography on Caxton’s shop.
27. In “Caxton’s Typography,” Barker argues that Caxton initially pur-
chased Type 3 before coming to England but used it only once, in his 1476 Indul-
gence, before printing the Advertisement, which Barker dates between 1479 and
1480. This creates an unexplained delay of up to four years in which the expen-
sive typeface sat idle. If the Advertisement is dated earlier, this unlikely delay is
avoided. See Hellinga, Caxton in Focus, 83, for her review of Caxton’s Type 3, and
her “Tradition and Renewal,” for the argument that Caxton actually owned the
matrices for Type 3 (15).
28. The “reed pale” has been variously interpreted as a unique sign for Cax-
ton’s shop, Caxton’s arms, and, most recently, the arms of the owner of the house
Caxton rented. See James Moran’s discussion of the “reed pale” at the end of
n o t e s t o p a g e s 9 7 – 10 6 323
“Caxton and the City of London,” Journal of Printing Historical Society 11

(1976–77): 81–91.
29. Discussions of the archival information regarding Caxton’s shops are
much confused due to W. J. B. Crotch’s early incorrect presentation of this mate-
rial in The Prologues and Epilogues, and Lawrence E. Tanner’s subsequent discus-
sion in “William Caxton’s Houses at Westminster,” The Library ser. v, 12 (1957):
153–66. Though Tanner’s article provides tremendously detailed information re-
garding where Caxton’s houses actually stood, it also allowed Crotch’s errors to
stand. Nixon, “Caxton, His Contemporaries and Successors,” provides an impor-
tant corrective by summarizing the Westminster Muniments as reporting that in
1476 Caxton took “una shopa” between the two northernmost flying buttresses
of the chapter house for 10s. per annum. In 1482 they also record Caxton’s having
taken two tenements in the Almonry at £2. 13s. 4d. a year, and a small loft above
the Gate of the Almonry for an additional 3s. 4d. Since the 1482 date cannot be
taken as Caxton’s first lease of these buildings because earlier records do not exist,
it is just as likely Caxton rented all four spaces upon his return to England. For
1485 the Muniments report a change in rents, suggesting Caxton dropped or
changed one of the tenements; from 1488 they show him taking another tene-
ment in the Almonry at 6s. 8d.
30. Howard Nixon reviews the scholarship on Caxton’s bindery and provides
a useful list of bindings in “William Caxton and Bookbinding,” Journal of Print-
ing Historical Society 11 (1976–77): 92–113. See also Painter’s discussion of Cax-
ton’s bindings in “Caxton Through the Looking Glass,” Gutenberg Jahrbuch
(1963): 73–80, and Backhouse, et al. William Caxton: An Exhibition, 90–93.
31. For Ebesham, see A. I. Doyle’s “William Ebesham”; for bookbinders in
Westminster, see Pollard’s “The Names of Some English Fifteenth-Century
Binders,” The Library ser. v, 25 (1970): 193–218; for the Caxton binder, see Nixon’s
“William Caxton and Bookbinding.” Nixon reviews five additional bookbinders
who rented in the Westminster sanctuary area in the late fifteenth, early six-
teenth centuries in “Caxton, His Contemporaries and Successors.”
32. “William Ebesham,” 321.
33. This is the argument Pollard presents in his Sandars Lectures, one Mar-
garet Deanesly advances through her famous assertion of the “extreme bookless-
ness” of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in “Vernacular Books in England
in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries,” Modern Language Review 15 (1920):
349, and the one Elizabeth Eisenstein asserts when she suggests a manuscript
“economy of scarcity” in contrast to the print world in “From Scriptoria to Print-
ing Shops: Evolution and Revolution in the Fifteenth-Century Book Trade,” in
Books and Society in History: Papers of the Association of College and Research Libraries
Rare Books and Manuscripts Preconference, 24–28 June 1980, ed. Kenneth E. Car-
penter ( New York: R. R. Bowker, 1983), 30.
34. Poets, Patrons, and Printers: Crisis in Authority in Late Medieval France
( Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), 5.
324 n o t e s t o p a g e s 10 6 – 10 7
35. See Kate Harris, “The Evidence for Ownership”; C. Paul Christianson,
“Evidence,” 87–108; and C. F. R. de Hamel, “Reflexions on the Trade in Books
of Hours at Ghent and Bruges,” in Manuscripts in the Fifty Years After the Invention
of Printing, 29–33. For further discussion of the collaborative nature of Bruges
manuscript production, see also Noël Geirnaert, “Classical Texts in Bruges
Around 1473: Cooperation of Italian Scribes, Bruges Parchment Rulers, Illumi-
nators and Bookbinders for Johannes Crabbe, Abbot of Les Dunes Abbey (CUL
MS 17),” Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society 10 (1992): 173–81.
36. See, for example, A. I. Doyle and M. B. Parkes, “The Production of
Copies of the Canterbury Tales”; A. I. Doyle, “English Books in and out of Court
from Edward III to Henry VII,” in English Court Culture in the Later Middle Ages,
ed. V. J. Scattergood and J. W. Sherborne (London: St. Martin’s Press, 1983),
163–81; Julia Bo±ey and Carol M. Meale, “Selecting the Text: Rawlinson C.86
and Some Other Books for London Readers,” in Regionalism in Late Medieval
Manuscripts and Texts: Essays Celebrating the Publication of A Linguistic Atlas of
Late Mediaeval English, ed. Felicity Riddy (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1991),
143–69; and Anne F. Sutton and Livia Visser-Fuchs, “Choosing a Book in Late
Fifteenth-Century England and Burgundy,” in Barron and Saul, England and the
Low Countries in the Late Middle Ages, 61–98.
37. Briefly, English book artisans formed a guild of text writers and illumi-
nators in 1403, which developed into the Mystery of Stationers, the common tag
for the various craftsmen associated with book production; however, 1357 city
legislation excepting writers of court hand, illuminators, and barbers from jury
duty suggests that these trades were already formally incorporated well before the
fifteenth century. For background material on these guilds, see three articles by
Graham Pollard: “The Company of Stationers Before 1557,” The Library ser. iv,
18 (1937): 1–38; “The Early Constitution of the Stationers’ Company,” The Li-
brary ser. iv, 18 (1937): 235–60; and “The English Market.”
38. C. Paul Christianson, “The Rise of London’s Book Trade,” in Hellinga
and Trapp, The Cambridge History of the Book, 131.
39. See Curtis Bühler, The Fifteenth-Century Book, and N. F. Blake’s “After-
math.” For the specialized role manuscripts took on as the press continued to ex-
pand, see J. W. Saunders, “The Stigma of Print: A Note on the Social Bases of
Tudor Poetry,” Essays in Criticism 1 (1951): 139–64; Harold Love, “Scribal Publi-
cation in Seventeenth-Century England,” Transactions of the Cambridge Biblio-
graphic Society 9 (1987): 130–54; and Arthur F. Marotti’s Manuscript, Print, and the
English Renaissance Lyric.
40. See Mary C. Erler, “Devotional Literature,” 596. Erler records that the
first printed book of hours was published in Rome around 1473 by Theobald
Schenbecher. Nicolas Jenson in Venice followed with three more editions in
1474–75, as did printers in Ferrara and Naples in 1475–76. Caxton produced at
least four editions: STC 15867, 15868, 15871, and 15872. A number of versions
were printed abroad for the English market, including one extremely early
n o t e s t o p a g e s 10 8 – 10 9 325
Cologne edition, known only from fragments: the 1475 Breuiarium ad usum
Sarum. For the books printed in Venice, as well as an excellent overview, see also
David Rogers, “Johann Hamman at Venice: A Survey of His Career. With a
Note on the Sarum ‘Horae’ of 1494,” in Essays in Honour of Victor Scholderer, ed.
Dennis E. Rhodes ( Mainz: Karl Pressler, 1970), 349–68.
41. “Caxton and the Trade in Printed Books,” The Book Collector 4 (1955):
197. Caxton exported 140 French volumes on December 10, 1488. Kerling’s essay
is substantially updated and corrected by Paul Needham in “The Customs Rolls,”
148–63. See also Kate Harris, “The Evidence for Ownership,” 163–99; Janet
Backhouse, “Caxton’s Imports of Books,” in William Caxton: An Exhibition, 77;
Henry R. Plomer, “The Importation of Books into England in the Fifteenth and
Sixteenth Centuries: An Examination of Some Customs Rolls,” The Library ser.
iv, 4 (1923): 146–50, and his “The Importation of Low Country and French Books
into England, 1480 and 1502–3,” The Library ser. iv, 9 (1928): 164–68; Elizabeth
Armstrong, “English Purchases of Printed Books from the Continent, 1465–1526,”
English Historical Review 94 (1979): 268–90; and Lotte Hellinga, “Importation of
Books Printed on the Continent.” Graham Pollard also discusses wholesale im-
portation in “The Names of Some English Fifteenth-Century Binders.”
42. Blades, Life and Typography, 1:122–23.
43. Discussed in Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin, The Coming of the
Book, 49–56; Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press, 49–53; and Rudolf
Hirsch, Printing, Selling, and Reading, 40±. The text of this suit is translated and
described in Douglas C. McMurtrie’s The Gutenberg Documents: With Translations
of the Texts into English, Based with Authority on the Compilation by Dr. Karl Schor-
bach ( New York: Oxford University Press, 1941), 93–127.
44. The Coming of the Book, 49–56; Gutenberg Documents, 175–87.
45. In Lister M. Matheson’s “Printer and Scribe: Caxton, the Polychronicon,
and the Brut,” Speculum 60 (1985): 599.
46. As presented in Caxton’s 1476/77 edition; unsigned pages 218 and 219
respectively.
47. See Febvre and Martin, The Coming of the Book, 49–60.
48. Quoted in Barker, “Caxton’s Typography,” 116.
49. STC 5013, a.iiv, and STC 21429, u9.
50. “Perpetual Motion: Alchemy and the Technology of the Self,” Studies in
the Age of Chaucer 15 (1993): 28 n. 8.
Chapter Three. Chaucerian Inheritances
1. Cultural Capital, 30.

2. Simon Horobin and Linne R. Mooney, “A Piers Plowman Manuscript by
the Hengrwt /Ellesmere Scribe and Its Implications for London Standard En-
glish,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 26 (2004): 96–97.
326 n o t e s t o p a g e s 110 – 117

3. Alternately known by Hammond’s title, “A Reproof to Lydgate”; see

Eleanor Prescott Hammond, “A Reproof to Lydgate,” MLN 26 (1911): 74–76.
Henry Noble MacCracken attributed this poem to William de la Pole, the Duke
of Su±olk, in “An English Friend of Charles of Orléans,” PMLA 26 (1911):
142–80. MacCracken’s identification has been met with skepticism. In the most
sustained examination of the poems, Maria Jansen argues, “Su±olk is an attractive
candidate, but the objection to MacCracken’s theory is that there is too little evi-
dence to warrant any poetic ascription. In fact, the evidence either way is far too
uncertain to merit a definitive statement,” The ‘Su±olk’ Poems: An Edition of the
Love Lyrics in Fairfax 16 Attributed to William de la Pole (Groningen: Universiteits-
drukkerij, 1989), 30; see also her “Charles d’Orleans and the Fairfax Poems,” Eng-
lish Studies 70 (1989): 206–24. Julia Bo±ey takes the same position in Manuscripts
of English Courtly Love Lyrics in the Later Middle Ages (Su±olk: D. S. Brewer, 1985),
65–67, and especially 76. Carol M. Meale overstates the case when she flatly states
they were “erroneously” attributed to de la Pole, in “Reading Women’s Cul-
ture in Fifteenth-Century England: The Case of Alice Chaucer,” in Mediaevali-
tas: Reading the Middle Ages, ed. Piero Boitani and Anna Torti (Cambridge: D. S.
Brewer, 1996), 83. Still, there remains no compelling reason to attribute the
poem to any other person.
4. Lines 15–21 as reprinted in Jansen, The Su±olk Poems (#19), which I have
corrected against the manuscript. Line numbers hereafter given within the text.
5. See David Lawton, “Dullness.”
6. The Riverside Chaucer, IV.29. Further citations to Chaucer will be given
parenthetically.
7. On Lydgate’s antifeminism, see Julia Bo±ey, “Lydgate’s Lyrics and
Women Readers,” in Smith and Taylor, Women, the Book and the Worldly, 139–49.
8. Chaucer and His Readers, 3.
9. See René Wellek, The Rise of English Literary History, 1–2.
10. Lerer, Chaucer and His Readers, 8. This is true for both the text of the
Canterbury Tales and, with the exception of the clearly linked units, the order of
the tales as well. See John M. Manly and Edith Rickert, The Text of The Canter-
bury Tales Studied on the Basis of All Known Manuscripts, 8 vols. (Chicago: Univer-
sity of Chicago Press, 1940; hereafter referred to as The Text), particularly their
conclusions on tale order and authorial intention at the end of volume 2, 475–94;
see also Ralph Hanna III, Pursuing History, and Charles A. Owen, Jr., The Manu-
scripts of The Canterbury Tales (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1991).
11. Lerer, Chaucer and His Readers, 8.
12. A few of the poems appear elsewhere: one in London, Lambeth Palace
MS 306, and seven in the autograph manuscript of Charles d’Orléans, Paris, Bib-
liothèque Nationale, MS fonds français 25458. BL Additional 34360 presents a
roundel—now attributed to Alain Chartier—to de la Pole, as does TCC R.3.20;
see J. C. Laidlaw, The Poetical Works of Alain Chartier (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1974), 130 and 142, and Aage Brusendor±, The Chaucer Tradition,
n o t e s t o p a g e s 118 – 122 327

especially 38–39 for de la Pole, and 186–92 for Fairfax 16 and his designation of
the name “Hammond Group.”
13. For de la Pole’s biography, see Ralph A. Gri¤ths, The Reign of King
Henry VI: The Exercise of Royal Authority, 1422–1461 (London: Ernest Benn,
1981), especially 676–86.
14. For Shirley, see Lerer, Chaucer and His Readers, 117–46; Margaret Con-
nolly, John Shirley; as well as Julia Bo±ey and A. S. G. Edwards, “‘Chaucer’s
Chronicle,’ John Shirley, and the Canon of Chaucer’s Shorter Poems,” Studies in
the Age of Chaucer 20 (1998): 201–18.
15. Samuel Moore, “Patrons of Letters in Norfolk and Su±olk, c. 1450,”
part 1, PMLA 27 (1912): 203.
16. The Siege of Thebes exists in thirty-one manuscripts. Lydgate’s main
sources are the Roman de Edipus and the Hystoire de Thebes, prose redactions of Le
Roman de Thèbes. Dated between 1421 and 1422, the Siege of Thebes is generally
considered one of Lydgate’s few unpatroned works; Meale proposes that the work
was commissioned for Alice’s betrothal to de la Pole in 1432 (“Reading Women’s
Culture,” 92).
The work was edited by Axel Erdmann and Eilert Ekwall for the Early Eng-
lish Text Series as Lydgate’s Siege of Thebes, 2 vols., EETS e.s. 108, 125 (London:
Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1911–30). My citations from the Siege of
Thebes come from this edition and are hereafter noted parenthetically within the
text. More recently Robert R. Edwards has edited the work as John Lydgate: The
Siege of Thebes (Kalamazoo: Western Michigan University for TEAMS, 2001); see
Edwards’s bibliography for the current scholarship.
17. A number of critics have discussed the literary relationship between fa-
thers and sons for Lancastrian literary culture, as well as the relationship between
print and paternity for the Tudor period. See Spearing, Medieval to Renaissance,
chapter 3, “Father Chaucer,” 88–110; Ethan Knapp, “Eulogies and Usurpations:
Hoccleve and Chaucer Revisited,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 21 (1999): 247–73,
revised as chapter 4 of The Bureaucratic Muse: Thomas Hoccleve and the Literature of
Late Medieval England (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press,
2001); and Derek Pearsall, “Hoccleve’s Regement of Princes: The Poetics of Royal
Self-Representation,” Speculum 69 (1994): 386–410.
18. See Gairdner, The Paston Letters, vol. 2, 146–49 ( letters, 120–21).
19. Between his return to England in late 1475 or early 1476 and 1479, Cax-
ton printed the following first series of Chaucerian material: in 1476 he printed
three short works by Lydgate in quarto half-sheet texts, The Churl and the Bird
(STC 17009), The Horse, the Sheep and the Goose (STC 17019), and Stans puer ad
mensam (STC 17030). In 1476/77 he printed the first English folio, the Canterbury
Tales (STC 5082), and reprinted two of the Lydgate quartos, The Horse, the Sheep
and the Goose (STC 17018) and The Churl and the Bird (STC 17008), as well as a new
edition of Lydgate’s Temple of Glass in quarto (STC 17032). In 1477 he added mis-
cellanies featuring Chaucer’s Parlement of the Fowls (titled the Temple of Brass, STC
5091) and Anelida and Arcite (STC 5090), and printed the Book of Courtesy (STC
328 n o t e s t o p a g e s 122 – 125

3303). In 1478 he printed Chaucer’s translation of Boethius’s Consolation of Philos-

ophy (STC 3199) with an epilogue and Stephen Surigonus’s epitaph. This last text
is the only edition in the first series to include original writing by Caxton.
Five years later, in 1483, Caxton returned to the Chaucerian tradition. At
this time he printed new folio editions of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (STC 5083),
The Book of Fame (STC 5087), and Troilus and Criseyde (STC 5094), as well as
Lydgate’s Life of Our Lady (STC 17023; four leaves of a trial printing, STC 17024,
also remain), and John Gower’s Confessio amantis (STC 12142). This series is
much more uniform than the first: all of the texts appear in the same year, all are
printed in folio (the Gower in a larger, Median or Bastard size), and all are
printed in some variant of Type 4 (the Canterbury Tales also makes some use of
Type 2). The Canterbury Tales and the Confessio contain original prose, while the
Book of Fame and the Lyfe of Our Lady contain prose and verse sections written by
Caxton.
In 1483 Caxton also printed two dream-visions associated with Lydgate: an
anonymous translation of Guillaume de Deguilleville’s Pilgrimage of the Soul
(STC 6474; one edition has reprinted sheet f3.6, identified as STC 6473), includ-
ing interpolated English poetry, particularly, in book iv, chapter 20, Hoccleve’s
“Complaint of the Virgin”; and the Court of Sapience (STC 17015; possibly 1480),
attributed to Lydgate by Stephan Hawes in the Pastime of Pleasure. It is unclear to
whom Caxton attributed these; he marks Lydgate’s authorship in Lyfe of Our
Lady, writing, “This book was compyled by dan John lydgate monke of Burye / at
the excitacion and styryng of the noble and victorious prynce / kyng harry the
fyfthe / in thonoure glorye & reuerence of the byrthe of our moste blessyd lady /
mayde wyf / and moder of our lorde jesu cryst / chapytred as foloweth by this
table” (p2). Clearly, Caxton felt that these works belonged in the Chaucerian
canon overall but was hesitant about their attribution.
20. The idea that the English fifteenth century is a period of repressive clo-
sure has deep roots in English literary history. C. S. Lewis suggests a fifteenth-
century “medievalization” of Chaucer’s originality (in Selected Literary Essays
[London: Cambridge University Press, 1969], 27), part of a larger “history of
decay” (English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama [Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1954], 129) in which an English culture faced with the social
chaos of the Lancastrian usurpation and the Wars of the Roses embraced estab-
lished aesthetics and abandoned the exploitative poetics of Ricardian writers such
as Chaucer, Langland, and the Pearl Poet. Three influential works have reasserted
this conclusion for late twentieth-century scholarship: perhaps the most inclusive
study, A. C. Spearing’s Medieval to Renaissance in English Poetry, argues that the
fifteenth century is a “move back rather than forwards” in literary history” (89).
Similarly, in two influential articles, “Chaucer’s Fifteenth-Century Audience and
the Narrowing of the ‘Chaucer Tradition’” and “Fourteenth- and Fifteenth-
Century Writers and Readers of Chaucer,” Paul Strohm argues that the dissolu-
tion of Chaucer’s circle left the succeeding generation less interested in com-
plexity and ambiguity than in a defined closure. Where aesthetics have given way
n o t e s t o p a g e 125 329
to cultural studies as a critical focus, the result for fifteenth-century studies has
been a change in register rather than in conclusion. See, for example, Nicholas
Watson, “Censorship,” and Paul Strohm’s England’s Empty Throne.
21. Kevin Pask, The Emergence of the English Author, 13.
22. Thynne’s Workes has frequently been touted as the founding edition of
the Chaucerian canon: for example, in The Chaucer Canon, W. W. Skeat writes,
“The most important book, with regard to the Chaucerian canon, is of course
Thynne’s first edition of Chaucer in 1532, as this was the first volume in which his
Works were presented in a collected form,” (1900; repr., New York: Hastell
House, 1965), 94. More recently, A. S. G. Edwards makes similar claims for
Thynne’s edition, arguing that that edition is “the first comprehensive, single-
volume collection of Chaucer’s works” (“Chaucer from Manuscript to Print: The
Social Text and the Critical Text,” Mosaic 28:4 [1995]: 4). So, Robert Costomiris
argues for the importance of this edition in “Sharing Chaucer’s Authority,” 6.
The problem with Edwards’s argument, as in Skeat’s before him and Costomiris’s
after him, lies in his bold assertion of a sixteenth-century moment of origins
while relying on the crucial importance of the fifteenth century overall. For ex-
ample, Edwards acknowledges that the editions of Caxton, de Worde, Notary,
and Pynson were all combined by readers into such editions well before Thynne,
a point previously put forward by Julia Bo±ey, “Pynson’s Book of Fame.” Simi-
larly, he argues that Thynne’s “example had no precedent and no imitators
among early Chaucer editors” (8) but recognizes Caxton’s e±orts to correct his
text and de Worde’s own role as an editor (6), as demonstrated by Thomas Gar-
bàty, “Wynkyn de Worde’s ‘Sir Thopas’ and Other Tales,” Studies in Bibliography
31 (1978): 57–67. That Thynne’s edition is clearly traceable to Caxton’s before
him is a bibliographic fact recognized as early as 1924, when W. W. Greg asserted
that after Caxton “each successive printer, whatever alterations or corrections
he may have introduced, set up his edition from one or the other of its prede-
cessors” (“The Early Printed Editions of the Canterbury Tales,” PMLA 39 [1924]:
740). More recently, see Robert Costomiris, “The Influence of Printed Edi-
tions and Manuscripts on the Canon of William Thynne’s Canterbury Tales,”
in Rewriting Chaucer: Culture, Authority, and the Idea of the Authentic Text, 1400–
1602 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1999), 237–57. See also Joseph A.
Dane’s discussion of these early editions in Who Is Buried in Chaucer’s Tomb? par-
ticularly 50–74, and Lotte Hellinga’s caution that “there is a risk in concen-
trating on single tales . . . a book as textual source has to be examined as an in-
tegral production, as well as in its constituent textual parts” (“Tradition and
Renewal,” 24).
23. Ralph Hanna, in Chaucer, The Riverside Chaucer, 1118. This point is true
for the woodcuts, too; see David R. Carlson, “Woodcut Illustrations of the Can-
terbury Tales, 1483–1602,” The Library ser. vi, 19 (1997): 25–67.
24. Manipulating the text to fit the page was fairly standard practice in Cax-
ton’s shop. Toshiyuki Takamiya argues for “the freedom of the compositor which
330 n o t e s t o p a g e s 126 – 129

evidently prevailed in Caxton’s printshop,” in “Caxton’s Copy-fitting Devices in

the Morte Darthur (1485): An Overview,” Chaucer in Perspective: Middle English
Essays in Honour of Norman Blake, ed. Geo±rey Lester (She¤eld: She¤eld Acad-
emy Press, 1999), 361. Similarly, Curtis Bühler argues that “we must suppose that
each compositor was responsible not only for setting up the type but also for dis-
tributing it again in his personal case,” in “Three Notes on Caxton,” The Library
ser. iv, 17 (1937): 161. See also Bühler, “Caxton’s Variants,” The Library ser. iv, 17
(1937): 62–69, and Kiyokazu Mizobata, “Caxton’s Revisions: The ‘Game of
Chess,’ the ‘Mirror of the World,’ and ‘Reynard the Fox,’” in Arthurian and Other
Studies Presented to Shunichi Noguchi, ed. Takashi Suzuki and Tsuyoshi Mukai
(Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1993), 257–62.
25. For example, Caxton’s edition reduces lines now taken as canonical, such
as Chaucer’s “I preye hem also that they arrette it to the defaute of myn unkon-
nynge and nat to my wyl, that wold ful fayn have sayd better yf that I had had
konnynge,” to “I praye hem also that they arette it to the defaute of myn uncon-
nyng,” and reduces “my translacions and enditynges of worldly vanytees” to
“namely of my translacions of Worldly Vanytees.” It is also missing “in it,” line
1071; “all,” line 1073; “the,” line 1087; and moves “for me” in line 1081. See
Manly and Rickert, The Text, 8:545–46. The most thorough study of Caxton’s
editions, Thomas Dunn’s The Manuscript Source of Caxton’s Second Edition of the
Canterbury Tales (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1940), is needlessly am-
biguous here, attributing these changes and the absence of certain lines simulta-
neously to the manuscript tradition and “eyeslip in the printing of Cx1” (3).
Trinity College Cambridge, MS R.3.19, a manuscript roughly contemporary to
Caxton’s which seems to have consulted the same copytext, does not have
roughly comparable omissions.
26. See, for example, Míc≥ eál F. Vaughan, who writes, “Modern editorial
consensus oversimplifies the widely varying manuscript forms of the rubrics.
Those forms indicate a high degree of uneasiness, in exemplars or on the part of
scribes, about how they might best meet—or more often, avoid—the demands of
the uninterrupted text” (“Creating Comfortable Boundaries: Scribes, Editors,
and the Invention of the Parson’s Tale,” in Rewriting Chaucer: Culture, Authority,
and the Idea of the Authentic Text, 1400–1602, ed. Thomas A. Prendergast and Bar-
bara Kline [Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1999], 48). Charles Owen
writes, “Recent work on the manuscripts has pointed in a di±erent direction,
namely that at Chaucer’s death The Canterbury Tales was a collection of fragments,
some of which soon became hard to come by. Scribes and editors were faced with
problems of arrangement and with the search for authentic links and tales. The
Treatise with the Retraction, appended to the Parson’s Prologue as a Parson’s Tale,
was perhaps not an ending ever intended by Chaucer” (“What the Manuscripts
Tell Us About the Parson’s Tale,” Medium Aevum 63 [1994]: 245). Manly and
Rickert link the Parson’s Tale and the Retraction, writing, “The presence of Rt in
practically all the MSS that have the whole of the PsT and the persistence (so far
n o t e s t o p a g e 129 331
as can be seen) of the same textual relations suggest that Rt was in the ancestor of
all the MSS of PsT” (The Text, 2:471). Writing alone, John M. Manly is more
assertive: “The Parson’s Tale, on the other hand, was probably never composed
»by Chaucer, the two uncomposed fragments of penitential treaties found in
our MSS under that designation being at best only loose materials, translated by
Chaucer for future use, and copied by his literary executor as the Parson’s Tale
only because Chaucer’s chest contained no other piece of prose that seemed ap-
propriate to the Parson” (“Tales of the Homeward Journey,” Studies in Philology
28 [1931]: 616). A. J. Minnis writes, “I incline to the view that the ‘litel tretys’ on
penitence and the ‘retracciouns’ (forming one unit) were added to the Canterbury
Tales—probably by Chaucer but possibly by someone else—in keeping with the
usual practice of compilatio” (Medieval Theory of Authorship, 208); see also James
A. Work, “Chaucer’s Sermon and Retractions,” Modern Language Notes 47 (1932):
257–59.
27. Hanna lists these six manuscripts as Hengwrt, Harley 7334, Corpus 198,
Merthyr, Ellesmere, and Cambridge Dd.4.24 ( Hanna, Pursuing History, 148).
Owen discounts Merthyr as too fragmentary to discuss (The Manuscripts, 105),
and provides an extended argument for the first six manuscripts written before
1420 as Hengwrt, Harley 7334, Corpus 198, Cambridge Dd.4.24, Ellesmere, and
Lansdowne 851 (The Manuscripts, 7). Hengwrt and Ellesmere were both written
by the same scribe, as were Harley 7334 and Corpus 198; Manly and Rickert
argue that Lansdowne came from the same shop (The Text, 1:307). On the scribes
of these manuscripts, see A. I. Doyle and M. B. Parkes, “The Production of
Copies of the Canterbury Tales.” Some of the arguments in this essay are followed
out by M. L. Samuels, “The Scribe of the Hengwrt and Ellesmere Manuscript of
The Canterbury Tales,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 5 (1983): 49–65; and J. J. Smith,
“The Trinity Gower D-Scribe and His Work on Two Early Canterbury Tales
Manuscripts,” in The English of Chaucer and His Contemporaries, ed. J. J. Smith
(Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1988), 51–69.
28. For Mooney’s initial identification of Pinkhurst, previously known only
as “Scribe B,” see “University of Cambridge Scholar Identifies Mystery Scribe of
the Canterbury Tales,” 04/01/04 www.Cambridgenetwork.co.uk.
Mooney’s identification of medieval scribes is presented on the “Late Me-
dieval English Scribes Database” (www.medievalscribes.com/scribes.html),
where she lists Pinkhurst’s literary texts as Geo±rey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales
(Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, Peniarth 392D, a.k.a. the Hengwrt
manuscript); Geo±rey Chaucer’s Boece (Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales,
Peniarth 393D); William Langland’s Piers Plowman, B-text (Cambridge, Trinity
College Library, B.15.17 ( James 353); John Gower’s Confessio Amantis (Cam-
bridge, Trinity College Library, R.3.2); Geo±rey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, end
of Prioress’s Prologue and beginning of Prioress’s Tale (Cambridge, University
Library, Kk.1.3); Geo±rey Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde ( Hatfield House, Mar-
quess of Salisbury, Cecil Papers, Box S/1); and Geo±rey Chaucer’s Canterbury
332 n o t e s t o p a g e s 129 – 130

Tales (San Marino, California, Henry E. Huntington Library, MS EL 26.C.9,

a.k.a. the Ellesmere manuscript).
For Mooney’s larger discussion of Scribe B’s involvement in the major works
of Chaucer, Gower, and William Langland, see her article with Simon Horobin,
“A Piers Plowman Manuscript by the Hengwrt/Ellesmere Scribe.”
29. Narrative, Authority, and Power, 24. For further references, see Vaughan,
“Creating Comfortable Boundaries,” 82 n. 3.
30. That the Canterbury Tales should be edited separately from the Retraction
is also Owen’s argument. Though I find Owen’s argument, and Vaughan’s elabo-
ration of it, provocative, I take issue with his rejection of the Retraction overall.
The Retraction is a historical part of the Canterbury Tales. As Owen himself writes,
“For a large majority of mediaeval readers the Parson’s Tale and the Retraction
belonged at the end of The Canterbury Tales” (“What the Manuscripts Tell Us
About the Parson’s Tale,” 240). To eliminate the Retraction from an edition of the
Canterbury Tales in the quest for authorial intention would to be to deny the his-
torical tradition of reading the work as a unity.
31. Manly and Rickert, The Text, 2:57.
32. Ibid., 1:256–63.
33. Ibid., 1:530.
34. Daniel S. Silvia, “Some Fifteenth-Century Manuscripts of the Canter-
bury Tales,” in Chaucer and Middle English Studies in Honour of Rossell Hope Robbins,
ed. Beryl Rowland (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1974), 161. More specifi-
cally, Silvia writes, “Fifty-five MSS have survived with reasonably complete texts
of the Tales. Of these, nine originally contained the Tales along with works by
other authors, while forty-six contained only the Tales. These forty-six MSS peak
between 1450 and 1480, when they start to slacken o± with Caxton’s printing
in c. 1478 and c. 1484” (154). Similarly, Charles A. Owen, Jr., phrases the evidence
nicely: “The early editors sought to make a book out of the fragments they col-
lected, a book that would satisfy contemporary expectations. The book we have
is far more complex, showing us a unity in the process of evolving rather than
the predictable, static, and conventional unity that is currently fashionable” (“The
Alternative Reading of The Canterbury Tales: Chaucer’s Text and the Early Manu-
scripts,” PMLA 97 [1982]: 247). More recently, Linne R. Mooney counts sixty-
four complete or near complete copies in “A New Scribe of Chaucer and Gower,”
Journal of the Early Book Society 7 (2004): 131–40.
35. For Bodleian Library MS Laud 739, see Manly and Rickert, The Text,
1:319–21; for Trinity College Cambridge, MS R.3.19, see Manly and Rickert, The
Text, 1:533–34; Silvia, “Some Fifteenth-Century Manuscripts,” 156; and N. F.
Blake, “Aftermath,” 419.
36. Manly and Rickert, The Text, 1:533. For this manuscript, see Eleanor
Prescott Hammond, “On the Order of the Canterbury Tales: Caxton’s Two Edi-
tions,” Modern Philology 3 (1905–6): 162; Julia Bo±ey and John J. Thompson,
“Anthologies and Miscellanies: Production and Choice of Texts,” in Gri¤ths and
n o t e s t o p a g e s 131 – 13 4 333
Pearsall, Book Production, 283. The main scribe of Trinity College, R.3.19 worked
at times with the “Hammond Scribe,” a prolific London copyist who worked on
the Harley 372 edition of Hoccleve’s Regement of Princes; see Brusendor±, Chaucer
Tradition, 181–82, for this name. More generally for booklet production, see
Pamela Robinson, “The Booklet: A Self-Contained Unit in Composite Manu-
scripts,” Codicologica 3 (1980): 46–69. See also Dane’s caution regarding exaggera-
tion of booklet evidence in Who Is Buried in Chaucer’s Tomb? 37–58.
37. On Sammelbände, and for a listing of Caxton editions bound as such, see
Paul Needham, The Printer and the Pardoner, 17 and 69–80. These have been well
discussed in terms of the Chaucerian tradition by Seth Lerer, who writes, “Cax-
ton appeared to follow the established manuscript tradition of producing book-
lets or fascicles of individual works or groups of works that would later be
brought together for a patron or a buyer” (“William Caxton,” in Wallace, The
Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, 726).
See also the substantial body of work by Alexandra Gillespie: her “Poets,
Printers, and Early English Sammelbände,” in Huntington Library Quarterly 67:2
(2004): 189–214, adds to Needham’s lists accounts of Bridgewater Sammelband
(193 n. 7), Liverpool and Marco Sammelbände (194 n. 15), Selden Sammelband
(196 n. 21), and the Moore Sammelband I and II (196 n. 21 and 199 n. 26, respec-
tively); and “Caxton’s Chaucer and Lydgate Quartos: Miscellanies from Manu-
script to Print,” Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society 12 (2000):
1–25, describes the Ferrers Sammelband and Doe Sammelband. Finally, see too
“The Lydgate Canon in Print, 1476–1534,” Journal of the Early Book Society 3
(2000): 59–93, and her chapter “‘Folowynge the trace of mayster Caxton’: Some
Histories of Fifteenth-Century Printed Books,” in Kuskin, Caxton’s Trace,
167–95.
38. Needham, The Printer and the Pardoner, 69–80.
39. Ibid., 66–67.
40. This is practically true in that print and manuscripts books were often
sold unbound in loose quires or in a paper wrapper; see Ernst Philip Gold-
schmidt, Gothic and Renaissance Bookbindings (London, 1928; repr., Nieuwkoop:
B. de Graaf, Amsterdam: N. Israel, 1967), 36–50; Needham, The Printer and the
Pardoner, 17.
41. The cost of printed books is notoriously di¤cult to calculate because of
the paucity of records. There are two witnesses to the price of a printed
fifteenth-century Canterbury Tales: a record from a lawsuit involving Richard
Pynson that lists a price per book of 5s. “p[re]nted and bounde,” and a note in
Lady Margaret Beaufort’s account books for January 29, 1508, recording “a boke
of Canterbury Tales. ijs. viijd.” Neither source indicates exactly to which of the cur-
rent editions these books belong; still, the figures are roughly comparable to the
remaindered price for the copies remaindered at St. Margaret’s Legenda ad usum
Sarum I touched upon in chapter 2. For the Pynson lawsuit, see H. R. Plomer’s
“Two Lawsuits of Richard Pynson,” The Library n.s. 10 (1909): 127. For the Beau-
fort Canterbury Tales, see Susan Powell, “Lady Margaret Beaufort and Her Books,”
334 n o t e s t o p a g e s 13 4 – 135
The Library ser. vi, 20 (1998): 135 n. 238. Importantly, both of these witnesses
notably undercut the average price of one-third a penny a page, which is the
assumed average recorded in H. S. Bennett, “Notes on English Retail Book-
Prices, 1480–1560,” The Library ser. v, 5 (1950): 176; and Francis R. Johnson,
“Notes on English Retail Book-Prices, 1550–1640,” The Library ser. v, 25 (1950):
83–112. In contrast, A. I. Doyle records that the London scribe William Ebesham
charged Sir John Paston III for copying his “Grete book” “Aftir A peny a leef,
which is right wele worth,” a generalized figure that does not appear to include
finishing or binding (“William Ebesham,” 302). A fine manuscript would average
out at much more.
Both Rudolf Hirsch, Printing, Selling and Reading, 34–35, and William
Blades, The Life and Typography of William Caxton, vol. 2:xxi, supply paper costs
for Italian paper, but these remain sketchy, at best conjectural for Caxton. Hirsch,
following Haebler, estimates labor at about 40–45 percent of printing cost, and,
following Febvre and Martin, paper at one-third the total, concluding, “The per-
missible generalization therefore is that in the earliest period the cost of material
probably equaled or slightly exceeded the cost of labor, that it decreased at a slow
rate, but may have been reduced to a third of the total cost some time during the
second half of the XVth century” (39). On the price of books in general, see
H. E. Bell, “The Price of Books in Medieval England,” The Library ser. iv, 17
(1937): 322, and Beverly Boyd, Chaucer and the Medieval Book (San Marino: Hunt-
ington Library, 1973), especially her appendix on money and prices, 141–57.
For Caxton’s paper stocks, see Daniel W. Moser, “Corrective Notes on the
Structures and Paper Stocks of Four Manuscripts Containing Extracts from
Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales,” Studies in Bibliography 52 (1999): 97–114, and his
“The Use of Caxton Texts and Paper Stocks in Manuscripts of the Canterbury
Tales,” in Chaucer in Perspective, ed. Lester, 161–77.
42. Gaskell, A New Introduction to Bibliography, 161. Arguments that main-
tain that fifteenth-century printing operated according to “bespoke” trade prac-
tices fail to realize this fundamental incentive. For the 1470s, print runs are
known to vary between as few as 100 copies and as many as 2,500. The terms for
Caxton’s particular output are di¤cult to estimate. H. S. Bennett suggests: “In
the earliest days of printing on the continent Dr. Haebler has estimated that be-
tween four and five hundred copies would be a fair average for a book published
between 1480–90, [but w]hether Caxton worked to such a figure we have
no means of telling” (English Books & Readers 1475–1557, 224). Rudolf Hirsch ar-
gues, “By 1470 editions of 400 copies were coming o± the presses . . . editions of
100 copies are known” (Printing, Selling and Reading, 66).
43. This is the first feature of the author-function in “What Is an Author?”
in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald F.
Bouchard, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon ( Ithaca: Cornell Univer-
sity Press, 1977), 124 (emphasis mine). I have some reservations about using this
term. In brief, Michel Foucault argues that “the author also constitutes a prin-
ciple of unity” (128) over a work that is fundamentally contradictory—“uneven”
n o t e s t o p a g e s 135 – 136 335

he calls it—and this much seems true. For Foucault, however, the process of con-
stituting the author in a functional capacity is largely legalistic, the outgrowth of
copyright rules, apparently established “toward the end of the eighteenth and the
beginning of the nineteenth century.” As a result the work remains alienated
from its physical form, the laborers who made it forgotten in history, and the
Middle Ages romanticized into a time when poetic labor was in some soft-focus
way a natural activity: “There was a time,” says Foucault, “when those texts which
we now call ‘literary’ (stories, folk tales, epics, and tragedies) were accepted, cir-
culated, and valorized without any question about the identity of their author”
(125). See Roger Chartier’s critique of Foucault in The Order of Books, 25–59; and
for Guillory, Cultural Capital, 56.
44. Edited by Beverly Boyd as Chaucer According to William Caxton: Minor
Poems and Boece, 1478 (Lawrence, Kans.: Allan Press, 1978). Brian Donaghey pro-
vides an appendix with detailed commentary on the remaining twenty-three
complete and fragmentary copies in “Caxton’s Printing of Chaucer’s Boece,” in
Chaucer in Perspective, ed. Lester, 73–99.
Caxton is not alone in using the Consolation of Philosophy as a vehicle for es-
tablishing Chaucer’s authority: John Walton’s 1410 verse translation of Boethius’s
Consolation of Philosophy also includes a tribute to Chaucer in its prologue.
To Chaucer wat is flour of rethoryk
In Englysshe tonge and excellent poete
This wot y wel no wing may I do like
†oghe so wat I of making entirmete
And Gower wat so craftily doth trette
As in hys book[es] of moralite
†oghe y to weym in making am vnmete
get must I schewe it forth that is in me.
(33–40)
The stanza contains the anthologizing function that we see in many fifteenth-
century texts, and especially in Caxton’s Book of Courtesy. McLean MS.184 appar-
ently contained Walton’s translation bound with a version of Hoccleve’s Regement
of Princes copied in the same hand, suggesting an individual owner’s appreciation
for the Chaucerian canon as defined by its three main figures. See Mark Science,
ed., Boethius: De consolatione philosophiae, translated by John Walton, EETS o.s.
170 (1927; repr., Millwood, N.Y.: Kraus Reprints, 1981), xii and 2.
45. The Book of Courtesy exists in two manuscript copies, Oriel College Ox-
ford MS 79 and Balliol College Oxford MS 354, and three early prints, Caxton’s
1477 (STC 3303) and two by Wynkyn de Worde, one in a 1492 edition (STC
3304) that bears Caxton’s trademark printed upside down and reprinted at the end
of the 1510 Stans puer ad mensam (STC 17030.5). Caxton’s print is taken to be the
earliest extant copy. Caxton’s edition and the two manuscript versions are pre-
sented in parallel form in Frederick J. Furnivall’s Caxton’s Book of Curtesye, EETS
336 n o t e s t o p a g e 136
e.s. 3 (1868; repr., Millwood, N.Y.: Kraus Reprints, 1973). Line numbers will be
given parenthetically in my text. For criticism on the Book of Courtesy, see Mark
Addison Amos, “‘For maners make man’: Bourdieu, de Certeau, and the Com-
mon Appropriation of Noble Manners in The Book of Courtesy,” in Medieval Con-
duct, ed. Kathleen Ashley and Robert L. A. Clark ( Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2001), 23–48.
46. Marx, Critique of Political Economy, 9.
47. This introductory section of Caxton’s epilogue generically follows the
pattern laid out by the accessus ad auctores tradition. On the accessus, see chapter 3
of Rita Copeland’s Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation, especially 193–95, and
“Rhetoric and Vernacular Translation in the Middle Ages,” Studies in the Age of
Chaucer 9 (1987): 41–75, as well as A. J. Minnis, “The Influence of Academic Pro-
logues on the Prologues and Literary Attitudes of Late Medieval English Writ-
ers,” Mediaeval Studies 43 (1981): 342–83, and Medieval Theory of Authorship,
particularly his introduction, “The Significance of the Medieval Theory of Au-
thorship,” and chapter 1, “Academic Prologues to ‘Auctores.’”
49. Taken from Caxton’s edition; compare fragment IV, lines 26–33, in The
Riverside Chaucer: Caxton’s 1483 edition revises the line to the more familiar “he
is now ded and nailed in his cheste” (163r).
50. The Siege of Thebes, ll. 56–57.
51. Lerer, Chaucer and His Readers, 185.
52. See Christopher Canon, “Chaucer and Rape: Uncertainty’s Certainties,”
Studies in the Age of Chaucer 22 (2000): 67–92.
53. Spearing, Medieval to Renaissance, 107.
54. Hoccleve’s Works: The Regement of Princes and Fourteen Minor Poems from
the Egerton MS. 615, ed. Fredrick J. Furnivall, EETS e.s. 72 (London: Kegan
Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1897), 465–69. For criticism on Hoccleve, see
William Kuskin, “The Erasure of Labor: Hoccleve, Caxton, and the Information
Age,” in The Middle Ages at Work, ed. Kellie Robertson and Michael Uebel ( New
York: Palgrave, 2004), n. 3.
55. Sylvia L. Thrupp’s The Merchant Class of Medieval London, 203. For a
shorter, more succinct argument along the same lines, see her article “The Prob-
lem of Conservation.”
56. The issue is connected to an ongoing process of change in urban struc-
ture stemming, in part, from the Black Death, taxation, and rural competition;
see Charles Phythian-Adams, “Urban Decay in Late Medieval England,” in
Towns and Societies: Essays in Economic History and Historical Sociology, ed. Philip
Abrams and E. A. Wrigley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 169.
57. J. M. Imray, “Les Bones Gentes de la Mercerye de Londres,” 161. For
evidence that the mercantile communities owned literary manuscripts of the
Chaucerian poets, see Carol M. Meale, “The Libelle of Engyshe Polycye and Mer-
cantile Literary Culture in Late-Medieval London,” in London and Europe in the
n o t e s t o p a g e s 137 – 146 337

Later Middle Ages, ed. Julia Bo±ey and Pamela King, Centre for Medieval and Re-
naissance Studies (London: Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of
London, 1995), 181–227.
58. The urban merchant class was less a fixed estate operating in, as Marx
and Engels presume, “the little workshop of the patriarchal master” than a fluid
group. See Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “The Communist Manifesto,” in
Karl Marx: Selected Writings, ed. D. McLellan (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1977), 227. See also Friedrich Engels, “The Origins of the Family, Private Prop-
erty and the State,” in Marx and Engels, Selected Works (London: Lawrence and
Wishard, 1968).
59. The two editions have been studied most extensively by Thomas Dunn
in The Manuscript Source of Caxton’s Second Edition of the Canterbury Tales. Dunn
concludes that Caxton had the 1483 text set from a corrected copy of his 1476/77
b-text, which he edited against a manuscript loosely related to the a-group, pro-
ducing a unique conflation (see especially 2, 15, and 36). Caxton rearranges his
text simply by moving the Squire’s Tale (from before to after the Merchant) and the
Franklin’s Tale (placing it directly after the Squire), a modification Dunn attrib-
utes to his discovery of the words of the Franklin to the Squire, rather than a the-
ory of fasicular displacement, as favored by Hammond in “On the Order of the
Canterbury Tales.” Hammond usefully catalogues Caxton’s miscellaneous addi-
tions and subtractions of lines from the tales. More recently, see Barbara Bor-
dalejo’s notes and collation on CD-ROM, Caxton’s Canterbury Tales: The British
Library Copies (Leicester: Scholarly Digital Editions, 2003).
Chapter Four. Uninhabitable Chaucer
1. Caxton presents the “Epitaphium Galfridi Chaucer . per poetam laurea-

tum Stephanum Surigonum Mediolanensem in decretis licenciatum” on the last
page of the Consolation of Philosophy (94r–v). Surigonus received a bachelor’s degree
in canon law from Milan, and taught Latin at Oxford between 1454 and 1464. He
appears at the university at Cologne in 1471, where he became attached to
Charles the Bold’s court and, afterward, returned to Cambridge in 1475 and 1476.
The last four lines of the epitaph, separated from the main text by a space, sug-
gest Caxton’s direct employment of Surigonus in a direct address to Chaucer:
Post obitum Caxton voluit te viuere cum
¶ Willelmi. Chaucer clare poeta tuj
Nam tua non solum compressit opuscula formis
Has quoque sed laudes. iussit his esse tuas
Noting this, William Blades suggested that Caxton “raised a public monument to
[Chaucer’s] memory before St. Benet’s Chapel, in Westminster Abbey, in the
shape of a pillar supporting a tablet upon which the above ‘Epitaphye’ was writ-
338 n o t e s t o p a g e s 147 – 155

ten” (The Life and Typography of William Caxton, 2:67). Norman F. Blake argues
that Caxton simply copied the epitaph from the tomb and added on the last four
lines to contrive a relationship with Surigonus (Caxton and His World, 198–99), an
argument that both runs against the critical tradition and has not been readily ac-
cepted. See Roberto Weiss, Humanism in England, 128; William Matthews, “Cax-
ton and Chaucer: A Re-View,” in The Malory Debate: Essays on the Texts of Le
Morte Darthur, ed. Bonnie Wheeler, Robert L. Kindrick, and Michael N. Salda
(Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2000), 1–34; and George D. Painter’s remarks that
Surigonus wrote a Latin verse advertisement for Johann Mentelin’s 1469 edition
of Virgil, the first ever (William Caxton, 92–93).
The passage has been discussed eloquently by a number of scholars. Seth
Lerer argues that with Chaucer entombed, his authority epitomizes the paradox-
ical state of fifteenth-century literature as simultaneously constructed through a
canon of “faders ancient,” but also engulfed by history. Thus, Caxton’s editions
are “products of recovery” of a laureate past (Chaucer and His Readers, 150; conve-
niently, Lerer reprints the passage and provides a translation, 159). David R.
Carlson takes it in a somewhat di±erent direction, noting that Chaucer “was
buried in Westminster Abbey, not because he was a poet, but because he had been
a successful, prominent government servant” (“Chaucer, Humanism, and Print-
ing: Conditions of Authorship in Fifteenth-Century England,” University of
Toronto Quarterly 64:2 [1995]: 274). For Joseph A. Dane the tomb is a central
metaphor for the illegibility of a history approached only through what appears
to be the tragically impermanent, yet nevertheless alluring medium of inscription
(see Who Is Buried in Chaucer’s Tomb? 11–32).
2. In “Marriage and Politics in the Fifteenth Century: The Nevilles and the
Wydevilles,” chapter 4 in Crown and Nobility, 1450–1509 ( Montreal: McGill-
Queen’s University Press, 1976), 104.
3. Peter J. Lucas supplies an influential definition of patronage as “a human
relationship based on exchange, a relationship between a person with money and
a person with a book,” in “The Growth and Development of English Literary
Patronage,” The Library ser. vi, 4 (1982): 223. See also Richard Firth Green, Poets
and Princepleasers: Literature and the English Court in the Late Middle Ages ( To-
ronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980), and H. S. Bennett, “The Production
and Dissemination of Vernacular Manuscripts in the Fifteenth Century,” The Li-
brary ser. v, 1 (1947): 167–78. For more recent discussions of patronage, and a
strong review of the field, see Deborah McGrady, “What Is a Patron? Bene-
factors and Authorship in Harley 4431, Christine de Pizan’s Collected Works,”
in Christine de Pizan and the Categories of Difference, ed. Marilynn Desmond ( Min-
neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 195–214. See also Jennifer Sum-
mit’s remarks in “William Caxton, Margaret Beaufort and the Romance of
Female Patronage,” in Smith and Taylor, Women, the Book and the Worldly, 155;
and A. S. G. Edwards and Carol M. Meale, “Marketing,” where they write,
“What is clear, perhaps, is that we need to allow for fluidity in our understanding
n o t e s t o p a g e s 155 – 15 6 339
of the symbiotic relations which were established between printers and their ‘pa-
trons’—to acknowledge that the benefits to be gained from any association were
not necessarily always equally balanced, and that at any given time one party may
have had more reason to pursue it than the other” (101).
4. Edited as The Curial: Made by Maystere Alain Charretier: Translated thus
in Englyssh by William Caxton, 1484, ed. Frederick J. Furnivall, EETS 54 (1888;
repr., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965).
5. Blake, Caxton and His World, 94. Blake, following Blades, dates the Curial
at 1484; Painter and later Needham place it at 1483.
6. Caxton’s modern readers have argued that Woodville (or one of his
party) is largely responsible for much of Caxton’s work. Thus Blades concludes
that Woodville’s “friendship and patronage . . . was in all probability a strong in-
ducement to [Caxton’s] adoption of a new vocation and settlement at Westmin-
ster,” in The Dictes and Sayings of the Philosophers: A Facsimile Reproduction of the
First Book Printed in England by William Caxton, in 1477 (1877; repr., London:
Diploma Press, 1974), vi; N. F. Blake ascribes Caxton’s printing of the Canterbury
Tales to Woodville’s patronage in “Caxton and Chaucer,” Leeds Studies in English
n.s. 1 (1967): 20; and Painter’s telling of Caxton’s biography is deeply committed
to the story of the nobility. In “The Early History of the Malory Manuscript”
Hilton Kelliher argues for a relationship between Woodville and Malory in
which the Winchester manuscript of Le Morte D’Arthur passed through
Woodville’s hands on its way to Caxton’s shop. Reliant almost entirely on Kelli-
her’s unique recreation of events, this narrative is strongly contested by Carol M.
Meale, who points out that libraries other than Woodville’s may just as well have
su¤ced for Malory’s research, adding, “Given the evident care with which
Wydville promoted his interests both in general and in respect of his role as pa-
tron, if he had been instrumental in the composition of the Morte, it is almost in-
conceivable, even making due allowance for his family’s downfall, that no record
of such an involvement should be traceable in either manuscript or printed copies
of the text” (“Manuscripts, Readers, and Patrons in Fifteenth-Century England:
Sir Thomas Malory and Arthurian Romance,” in Arthurian Literature, vol. 4, ed.
Richard Barber [ Totowa, N.J.: Barnes and Noble, 1985], 112). It is important to
remember that no evidence other than Caxton’s testimony in the Dictes, the
Morale Prouerbes, and the Cordyal exists for Woodville’s involvement in Caxton’s
a±airs. Blake actually asserts this lack of evidence as grounds for what he calls
“anonymous patronage” (Caxton and His World, 94; see also his “Investigations
into the Prologues and Epilogues by William Caxton” BJRL 49 [1967]: 17–46), a
position he later abandons in “Lydgate and Caxton.”
7. Jennifer Summit, Lost Property, 3; see also 7 and 71.
8. Curtis Bühler, The Dicts and Sayings of the Philosophers: The Translations
Made by Stephen Scrope, William Worcester and an Anonymous Translator (London:
Oxford University Press, 1941), xii; Backhouse, et al., William Caxton: An Exhibi-
tion, 40.
340 n o t e s t o p a g e s 157 – 162

9. M. A. Hicks points out that Elizabeth began making her own appoint-
ments for her estates within months of her marriage, “The Changing Role of the
Wydevilles in Yorkist Politics to 1483,” in Patronage, Pedigree, and Power, ed.
Charles Ross (Gloucester: Alan Sutton, 1979), 60–86; Lander describes her as
“hard-headed in her business relations” (“Marriage and Politics,” 118).
10. Hicks, “The Changing Role,” 79.
11. For Woodville’s biography, see Hicks, “The Changing Role,” 60–86, and
False, Fleeting, Perjur’d Clarence: George, Duke of Clarence, 1449–78 (Gloucester:
A. Sutton, 1980).
12. For the Bodye of Polyce see Diane Bornstein, The Middle English Transla-
tion of Christine de Pisan’s Livre du Corps de Policie ( Heidelberg: Carl Winter,
1977), and “Sir Anthony Woodville as the Translator of Christine de Pisan’s Livre
du corps de policie,” Fifteenth Century Studies 2 (1979): 9–20. For Harley 4431, see
McGrady, “What Is a Patron?” and Sandra L. Hindman, “The Composition of
the Manuscript of Christine de Pizan’s Collected Works in the British Library: A
Reassessment,” British Library Journal 9 (1983): 93–123.
13. For these details, see Jennifer R. Goodman, “William Caxton and
Anthony Woodville, Translators: The Case of the Dictes or Sayengis of the Philos-
ophres,” New Comparison 12 (1991): 10, and “Malory and Caxton’s Chivalric Se-
ries”; Blake, Caxton and His World, 84–85; Painter, William Caxton, 84–91; Lander,
“Marriage and Politics,” 115, 125–41, 260–64. For the overlap between Burgun-
dian titles and Caxton’s output in general, see Diane Bornstein, “Caxton’s Chival-
ric Romances”; J. H. Hexter, “The Education of the Aristocracy in the
Renaissance,” Journal of Modern History 22 (1950): 1–20, especially 11–15; and
Anne F. Sutton and Livia Visser-Fuchs, “Choosing a Book in Late Fifteenth-
Century England,” in England and the Low Countries in the Late Middle Ages, ed.
Caroline Barron and Nigel Saul ( New York: St. Martin’s, 1995): 61–98, who pro-
vide a list of Edward IV’s books, 84–86.
14. For these jousts, see James Gairdner, The Paston Letters, 4:279 (letter 669)
and 298 ( letter 684), respectively. See also 4:275 ( letter 665).
15. Reviewed by E. W. Ives, “Andrew Dymmock and the Papers of Antony,
Earl Rivers, 1482–3,” Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 41 (1968): 216–29.
16. See Bühler, Dicts, x, and Painter, William Caxton, 87.
17. For the Cordyal, see J. A. Mulders, The Cordyal by Anthony Woodville, Earl
Rivers: Edited from M 38 A1, The Museum Meermanno Westreenianum, the Hague
( Nijmegen: Centrale Drukkerij, 1962).
18. For the following, see Hicks, False, Fleeting, Perjur’d Clarence, 141–45.
19. Hicks records this presentation as November 1, 1477, but does not pro-
vide a source (False, Fleeting, Perjur’d Clarence, 145). Painter speculates that it was
a Christmas present for the king (William Caxton, 90). There is no hard and fast
date for the presentation.
20. Additional 22718 was copied by Thomas Cokke, who apparently misread
the regenal year for 1467 rather than 1477. Caxton printed three editions of the
n o t e s t o p a g e s 163 – 16 9 341
Dictes and Sayings: 1477 (STC 6826), 1480 (STC 6828), and 1489 (STC 6829).
The dating of these editions is somewhat complicated. The copy of the 1477
Dictes at the John Rylands Library in Manchester, once owned by Earl Spencer,
possesses a unique colophon (STC 6827) similar to that of the Lambeth Palace
manuscript:
Thus endeth this book of the dyctes and notable wyse sayengs of the phy-
losophers late translated and drawen out of frenshe into our englisshe tonge
by my forsaide lord Therle of Ryvers and lord Skales .and by hys comande-
ment sette in forme and emprynted in this manere as ye maye here in this
booke see Whiche was fynisshed the .xviij. day of the moneth of Nouembre.
and the seuenteenth yere of the regene of kynge Edward the fourth. (See
Blades, Facsimile, viii)
This suggests that the 1477 print run had a special batch that was treated
separately. Further, the 1480 edition has the date of the first edition, making the
two di¤cult to distinguish. The 1489 edition returns to the 1477 edition, with
a new colophon. See Curtis Bühler, “Some Observations on The Dictes and
Sayings of the Philosophers,” The Library ser. v, 8 (1953): 77–88; Painter, William
Caxton, 89; Blake, Caxton and His World, 219–20; and Hellinga, Caxton in Focus,
77–80.
21. Ingulph’s Chronicle of the Abbey of Croyland with the Continuations of Peter
of Blois and Anonymous Writers, trans. Henry T. Riley (London: Henry G. Bohn,
1854), 470.
22. On the Caister circle, see Jennifer Summit, Lost Property, 71–81; K. B.
McFarlane, “William Worcester: A Preliminary Survey,” in England in the Fif-
teenth Century: Collected Essays (London: Hambledon Press, 1981), 199–224, and
“William Worcester and a Present of Lampreys,” in the same volume, 225–30;
and Bühler, Dicts, xxvii. As a poet and clerk of the Signet, Ashby appears engaged
in the same literary culture as Caxton; see Mary Bateson’s introduction to her
edition, George Ashby’s Poems, EETS e.s. 76 (1899; repr., London: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 1965).
23. Hicks, “The Changing Role,” 70.
24. For a brief overview of Tiptoft’s interests, see James P. Carley, “The
Royal Library Under Henry VIII,” in Hellinga and Trapp, The Cambridge History
of the Book, 297–99, and Weiss, Humanism in England, 112–23.
25. Painter, William Caxton, 114 n. 1.
26. See Summit, Lost Property, 81–93, and A. E. B. Coldiron, “Taking Advice
from a Frenchwoman: Caxton, Pynson, and Christine de Pizan’s Moral Pro-
verbs,” in Kuskin, Caxton’s Trace, 127–66.
27. See J. C. Laidlaw, “Christine de Pizan, the Earl of Salisbury and Henry
IV,” French Studies 36 (1982): 129–43.
28. Crotch, The Prologues and Epilogues, 32.
29. Summit, Lost Property, 62.
30. Ibid., 73.
342 n o t e s t o p a g e s 172 – 175

31. In The Book of Fayttes of Armes and of Chyualrye, EETS 189 (London:
Oxford University Press, 1932), the editor, A. T. P. Byles, terms these two tradi-
tions the A-group and the B-group, which lacks all references to female author-
ship, substituting “l’aucteur” or “le disciple” for de Pizan’s name, and replacing
feminine forms with masculine (xiv). These traditions also di±er somewhat re-
garding chapter divisions (xv). Caxton’s text comes from the A-group but has the
chapter confusions of the B-group. Byles identifies BL Royal 19 B xviii as the
closest to Caxton’s translation, and points out that Caxton’s epilogue only allows
six weeks between his completion of the translation and the printing of the
book—a surprisingly quick turnaround. Byles, following an implicit revision
made by Blades (1:72), suggests the date should read 1490 (xxx). Caxton’s epi-
logue suggests this reading: “Whiche translacyon was finysshed the / viij / day of
Iuyll the sayd yere [1489] 7 enprynted the / xiiij / day of Iuyll next folowyng 7 ful
fynyshed” (S5v). This has not been picked up in the more recent chronologies of
Caxton’s imprints. British Library Royal 15 E vi. was given as a present to Mar-
garet of Anjou by her escort to her marriage to Henry VI, John Talbot, Earl of
Shrewsbury, in 1445. Byles dates this manuscript before 1447. This manuscript
features a presentation scene depicting Shrewsbury’s presentation of the manu-
script to Margaret and Henry VI. Blades argues that Caxton had access to this
manuscript, and suggests it is “not improbable” that it was his copytext (2:206),
and Byles concurs, but points out that as Caxton has anti-English material lack-
ing in Royal 15 E vi., he must have used another manuscript as well.
More generally, for de Pizan’s Le livre des faits d’armes see Charity Cannon
Willard, “Christine de Pizan on the Art of Warfare,” in Christine de Pizan and the
Categories of Difference, ed. Desmond, 3–15, and her “Pilfering Vegetius? Christine
de Pizan’s Faits d’Armes et de Chevalerie,” in Smith and Taylor, Woman, the Book and
the Worldly, 31–37. For Christine de Pizan’s rhetorical shaping of her role as an au-
thor, see Liliane Dulac, “Authority in the Prose Treatises of Christine de Pizan:
The Writer’s Discourse and the Prince’s Word,” in Politics, Gender, and Genre: The
Political Thought of Christine de Pizan, ed. Margaret Brabant (Boulder, Colo.: West-
view Press, 1992), 129–40; Earl Je±rey Richards, “Christine de Pizan, the Conven-
tions of Courtly Diction, and Italian Humanism,” in Reinterpreting Christine de
Pizan, ed. Earl Je±rey Richards (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992),
250–71; and Helen Solterer, The Master and Minerva: Disputing Women in French
Medieval Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), particularly
chapter 6, “Christine’s Way: The Querelle du Roman de la rose and the Ethics of a
Political Response,” 151–75. For the relationship between this rhetoric and book
construction, see Joël Blanchard, “Compilation and Legitimation in the Fifteenth
Century: Le Livre de la Cité des Dames,” in Reinterpreting Christine de Pizan, ed.
Richards, 228–49; Cynthia J. Brown, “The Reconstruction of an Author in Print:
Christine de Pizan in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries,” in Christine de Pizan
and the Categories of Difference, ed. Desmond, 215–35, who discusses the waning
of de Pizan’s identity as an author in English prints in the sixteenth century; and
A. E. B. Coldiron, “Taking Advice from a Frenchwoman.” See also Angus J.
n o t e s t o p a g e 175 343
Kennedy’s useful review of the literature, “A Selective Bibliography of Christine

de Pizan Scholarship, circa 1980–1987,” in Reinterpreting Christine de Pizan, ed.
Richards, 285–98.
32. For women patrons and bookowners, see Summit, Lost Property; Susan
Groag Bell, “Medieval Women Book Owners: Arbiters of Lay Piety and Ambas-
sadors of Culture,” Signs 7 (1982): 742–68; Joan Ferrante, “Whose Voice? The
Influence of Women Patrons on Courtly Romances,” in Literary Aspects of Courtly
Culture: Selected Papers from the Seventh Triennial Congress of the International
Courtly Literature Society, ed. Donald Maddox and Sara Sturm-Maddox ( Wood-
bridge, Su±olk: D. S. Brewer, 1994), 3–18; Lotte Hellinga, “Importation of Books
Printed on the Continent,” 218; and the essays in Women and Literature in Britain,
1150–1500, ed. Carol M. Meale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993),
especially, Meale, “‘. . . alle the bokes that I haue of latyn, englisch, and frensch’:
Laywomen and Their Books in Late Medieval England,” 128–58, and Julia
Bo±ey, “Women Authors and Women’s Literacy in Fourteenth- and Fifteenth-
Century England,” in the same volume, 159–82; as well as the essays in Smith and
Taylor, Women, the Book and the Worldly, especially Summit, “William Caxton,
Margaret Beaufort and the Romance of Female Patronage.”
33. Byles, 1:v; 1:xxiii. Willard argues de Pizan also drew from John of Leg-
nano’s Tractatus de bello, in “Pilfering,” 35.
34. “The Investment of Sir John Fastolf’s Profits of War,” in England in the
Fifteenth Century, 184; see also McFarlane, “War, the Economy and Social
Change: England and the Hundred Years War,” in England in the Fifteenth Cen-
tury, 139–49; and C. A. J. Armstrong, “Sir John Fastolf and the Law of Arms,” in
England, France and Burgundy in the Fifteenth Century, ed. C. A. J. Armstrong
(London: Hambledon, 1983), 123–33. More generally, see M. M. Postan, “The
Fifteenth Century,” Economic History Review 9 (1938–39): 165; and M. M. Postan,
“Some Social Consequences of the Hundred Years’ War,” Economic History Review
12 (1942): 1–12.
35. McFarlane, “The Investment of Sir John Fastolf’s Profits of War,” 184.
36. On the emerging class of literate clerks, particularly the rise of the gen-
tleman bureaucrat, see Summit, Lost Property, 67–71; R. L. Storey, “Gentleman-
Bureaucrats,” in Profession, Vocation, and Culture in Later Medieval England: Essays
Dedicated to the Memory of A. R. Myers, ed. Cecil H. Clough (Liverpool: Liverpool
University Press, 1982), 90–129; McFarlane, “William Worcester: A Preliminary
Survey,” 202; Anne Middleton, “The Idea of Public Poetry in the Reign of
Richard II,” Speculum 53 (1978): 94–114, and “Chaucer’s ‘New Men’ and the
Good Literature in the Canterbury Tales,” in Literature and Society: Selected Papers
from the English Institute, 1978, ed. Edward W. Said (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1980), 15–56.
37. Hicks, False, Fleeting, Perjur’d Clarence, 60. John Fortescue objected to
the Yorkist inheritance through the female line; see M. H. Keen, England in the
Later Middle Ages, 462.
344 n o t e s t o p a g e s 17 6 – 18 0
38. Susan Powell, “Lady Margaret Beaufort and Her Books,” The Library
ser. vi, 20 (1998): 196. For Margaret’s independent authority, her patronage of the
University of Cambridge, and her licensed retinue, see Michael K. Jones and Mal-
colm G. Underwood, The King’s Mother: Lady Margaret Beaufort, Countess of Rich-
mond and Derby (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), and two articles
by Malcolm G. Underwood, “The Lady Margaret and Her Cambridge Con-
nections,” Sixteenth Century Journal 13 (1982): 67–81, and “Politics and Piety in
the Household of Lady Margaret Beaufort,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History
38 (1987): 39–52. For an important narrowing of Lady Margaret’s influence, as
well as a useful biography, see Retha M. Warnicke, “The Lady Margaret, Count-
ess of Richmond: A Noblewoman of Independent Wealth and Status,” Fifteenth-
Century Studies 9 (1984): 215–48; for her relationship to Caxton see M. J. C.
Lowry, “Caxton, St. Winifred and the Lady Margaret Beaufort,” The Library
ser. vi, 5 (1983): 101–17; Rebecca Krug, Reading Families: Women’s Literate Prac-
tice in Late Medieval England ( Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002), particularly
chapter 2, “Margaret Beaufort’s Literate Practice: Service and Self-Inscription,”
65–113, especially 151–52; Summit, “William Caxton, Margaret Beaufort”; and
A. S. G. Edwards and Carol M. Meale, “Marketing,” 100–115. Also useful are
David Baldwin, Elizabeth Woodville: Mother of the Princes in the Tower (Gloucester-
shire: Sutton, 2002), 11–12; and C. A. J. Armstrong, “The Piety of Cicely, Duch-
ess of York: A Study in Late Mediaeval Culture,” in England, France and Burgundy
in the Fifteenth Century, 135–56.
39. The English Works of John Fisher, ed. J. E. B. Mayor, EETS e.s. 27 (Lon-
don: N. Trübner, 1876), 292
40. Powell, “Lady Margaret Beaufort and Her Books,” 234.
42. Powell, “Lady Margaret Beaufort and Her Books,” 233–34.
43. Ibid., 223 nn. 168, 167, and 170 respectively. The bracketed glosses are
Powell’s.
44. STC lists these as one publication, printed in 1504; however, the first
three books are printed in continuous register, and end with the following
colophon:
¶ Here endeth the thyrde boke of John Gerson : Emprynted in London by

Rycharde Pynson . in fletestrete at the Synge of the George . at the com-
maundement and instaunce of the ryght noble & excellent Prynces Mar-
garete moder to our souerain lorde kynge Henry the .vii. and Countesse of
Rychmount and Derby . The yere of our lorde .M.V.iii. The .xxvii. day of
June. (Q3v )
This is followed by a blank sheet on the verso side of which appears Pynson’s
mark, and then Margaret’s portcullis. On the next page begins the following ru-
bric, elaborately set with woodcuts of the Tudor shield and Margaret’s portcullis:
n o t e s t o p a g e s 181 – 182 345

¶ Here beginethe the forthe boke of the folowinge Jesu cryst & of the con-
tempnige of the world. Inprynted at the commaundement of the most excel-
lent prynces Margarete:moder unto our souereyne lorde:kinge Henry the
vii. Countes of Richemount and Darby And by the same Prynces it was
translated oute of frenche into Englisshe in fourme and maner ensuinge .
Theyere of our lord god M.D.iiii. (p1v)
The visual apparatus ( lacking for the first three books), the dates, the new regis-
ter, conspire to suggest that Margaret’s fourth book constitutes a separate publi-
cation associated with Atkinson’s after printing.
45. Martha W. Driver argues, “The Bridgettines were active not only in pro-
moting vernacular translations, but in selecting, commissioning, and, to some ex-
tent, designing books thought appropriate to be read not only by themselves, but
by a lay audience outside the walls of Syon” (“Nuns as Patrons, Artists, Readers:
Bridgettine Woodcuts in Printed Books Produced for the English Market,” in
Art into Life: Collected Papers from the Kresge Art Museum Medieval Symposia, ed.
Carol Garrett Fisher [East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1995], 239).
De Worde, Pynson, and Richard Fawkes printed books for the members of the
Syon community, and Driver connects Syon specifically to Caxton’s shop:
Further evidence suggests that the woodcut of Saint Bridget writing at her
desk and its copies issued from a single workshop, a workshop connected
with William Caxton and Wynkyn de Worde and closely tied to Syon. One
work without direct textual reference to Syon but with the Bridget woodcut
is the Dyetary of Ghostly Helthe. Like many of the books with prefaces by
Syon monks, the Dyetary is directed to “my good sisters” and describes vari-
ous activities, such as reading aloud at meals, which were practiced by Brid-
gettines. From these internal clues one might deduce that this book, too, was
a product of Syon. More striking still are the patterns of picture use in vari-
ous editions of the Dyetary. (250)
For a useful overview of the history of the abbey in general, and its particular
connection with the Carthusian house at Seen, see Ann M. Hutchison, “Devo-
tional Reading in the Monastery and in the Late Medieval Household,” in De
Cella in Seculum: Religious and Secular Life and Devotion in Late Medieval England,
ed. Michael G. Sargent (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1989), 215–27; for discussion of
Syon’s books and book production, see also Mary C. Erler, “Syon Abbey’s Care
for Books: Its Sacristan’s Account Rolls 1506/7–1535/6,” Scriptorium 39 (1985):
293–307; for the role of the Carthusians in the production of English mystical
manuscripts, see Michael G. Sargent, “The Transmission by the English Carthu-
sians of Some Late Medieval Spiritual Writings,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History
27 (1976): 225–40; finally, see Krug, Reading Families, chapter 4, “Reading at
Syon,” 153–206.
46. See Nicholas Watson’s definition of the term vernacular theology, in
“Censorship,” 823 n. 4; see also two important essays in The Medieval Mystical Tra-
346 n o t e s t o p a g e s 182 – 183

dition in England: Exeter Symposium IV: Papers Read at Dartington Hall, July 1987,
ed. Marion Glasscoe (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1987): George R. Keiser, “The
Mystics and the Early English Printers: The Economics of Devotionalism,” 9–26,
and Sue Ellen Holbrook, “Margery Kempe and Wynkyn de Worde,” 27–46.
47. See Painter, “Caxton Through the Looking Glass,” Gutenberg Jahr-
buch (1963): 73–80, and William Caxton, 184–86; Powell, “Lady Margaret Beau-
fort and Her Books,” 209; and Mary C. Erler, “Devotional Literature,” 506, re-
spectively.
48. See David Rogers, “Johann Hamman at Venice: A Survey of His Career.
With a Note on the Sarum ‘Horae’ of 1494,” in Essays in Honour of Victor
Scholderer, ed. Dennis E. Rhodes ( Mainz: Karl Pressler, 1970), 349–68.
49. Erler, “Devotional Literature,” 515. Martha W. Driver also comments on
the volume of vernacular religious printed material intelligently in “Pictures in
Print: Late Fifteenth- and Early Sixteenth-Century English Religious Books for
Lay Readers,” in De Cella in Seculum, ed. Sargent, 229–44.
50. Cited in Powell, “Lady Margaret Beaufort and Her Books,” 201 n. 16.
51. Erler, “Devotional Literature,” 498.
52. The Dialogue Between a Lord and a Clerk appears in five of the fourteen
manuscripts of the Polychronicon; see Emily Steiner, “Radical Historiography:
Langland, Trevisa, and the Polychronicon,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 27 (2005):
171–211, especially 182–83 for a review of the available criticism on this passage.
See also Alastair Minnis’s comments on the passage in this same issue, “‘I speke of
folk in seculer estaat’: Vernacularity and Secularity in the Age of Chaucer,” 30–31.
53. See, specifically, Underwood, “The Lady Margaret and Her Cambridge
Connections,” and “Politics and Piety in the Household of Lady Margaret Beau-
fort,” as well as Warnicke, “The Lady Margaret, Countess of Richmond,” 233.
54. Edwards and Meale, “Marketing,” 101. Lady Margaret was also alive to
the importance of devices, and upon Henry’s ascension changed her own signa-
ture from “M. Richmond” to “Margaret R.,” echoing his “Henry R.,” for Henrici
Rex. She also changed her seal (see STC 18566, 19305).
55. Chartier was the court secretary for Charles VII. The Belle dame, circu-
lated in 1424, inspired debate within this court, which Chartier answered with his
Excusacioun aus dames, after Jean de Meun, and which, in turn, occasioned La re-
sponse des dames faicte a maistre Alain, authored by “Jeanne, Katherine, and Marie,”
and was carried on by at least five more texts. See Solterer, The Master and Min-
erva, 177–78.
56. “William Caxton and Anthony Woodville, Translators,” 17.
57. A list of Alice’s books, documented in the Ewelme Muniments, Bodleian
Library VII.A.47, are reproduced by Henry Alford Napier, as “the Letters from
Alice,” undated, as item 6.i., in Historical Notices of the Parishes of Swyncombe and
Ewelme in the County of Oxford (Oxford: James Wright, 1858), 127–28; see also
Jansen, Suffolk Poems, 17 n. 12; and Meale, “Reading Women’s Culture,” 84, and
“alle the books that I haue,” 134.
n o t e s t o p a g e s 183 – 18 9 347
Chapter Five. Caxton’s Worthies Series
1. Diane Bornstein argues that Caxton’s selection of texts almost com-

pletely follows “the practice of writers at the Court of Burgundy” (“Caxton’s
Chivalric Romances,” 9); Derek Pearsall discusses the English romances as “pure
transplantation” (“The English Romance in the Fifteenth Century,” 79); Eliza-
beth Kirk labels him “a fundamentally non-innovative thinker” (“‘Clerkes, Po-
etes, and Historiographs’: The Morte Darthur and Caxton’s ‘Poetics’ of Fiction,”
in Studies in Malory, 291); William Kretzschmar sees in him the “straightforward
and conservative view” of his times (“Caxton’s Sense of History,” JEGP 91:4
[1992]: 528); R. F. Yeager cautiously finds in him a sober literary view, one “repre-
sentative of his age” and reflecting “a serious, if bourgeois, literary theory” (“Lit-
erary Theory at the Close of the Middle Ages,” 146–47); and Werner Hüllen
writes that “Caxton’s historical role seems to lie in the fact that he printed the
right text at the right time” (“A Close Reading of William Caxton’s Dialogues:
‘. . . to lerne Shortly frenssh and englyssh,’” in Historical Pragmatics: Pragmatic
Developments in the History of English, ed. Andreas H. Jucker [ Philadelphia: John
Benjamins, 1995], 114). Within this view, any originality on Caxton’s part is
usually presented as an o±shoot of his good—if precapitalist—business sense:
Russell Rutter suggests, “Caxton should be recognized as a pioneer in the mass-
marketing of books just as in the past he has been recognized as the pioneer of
English printing itself” (“William Caxton and Literary Patronage,” 470), and
Marilynn Desmond argues that his tolerance of multiplicity in literature
“demonstrates his mercantile assumptions” (Reading Dido, 176).
2. Traditionally Caxton studies have moved past these problematic ques-
tions simply by taking their resolution as a given. As Barbara Belyea points out in
“Caxton’s Reading Public,” English Language Notes 19 (1981): 14–19, the dearth of
evidence regarding Caxton’s print runs and his finances has meant that the pre-
cise nature of his audience has remained “conjectural,” but nevertheless she finds
Caxton “loyal” to traditional values, unable to “anticipate the intellectual and so-
cial changes . . . which his introduction of the printing press” would cause, and
generally addressing the bourgeoisie (19). The main dissenter to these assump-
tions is, of course, George D. Painter in William Caxton, who argues that Caxton
was so involved with the nobility as to transmit coded messages to them through
his prologues, epilogues, and selection of texts. Painter aside, Belyea is typical in
selecting the bourgeoisie as Caxton’s audience.
The experiences of this bourgeoisie are rarely looked into in any depth. For
example, in perhaps the most considered investigation of the bourgeoisie’s move
into Arthurian literature, David Carlson sets the birth of Arthur Tudor in 1486 as
the significant break point in the appeal of the Arthurian legend to the nobility:
The Arthur myth was viable propaganda for the urban middle class, but not
for an aristocracy jealous of its prerogatives and perhaps vaguely resentful of
bourgeois usurpations in general, nor for an educated élite, increasingly hu-
348 n o t e s t o p a g e 193
manist in its orientation and increasingly skeptical about King Arthur.

(“King Arthur and Court Poems,” 165)
Published some thirteen months before Arthur Tudor’s birth and accompanied by
its skeptical prologue, Caxton’s Le Morte D’Arthur seems to exemplify Carlson’s
paradigm for change; indeed, Carlson briefly cites it as such. In imagining the
bourgeoisie as usurping, but still in some way satisfied by a literature the nobility
was rapidly coming to see as empty, this line of thinking fails to account for these
middle classes’ desires beyond an implied notion of cultural capital. In fact, the
very identity of these classes remains poorly understood, and it is a case in point
that the definitive treatment of their experience, Sylvia Thrupp’s The Merchant
Class of Medieval London, argues for the di¤culties any middle group had in repro-
ducing itself (299). Far from speaking their desire to usurp with a single voice, it
appears that these middle classes had trouble articulating any voice at all. If mem-
bers of this group embraced Caxton, they embraced him not as a matter of
course, but because he provided them with such a voice.
3. Stephen Knight’s “The Social Function of the Middle English Ro-
mances,” in Medieval Literature, ed. David Aers ( New York: St. Martin’s Press,
1986), 99–122, stands as perhaps the first attempt to read Le Morte D’Arthur in
terms of ideology. While Knight deserves praise for raising the issue, his model
of medieval society as a hierarchy (103), forces him to theorize romance as a static
exploration of ideal values (118) instead of the dynamic engagement with the ma-
terial conditions of existence that the Marxist apparatus implies.
4. Though relatively unremarked upon by Caxton’s early historians, a
significant body of work has begun to examine the Worthies Series. It is com-
mented upon by Blake in Caxton and His World, 110; Painter acknowledges it in
William Caxton (148); Russell Rutter mentions it in “Literary Patronage”
(464–65); and Jennifer R. Goodman has discussed it in two full-length studies:
“Malory and Caxton’s Chivalric Series,” and Malory and William Caxton’s Prose
Romances of 1485.
5. For the relationship between print jobbing and literary production, see
David R. Carlson, “A Theory of the Early English Printing Firm,” in Caxton’s
Trace.
6. My understanding of the term ideology comes largely from Louis Al-
thusser’s essay “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.” Althusser elaborates
this term usefully in For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster (1965; repr., London: Verso,
1993); see especially 231–36. I have also benefited from a number of readings, par-
ticularly, Slavoj Z˚ iz˚ek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989; repr., London: Verso,
1992), particularly 21, 43–49, and Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Nar-
rative as a Socially Symbolic Act ( Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), 219–42.
7. See my discussion of the fifteenth-century print market in “Onely imag-
ined,” in Caxton’s Trace. For a brief account see Blake’s “The Spread of Printing.”
8. Imagined Communities, 41. See also my critique of Anderson in “Onely
imagined,” 222.
n o t e s t o p a g e s 193 – 195 349

9. See Caxton’s Malory: A New Edition of Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte

Darthur Based on the Pierpont Morgan Copy of William Caxton’s Edition of 1485,
2 vols., ed. James W. Spisak and William Matthews (Berkeley: University of Cali-
fornia Press, 1983).
10. R. L. Græme Ritchie provides the text of Les Voeux du Paon in his edition
of The Buik of Alexander, Scottish Text Society 2nd ser., 25 (London: W. Black-
wood and Sons, 1929). His earlier volume (STS 2nd ser., 17, 1925) includes exten-
sive commentary on the text and on the Nine Worthies.
11. “The English Romance in the Fifteenth Century,” 78.
12. The reading of the Nine Worthies as a negative exemplum begins with
their first major collation and continues to their most recent treatments. In his
edition of the Parlement of the Thre Ages, Select Early English Poems 3 (London:
H. Milford, 1915), Israel Gollancz presents an appendix of eighteen examples of
the Nine Worthies. He forwards the edition with the definition of tragedy taken
from the Monk’s Tale, implying it su¤ces for their exemplary meaning. Similarly,
in his reading of the alliterative Morte Arthure, Lee Patterson argues that the
Worthies represent history as based in the fall as a prototype that it repeats with-
out hope of correction, in Negotiating the Past ( Madison: University of Wiscon-
sin Press, 1987), 197–230. Frank Grady finds a similar structure operating in
Gower’s “In Praise of Peace,” in “The Lancastrian Gower and the Limits of Ex-
emplarity,” Speculum 70 (1995): 566–67.
13. See F. J. Furnivall’s “The Nine Worthies and the Heraldic Arms They
Bore,” Notes and Queries ser. 7 (1889): 22–23.
14. For the Worthies in the visual arts, see the following: Gollancz presents
the text of a number of woodcuts and a mumming in his edition of the Parlement
of the Thre Ages; R. S. Loomis’s “Verses on the Nine Worthies,” Modern Philology
15 (1917): 22, adds to this list more woodcuts and the Coventry pageant; R. S.
Loomis and Laura Hibbard Loomis’s Arthurian Legends in Medieval Art (London:
Oxford University Press, 1938) presents the definitive study of Arthurian material
in art which includes a number of examples of the Worthies; Anne McMillan
reprints tapestries in her discussion of the Nine Female Worthies in “Men’s
Weapons, Women’s War: The Nine Female Worthies, 1400–1640,” Mediaevalia 5
(1979): 113–39; F. W. Reader’s “Tudor Mural Paintings in the Lesser Houses in
Bucks,” Archaeological Journal 89 (1932): 116–73, shows some domestic murals;
Ritchie (Buik [1925], xlii n. 3) tells that from 1480 on the male and female Wor-
thies began to appear on playing cards; James J. Rorimer and Margaret B. Free-
man discuss the most famous Nine Worthies tapestry in The Cloisters: The Building
and the Collection of Medieval Art in Fort Tryon ( New York: Metropolitan Museum
of Art, 1963).
15. For example: the “Ballet of the Nine Nobles” adds Robert Bruce to the
list (see Ritchie, 1925); Bertrand du Guesclin makes a tenth Worthy in the statues
at Coucy (see Loomis’s “Verses on the Nine Worthies”); Gower shortens the
Worthies to six knights in his Mirour de l’Omme; Caxton himself proposes a tenth
350 n o t e s t o p a g e s 19 6 – 19 8
Worthy in the prologue to Godfrey. Though rarely commented upon, a parallel

tradition of Nine Female Worthies exists from Deschamps through Thomas
Heywood’s 1640 Nine of the Most Worthy Women of the World (see McMillan’s
“Men’s Weapons”). That the Worthies’ structure can be doubled over for female
as well as male heroes is precisely the sort of situational flexibility I see in the
trope in general.
16. “A Poem on the Nine Worthies,” Nottingham Medieval Studies 27 (1983):
79; “Verses on the Nine Worthies,” 27.
17. In The Coventry Leet Book: or Mayor’s Register, containing the Records of the
City Court Leet or View of Frankpledge, A.D. 1420–1555, with Divers Other Matters,
ed. Mary Dormer Harris, EETS o.s. 134 (London: Kegan Paul, 1908), 285–92.
The various speeches are also presented in appendix 3 of H. Craig’s Two Coventry
Corpus Christi Plays, EETS e.s. 87, 2nd ed. (London: Oxford University Press,
1952), 109–14. A similar pageant including the Nine Worthies was held in Dublin
from 1498 to 1569; see Alexandra F. Johnston, “Traders and Playmakers: English
Guildsmen and the Low Countries,” in England and the Low Countries in the Late
Middle Ages, ed. Caroline Barron and Nigel Saul ( New York: St. Martin’s Press,
1995), 99–114.
18. See Mervyn James’s “Ritual Drama and the Social Body in the Late Me-
dieval English Town,” Past and Present 98 (1983): 9.
19. Past and Present 138 (1993): 32–34.
20. Edited by John Bruce and recently represented in Three Chronicles of the
Reign of Edward IV (Gloucester: Alan Sutton, 1988), 149. For a discussion of
the relationship between versions of the Arrivall, see J. A. F. Thompson’s “‘The
Arrival of Edward IV’—The Development of the Text,” Speculum 46 (1971):
84–93.
21. In “The Formation of the English Gentry,” 57. This plane seems to have
expanded during the fifteenth century so that, as Christine Carpenter argues,
“the gentry may well have come to believe in the mid- to late 1450s that they were
better o± without the nobility” (Locality and Polity: A Study of Warwickshire
Landed Society, 1401–1499 [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992], 479).
Coss points out that the nobility responded to this shift with even greater levels
of patronage, creating a competition between royal and magnate patronage:
“Personal control over local o¤cials and law o¤cers, the quest for royal patron-
age to secure that control, retaining and maintenance, private arbitration and the
a¤nity, all stemmed from a single impulse—that which sought the survival of
magnate power” (“Bastard Feudalism Revised,” 54). See also the discussion of
Coss’s article by David Crouch and D. A. Carpenter, and his reply in Past and
Present 131 (1991): 164–203.
22. Chaucer uses the term in four separate texts: The Squire’s Tale, The Man-
ciple’s Tale, The Legend of Good Women, and Anelida and Arcite. His most elaborate
usage appears in The Squire’s Tale where the lovelorn Falcon applies it to her
beloved Tercelet’s desertion. For the Falcon, newfangledness is a fundamental
n o t e s t o p a g e s 19 9 – 20 4 351
character trait that drives both bird and man toward novelty. In the other texts,
Chaucer uses the term in a similar vein: in the prologue to The Legend of Good
Women the chorus of birds denounces the Tydif for acting “for newfangelnesse,”
and in The Manciple’s Tale the Manciple uses it to cap o± the list of untrue birds,
cats, and wolves with the moral that men’s “flessh is so newefangel, with
meschaunce / That we ne konne in nothyng han plesaunce / That sowneth into
vertu any while” (The Riverside Chaucer, 284:193–95). Gower uses the term in
book 5 of Confessio Amantis as a gloss for lovers who would abandon true love, and
Lydgate uses it in Temple of Glas when he depicts Venus marrying the two lovers
and instructing them to be faithful and avoid newfangledness, and the word ap-
pears, as we have seen, in Caxton’s translation of Alain Chartier’s Curial (STC
5057). Though the various texts’ genres run the gamut from beast fable to
complaint the word suggests sexual roving to the point of historical failure, a trait
of human nature that leads to the turning away from truth and a descent into his-
torical incoherence. See also the anonymous poetry of the Devonshire and
Findern manuscripts, presented in Kenneth Muir’s “Unpublished Poems in the
Devonshire MS,” Proceedings of the Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society 6 (1947):
253–82, especially 273; and Rossell Hope Robbins’s “The Findern Anthology,”
PMLA 69 (1954): 610–42. The sexual sense of newfangledness continues well into
the sixteenth century where it appears most famously in Wyatt’s “They Flee from
Me,” and in Spenser’s description of Lechery in the procession of the seven
deadly sins in book 1 of The Faerie Queene (4.25).
23. In “‘Thirled with the Poynt of Remembraunce’: The Theban Writing of
Anelida and Arcite,” in Chaucer and the Subject of History ( Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 1991), 74.
24. See Godeffroy of Boloyne or The Siege and Conqueste of Jerusalem Translated
by William Caxton, ed. Mary Noyes Colvin, EETS e.s. 64 (1893; repr., Millwood,
N.Y.: Kraus Reprints, 1973).
25. The Interlinear NRSV-NIV Parallel New Testament in Greek and English,
ed. Alfred Marshall (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1993). Romans 15:4 is one of the
medieval canon’s most significant texts on allegoresis, and in the fourteenth cen-
tury it becomes an important rhetorical tool for the lay appropriation of scrip-
tural authority. For Paul’s general influence on medieval theories of authorship
see A. J. Minnis’s Medieval Theory of Authorship, 59–63. For the definitive reading
of the appropriative force of Romans 15:4, see Larry Scanlon’s “The Authority of
Fable: Allegory and Irony in the Nun’s Priest’s Tale,” Exemplaria 1 (1989): 43–51.
Caxton was exposed to Romans 15:4 in a number of vernacular texts, includ-
ing Chaucer’s Nun’s Priest’s Tale and Retraction and Trevisa’s translation of Hig-
den’s original prologue to the Polychronicon. In addition to Le Morte D’Arthur and
Charles the Grete, he uses it in his Recuyell, his revised prologue to the 1482 Game
and Play of the Chess, and his 1480 Methamorphose. That Caxton applies Romans to
four of his prologues between 1480 and 1485 demonstrates his specific interest in
it during this period. That he uses it in the Recuyell, his first English text, suggests
352 n o t e s t o p a g e s 205 – 20 8
it underwrites his thinking on vernacular reading from the start. William A.

Kretzschmar, Jr., explores Caxton’s use of Paul in “Caxton’s Sense of History,”
510–28; I disagree with his assumption that Caxton imported his thinking on Ro-
mans 15:4 from the Polychronicon. Caxton’s own prologue to the Polychronicon
stresses the allegorical nature of history rather than Higden’s interpretation of
Paul, and, as Samuel K. Workman points out in “Versions by Skelton, Caxton
and Berners of a Prologue by Diodorus Siculus,” 252–58, actually replaces much
of Higden with Diodorus Siculus. Further, Caxton clearly encountered Romans
15:4 in the French Charles the Grete, which—in contrast to Higden’s commentary
on Paul—he did incorporate into his own text.
26. In S. J. H. Herrtage’s The English Charlemagne Romances, Part I: Sir Fer-
umbras (1879; repr., London: Oxford University Press, 1966). Caxton’s prologue
to Charles the Grete is unique for the way he silently adopts the first-person voice
of “Saint Pol docteur de verite,” making it seem as if the text’s original patron was
his own: “For oftymes I haue ben excyted of the venerable man messire henry
bolomyer chanonne of lausanne for to reduce for his playsyr somme hystoryes”
(a.ii). In his epilogue, Caxton names a contemporary bureaucrat as providing him
with the text: “I Wylliam Caxton was desyred & requyred by a good and synguler
frende of myn / Maister wylliam daubeny one of the tresorers of the Iewellys of
the noble & moost crysten kyng / our naturel and souerayn lord late of noble
memorye kyng Edward the fourth on whos soule Ihesu haue mercy To reduce al
these sayd hystoryes in to our Englysshe tongue” (m7v). In addition to being a
clerk of the Jewels, Daubeney was also searcher for the Port of London under Ed-
ward IV, a position that granted him half of all confiscated imports. Richard
maintained Daubeney’s appointments and added to them commissioner general in
the o¤ce of the Admiralty, and, apparently, the title of knight. In 1485—the year
of Caxton’s epilogue—an order under the Privy Seal of Henry VII reveals
Daubeney stripped of his o¤ces for his involvement in pawning the royal jewels
to the mayor and alderman of London for “the said late pretesed king,” Richard.
Painter records that Daubeney was executed in 1495 with a group of Perkin War-
beck supporters (William Caxton, 149). Daubeney was a gentleman bureaucrat
moving into the noble class but was pinned by his allegiances to a suddenly dis-
placed power; his career is defined by the politics of participation and appropri-
ation.
Claiming dual inspiration from his larger Worthies Series and this patron,
Caxton positions Charles the Grete, like Le Morte D’Arthur, in terms of structure
and spontaneity. We can see this on a larger scale at the tail end of the epilogue
when Caxton gives the text’s date:
the whyche werke was fynysshed in the reducyng of hit in to englysshe the
xviij day of Iuyn the second yere of kyng Rychard the third / And the yere of
our lord M CCCC lxxxv / And enprynted the fyrst day of decembre the
same yere of our lord & the fyrst yere of kyng Harry the seuenth. (iii.7v)
n o t e s t o p a g e 20 8 353
Thus Caxton registers the transference of power that controls Daubeney’s career,
and that colors the political infighting of the Wars of the Roses in his regnal dat-
ing. See Herrtage’s introduction to The English Charlemagne Romances, Part III:
The Lyf of the Noble and Crysten Prince, Charles the Grete, Translated from the French
by William Caxton and Printed by Him in 1485, 2 vols., EETS e.s. 36 & 37 (Lon-
don: Trübner, 1880–81), viii–xii.
27. See Blake’s Prose, 152. Blake notes that Caxton drew his prologue from a
French source, but fails to mention that Caxton makes “Thenvoye” available as
well (152). Blake’s discussion of this passage is further troubled by his assertion
that Caxton’s source for this text is Garbin’s 1483 edition of Fierabras, a point
Painter cautions is entirely hypothetical, a misreading of Sidney J. H. Herrtage’s
notes to the EETS edition. See Painter, William Caxton, 148 n. 1.
28. See Scanlon, “The Authority of Fable,” 46–47.
29. Although Caxton is careful to present the Worthies as located in textual
sources in both Godfrey and Le Morte D’Arthur, he does not mention a textual
precedent for Alexander, odd because, of course, Alexander has a long textual his-
tory in the Middle Ages. See for example William Matthews’s The Tragedy of
Arthur: A Study of the Alliterative Morte Arthure (Berkeley: University of Califor-
nia Press, 1960).
30. See P. J. C. Field, The Life and Times of Sir Thomas Malory (Cambridge:
D.S. Brewer, 1993), and Christine Carpenter, “Sir Thomas Malory and Fifteenth-
Century Local Politics,” Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 53 (1980):
31–43.
31. Caxton translates a similar passage as “Thenuoye of thauctour” at the
end of his text. The envoy contains this pairing as well, albeit with less tension:
“For the comune vnderstondyng is more contente to reteyne parables and exam-
ples for the ymagynacion locall / than to symple auctoryte / the whyche is
reteyned by vnderstondyng / and also semblably thystoryes spekyng of our lord
Ihesu cryst of hys myracles / & of his vertuous subgettes / euery man ougt gladly
to here and retenne them” (m7).
32. In “Manuscripts, Readers, and Patrons in Fifteenth-Century En-
gland: Sir Thomas Malory and Arthurian Romance,” in Arthurian Literature,
vol. 4, ed. Richard Barber ( Totowa, N.J.: Barnes and Noble, 1985), Carol Meale
concludes,
Whoever bought the Additional MS [the Winchester Malory] must have had
at least a moderate income, but its quality suggests that the purchaser is un-
likely to have come from the nobility because, even leaving out of consider-
ation the sumptuous painted books which Edward IV and his close associates
obtained from Flemish workshops, the quality of the books commissioned
and owned by the nobility at this time is very di±erent from that of the Mal-
ory MS (116).
33. “Manuscripts, Readers, and Patrons,” 116.
354 n o t e s t o p a g e s 20 8 – 213
34. The actual edition Caxton used was owned by Seigneur de la Gruy-
thusye, who received Edward IV during his exile in 1470. See Colvin’s introduc-
tion to the text (ix).
35. For Edward’s hesitancy, see Painter, William Caxton, 115 n. 2; see also 105
and 114.
36. Paul Needham, The Printer and the Pardoner, 28–33. Further, Needham
reports that records from the Hospital at Rounceval, Charing Cross, during the
1520s show Wynkyn de Worde and Robert Copland doing steady business in in-
dulgences and religious jobbing:
Which is to say that Wynkyn (“Wylkyns”) was paid 16 pence for printing
200 briefs, or indulgence bills, at the rate of 8 pence per 100; and that an-
other halfpenny was laid out for the paste and putting them up on the doors
of London’s churches at the feast of the Visitation, 2 July. Later in the sum-
mer of 1521 Wynkyn was paid at the same rate to print 300 more such bills,
and another halfpenny’s worth of paste was spent for placarding them at As-
sumptiontide, 15 August, and the same again at the Nativity of Our Lady, 8
September. In the accounts for 1523–24, Robert Copland was paid a sum of
7 shillings 6 pence for printing 500 letters of indulgence, a rate of 18 pence
per 100 forms. (44–45)
37. Carlson, “A Theory of the Early English Printing Firm,” in Kuskin,
Caxton’s Trace, 45.
38. This debate is excellently reviewed in The Malory Debate: Essays on the Texts
of Le Morte Darthur, ed. Bonnie Wheeler, Robert L. Kindrick, and Michael N.
Salda (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2000). Perhaps the most useful comparison of
the Winchester and Caxton texts is Sally Shaw’s “Caxton and Malory,” in Essays
on Malory, ed. J. A. W. Bennett (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963), 114–45. The
issue is further complicated by Lotte Hellinga’s discovery of printer’s ink, traces
of Caxton’s Types 2 and 4, and a piece of printer’s waste used to repair one of the
pages in the Winchester manuscript, suggesting that Caxton had the manuscript
in his shop during his printing of Le Morte D’Arthur and kept it until at least 1489
(announced in “The Malory Manuscript” with Hilton Kelliher in The British Li-
brary Journal 3 [1977]: 91–113, and later presented in by Kelliher in “The Early
History of Malory Manuscript,” by Hellinga in Caxton in Focus, 89–94. Overtly,
this discovery would seem to pinpoint the Winchester manuscript as Caxton’s
source; however, lacking the compositor’s casting-o± marks ( by which the com-
positor marks o± line breaks on the manuscript he intends to print from), the
manuscript could only have supplemented some additional version.
39. See Shaw’s “Caxton and Malory” and Blake’s Caxton and His World.
Blake argues, “Arthur’s war comes to resemble Charlemagne’s crusade in Spain
and the conquest of Jerusalem by Godfrey of Bouillon; and crusading, we should
remember, was much in the public mind in England at the end of the fifteenth
century” (112). Similarly, Shaw notes, “References to ‘Sarasyns’ are almost always
n o t e s t o p a g e s 214 – 220 355

left intact in his text, prompting the thought that Caxton may have wanted to en-
courage the view of the campaign against Rome as a sort of crusade, a holy war
which could be related to the later mystical Christianity of the Grail story” (137).
40. Spisak edits the Winchester manuscript’s version as “Appendix II: The
Manuscript Version of Arthur’s War with Lucius,” in Caxton’s Malory, 875.
41. Caxton, STC 801, i2; Spisak’s Appendix II, 880–81.
42. Spisak, Appendix II, 883.
43. This represents the Winchester manuscript’s thematic inheritance from
its source, the alliterative Morte Arthure. Book 5 is based on the alliterative Morte
Arthure, Hardyng’s Chronicle, the French prose Merlin, and more generally, the
Brut and Lydgate’s Fall of Princes. See Spisak’s introduction to Caxton’s Malory;
Robert H. Wilson’s “More Borrowings by Malory from Hardyng’s Chronicle,”
Notes and Queries n.s. 17 (1970): 208–10.
44. As Patterson points out in Negotiating the Past, for the alliterative Morte
Arthure, the text’s source, “Gawain’s defeat of Priamus is a metaphor for histori-
cal transition, a translatio virtutis from past to present. But if the dominion of the
present over the past is asserted, so too is the continuity between them” (221). Fit-
ting the flexible structure of the Nine Worthies, where the alliterative Morte
Arthure ends the Roman War with Arthur’s repetition of Alexandrine history in
his dream of Fortune’s prophecy of his fall, Le Morte D’Arthur ends with a con-
solidation of secular and ecclesiastical power that permits lay domestic tran-
quility. To this end, Malory (and in maintaining Malory, Caxton) leaves the Morte
Arthure to follow Le Roi Arthur, postponing Arthur’s second dream until after
Lancelot’s a±air with Guenevere. In doing so, Malory separates out Arthur’s his-
torical influence from the Morte Arthure’s ultimately recursive nature of history.
In Le Morte D’Arthur, the crucial moment of historical change is Priamus’s con-
version.
45. “Caxton, Foucault, and the Pleasures of History,” in Premodern Sexuali-
ties, ed. Louise Fradenburg and Carla Freccero ( New York and London: Rout-
ledge, 1996), xiv.
46. Recognized by Reginald Harvey Gri¤th in “Malory, Morte Arthure,
and Fierabras,” Anglia 32 (1909): 389–98.
47. Douglas Kelly discusses this type of description as “the commonplace
inventory of female parts” in French literature in “Translatio Studii: Translation,
Adaptation, and Allegory in Medieval French Literature,” Philological Quarterly
57 (1978): 288. Kelly argues that regardless of their well-worn demeanor, these
tropes become significant when adapted to individual purpose. I would like to
suggest that their appearance in English further renews them, and also o±er what
Nancy Vickers says of the blazon to this prose description:
The term “blazon” derives both from the French blasonner and from the
English “to blaze” (“to proclaim as with a trumpet, to publish, and, by exten-
sion, to defame or celebrate”). Its usage was firmly rooted in two specific de-
scriptive traditions, the one heraldic and the other poetic. A blazon was, first,
356 n o t e s t o p a g e s 220 – 228

a conventional heraldic description of a shield, and, second, a conventional

poetic description of an object praised or blamed by a rhetorician-poet.
(“‘The blazon of sweet beauty’s best’: Shakespeare’s Lucrece,” in Shakespeare
and the Question of Theory, ed. Patricia Parker and Geo±rey Hartman [ New
York: Methuen, 1985], 95)
See also Vickers, “Diana Described: Scattered Woman and Scattered Rhyme,” in
Writing and Sexual Difference, ed. Elizabeth Abel (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1982), 95–109, where she argues that Petrarchan description so-
lidifies the male speaker through a process of fetishization which in turn silences
the female. Surely Charles the Grete is part of what Vickers sees as the establish-
ment of idealized fetishistic beauty popularized through “the early years of print-
ing” (107). More recently, see Lawrence D. Kritzman’s The Rhetoric of Sexuality
and the Literature of the French Renaissance ( New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1991).
48. These are recorded by E. Gordon Du± in Fifteenth Century English Books
as no. 205 (1480; granted by Sixtus IV and commissioned by John Kendale; single
issue), no. 206 (1480; granted by Sixtus IV, commissioned by John Kendale;
single issue), and no. 208 (1480; granted by Sixtus IV, commissioned by John
Kendale; plural issue); see also R. N. Swanson, “Caxton’s Indulgence for Rhodes,
1480–81,” The Library ser. v, 2 (2004): 195–201.
Chapter Six. Vernacular Humanism
1. See “The Humanist Book,” in The Cambridge History of the Book, 292. For
fifteenth-century humanism, see Roberto Weiss’s foundational study Humanism
in England in the Fifteenth Century; David Carlson, English Humanist Books: Writ-
ers and Patrons, Manuscript and Print, 1475–1525 ( Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 1995); Seth Lerer, Chaucer and His Readers; Jill Kraye, ed., The Cambridge
Companion to Renaissance Humanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1996); and Jonathan Woolfson, ed., Reassessing Tudor Humanism ( New York: Pal-
grave, 2002).
2. I borrow the terms of this chapter—vernacular humanism, self-
fashioning, the laureate system—from a cross section of scholarship that a¤rms
the originality of sixteenth-century English writing. As in Caxton’s own prose,
my borrowing is less a broad endorsement of these ideas than an appropriation, a
reworking of pre-existing terminology toward my own uses. So, David Rundle
argues that fifteenth-century humanism
is distinct from “Tudor humanism”—or, rather, from that strand of lay ver-
nacular humanism [italics mine] which arguably came to dominate after the
first quarter of the sixteenth century. Fifteenth-century English humanist
interest, in other words, is not Tudor humanism writ small; it has to be
n o t e s t o p a g e s 232 – 237 357

judged on its own terms and its own context. That context, I suggest, is its
critical role in the Europe-wide marketing of the studia humanitatis. (“Hu-
manism Before the Tudors: On Nobility and the Reception of the studia hu-
manitatis in Fifteenth-Century England,” in Reassessing Tudor Humanism, ed.
Jonathan Woolfson, 24)
While I agree this is broad di±erentiation, Rundle goes on to argue that
fifteenth-century humanism is “disparate” and “localized,” a European import
fundamentally separate from the cultural developments in early modern England.
I suggest that the Yorkist period is not so divorced from the rhetoric of public
self-creation that identifies sixteenth-century humanism. See also Colin Burrow’s
assessment of an uncentered literary culture of “flux, negotiation and gossip,” in
“The Experience of Exclusion: Literature and Politics in the Reigns of Henry
VII and Henry VIII,” in Wallace, The Cambridge History of Medieval Literature,
794–95; and James Simpson’s argument for a “culture of jurisdictional hetero-
geneity,” in Oxford English Literary History, 1. While I do not deny the com-
plexity these arguments suggest in their insistence on fifteenth-century literary
culture’s fluidity and heterogeneity, I am suspicious: Westminster literary, scribal,
and print production asserts a strong centralizing presence on English literary
culture.
Similarly, in arguing for a state-sponsored laureate system of self-fashioning
persona, I lift terminology from well-known New Historicist studies, specifically
Stephen Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self-Fashioning and Richard Helgerson’s Self-
Crowned Laureates, to describe this earlier, neglected period. The view that the
fifteenth century can rightly be neglected is widely repeated in scholarship on the
early modern period. So, in Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the
English Renaissance, Wendy Wall dismisses the importance of English writing in
the late Middle Ages, to argue, like many others, for a firm break into the modern
period:
Certainly past writers were well established within a more aesthetically
defined literary canon: Dante, Virgil, Petrarch, Ovid, Chaucer. But classical
and medieval authorial roles were not accessible to contemporary writers be-
cause of the prestige attached to poetic amateurism, the vitality of the insti-
tution of patronage, the court’s curb on channels of ambition, and the special
di¤culties created by writing vernacular love poetry. (12–13)
A. F. Marotti also dismisses the cultural authority of the fifteenth-century laure-
ate with a single sentence: “The editions of [Skelton’s] works that survive present
him as ‘Skelton Laureate,’ ‘Skelton Poet Laureat’ or ‘Skelton Poeta,’ titles that
emphasize his academic credentials and allude to his occasional courtly verse but
do not seriously assert cultural authority within the print medium—something
that might be claimed for the sixteenth-century editions of Chaucer’s collected
works, for example, Thynne’s, published in 1532” (Manuscript, Print, and the En-
glish Renaissance Lyric, 293). Though threadbare, these assumptions have by no
358 n o t e s t o p a g e 237
means been discarded. For example, the introduction to Reading, Society and Poli-
tics in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003),
Kevin Sharpe and Steven N. Zwicker argue for the modernity of the confluence
between print, spirituality, and politics within a circuit of production and con-
sumption (5) and marvel over the precocity of the sixteenth century (8).
3. See my review of the scholarship on John Russell in “Onely imagined,”
in Kuskin, Caxton’s Trace, 220–23, and 239 n. 64.
4. M. E. Mallett, “Anglo-Florentine Commercial Relations, 1465–91,” Eco-
nomic History Review 15 (1962–63): 261.
5. See Sutton and Visser-Fuchs, Richard III’s Books, 261.
6. Lowry, “The Arrival and Use of Continental Printed Books in Yorkist
England,” 450 and 456.
7. Baldwin, Elizabeth Woodville: Mother of the Princes in the Tower (Stroud:
Sutton, 2002), 101.
8. Lowry, “Diplomacy and the Spread of Printing,” 133.
9. Lowry, “The Arrival and Use of Continental Printed Books in Yorkist
England,” 456; note Sutton and Visser-Fuchs’s modification of his argument in
Richard III’s Books, 261 n. 97.
10. In “Vernacular Humanism in the Sixteenth Century,” Warren Boutcher
characterizes sixteenth-century vernacular humanism as moving through “chan-
nels of international diplomacy, commercial exchange, international book distri-
bution and polyglot humanistic culture and pedagogy—between international
mediation and textual ‘intelligence,’” and discusses “the measure of humanistic
success . . . [as] not textual elegance in Latin but ‘familiar’ vernacular talk on im-
portant and confidential matters with influential courtier-friends—crossing the
cultural gap between ‘learned men,’” and this is exactly what we see in Russell’s
biography and writing: an international court culture involved in the recovery
and application of literary texts (in Kraye, The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance
Humanism, 191–92).
11. See Ingulph’s Chronicle of the Abbey of Croyland with the Continuations of
Peter of Blois and Anonymous Writers, trans. Henry T. Riley (London: Henry G.
Bohn, 1854), 489. See also Keen, England in the Later Middle Ages, 482–89, for a
concise summary of the events, and Alison Hanham’s chapter “The Usurpation
and Reign of Richard III,” in Richard III and His Early Historians: 1483–1535 (Ox-
ford: Clarendon Press, 1975) for a more in-depth account. Dominic Mancini’s De
occupatione regni anglie provides a contemporary witness’s assessment of the situa-
tion from Edward IV’s death to Richard’s coronation on July 6 in The Usurpation
of Richard III, trans. C. A. J. Armstrong (Gloucester: Alan Sutton, 1984). Finally,
see Margarita Stocker, “Apocryphal Entries: Judith and the Politics of Caxton’s
Golden Legend,” in Smith and Taylor, Women, the Book and the Worldly, 171.
12. Edited in John Gough Nichols, ed. and intro., Grants, Etc. From the
Crown During the Reign of Edward the Fifth, Camden Society 60 (London: J. B.
Nichols and Sons, 1854), xxxv–lxiii. Page numbers hereafter cited in text. For
n o t e s t o p a g e s 237 – 238 359

further comments on this document, see also Sutton and Visser-Fuchs, Richard
III’s Books, 150–51.
13. Hanham, Richard III, 45.
14. Edited by John Topham and Thomas Astle for the Rotuli Parliamento-
rum; ut et Petitiones, et Placita in Parliamento, vol. 6 (London, 1767–77), 240–42.
15. Summit, Lost Property, 39.
16. See Painter, William Caxton, 92–97, 104–5, 135–36, 157; Lerer, Chaucer
and His Readers, chapter 5; and Carlson, English Humanist Books, particularly
chapter 2, and pages 37–38, 134–35, 149, and 175–76.
17. The first half of the Livre des Eneydes greatly amplifies the Historie’s
rendition of the Aeneid’s books 1–4, while the second remains closer to its account
of Aeneas’s adventures after leaving Carthage. In addition to the extended con-
trast between Boccaccio’s and Virgil’s versions of the Dido tale, the Eneydos
presents a number of major di±erences from the Aeneid, well reviewed in
Louis Brewer Hall’s “Caxton’s Eneydos and the Redactions of Virgil,” Medieval
Studies 22 (1960): 136–47. W. T. Culley provides a rough guide to plot di±erences
between the two texts in his introductory notes to the EETS edition, and dis-
cusses Caxton’s adjustments to the text in Caxton’s Eneydos, 1490, ed. W. T. Cul-
ley and F. J. Furnivall, EETS e.s. 57 (1890; repr., London: Oxford University
Press, 1962).
18. For a full overview of the development of the Justinian and Virgilian
Didos, see Marilynn Desmond’s Reading Dido, especially pages 27–33 and 55–73.
In his In Praise of Aeneas: Virgil and Epideictic Rhetoric in the Early Italian Renais-
sance ( Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1989), Craig Kallendorf
argues that Boccaccio learned the Justinian version from Petrarch and included it
in his Latin works as the more scholarly. See also Mary Louise Lord’s “Dido as an
Example of Chastity: The Influence of Example Literature,” Harvard Library
Bulletin 17 (1969): 22–44. A number of critics have argued that the separation of
these two traditions alleviated any conflict between them. See for example, John
Watkins, The Specter of Dido: Spenser and the Virgilian Epic ( New Haven: Yale Uni-
versity Press, 1995), 51, and Jerome Singerman’s Under Clouds of Poesy: Poetry and
Truth in French and English Reworkings of the Aeneid, 1160–1513 ( New York: Gar-
land, 1986), 210.
19. See John Carter’s “The Caxton Ovid,” The Book Collector 20 (1971): 7–18,
for an account of its discovery and eventual purchase. Caxton includes “the xv
bookes of Metamorpheseos in whyche been conteyned the fables of ouyde” in a
list of “werkys & hstoryes translated out of frensshe in to englysshe” in the
Golden Legend (pI; STC 24873); the comment is obviously ambiguous as to
whether he printed it. Painter provides reasoned assessment that Caxton may
have had time to print his translation in 1481 in William Caxton, 101–2.
20. Because Caxton did not include an original prologue of his own, the
Methamorphose has received little scholarly investigation and remains without a
modern edition. Blake ignores both the proem and the preface in Caxton and His
World and presents only Caxton’s colophon in Caxton’s Own Prose; in the longest
360 n o t e s t o p a g e s 238 – 247

consideration of the manuscript to date, J. A. W. Bennett dismisses the prefatory

matter as completely formulaic, in Kathleen Scott’s The Caxton Master, xii.
21. Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation, 114.
22. My text comes from St. Jerome: Letters and Selected Works, vol. 6: A Select
Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd ser., ed. Philip Scha± and Henry
Wace (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1979), 149–51. See J. N. D. Kelly, Jerome: His
Life, Writings, and Controversies ( New York: Harper & Row, 1975), 213, for a dis-
cussion of this text; and Eugene Rice, Jr., Saint Jerome in the Renaissance (Balti-
more: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 1–7, for a discussion of the dream
and the traditions surrounding it.
23. Deuteronomy 21:14, in The Oxford Annotated Bible, ed. Herbert G. May
and Bruce M. Metzger ( New York: Oxford University Press, 1962).
24. Saint Jerome, 205 n. 18.
25. Caxton seems to have drawn this story from his own biography; see
Anne F. Sutton’s “Caxton Was a Mercer,” 127.
26. Henry inherited a vernacular bureaucracy from the Lancastrians and en-
gaged a number of Continental humanist scholars in specialized positions. See the
two definitive articles on the emergence of a vernacular bureaucracy by John H.
Fisher, “Standard Written English,” and “Caxton and Chancery English.”
27. Perhaps the best characterization of this tendency in Skelton criti-
cism is Gordon Kipling’s description of Skelton as “half-More, half-Lydgate,”
in “John Skelton and Burgundian Letters,” 2. John Scattergood provides a use-
ful bibliography in “Skelton and Elegy,” Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy 84
(1984): 333–47, to which should be added Stanley Fish’s reading in John Skelton’s
Poetry ( New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965), 1–35. More recently, a number
of scholars have begun to look away from the blanket terms of medieval and Re-
naissance to examine seriously the ways Skelton contributes to literary history. See
chapter 1 of David Lee Miller’s The Poem’s Two Bodies.
28. Stanza 2, ll. 8–14. My quotations come from John Scattergood’s edition,
John Skelton: The Complete English Poems ( New Haven: Yale University Press,
1983), 29–35. Line numbers are hereafter inserted parenthetically.
29. Derek Pearsall discusses Skelton as a Chaucerian in “The English
Chaucerians,” in Chaucer and Chaucerians, ed. D. S. Brewer (Auburn: University of
Alabama, 1966), 233. Work on Skelton’s Garland of Laurel usually focuses on this
relationship as well. See Scattergood’s “Skelton’s Garlande of Laurell, and the
Chaucerian Tradition,” in Chaucer Traditions: Studies in Honour of Derek Brewer,
ed. Ruth Morse and Barry Windeatt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1990), 122–38; and David Loewenstein’s “Skelton’s Triumph: The Garland of Lau-
rel and Literary Fame,” Neophilologus 68 (1984): 611–22. This connection was also
recognized shortly after Skelton’s death, and a number of sixteenth-century crit-
ics link him directly with Chaucer, Gower, and Lydgate. In The Poem’s Two Bodies,
Miller points out that
in 1574 Richard Robinson reported sighting Skelton on Mount Helicon in
the company of Homer, Virgil, Ovid, Chaucer, Lydgate, Wager, Heywood,
n o t e s t o p a g e s 247 – 261 361

and Barnaby Googe, while in 1579 an anonymous poet returned from

Cupid’s camp with news of Skelton’s presence there in company with
Homer, Virgil, Ovid, Hesiod, Euripides, Chaucer, and Gower. Not until
after the early works of Sidney and Spenser had set wholly new standards for
English versification do we find a growing condescension towards the rough-
ness of both style and tone in Skelton’s satire. (46)
For further examples, see A. S. G. Edwards’s introduction to Skelton: The Critical
Heritage (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), 9–13.
31. Cited in the anonymous “The Yorkshire Rebellion in 1489,” Gentleman’s
Magazine 124:2 (1851): 459–68. On the Yorkshire exemption, see M. A. Hicks,
“The Yorkshire Rebellion of 1489 Reconsidered,” Northern History 22 (1986):
39–62.
32. Hicks, “The Yorkshire Rebellion,” 50.
33. Gentleman’s Magazine, 463.
34. On Chambre see the article in the Gentleman’s Magazine and S. B.
Chrimes’s Henry VII (London: Methuen, 1972), 80.
35. Sir John Egremont distinguished himself in the suppression of Bucking-
ham’s rebellion against Richard III and had been granted the manor of Kempston
in Bedfordshire as his reward. On May 3, 1487, Henry granted him an annuity
out of the estates of the Yorkist Lord Lovell. In “The Murder at Cocklodge,”
Durham University Journal 57 (1964–65), M. E. James argues that, driven by
“frustrated ambition,” Egremont was the motivating force behind the rebellion,
“a prototype of the bastard Machiavel of Elizabethan drama” (87). Regardless of
Egremont’s actual role in the uprising, he was able to recuperate his position, and
by 1493 the king made him a grant (under the title of Lord Egremont) of the
Percy manors of Isleham and Farston during the fifth earl’s minority.
36. Hicks, “The Yorkshire Rebellion,” 49.
37. Letter 818 in The Paston Letters and Papers of the Fifteenth Century, 2 vols.,
ed. Norman Davis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971, 1976).
38. See M. A. Hicks, “Dynastic Change and Northern Society: The Career
of the Fourth Earl of Northumberland, 1470–89,” Northern History 14 (1978):
78–107. For related discussions of the turbulent politics of the North, see
Michael Weiss’s “A Power in the North? The Percies in the Fifteenth Century,”
Historical Journal 19 (1976): 501–9, where he argues against the more traditional
view that Northumberland represented a strong and stable influence; see also
R. L. Storey’s “The North of England,” in Fifteenth-Century England, 1399–1509:
Studies in Politics and Society, ed. S. B. Chrimes, C. D. Ross, and R. A. Gri¤ths
( Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1972), 129–44; and R. A. Gri¤ths’s
“Local Rivalries and National Politics: The Percies, the Nevilles, and the Duke of
Exeter, 1452–55,” Speculum 43 (1968): 589–632.
39. In A. F. Pollard’s The Reign of Henry VII from Contemporary Sources, vol. 1:
Narrative Extracts (1913; repr., New York: AMS Press, 1967), 71–72.
362 n o t e s t o p a g e s 262 – 26 6
40. Ibid., 70.

41. Ibid., 71–72.
42. Hicks, “The Yorkshire Rebellion,” 48. In total, Hicks writes, “Five [pro-
testers] were condemned to death, at most only four were hanged” (43): three
yeomen—Chambre, Chistopher Atkinson of Ayton, and James Binks of
Sowerby—and a York cobbler, William Lister (46).
43. See G. L. Harriss, “Political Society and the Growth of Government
in Late Medieval England,” Past and Present 138 (1993): 28–57; and two articles by
P. R. Coss, “Bastard Feudalism Revised,” and “The Formation of the English
Gentry”; as well as Sylvia L. Thrupp’s “The Problem of Conservation.”
44. The manuscript is discussed by Gavin Bone, in “Extant Manuscripts,”
who tells that it was “begun for William Herbert of Pembroke and his wife Ann
Deuereux (whose shields c. 1460–70 appear on the first page of ‘Troy’), but [was]
unfinished until the time of Henry Algernon, the magnificent fifth Earl of
Northumberland, their grandson” (292–93). John Scattergood also reviews the
manuscript in “The London Manuscripts of John Skelton’s Poems,” in Reading
the Past: Essays on Medieval and Renaissance Literature ( Dublin, Ireland, and Port-
land, Ore.: Four Courts Press, 1996), writing, “It is clear that Skelton’s London
audience extended beyond the court, to provincial gentlemen who came to Lon-
don for court or governmental business, and to the professional and mercantile
areas of the literature citizenry” (279). More recently Alexandra Gillespie dis-
cusses the manuscript in “‘These proverbes yet do last’: Lydgate, the Fifth Earl of
Northumberland, and Tudor Miscellanies from Print to Manuscript,” Yearbook of
English Studies 33 (2003): 215–32.
45. For Skelton as a royal tutor, see David Carlson, “Royal Tutors in the
Reign of Henry VII,” Sixteenth Century Journal 22 (1991): 253–79. For Skelton’s
earnings at court, see Greg Walker, John Skelton and the Politics of the 1520s (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 37; and Margaret Condon’s “Ruling
Elites in the Reign of Henry VII,” in Patronage, Pedigree and Power in Later Me-
dieval England, ed. C. Ross (Gloucester: Alan Sutton, 1979), 110–11. For Henry’s
patronage of such figures in general, see Carlson’s English Humanist Books, chap-
ter 1, as well as “King Arthur and Court.”
46. The Bibliotheca Historica of Diodorus Siculus Translated by John Skelton,
2 vols., ed. F. M. Salter and H. L. R. Edwards, EETS o.s. 233 & 239 (London: Ox-
ford University Press, 1956–57), 321.
47. For Grey, Free, and Tiptoft, see Roberto Weiss’s Humanism in England.
For Russell, Shirwood, and Gunthorpe, as well as for an important caution to
Weiss’s thesis concerning England’s intellectual isolation, see Martin Lowry’s
“The Arrival and Use of Continental Printed Books in Yorkist England.”
48. Presented in E. Gordon Du±’s A Century of the English Book Trade:
Grant, for life, to Peter Actoris, born in Savoy of the o¤ce of stationer to
the King; also license to import, so often as he likes, from parts beyond the
sea, books printed and not printed into the port of the city of London, and
n o t e s t o p a g e s 267 – 275 363

other ports and places within the kingdom of England, and to dispose of the
same by sale or otherwise, without paying customs, etc. thereon and without
rendering any accompt thereof. (1)
49. André, an Augustinian friar, was present at Henry’s entry into London
after Bosworth Field and is believed to have died in London around 1521. David
Carlson discusses the poems written against Gaguin in “Politicizing Tudor Court
Literature: Gaguin’s Embassy and Henry VII’s Humanists’ Response,” Studies in
Philology 85 (1988): 279–304. For André in general, see William Nelson’s John
Skelton, Laureate ( New York: Columbia University Press, 1939), appendix 1,
239–41. André’s remaining work is edited in James Gairdner’s Historia Regis
Henrici Septimi, A Bernardo Andrea Tholosate Conscripta Necnon Alia Quaedam as
Eudem Regem Spectantia, Rolls Series 10 (London: Longmans, 1858), and Gaird-
ner’s preface to that work provides a useful biography. See also Edmund Kemper
Broadus’s The Laureateship: A Study of the Office of Poet Laureate in England with
Some Account of the Poets (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1921); Walker briefly discusses
André in relation to Skelton in his John Skelton and the Politics of the 1520s, 36–37;
and Carlson devotes chapter 3 of English Humanist Books to André, and discusses
the intellectuals at Henry’s court in “King Arthur and Court Poems.”
50. Gairdner, 48–49, l.6. Translations are my own.
51. See Christine Carpenter’s “Henry VII and English Polity,” in The Reign
of Henry VII: Proceedings of the 1993 Harlaxton Symposium, ed. Benjamin Thomp-
son (Stamford, Conn.: Paul Watkins, 1995) , 11–30; as well as I. Arthurson’s “The
Rising of 1497: A Revolt of the Peasantry?” in People, Politics, and Community in
the Later Middle Ages, ed. J. T. Rosenthal and C. Richmond (Gloucester: Alan
Sutton, 1987), 1–18. More generally, see Paul Slack’s Rebellion, Popular Protest and
the Social Order in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1984).
52. Walker, John Skelton, 36.
53. Thomas E. Martson, “A Book Owned by Giovanni Gigli,” Yale Univer-
sity Library Gazette 34 (1959): 48.
54. Presented in Sutton and Visser-Fuchs, Richard III’s Books,
Presens liber pertinet ad Willelmum purde emptus a Willelmo Caxton regis
impressore vicessimo Novembris Anno Regni Regis Edwardi quarti vices-
simo secundo [this book belongs to William Purde; [it was] bought from
William Caxton the king’s printer, on 20 November in the twenty-second
year of the reign of King Edward IV]. (255)
55. In “Caxton Was a Mercer” Anne F. Sutton discusses John She¤eld as a
Mercer whose term was responsible for a significant political snafu:
His youth, inexperience and hot temper may have been the cause of his argu-
ment with the meter of Antwerp, Martin van der Hove, over a bale of mad-
der which split during the weighing. She¤eld became abusive and provoked
364 n o t e s t o p a g e s 27 6 – 27 9
Martin to come out with the age-old insult for Englishmen—that they were
born with tails like devils, the mark of Cain, the result of a curse laid on
them by St Augustine. The authorities of Antwerp decided to take a militant
anti-English stand over the quarrel, and the English, led by Overey as gover-
nor, packed their goods and left for Bruges, declaring they would not sell any
more in Antwerp. (127)
Thus Caxton’s story uses She¤eld to recollect, more privately, a larger incident
of nationalism and language.
56. “Illuminated Manuscripts Associated with Henry VII and Members of
His Immediate Family,” in The Reign of Henry VII, 179. See also Eleanor P.
Spencer’s description of these manuscripts in “Antoine Vérard’s Illuminated Vel-
lum Incunables,” in Manuscripts in the Fifty Years After the Invention of Printing, ed.
J. B. Trapp (London: University of London, 1983): 62–65, where she comments
on the elaborate ends to which Vérard went to make his printed editions approx-
imate written text. For a brief overview of Vérard’s life and work, see Mary Beth
Winn’s “Antoine Vérard’s Presentation Manuscripts and Printed Books,” also in
Manuscripts in the Fifty Years After the Invention of Printing, 66–74.
57. See Kipling’s “Henry VII and the Origins of Tudor Patronage,” in Pa-
tronage in the Renaissance, ed. Guy Lytle and Stephen Orgel (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1981), 126. In The Triumph of Honour, Kipling argues that upon
Caxton’s death Vérard gained Henry’s exclusive patronage through the Royal Li-
brarian, Quentin Poulet, and established “both a library and a Flemish manu-
script workshop at Richmond, sta±ed by Flemish scribes and illuminators” (8).
See Backhouse, “Illuminated Manuscripts,” in Thompson, The Reign of Henry
VII, for a strong caution regarding Kipling’s argument.
58. See Salter and Edwards’s introduction to volume 1 of Skelton’s Bibliotheca
historica, ix.
Epilogue
1. Everyman, printed by John Skot (London, 1535; STC 10606.5), B.iiv.

2. For example, Caxton printed approximately eight texts after 1490. Of
these almost half, The Fifteen Oes (STC 20195), The Book of Divers Ghostly Matters
(STC 3305), and the Ars moriendi (STC 786), are overtly concerned with death.
3. See note 8 in the introduction.
4. See note 7 of the introduction.
5. In Hellinga and Trapp, The Cambridge History of the Book, 575.
6. Ibid., xviii and 3, respectively.
7. David Scott Kasten, “Print, Literary Culture and the Book Trade,” in
The Cambridge History of Early Modern English Literature, ed. David Loewenstein
and Janel Meuller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 88 and 108
respectively.
n o t e s t o p a g e s 281 – 28 6 365
8. See Simpson’s “Envoi” to Oxford English Literary History, particularly

page 558.
9. Almost all twentieth-century examinations of the Eneydos have com-
pared it to Douglas’s Eneados and, following his argument, concluded that Cax-
ton’s text betrays a conceptually older understanding of translation. See, for
example, Christopher Baswell’s conclusion to Virgil in Medieval England: Figuring
the Aenied from the Twelfth Century to Chaucer (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1995), 270±.; chapter 5 of Marilynn Desmond’s Reading Dido: Gender, Tex-
tuality, and the Medieval Aeneid ( Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1994); A. E. C. Canitz’s “From Aeneid to Eneados: Theory and Practice of Gavin
Douglas’s Translation,” Medievalia et Humanistica 17 (1991): 81–99; and Louis
Brewer Hall’s “Caxton’s Eneydos and the Redactions of Virgil,” Medieval Studies 22
(1960): 136–47.
10. These also include Thomas Creed, 1607 (STC 15380); Barnard Alsop,
1617 (STC 15381); Alsop and T. Fawcett, 1636 (STC 15382); Samuel Speed, 1663
( Wing L929, L934, L938); T. Passenger, 1670 (STC Wing L930, L935, L939);
Passenger, 1676 ( Wing L931, L936, L940); Passenger, 1680 ( Wing L932); Pas-
senger, 1684 ( Wing L933, L937A, L941A).
11. Norton Anthology of English Literature, vol. 1, 6th ed., ed. M. H. Abrams
( New York: W. W. Norton, 1993), 384; The Bedford Introduction to Drama, 5th ed.,
ed. Lee A. Jacobs (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2005).
12. (Boston: Houghton Mi¬in, 1975), 791.
13. Pynson’s editions are 1515 (STC 10604) and 1526 (STC 10604.5), and
complete copies of John Skot’s editions of 1528 (STC 10606) and 1535 (STC
10606.5).
14. The argument comes from W. W. Greg, “Everyman,” from the Fragments
of the Two Editions by Pynson Preserved in the Bodleian Library and the British Mu-
seum Together with Critical Apparatus (Louvain: A. Uystpruyst, 1910), and is thor-
oughly reviewed by Joseph A. Dane and Rosemary A. Roberts in “The Calculus
of Calculus: W. W. Greg and the Mathematics of Everyman Editions,” Studies in
Bibliography 53 (2000): 117–28.
15. Dane and Roberts, “Calculus,” 123.
16. Ibid., 124–28.
17. Dane, The Myth of Print Culture; see chapter 2, “Twenty Million Incun-
ables Can’t be Wrong,” 39±.
18. The two earlier versions are in McKerrow, Printers’ & Publishers’ Devices,
59a–b. The last version ( McKerrow, Printers’ & Publishers’ Devices, 75), though
maintaining the triangular arrangement, is somewhat di±erent, substituting the
Parisian bookseller Denis Roche’s famous wild men or satyrs; see McKerrow’s
commentary on page 26.
19. Davies, Devices of the Early Printers, 91. Davies also points out that Ger-
ard Leeu used a similar device the same year and suggests that the two used the
same woodcutter (366–70).
366 n o t e s t o p a g e s 28 6 – 29 0
20. See my discussion in chapter 1.

21. Du±y, The Stripping of the Altars, 51.
22. Erler, “Devotional Literature,” 496, 506, and 515; Mary Kay Duggan,
“Reading Liturgical Books,” 72.
23. Kristian Jenson, “Printing the Bible in the Fifteenth Century: Devotion,
Philology and Commerce,” in Jensen, Incunabula, 115.
n o t e s t o p a g e s 292 – 29 7 367
Kuskin Index 11/15/07 9:39 AM Page 368
Index
Ackworth Rebellion, 276 of printer’s marks, 52, 55, 65, 67–73,

Act for the Settlement of the Crown, 68–69f, 70–73f, 185, 290–93, 291f,
238–40 292f
Actors, Peter, 275, 317n77 as a rhetorical weapon, 248–49
Agüera y Arcas, Blaise, 6–8 tension of doubleness in the Worthy
alchemy of the press, 111–14, 118, 148 Series, 208–12
Alcock, John, 162 archival imagination, 5–6, 285, 288, 295,
Al-Jazerra, 38 298
Al-Thani, Hamad Bin Khalifa, king of Aristotle, 167–68, 180
Qatar, 37–38 Ethics, 243
Althorp library, 33–35 Arthur, Prince, 275–76
Althusser, Louis, 26 Arthurian legend, 203–6, 210–11,
Amerbach, Johann, 297 348n2. See also Caxton, William,
Ames, Joseph: Typographical Antiquities, Le Morte D’Arthur
7, 33, 50 Arundel, Thomas, 183, 184
Anderson, Benedict, 208 Ashby, George, 172
Imagined Communities, 195, 300n6 Prisoner’s Reflections, 133
André, Bernard, 275–77 Assembly of Ladies (anon.), 134
“Les douze triomphes de Henry Atkinson, William: Imytacyon and
VII,” 275 Folowynge the Blessed Lyfe of our
Vita Henrici Septimi, 275–76 Sauyour Chryste, 182
Anwykyll, John: Compendium totius audience
grammaticae, 75, 243 defining the, 19–20
appropriation. See also authority: for Eneydos, 278–79
appropriation of; Chaucerian Skelton’s, 281, 363n44
inheritance for Worthies Series, 196–97, 212–13,
the book as an object of, 136–37, 148, 234
335n43 Audubon: Birds of America, 37–38
The Book of Courtesy on, 144–45 Augustine: Retractationes, 131
Caxton’s use of, 16, 19, 139–40, 154, Aurner, Nellie Slayton: Caxton,
208–9 Mirrour of Fifteenth-Century Let-
“Myn Hert ys Set” illustrating, ters, 307n1
118–22 authorial identity, 18, 176–79, 282
nature of, 140 authorial intention, 5, 245, 250, 254–56
368
authority. See also women, literary of the vernacular, 4–5, 19–20, 179–80,
authority of 207–9, 233–34, 247, 265–66
appropriation of in the Worthies Series, 207–13
—political, 163, 201–7, 260–70 authorship
—print in facilitating, 147–48 the articulation of intention, 245–46
—scriptural, 208–9 legal codification of, 108
—by writers, post-Chaucer, 18–19, literary authority and, 19, 108
143–44, 160–61
the book as tangible representation The Babees Book, 137
of, 18–20, 60–61, 81, 102, 136, Backhouse, Janet, 281
172–73 Bagnyon, Jean, 224
capital’s relationship to, 19, 82–90, Balbus, Johannes: Catholicon, 94
94–96, 102 “Ballet of the Nine Nobles,” 198
commodities’ symbolic power to Barbier, Jean, 15
invoke, 62, 213 Barker, Nicolas, 105
immutable, 145 Bartholomeus Anglicus: De proprietati-
of the nobility, 162–65, 168–69, bus rerum, 52
199–206, 270 Beaufort, Lady Margaret, 67, 156, 161,
paternal, 146–47, 152–53, 155 181–86, 189–90, 278
political, capital in construction of, The Mirroure of Golde for the Synfulle
82–90 Soule, 182
the political and the literary Beauvais, Vincent of: Speculum
joined, 92, 162–65, 168–71, historiale, 225, 311n26
170f, 185, 233–34, 240, Belfortis, Andreas, 10
265–66 Belyea, Barbara, 348n2
of the printer, 94–96, 136 Benjamin, Walter, 37
printer’s marks as signs of, 58–62, 63, Berkeley, Lord, 184
65, 67, 78 Berners, Juliana, 56
social, 20, 172–73, 180–81 Bevington, David: Medieval Drama, 288
symbolic production of through bibliography, 5, 62, 74
printed material, 11 bibliomania, 32–33, 164, 309n12
of the translator, 206–7, 211 Birrell, T. A., 35
authority, literary. See also women, Bishop Moore Sammelband, 134, 138
literary authority of Blades, William, 33, 50, 306n1, 313n52,
ambivalence in, 241 314n53, 338n1, 343n31
authorship and, 19, 108 The Life and Typography of William
cultural importance of, 276 Caxton, 306n1
defined, 19 William Caxton: England’s First
identity defined through, 258 Printer, 7
inheritance of, 167–68 Blake, N. F., 74–75, 157, 339n1, 340n6
the laureate system and, 241, 258, Book Collector, 308n2
270–78, 283 Caxton and His World, 307n1, 319n1
“Myn Hert ys Set” and, 121 A Study of the Literature of the First
of the printed text, 94–97, 105 English Press, 307n1
i n d e x 369
Blake, N. F. (cont.) as symbols

William Caxton: A Bibliographical —of appropriation, 136–37, 148,
Guide, 25, 307n1 335n43
William Caxton (Authors of the Middle —of authority, 11, 18–20, 60–61, 81,
Ages), 25, 307n1 102, 136, 154, 172–73
Blandford, Marquis of, 32–33 —of capital, 110, 135–36
to blaze/blazing, 58–59, 65, 356n47 —of English culture, 20
Boccaccio, Giovanni, 286 —of power, 127
Decameron, 32–33, 39 —of social reproduction, 2, 136–48
De casibus, 55, 238, 244, 251 uses for, 10, 183
Bodley 414 manuscript, Canterbury books, demand for. See also literary
Tales, 129 production, fifteenth century;
Boethius, 208–9 print market
De consolatione philosophiae, 16, 54 classical authors, 242–43
Boffey, Julia, 287, 289 creating, strategies for, 52, 55, 61,
“Literary Texts,” 285 106–7, 137, 212–13
Bona of Savoy, 83, 85 Everyman, 289
Bone, Gavin, 363n44 humanist scholarship, 242–43
Bonet, Honoré: L’arbre des batailles, liturgical material, 9–10, 109, 182–84,
176 296–97
Book of Courtesy (anon.), 125, 136–39, Recuyell of the Histories of Troye, 287
143–48, 172, 336n45 statistics reflecting, 1, 10–11, 15–16,
books. See also the press; the reader- 18, 296–97, 303n20, 304n32
book relationship in transforming English public and
as archive, 298 private life, 3–5
collecting book sellers, illustrated, 48
—clubs for, 33, 35 Bornstein, Diane, 197, 348n1
—defining identity through, 32, the bourgeoisie, 20, 35, 37, 147, 193,
37–38 201, 348n2. See also class
—the nobility and, 354n32 structure
—politics and, 37–38 Boutcher, Warren, 359n10
—women and, 181–82, 189–90 Bracciolini, Poggio: Bibliotheca historica
as commodities, 50, 61, 106–9, 293, (trans.), 47, 274
295–97 Bradshaw, Henry, 7, 33, 313n52, 314n53
distribution of, 182–83, 346n45 Braytoft, Richard, 199
importing, 76, 110, 317n77, 363n48 Brice, Hugh, 43, 48, 156, 311n33
innovations in, 43, 52, 61 Bridgettine order, 182, 346n45
magic of, 23, 127 Brothers of the Common Life, 65
manuscripts compared, 19–20 Brown, Cynthia: Poets, Patrons, and
object-value connection, 1–2, 31–39, Printers, 107
50 Bühler, Curtis, 165
remaindered, 52, 55 The Fifteenth-Century Book, 109
representative aspects of, 117 Bunting, Hugh, 263
as social objects, 42–43 Burgundian court, 77, 82–90, 95,
structure, 41, 61, 195, 298 164–65, 197–98, 242
370 i n d e x
Burley, Walter on woodcuts, 42

De vita et moribus philosophorum, 53 works financed by, 52–53
Buttler, Eleanor, 238 Caxton, William, as printer. See also
Byddell, John, 67 printer’s mark: Caxton’s; the press,
Byles, A. T. P., 343n31 Caxton’s
authority of, 94–96, 136
Caister circle, 160, 173 the King’s Printer, 15, 278
Caoursin, Guillaume: The Siege of marketing strategies, 17, 31, 82, 102,
Rhodes, 232–34 104–7, 114, 136–37, 212, 348n1
capital. See also economics on printing, 82, 105, 111–13
books as symbolic of, 110, 135–36 techniques, evolution of, 43
defined, 19 title pages used by, 41
for the production of capital, 17, 22, typefaces used by, 43, 53, 54, 95, 105
52, 77, 82–90, 111, 114 Caxton, William, critical program
relationship to authority, 82, 87–90, constructing a unified literary
94–96 culture, 19–20, 193–95, 202–3,
capitalism, 305n37 232–35
Carlson, David R., 52, 215, 339n1, doubleness element in, 283
348n2 introduction, 2–4
Carmelianus, Petrus, 75, 275 power of, 195
Sex epistolae, 242 readers in
Carpenter, Christine, 351n21 —creating an imaginary community
Carus-Wilson, E. M., 77, 320nn5–6 of, 23, 137
“The Woollen Industry,” 305n37 —enabling through technology,
Castel, Jean, 174 19–20, 82, 206, 212–14
Caston, William, of Calais, 314n53 —making literary authority available
Cato: Disticha, 137, 138 to, 283
Caxton, Elizabeth, 15, 110 Caxton, William, friends/relationships
Caxton, William Large, Robert, 29, 30, 307n2
autobiography, 29 Malory, Thomas, 340n6
biography, 13–17, 29–31, 77–78, Mansion, Colard, 54, 315n63
306n1, 307n1 Margaret of York, 29, 90–93, 189,
career, 29–30, 52–53, 314n57, 340n6 321n15
feminism and, 24 with the nobility, 87–93, 102, 162,
on language, 257–60, 279, 281 278, 319n1, 321n15
legacy of, 2–4, 9, 19, 23, 298 Skelton, John, 260, 281
on literary production, 43–44 Woodville, Anthony, 30, 156–66,
Mansion compared, 54–55 340n6
patrons of, 43, 90–93, 156–58, 166, Wynkyn de Worde, 15
181–82, 189, 194, 321n15 Caxton, William, identity/persona
on reader-book relationship, 31 of authority, 85–90
on readers, 1 Caxton’s construction of, 22, 77–79,
as translator, 90–94, 206–7 82, 102
unprinted works, Ovyde his booke of as courtier, 158–59
Methamorphose, 241 as diplomat, 77, 83, 85–90, 321n15
i n d e x 371
Caxton, William, identity/persona Canterbury Tales. See Caxton,

(cont.) William, imprints, Canterbury
as entrepreneur, 30–31, 77–78, Tales
87–88, 195 Charles the Grete. See Caxton,
as innovator, 16 William, imprints, Charles the
as Mercer and Stapler, 13, 77–78, Grete
102, 304n27, 318n80 Chronicles of England, 43, 56, 74, 105,
as merchant, 22, 75–77, 110, 183, 111, 113, 134, 178
317n77 Commemoratio lamentationis, 76
as reader, 46–48, 189, 257 Confessio amantis, 17, 328n19
as scholar, 23–24, 242, 277–78 Consolation of Philosophy/De consola-
Caxton, William, imprints tione philosophiae, 16, 54, 134,
1476–1479, 16–17 136–37, 145–46, 155, 242
1482–1485, 15 Cordiale quattuor novissimorum, 53
audience for, 348n2 Cordyale, 17, 156–57, 162, 194
Caxton name associated with in- Curial, 156–60, 173, 204, 240
creased value, 31 De proprietatibus rerum, 314n57
of Chaucerian poetry, 16–17, 124–25, Description of Britain, 134
328n19 Dictes and Sayings of the Philosophers,
chronology of, 25 17, 157, 160, 162–65, 172–74,
as heretical, 184 188–89, 342n20
of humanist books, 242 Directorium sacerdotum, 257, 317n78
illustrations in, 40f Disticha, 137, 138
indulgences, 95–97, 194, 213–16, 242 Doctrinal of Sapience, 305n35, 313n50
pamphlet miscellaney, 156–57 Doctrine to Learn French and English,
patterning in, 16–17, 23, 193–94 134
political and propagandistic, 195–96 Donatus melior, 242
quarto miscellany, 134, 138 Eneydos. See Caxton, William, im-
sales of prints, Eneydos
—to collectors, 31–33 Epitome, 242
—prices, 212–13, 281–82 Fayts of Arms, 23, 161, 175, 194,
—Recuyell of the Histories of Troye, 343n31
309n12 Festial, 33
—Wentworth Chaucer, 31–32, 36–38, Festum transfigurationis Jesu Christi,
41 76, 317n78
statistics, 15 Fifteen Oes, 181, 183
Caxton, William, imprints (editions) Foure Sonnes of Aymon, 156, 175, 194
Advertisement, 22, 102, 104–7, 104f, Game and Play of Chess, 13, 50, 53, 90,
114 95, 157–58, 305n35
Anelida and Arcite, 204, 328n19 Godfrey of Boloyne. See Caxton,
Blanchardin and Eglantine, 33, 106, 181 William, imprints, Godfrey of
Book of Courtesy, 125, 136–39, 143–48, Boloyne
328n19 Golden Legend, 15, 17, 55, 112, 156,
The Book of Fame/House of Fame, 17, 194, 305n35
140, 328n19 Histoire de Jason, 53, 95
Book of Good Manners, 76 History of Jason, 112, 194, 242
372 i n d e x
Horae ad usum Sarum, 10, 109, 183, 1483, 15, 17, 47, 126, 134, 140, 148,
317n78 151, 328n119
House of Fame/Book of Fame, 17, 140, capital investment embodied in,
328n19 135–36
Image of Pity, 76 defined, 136
Infancia salvatoris, 138 freedom of the compositor in, 129,
Jubilee Indulgence to England, 214 136, 330n24
Knight of the Tower, 33 General Prologue, 133, 140–42, 141f
Legenda ad usum Sarum, 50, 110, 212, manuscripts derived from, 133–34
317nn77–78 marketing strategy, 136–37
Le Morte D’Arthur. See Caxton, Wil- Monk’s Tale, 133
liam, imprints, Le Morte D’Arthur Prologue to the Clerk’s Tale, 139
Life of Our Lady, 17, 328n19 Retraction, 126–36, 128f
Lives of the Fathers, 15 sales price, 334n41
Méditations sur les sept psaumes Sammelbände, 134
pénitentiaux, 53, 95 Wife of Bath’s Tale, 39, 40f
Methamorphose, 23, 236, 244, 255–56 Caxton, William, imprints, Charles the
The Mirrour of the World, 39, 41–43, Grete
47–48, 112, 148, 156, 305n35, 311n26 authority of, 208
Missale ad usum Sarum, 49, 110, defining the individual through
317nn77–78 desire, 225–32
Morale Prouerbes, 17, 23, 157, 174 discussion of Paul in, 208–9, 211
Nova rhetorica, 242 emphasis on the imaginary, 233
Of Old Age; Of Friendship; Of Fierabras section, 197, 208, 225–27
Nobility, 173, 278 in folio, 212
Ordinale ad usum Sarum, 82, 102, Godfrey of Boloyne compared, 225,
104–7, 114 226–27
Ordre of Chyualry, 48, 305n35 grouping by Caxton, 17, 194
Parlement of Fowls, 138, 328n19 Le Morte D’Arthur compared, 225
Polychronicon, 15, 17, 47, 55, 148, 184, mentioned, 196
194, 278, 305n35 reduction used by Caxton in, 112
Propositio, 195, 237 “Saint Pol docteur de verite,” 208,
Quattuor sermones, 76, 134 211
Recueil des Histories de Troie, 53, 95 source material, 197–98, 225
Recuyell. See Caxton, William, Caxton, William, imprints, Eneydos
imprints, Recuyell of the Histories audience for, 278–79
of Troye Caxton as the reader in, 48
Robert Erle of Oxeforde, 175, 194 Dido traditions in, 240–41, 244–46,
Royal Book, 112 251–57
Sex epistolae, 242 doubleness theme in, 240, 278, 283
Speculum vitae Christi, 33, 182 eggs anecdote, 259, 279, 281
Troilus and Criseyde, 16, 328n19 history of the book in, 243–44
Caxton, William, imprints, Canterbury history of writing in, 240, 244–46,
Tales 251–57, 275
1476/77, 14, 31–33, 126, 139, 151, identity developed in, 258, 282
328n19 illustrations, 280f
i n d e x 373
Caxton, William, imprints, Eneydos War with Lucius, 220–21

(cont.) Winchester manuscript compared,
intention-artifice relationhip, 252–53 212–13, 220–23
literary culture, role in constructing, Caxton, William, imprints, Recuyell of
242 the Histories of Troye
mentioned, 82, 236 Burgundian court’s influence on, 242
Methamorphose linked to, 244 Caxton on Caxton in, 29
mutability of language discussion, commentary on, 22
279 copperplate engraving, 171
Ovid Moralisé compared, 251 demand for, 287
Recuyell and, 258, 260, 277 Eneydos compared, 258, 260, 277
source material, 243–44 fourme of literary authority, 90–102
Troy myth in, 251–57 frontispiece, 98f
vernacular humanism and, 23, 282–83 grouping by Caxton, 17, 194
Caxton, William, imprints, Godfrey of mentioned, 13, 82
Boloyne patronage for, 90–93, 156
about, 214 printer’s mark in, 50
audience for, 212–13 production process, 54
Charles the Grete compared, 225, prologues and epilogues, 90–102
226–27 sales of, 33
Le Morte D’Arthur compared, 222, 224 in sixteenth century, 287
mentioned, 17, 194, 233 textual history as personal history in,
political action modeled in, 206–7 165
review of Nine Worthies in pro- typography of, 53
logue, 196 the vernacular expression in, 257–60
source material, 197, 210–11, 214 Caxton, William, Worthies Series of
tension of doubly appropriative romances. See also specific titles in
mechanisms in, 209–10, 216–19, audience for, 196–97, 212–13, 234
222 authority of, 207–13, 234
Caxton, William, imprints, Le Morte conclusions, 233–35
D’Arthur introduction, 193–96
Arrivall’s similarity to, 203 in manuscript vs. in print, costs of,
audience for, 212–13 212–13
authority of, 203–5, 208, 211 as marketing strategy, 348n1
Charles the Grete compared, 225 patronage for, 194
critique of Godfrey in prologue, patterning in, 215–16
196–97 the reader-book relationship in, 213
in folio, 212 source material, 197, 208
Godfrey of Boloyne compared, 222, 224 structural devices, 194, 197–99
grouping by Caxton, 17, 194 tension of doubly appropriative
mentioned, 15, 55, 233 mechanisms in, 208–12, 219–24
patronage, 194 titles contained in, 23, 196
source material, 198, 210–11, 220, 226 Caxton, William, writing in prologues
tension of doubly appropriative and epilogues. See also specific titles
mechanisms in, 210, 219–24 capital, authority, print and persona
thematic continuity in, 219–20 domination of, 82, 90–102
374 i n d e x
discussion of Paul in, 208–9 authority as poet laureate, 272

on durability of writing, 46–47 feminism and, 120, 188
on investment and labor of newfangledness used by, 204–5,
production, 112 351n21
on libraries, 47–48 Skelton and, 261–62, 270
on patronage and commerce, 53 Socrates compared, 167
self-identity revealed in, 77 tributes to, 137, 139, 148–50
tension in, 92–94 Chaucer, Geoffrey, Canterbury Tales
themes of passage in, 137 Canon Yeoman’s Prologue and Tale,
tributes to Chaucer in, 137, 148 130
uses for, 193–94 Caxton imprints, 14, 15, 17, 31–33,
on value of literary production, 47, 126
46–47 Caxton prologue, 148–53
Caxton, William, writing of Clerk’s Tale, 148, 272
appropriation practices, 19, 139–40, General Prologue, 133, 138, 140–42,
208–9 141f, 167
Burgundian court’s influence on, in manuscript, 36–37, 123, 127,
197–98, 242 129–34, 149–51
conventionality of, 92–94 Monk’s Tale, 133, 198
as derivative, 17, 193, 242 Parson’s Tale, 127, 129–30
literary and political authority linked Prioress’s Tale, 144
in, 258 Prologue to the Clerk’s Tale, 139
literary tropes, 24, 93, 152–53, public demand for, 127, 133
197–98, 208, 211–12 Retraction, 126–36, 128f, 209
as a reader, 189 textual history as personal history in,
self-reflective quality of, 30–31 165
use of the vernacular, 278 Troilus and Criseyde, 134
Caxton studies Wife of Bath’s Tale, 39, 40f
history of, 306n1 women as readers of, 181
patronage and commerce polarizing, Chaucer, Geoffrey, other works of
107–9, 155–57, 319n1 “Adam Scriveyn,” 130, 143
recent research, 307n1 Anelida and Arcite, 204
traditional assessment of classical The Book of Fame/House of Fame, 17,
texts, 241–42 140, 328n19
Chambre, John à, 263, 264 Consolation of Philosophy, 134
Charles the Bold, 88–89, 164, 195, 237 Gentilesse, 138
Charles V, 163 Legend of Good Women, 120–21, 144,
Charles VII, 83, 188 328n19
Chartier, Alain in manuscript, 122, 133–34
Belle Dame sans Merci, 173, 188 Parlement of Fowls, 133, 328n19
Curial, 157–60 themes, 142–43
Chaucer, Alice (Alice de la Pole), 123, “Treatise on the Seven Deadly Sins,”
149, 189 129
Chaucer, Geoffrey Troilus and Criseyde, 16, 142
appropriation practices, 136, 139–40 vernacular poetics embedded in
authorial identity, 18 social class, 140–43
i n d e x 375
Chaucer, Thomas, 123 symbolized through consumer

Chaucerian canon, 122, 136, 144, 286, goods, 60–61
330n22 Yorkshire uprising and, 260–70
Chaucerian inheritance Colonia, Johannes de: Lectura super
defined, 117, 153 Clementinas, 65, 67f
the female legacy in, 189 color
introduction, 18–19 in Boke of St. Albans, 58
“Myn Hert ys Set” illustrating, intentionality conveyed through,
118–22 245–46
paternal legacy in, 123–25, 138–39, red rubrics, printing of, 257, 315n63,
153–54, 162, 167–68, 189 317n78
of poetic authority, habitability by commodities. See also capital
minor writers, 23, 124–25, 155, books as, 50, 61, 106–9, 293, 295–97
160–61 Dibdin’s construction of the library,
Christianson, C. Paul, 16, 108 33–36
Christie’s book auctions, 31–32, 37 symbolic power to invoke authority,
Christine de Pizan, 161, 173–80, 62, 213
186–89 computer imaging, identifying type
Dits moraux, 174 using, 6
Fayts of Arms (Le livre des faits Conches, Guillaume de: Moralis
d’armes), 23, 30, 161, 175–78, philosophia, 165
186–88, 343n31 conduct literature, 136–39, 143–48,
La cité des dames, 176–77 336n45. See also specific titles
L’Epitre d’Othéa, 173, 175, 181 Confrérie de St. Jean, 54
Livre du corps de policie/Bodye of Polyce, Constable, Marmaduke, 265
163, 290 Constitutions of 1409, 183, 184
Morale Prouerbes, 15, 17, 23, 48, Copeland, Rita, 247
161–62, 173–75, 188 Copland, Robert, 16
Querelle du Roman de la Rose, 188 indulgences, 355n36
Cicero Copland, William, 156
De amicitia, 278 Recuyell of the Histories of Troye,
De officiis, 237 287
De senectute, 278 Coss, P. R., 202
Epistolae ad familiars, 237 Costomiris, Robert: “Sharing Chaucer’s
Of Old Age; Of Friendship; Of Authority,” 330n22
Nobility, 173, 278 Cosyn, Robert, 87
Paradoxa, 237 Coventry corporation, 199–200
Clanvowe, John, 140 Crane, John, 124
class structure. See also nobility; the Creede, Thomas: Recuyell of the
bourgeoisie Histories of Troye, 287
books in flattening, 20, 35–36, 60–61, Cresse, William, 314n53
106, 196–97 Crop, Gerard, 110
in Chaucer’s hierarchy of writing, Crotch, W. J. B., 305n35, 314n53
140–43 The Prologues and Epilogues of William
reproduction through paternity, Caxton, 25, 306n1
146–47 Croyland Chronicle, 171–72
376 i n d e x
culture, material, 33, 60–62 economics. See also the press: economics
“Cuneiform Typography,” 6 of
capital in construction of political
Dane, Joseph A., 289–90, 339n1 authority, 82–90
Daubeney, William, 156, 353n26 capitalist mode of literary
Davies, H. M., 49, 51, 314n54 production, 18, 22, 82, 87, 102,
death, 44–46, 45f, 284, 293–95, 294 f 104–7, 111–14
De consolatione ( Jena MS), 97, 100, 101f of manuscript production, 108–9
De Hamel, C. F. R., 108 trade relations, 82–90, 89f, 305n37,
Desmond, Marilynn, 348n1 320nn4, 9
Deuereux, Ann, 363n44 Edward, Prince, 125, 199
Deuteronomy 21:10–13, 248–49 Edward IV
Dibdin, Thomas Frognall, 33–35 1471 return to England, 201–4
Aedes Althorpianae, 33–34 Act for the Settlement of the Crown
Diodorus, Siculus, 49 charges, 238–40
Bibliotheca historica, 47, 260, 274–75, Bona of Savoy and, 83
305n35 claim to the throne, 125, 155, 180
Dominican priory of Arundel, 216 literary culture in court of, 95
doubleness Lord Hastings and, 43
in Caxton’s Eneydos, 240, 278, 283 marriage to Elizabeth Woodville, 85,
of contradiction in “Myn Hert ys 125, 162, 238
Set,” 119–21 mentioned, 237, 353n26
in English culture, 240 Northumberland and, 264
of recognition and complicity, 240 patronage, 162–63, 170f
reduction-multiplication relation- trade relations, Burgundy and
ship, 112–13, 118, 148, 173, 176, France, 83–88
184, 186 Woodville and, 168–71
Russell’s, 238–40, 270, 283 Edwards, A. S. G., 44, 82, 185, 287, 289,
Skelton’s, 265–69, 283 330n22, 339n3
tension of, in Worthy Series, 208–12, “Literary Texts,” 285
219–24 Edward V, 125, 237, 238
Douglas, Gavin Egremont, John, 263, 264, 265
Aeneid, 287 Eisenstein, Elizabeth L.: The Printing
Eneydos, 285 Press as an Agent of Change, 107,
Doyle, A. L., 106 300n6
Dritzehen, Andreas, 110 E. K.’s preface to Shephearde’s Calender,
Dritzehen, George, 110 286
Duff, E. Gordon, 195, 313n52 Elizabeth, Queen of England, 30, 156,
A Century of the English Book Trade, 168, 199
363n48 Elizabeth of York, 180–81, 195
William Caxton, 306n1 Ellesmere manuscript, Canterbury Tales,
Duffy, Eamon, 296 129–30
Duggan, Mary Kay, 296–97 England, fifteenth-century
doubleness in culture of, 240
Eastlake, Abbot, 48 as insular and romantic, 30
Ebesham, William, 106, 335n41 political society, 200–201
i n d e x 377
England, fifteenth-century (cont.) George, Duke of Clarence, 168–69,

print in transforming, 3–5 171, 180, 238
social change in, 146–48, 201–7 Gering, Ulrich, 317n78
trade relations, 82–90, 89f, 305n37, Gerson, Jean: Imitatio Christi, 181–82
320nn4, 9 Getty, Paul II, 32–33, 36, 37–38
Erler, Mary C., 10, 109, 183, 296 Gigliis, Johannes de, 215, 216, 242, 275,
Everyman, 288–97 278
Gigliis, Silvestro de, 275
Fastolf, John, 160, 172–73, 179, 180 Gill, Louise, 77, 304n27
Fauconbourg’s rebellion, 162 to gloss/glossing, 59
Febvre, Lucien, 1, 18, 289 Godfray, Thomas: The Workes of
Fisher, John, 181, 183 Geffray Chaucer Newly Printed,
The Fruytfull Saynges of Dauyd, 182 126
Fitzalan, William, Earl of Arundel, 156 Goes, Hugh, 16
Fitzwilliam, Countess (Olive), 32 Goldwell, James, 14
fixity concept, 8 Gollancz, Israel, 350n12
Foucault, Michel, 136, 335n43 Goodman, Jennifer R., 188–89
fourme/forme, 82–90, 94–95, 106, Gotz, Nicholus, 55
111–14, 147 Meditationes vitae Christ, 53–54
Fradenburg, Louise, 225 Gossouin of Metz: Image du Monde,
France, trade relations, 82–90 311n26
Frankenberg, Henry, 317n77 Gower, John, 125, 181, 204
Freccero, Carla, 225 Confessio amantis, 17, 328n19
Frederick II, 165 “In Praise of Peace,” 198
Free, John, 173, 180 Mirour de l’Omme, 198
Frisner, Andreas, 55 Grady, Frank, 350n12
Froben, Johannes, 67, 69f Granton, John, 308n2
Frontinus, Sextus Iulius: Strategemata, Greg, W. W., 330n22
176 Everyman, 288–97
Fust, Johannes, 51–52, 51f, 55, 65, Grey, Richard, 169, 264
110–11, 214 Grosseteste, Robert, 137
De officiis, 237 guilds, 54, 77–78, 84, 108, 146–47,
Paradoxa, 237 320n6, 325n37
Guillory, John, 136
Gascoigne, 265 Cultural Capital, 117
Gaskell, Philip, 135 Gutenberg, Johannes, 6–9, 110–11, 214
gender and literary production Catholicon, 94
Chaucerian interest in, 24 Gutenberg Bible, 32, 37, 111
Christine de Pizan, works of, 173–80
defining the individual through de- Hammond, Eleanor Prescott: “A
sire, 225–32 Reproof to Lydgate,” 327n3
Dido traditions in the Eneydos, Han, Ulrich: Regulae cancellariae
240–41, 244–46, 251–57 apostolicae, 52
Jerome’s equation of sensuality, Hanna, Ralph, 127
248–51, 255 Harowe, John, 87
378 i n d e x
Harris, Kate, 108 Huizinga, Johan, 302n8

Harriss, G. L., 204 humanism, 236–37. See also vernacular
“Political Society and the Growth of humanism
Government in Late Medieval humility trope, 118–20, 156, 177, 261
England,” 200–201 Hundred Years War, 153, 179
Hastings, Lord ( William), 43 Hunte, Thomas, 14, 76, 316n69
Heilmann, Andreas, 110 Compendium totius grammaticae, 75,
Hellinga, Lotte, 1, 32, 44, 54–55, 97, 243
330n22 Epistolae, 243
The Cambridge History of the Book in Ethics, 243
Britain, 285–86 Vulgaria quedam abs Terencio in An-
Hellinga, Wytze, 54, 55 glica[m] linguam traducta, 242–43
Helmingham manuscript, Canterbury Hus, Matthias: La grante danse macabre
Tales, 133 des homes et des femmes, 44–46, 45f,
Hengwrt manuscript, Canterbury Tales, 48
129–30 Huvain, Jean, 15
Henry, Prince, 274 Hylton, Walter
Henry V, 93 Epistle on the Mixed Life, 182
Henry VI, 124, 195, 343n31 Lyf of Saynt Vrsula, 182
Henry VII Scale of Perfection, 182
advisors to, 237, 275 The Shyppe of Fooles, 182
mentioned, 182, 195, 282, 353n26
monarchial power and the laureate identity. See also Caxton, William,
system, 241, 272, 274–75, 276–77, identity/persona
283 authorial, 18, 176–79, 282
patronage, 156, 175 books in defining, 32, 37–38
rebellions against, 241, 262–70, 276 English, 32, 37–38, 75, 165, 195–97,
Henry VIII, 282 233–34
heraldry, 58–62, 63–64f, 65 literary authority in producing, 258
Herbert, William of Pembroke, 363n44 political, of the nobility, 270
Herbort, Johannes, 237 printer’s mark relationship to, 76,
Heywarde, scribe of Dictes and Sayings, 79–80
170–71, 170f the public vs. private self, 148
Hicks, M. A., 180, 268 ideology, 26, 193–95
Hirsch, Rudolf, 335n42 “I. H.” See Huvain, Jean
Historie ancienne jusqu’à César, 243 imagination. See also archival imagi-
Hoccleve, Thomas, 3, 22, 41 nation
Regement of Princes, 24, 144 in ideology, 26
Holbein, Ambrose, 67, 69f in the reader-book relationship, 1–2,
Hornby, Henry, 182 213, 298
Hornes, Philippe de, 54 shaping the cultural, 23, 194–95
Horobin, Simon, 117 Imray, J. M., 146
Hospital of St. Mary Rounceval, incunable, 300n6
Charing Cross, 215 Innocent VIII, 195
Hughe, Inghelbert de la, 183, 185 intellectual production, defined, 25
i n d e x 379
Isabeau of Bavaria, 163, 175 language, Caxton, William on, 257–60,

Isidore of Seville: Etymologies, 47 279, 281
Large, Robert, 13, 29, 307n2, 318n80
Jacqueline of Bavaria, wife of Duke Lathbury, John: Liber moralium super
Humphrey, 82 trenis Ieremiae, 75
Jacquetta of Luxembourg, 163, 175 Lathrop, Henry: “The First English
James, M. E.: “The Murder at Printers and Their Patrons,”
Cocklodge,” 362n35 319n1
James I of Scotland: Kingis Quair, 272 laureate system, 241, 258, 270–78, 283,
Jansen, Maria, 327n3 358n2
Jenson, Nicolas, 7, 10, 316n69 Lawton, David, 92
Lectura super Clementinas, 65, 66f Le Clerc, Jehan, 42, 311n26
Lives, 237 Leeu, Gerard of Antwerp: Vulgaria
Jerome, Epistle 70, 247–48 quedam abs Terencio in Anglica[m]
Johannes de Prodica, 165 linguam traducta, 242–43
John, Duke of Bedford, 163, 175 Le Fèvre, Raoul, 99, 102
Johns, Adrian: The Nature of the Book, Histoire de Jason, 53, 95
300n6 History of Jason, 112, 194, 242
Justin: Epitoma historiarum Philippi- Recuyell of the Histories of Troye,
carum Pompei Trogi, 244 90–91, 96, 98f
Lerer, Seth, 31, 139, 261–62, 272,
Kallendorf, Craig, 360n18 334n37, 339n1
Kay, John: Siege of Rhodes, 74, 196, 214, Chaucer and His Readers, 121–22
232–34 Le Tailleur, Guillaume, 67, 71f
Keiser, George R., 56 Lettou, John, 14, 95
Kelly, Douglas, 356n47 Abbreuiamentum statutorum, 195
Kempis, Thomas à: Imitatio Christi, 182 indulgences, 196, 214, 232
Kendale, John, 215, 232 Quaestiones super xii libros
Kerling, N. J. M., 110 metaphysicae, 74
Knight, Charles: The Old Printer and the Siege of Rhodes, 196, 214, 232–34
Modern Press, 306n1 Tenures, 195
Knight, Stephen, 349n3 Lewis, C. S., 329n20
knight bibliophiles, 164–65, 179–80 Liber moralium philosophorum, 165
Knights of Rhodes, 215 library/libraries, 31–39, 47–49, 163, 197
Koelhoff, Johann the Elder, 53 literary canon, English, 17, 20, 122–23,
136, 144, 286, 330n22
labor literary culture
print as the permanent record of, 15th- and 16th-century continuity, 4,
46–47 107–9, 236–37, 285–87
of the printshop, 19, 49, 135, 335n41 backward-looking aesthetic in, 125,
writing as, 187 195
Lambeth Palace Library, Dictes and Say- Eneydos’s role in construction, 242
ings of the Philosophers manuscript, modernity and, 4–5
162, 169, 170f, 172, 174 narrowing of, 301n8
Lander, J. R., 155 paternity metaphor in, 123–25
Langley, Henry and Catherine, 214 post-Chaucer, 121, 124–25, 156
380 i n d e x
print as unifying function over, 154 Love, Nicholas: Speculum vitae Christi,
question of existence, 117, 121–22, 182–83
300n6 Lowry, Martin, 237
romance genre in, 30 Lucas, Peter J., 339n3
self-reflective quality of, 5–6, 30–31, Luke, Gospel of, 239–40
41–43, 107, 121, 237, 239, 254 Lydgate, John
the vernacular, 44, 156, 182–85 Chaucerian inheritance, 3, 118–20
Yorkist, 124 death of, 153
literary production. See also books, dede la Pole and, 123
mand for; manuscript production; feminism and, 24, 188
vernacular literary production mentioned, with Caxton, 16, 41, 48,
Caxton on, 43–44, 46–47 92, 102, 125
commerce model, 18, 22, 82, 87, 102, patrons of, 189
104–7, 111–14 Skelton and, 272, 275
consumption-production relation- Lydgate, John, works of
ship in, 6, 20, 31–39, 43–44, 49, “Bochas,” 133
61–62, 70, 76, 181–83, 189 Canterbury Tales prologue, 123
contemporary understanding of, Churl and Bird, 133, 328n19
39–41 demand for, 286
danse macabre genre, 44–45 “Dietary,” 137
illustrations in, 41–42 Fall of Princes, 286
morality plays, 288 The Horse, the Sheep and the Goose, 137,
romantic ideology of, 48–49 144, 328n19
literary reproduction Life of Our Lady, 17, 328n19
material and intellectual com- newfangledness as term in, 204
ponents, 19, 109–10 Siege of Thebes, 120, 123, 134, 139,
Retraction and the cycle of, 126–36 144, 148–49, 246, 270, 286
as social reproduction, 136–48 Siege of Troy, 270
literary reproduction theory, 6, 13 Stans puer ad mensam, 137, 328n19,
literature, fifteenth-century English 336n45
paradox of, 11–12, 121–22, 127 Temple of Glass, 328n19
purpose of, 213 “Timor Mortis Conturbat Me,” 198
war and, 176, 178–80, 187, 247–48 Troy Book, 24, 93, 96, 148
Littleton, Thomas Lyndewode, William: Constitutiones
Tenores nouelli, 74 provincials ecclesiae Anglicanae, 75
Tenures, 70, 195 Lynton, John, 215
Livre d’Eracles, 197
logic of reproduction, 10, 16, 134 MacCracken, Henry Noble, 327n3
Lomner, William, 124 Macherey, Pierre, 304n26
London Mercers, letter of October 17, Machlinia, William de, 14, 67, 74, 76,
1464, 82, 83, 85–86 95, 195, 237
Longuyon, Jacques: Les Voeux du Paon, Abbreuiamentum statutorum, 195
197, 198 indulgences, 196, 214
Loomis, R. S., 198 Innocent VIII’s papal dispensation,
Louis, Dauphin of France, 83 195
Louis de Bruges, 54, 197 Noua statuta, 195
i n d e x 381
Machlinia, William de (cont.) Margaret, Duchess of York, wife of

political and propagandistic imprints, Charles the Bold
195–96 Caxton and,29,90–93,156, 189,
Promise of Matrimony, 74, 195 321n15
Siege of Rhodes, 74, 196, 214, 232–34 marriage, 88–89, 164
Tenures, 195 as patron, 92–93, 97–100, 98f, 101f,
Treatise on the Pestilence, 74, 75 156, 166, 189
Vulgaria quedam abs Terencio in An- Margaret, Queen of England, 199
glica[m] linguam traducta, 242–43 Margaret of Anjou, 124, 162, 343n31
Maggs, Bryan, 32 Margaret of Burgundy, 265
Mainz Psalter, 51–52, 51f, 55, 65, 111 marketing
Malory, Thomas, 266, 278 Advertisement for the Ordinale ad
Le Morte D’Arthur, 15, 203–6, 208, usum Sarum, 82, 102, 104–7, 114
211, 212–13, 219–22, 340n6 for Canterbury Tales, imprints,
Malviciis, Perseus de, 216 136–37
Mancinellus, Antonius: Donatus melior, development of, 17
242 manuscripts, 301n6
Manley, John, 132, 133, 134 printer’s mark in, 31, 52, 55, 73
Mansion, Colard, 50, 165, 315n63 Worthies Series of romances, 348n1
De consolatione philosophiae, 54 Marotti, A. F., 108–9
De casibus virorum illustrium, 55 Marston, Thomas E., 278
Ovide Moralisé, 54–55, 242 Martens, Thierry, 53
manuscript market Martin, Henri-Jean, 1, 18, 289
Canterbury Tales, 127, 133 Marx, Karl, 137
marketing and distribution in the, Master of Mary of Burgundy, 97,
301n6 99–100, 101f
sales prices, 212–13, 281–82 material production, defined, 25
statistics, 10, 44, 108, 127 Matthews, David, 33
manuscript production. See also literary Maydeston, Clement: Directorium
production sacerdotum, 317n78
Canterbury Tales, 127, 129–30 Maynyal, Guillaume
consumption-production relation- Legenda ad usum Sarum, 50, 110
ship, 132–33 Manuale ecclesiae Carnotensis, 317n78
economics of, 108–9, 135, 281–82, Missale ad usum Sarum, 49, 110
335n41 Statua synodalia ecclesiae Carnotensis,
scribes in constructing authorial in- 317n78
tent, 129–32 use of red rubrics, 315n63, 317n78
transitioning to print, 52, 106, McFarlane, K. W., 179
126–36, 173, 181 McGann, Jerome: A Critique of Modern
manuscripts Textual Condition, 307n1
books compared, 19–20 McKenzie, D. F., 78
constructed nature of the text, McKerrow, R. B., 291f
127–32, 128f McLuhan, Marshall: The Gutenberg
Marchant, Guy: La grante danse macabre Galaxy, 301n6
des homes et des femmes, 44 McMurtrie, Douglas C., 313n48
382 i n d e x
Meale, Carol M., 82, 185, 339n3, 340n6, Nine Worthies, 194, 197–203, 207–16,
354n32 220–23, 234. See also Caxton,
Mentelin, Johann, 237 William, Worthies Series of
Mercers’ Company, 146 romances
Mercers’ guild, 84, 320n6 nobility. See also individual nobility
Mercers’ letter of October 17, 1464, 82, appeal of Arthurian legend to, 348n2
83, 85–86, 94–95 authority of the, 162–65, 168–69,
merchant adventurer, 320n5 199–206, 270
Merchant Adventurers, 13, 77, 83–90, as book-collectors, 354n32
84f, 320nn5–6 Caxton’s relationship with, 87–93,
Meun, Jean de, 188 102, 162, 278, 319n1, 321n15
Meyers, Robin, 313n52 language of the elite, 258
Mireur historial, 225 as patrons, 181–83, 185, 272, 274–75,
Mirk, John 277, 283, 319n1
Festial, 75, 134 as readers, 19–20, 183, 196–97
Mokhtâr el-Hikam (Abul’l Wefa Skelton’s charge of treason, 263,
Mubeschschir ben Fatik), 165 265–68
Monke of Bury. See Lydgate, John, Woodville’s relationship with the,
works of 162–65, 168–69
monkey cup, 100, 103f Noir, Philippe le: Le livre des faits
monkeys, 98f, 100, 102 d’armes, 175
Mooney, Linne R., 117, 130 North, Elizabeth, 14, 74
morality play, 288–97 Notary, Julian, 15
Morgan, Paul: “The Caxton Legenda,”
314n53 Origen: In Leviticum homilia, 249
Mowbray, Anne, 168 Overey, William, 84–85
museums, housing books in, 38 Ovid, 247, 255–57, 277
mutability principle, 266, 269, 279 Ovide Moralisé, 54–55, 236, 242, 244,
“Myn Hert ys Set” (anon.), 118–21, 246–51
123–24, 139, 160–61, 188, 246, 272, Owen, Charles A., Jr., 129, 130, 333n34
327n3 Owen, Tudor, 171
Mystery of Stationers, 325n37 Oxford group, 122
Oxford printer
Needham, Paul, 6–8, 32, 94–95 Exposicio sancti Ieronimi, 74, 316n72
“The Customs Rolls as Documents Libri ethicorum, 74
for the Printed-Book Trade in Tractatus de peccato originali, 74
England,” 317n77
The Printer and the Pardoner, 25 Paffroed, Richard: Compendium totius
Neve, John, 87 grammaticae, 243
Neville, George, 180 Painter, George D., 50, 183, 313n52,
Neville, Richard, Earl of Warwick, 314n53, 353n26
83, 85, 87, 162, 171, 180, 201–2, “The Caxton Legenda,” 314n53
264 William Caxton, 307n1, 314n53,
newfangledness, 204–6, 232, 266, 282, 319n1, 348n2
351n21 Parker, Alice, 181
i n d e x 383
Pask, Kevin, 126 Pinkhurst, Adam, 130

Paston, John III, 124, 263, 265, 278 Plato, 167
“Grete Booke,” 106, 335n41 Plomer, Henry R., 313n52
Paston, William, 267 William Caxton, 306n1
paternity/paternal legacy Plumpton, Robert, 263
of authority, 152–53, 155 Plutarch: Lives, 237–38
Chaucerian inheritance, 123–25, poet laureate, 233, 270–78, 283
138–39, 162, 167–68, 189 Pole, Alice de la (neé Chaucer), 123,
of class structure, 146–47 149, 162, 189
of the Lancastrian court, 171–72 Pole, Richard de la, 272
symbolic construction of, 172 Pole, William de la, Duke of Suffolk,
of the Yorkist court, 168–69, 171–72 122–24, 149, 160, 162, 272, 327n3
patriarchy, 248–50 politics. See also authority: the political
patronage. See also under specific names; and literary joined
women, literary authority of of participation and appropriation,
Caxton on, 53 201–7, 260–70
defined, 155–56, 160, 339n3 power of the press in, 154, 195
illustrated, 98f, 101f, 170f, 171 Pollard, Graham: “The English Mar-
literary culture producing, 189 ket,” 319n1
as mass production, 180–90 Ponyngs, Edward, 215
of the poet laureate, 272, 274–75, Poulet, Quentin, 275
277, 283 Powell, Susan, 181–83
printer-patron relationship, 185 Pratt, William, 8, 145, 156
producer-patron relationship, 98f, Premierfait, Laurent de: Des cas des no-
99–102, 101f, 158–60, 180–81, bles homes et femmes, 244
339n3 the press. See also books; marketing
Patterson, Lee, 113, 205, 302n8, 350n12 15th- to 16th-century development
“On the Margin: Postmodernism, of, 107–9
Ironic History, and Medieval alchemy of, 111–14, 118, 148
Studies,” 302n8 economics of
Pearsall, Derek, 44, 197, 301n8 —appropriation practices, 67–68, 70,
Pen, Robert, 282 79
Percy, Henry, Earl of Northumberland, —competition, 53, 74–76, 195–96
241, 258, 260–72, 271f, 273f, 274f, —consumption-production relation-
276, 281–82 ship, 31–39, 43–44, 49, 61–62, 70,
persona. See also Caxton, William, 76, 181–83, 189
identity/persona —jobbing work, 214–16
intersection with capital and —labor costs, 335n41
authority, 82–90, 106 —manuscript production vs., 135
literary, models for the, 23 —new technology, 43
Petrarch, 272 —paper costs, 335n41
Phalaris: Epistolae, 243 —the printer’s mark, 52
Philip the Good, 54, 82–83, 85, 88, 90, —vernacular literary production,
124, 197 74–75
Pickering, Elizabeth: Magna Carta, 70 —volume output, 17–18, 43, 46, 56,
Pickering, John, 85 135, 136, 212, 312n38, 335n42
384 i n d e x
manuscript production in the transi- —biographical detail in, 50, 313n52,

tion to, 52, 106, 126–36, 173, 181 314n53
representations of, 44–46, 45f, 48 —in Book of Courtesy, 336n45
successful, requirements for, 17–18 —development of, 31, 49–50
the press, Caxton’s. See also marketing; —layers of meaning in, 76–78
printer’s marks: Caxton’s —texts used to introduce, 317n77
color printing, 257, 315n63, 317n78 —Worde’s synthesis of, 67, 68f
development of, 54 expanding use of, 55
economic practices forms and origins of, 51, 56, 62,
—capitalist mode of production, 18, 313n52, 314nn53–54
22, 82, 102, 104–7, 111–14 function of, 50, 79–80
—competitive, 55, 75–76 Gotz’s, 53–54
—financial backing and patronage, identity imprinted through, 76,
14–15, 43, 90–93, 156–58, 166, 79–80
181–82, 189, 194, 319n1, 321n15 Margaret’s portcullis gate, 185
—indulgences, printing of, 95–97, orb and cross style, 65
194, 213–16 shields used in, 62, 63–64f, 65, 290
—investment in new technology, 43, Skot’s, 290–92, 291f
75, 135 statistics, 49, 313n48
—jobbing work, 214–16 use of post-1491/92, 76
—to reduce costs, 55 value added through, 52, 55, 73, 78
—volume output, 212 print market. See also books, demand
freedom of the compositor in, 129, for
330n24 1450–1500 statistics, 2
one-pull process of printing red 1470s–1480s, 14, 15, 53, 74–76, 242
rubrics, 315n63 1490s, 76
political power of, 195 English, Caxton in defining, 2–4
two-pull process used in, 43, 135, Richard III’s Parliamentary acts con-
317n78 cerning, 15, 75–76
in Westminster, 14, 16, 106, 340n6 print production. See the press
print. See also books Purde, William, 15, 278
color, 58, 61, 62, 315n63, 317n78 Purfoot, Thomas: Life and Death of
defined by Caxton, 82 Hector, 286
introduction of, 6–9 Pynson, Richard
paradox of, 11–12, 73, 112–13 Abridgment des libres annales, 70
transformative nature of, 3–5, 9–10, Canterbury Tales, 70, 126
12, 111–14, 118 Chaucer folio editions, 134
unifying function, 154 Compendium totius grammaticae, 243
print culture, 4, 18, 296, 300n6 Everyman, 288–97
printer’s mark imprint statistics, 16, 304n32
appropriations of, 52, 55, 65, 67–73, Imytacyon and Folowynge the Blessed
68–69f, 70–73f, 185, 290–93, 291f, Lyfe of our Sauyour Chryste, 181–82
292f liturgical texts, 183
authority of, 58–62, 65, 67, 78 Mandeville’s Travels, 290–91
Caxton’s The Mirroure of Golde for the Synfulle
—authority of, 78 Soule, 182
i n d e x 385
Pynson, Richard (cont.) reduction-multiplication relationship,

as printer, 15–16, 159 112–13, 118, 148, 173, 176, 184, 186
printer’s mark, 67, 70, 72f, 290–92, Renatus, Flavius Vegetíus: Instituta rei
292f militaris, 176
Redman and, 70 reproduction, logic of, 10, 16, 134.
Retraction (Canterbury Tales), 126 See also literary reproduction
Speculum vitae Christi, 182 Reviczky, Count de, 33
Tenures, 70 rhetoric of dullness, 92, 118, 177
Terence, works of, 243 rhetoric of humility, 118–20, 156, 177
Ricci, Seymour de, 32–33, 309n12
Quentell, Heinrich: Compendium totius Rice, Eugene, 249
grammaticae, 243 Richard, Duke of Gloucester, 201–2
Richard, Earl of Salisbury, 171, 174, 183
Rastell, John, 16 Richard III, 125, 181, 237, 238, 264–65,
Ravenswalde, William. See Machlinia, 318n80
William de Richard III’s Parliament, 75–76, 195
the reader-book relationship Richard of York, 124, 155, 168, 171
appropriation in, 136 Rickert, Edith, 132, 133, 134
the imaginative connection in, 1–2, Riff, Hans, 110
213, 298 Ripon Cathedral Sammelband, 134
symbolic value of the book in, 293, Robert, Earl of Oxford, 175, 194
295 Roberts, Rosemary, 289
reader(s). See also audience Roche, Antoine de la, 164
Caxton as, 46–48, 189, 257 Rolle, Richard
as consumers, 254, 257 Explanationes notabiles . . . Richardi
creating, methods of, 52, 55, 61–62, Hampole heremite, 75
106–7, 137, 211–13, 243 [Q]uonia[m] ex t[er]mi[ni]s fiu[n]t
English, interests of, 173–80, 188, p[ro]po[si]c[ion]es, 75
272, 274–75 Roman d’Eneas, 243
the imaginary community of, 23, 212 Romans 15:4, 131, 208–10
of manuscripts, 281, 363n44 Rood, Theodoric, 14, 76, 195, 316n69
nobility as, 19–20, 181–86, 196–97 Compendium totius grammaticae, 75,
of romances, 212 243
women as, 181–83 Constitutiones prouincials ecclesiae An-
reading glicanae, 75
engagement with the physical, Epistolae of Phalaris, 75, 243
248–50, 255 Ethics, 243
libraries for, 34 Explanationes notabiles . . . Richardi
relationship to pleasure, 233 Hampole heremite, 75
reading communities, 160–61, 173 Exposicio sancti Ieronimi, 74, 316n72
Rede, John, 87 Expositio super tres librios Aristotelis de
Redman, Robert: The Boke of Magna anima, 74
Carta, 70, 73f Liber Festivalis, 75
red rubrics, printing of, 257, 315n63, Liber moralium super threnis Ieremiae,
317n78 75
386 i n d e x
Long parvula, 74 Scriveners’ guild, 108

Vulgaria quedam abs Terencio in Scrope, Stephen, 172, 173, 180
Anglica[m] linguam traducta, 75, La Belle Dame sans Merci, 173
242–43 L’Epitre d’Othéa, 173, 175
Roos, Richard: La Belle Dame sans Sensenschmidt, Johann, 55
Merci, 134 Sha, Edmund, 238
Roxburghe auction, 32–33 Sha, Ralph, 238
Roys, Guillaume le: Livre des Eneydes, Shakespeare, William, 32
243, 244 Troilus and Cressida, 287
Rundle, David, 357n2 Sharpe, Kevin, 359n2
Russell, John, 270, 283 Shelley, John, 87
Act for the Settlement of the Crown, shields used in printer’s marks, 63–64 f,
238–40 65
Edward V coronation address, Shirley, John, 3, 22
237–38, 254 Shore, William, 87
Propositio, 195, 237 Silva, Daniel S., 133
Richard III’s coronation address, 238 Simmes, Valentine: Recuyell of the
Rutter, Russell, 348n1 Histories of Troye, 287
“William Caxton and Literary Simnel, Lionel, 276
Patronage,” 319n1 Simpson, James: Oxford English Literary
History, 286
Salford, John, 87 Sixtus IV, 214, 242
Sant, John, 214 Skeat, W. W.: The Chaucer Canon,
Scanlon, Larry, 19, 131 330n22
Scattergood, John: “The London Skelton, John
Manuscripts of John Skelton’s audience of, 281, 363n44
Poems,” 363n44 authority of, 358n2
Schencbecher, Theobaldus, 10 charge of treason made by, 263,
Schilling, Johannes 265–68
De proprietatibus rerum, 52 Chaucer and, 261–62, 270
De vita et moribus philosophorum, 53 doubleness in writing of, 265–69, 283
Gesta Romanorum, 52–53 feminism, interest in, 24
Schoeffer, Peter, 51–53, 51f, 55, 65, 111 literary authority of, 260–70, 272,
De officiis, 237 273f, 274–75
Paradoxa, 237 Lydgate and, 272, 275
Schoolmaster Printer of St. Albans, 14, poetic voice, 261
95, 195 vernacular used politically, 258,
Boke of St. Albans, 56–62, 67 262–70
Libellus super Tullianis elegantiis, 74 Skelton, John, works of
printer’s mark, 56, 57f, 62, 63–64f, Bibliotheca historica, 260, 274–75, 282
65, 67, 70, 316n69 Eleanor Rumming, 24
St. Albans Chronicle/Chronicles of Eng- “Upon the Dolorus Dethe . . . Erle of
land, 56, 57f, 61–62, 315n64 Northumberlande,” 241, 258,
Scogan, Henry, 140 260–72, 271f, 273f, 274f, 276,
“Moral Ballad,” 138 281–82
i n d e x 387
Skot, John, 290–92, 291f Tanselle, G. Thomas: A Rationale of

Bodye of Polyce, 290 Textual Criticism, 25
Everyman, 288–97 technology
Mayde Emyl, 290 Caxton’s investment in, 43, 75
social reproduction, literary reproduc- computer imaging, identifying type
tion as, 2, 136–48 using, 6
society, imaginative organization of, enabling the reader through, physi-
23, 194–95. See also class cally and symbolically, 19–20, 206,
structure 212–13
Socrates, 166–67, 173–74, 188–89 Ter Hoernen, Arnold, 7, 49, 53, 55
sovereign clerk, 168, 176, 180, 184 De remediis utriusque fortunae, 52
Spearing, A. C., 144 Terence: Vulgaria quedam abs Terencio in
Spencer, Lord, 33–35, 37, 39 Anglica[m] linguam traducta, 75,
Spenser, Edmund: Shephearde’s 242–43
Calender, 286 text of art, defined, 6
Stanbridge, John: Long parvula, 74 textual culture, 296
Stanley, John, 122–23 Thesaurius, Bernardus, 214
Staplers, 83 Thorney Sammelband, 134
Statham, Nicholas: Abridgment des libres Thrupp, Sylvia L., 65, 146
annales, 70 Thynne, William: The Workes of
Stephenson, J. J.: “Wool Yields in the Geffray Chaucer Newly Printed, 126,
Medieval Economy,” 319n4 286
St. John, John, 181 Tignonville, Guillaume de: Dits des
St. Margaret’s Abbey at Westminster, philosophes, 165
110 Timaeus, 244
Strangeways, R., 65 Tiptoft, John, Earl of Worcester, 173,
Strohm, Paul, 301n8 179, 180
Summit, Jennifer, 161, 175, 240–41 Todd, William, 262
Surigonus, Stephano, 242, 338n1 Tottel, Richard
Sutton, Anne F. Mirror for Magistrates, 285, 286
“Caxton Was a Mercer,” 319n1, Miscellany, 285
364n55 Songes and Sonnettes, 287–88
“Ramon Lull’s Order of Chivalry Trapp, J. B., 1, 44
Translated by William Caxton,” The Cambridge History of the Book in
319n1 Britain, 285–86
Swanson, Heather, 78 Traversanus, Laurentius: Nova rhetorica
Swineshead, Richard: “Insolubilia,” 75 (Epitome), 242, 316n64
symbolic, defined, 25–26 Treaty of Calais, 83
symbolic bibliography, 5, 74 Trevisa, John of
symbolic production, 25–26, 30–31, Dialogue Between a Lord and a Clerk,
109–12, 135, 213 184
symbolic reproduction theory, 13 Polychronicon, 15, 17, 47, 55, 148, 184,
194, 278, 305n35
Talbot, John, Earl of Shrewsbury, Tudor, Arthur, 348n2
343n31 Tunstall, Richard, 263
388 i n d e x
Tupper, G. I. F., 7 the laureate system of, 241, 258,

Turville-Petre, T. F. S., 198 270–78, 283, 358n2
typeface design and formation Lydgate’s association with, 286
computer imaging in identifying, 6 Russell’s association with, 237–38
by Johannes Veldener, 53, 95, 105, vernacular literary culture, 44, 156,
112 182–85
metal type, 2 vernacular literary production. See also
movable type, 6–9, 111 literary production
printer’s mark role in, 55 authorial reflection on, 120–21
sand-casting, 6–7 Chaucer’s definition of, 142–43, 154
demand for, 10–11, 44, 53, 74–76,
Urry, John, 126 182–85
Usk, Thomas, 140 statistics, 44
typography of, 53, 95
Valdarfer Boccaccio, 32–33, 39 Vickers, Nancy, 356n47
Valerius Maximus: Facta et dicta Vienna Psalter, 52
memorabilia, 54, 176 Vignay, Jean de, 305n35
Vaughan, Míc≥eál F., 129, 130 Virgil, 277
Veldener, Johannes, 53, 55, 95, 105, 112, Aeneid, 243–44, 287
290 Visser-Fuchs, Livia: “Ramon Lull’s
De proprietatibus rerum, 52 Order of Chivalry Translated by
De vita et moribus philosophorum, 53 William Caxton,” 319n1
Epistolares, 112 vocabulary of impression, 139, 262
Gesta Romanorum, 53
Vérard, Antoine, 281–82 Wall, Wendy, 358n2
Le livre des faits d’armes, 175 Wallace, David: History of Medieval Lit-
Vere, Anne, 181 erature, 286
Vere, John de, Earl of Oxford, 30, 156, Walter, William: “Guyscard and
161, 175, 194, 278 Seiesemonde,” 133
vernacular war and literature, 176, 178–80, 187,
literary authority and the, 4–5, 247–48
19–20, 179–80, 207–9, 233–34, Warbeck, Perkin, 276, 353n26
247 War of Public Weal, 88
political use of the, 262–70 Wars of the Roses, 30, 124, 149, 153–55,
reflecting personal experience, 278 168, 201–4, 264
vernacular humanism Watson, Henry, 16
16th-century, 359n10 Watson, Nicolas, 10–11
ambivalence cross-cut by doubleness Wedurby, John, 199
in, 282–83 Wellek, René: “Origins,” 121–22
Caxton’s association with, 23–24, Wentworth Chaucer, 31–32, 36–38, 41
242–43 Westminster, literary production in, 14,
conclusions, 282–83 16, 106
defined, 236 Westphalia, Johann de, 53, 55
the Eneydos and, 242, 281–83 Whetehill, Richard, 85, 87
introduction, 23–24, 235–41 Whittington, Robert: Syntaxis, 67
i n d e x 389
Willems, Pieter, 307n2 Worde, Wynkyn de, 15, 290

William of Tyre, 214 Boke of St. Albans, 75
Willoughby, Edwin Eliott, 313n52 Book of Margery Kempe, extracts
Winship, George Parker: William from, 184
Caxton & His Work, 307n1 Chastising of God’s Children, 33
women, literary authority of. See also Chaucer folio editions, 134
specific women De proprietatibus rerum, 314n57
as book-collectors, 181–82, 189–90 Epistle on the Mixed Life, 182
Chaucerian inheritance, 189 The Fruytfull Saynges of Dauyd,
as patrons, 92–93, 97–99, 98f, 156, 182
166, 180–86, 189 Horae ad usum Sarum, 183
as readers, 181–83 imprint statistics, 16, 304n32
as writers, 173–80 indulgences, 355n36
Woodville, Anthony The King’s Mother’s Printer, 185
authority of, 162–65, 168–70, 180 Lyf of Saynt Vrsula, 182
background, 162 printer’s mark, 68f
Caxton, relationship with, 30, Recuyell of the Histories of Troye, 287
156–66, 180, 340n6 Retraction (Canterbury Tales), 126
de Pizan and, 174–75, 188 Scale of Perfection, 182
identity The Shyppe of Fooles, 182
—chivalric, 164–65, 170f Speculum vitae Christi, 182
—literary, 163–65, 168, 175, 179–80 Syntaxis, 67
—as patron, 156–58 Workman, Samuel K., 305n35
Malory and, 340n6 Wormsley estate and library, 33, 36,
mentioned, 48, 201, 264, 272 38
relationship with the nobility, Wrangwish, Thomas, 263, 264
162–65, 168–70, 170f writing
as writer, 180 history of in the Eneydos, 244–46,
Woodville, Anthony, works of 251–57, 275
Bodye of Polyce, 163 intentionality conveyed through,
Cordyale, 162, 164, 340n6 245–46
Dictes and Sayings of the Philosophers, symbolic authority of, 258
17, 160, 162–65, 169–71, 170f, 188, as warfare, 176, 179–80, 187
246 Wylcoks, William, 14, 74
Morale Prouerbes, 161, 173–75, 188
Woodville, Elizabeth, 85, 125, 162, 238 Yorke, Richard, 262
Woodville, Richard, 162, 163, 173, 175 Yorkist court, 4, 168–72, 170f, 180,
wool and broadcloth trade, 83, 89, 89f, 196
319n4 Yorkshire uprising, 241, 262–70
Worcester, William, 172–73, 180
Le livre de faits d’armes et de chevalerie, Zell, Ulrich, 53
173 Zwicker, Steven, 359n2
390 i n d e x

Kuskin, William. Symbolic Caxton Literary Culture

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symbolic caxton

“There are certainly recent books on Caxton,

Kuskin.SymbolicLobic.indd 1 11/14/07 10:30:38 AM

and Print Capitalism

University of Notre Dame Press

Copyright © 2007 by University of Notre Dame

Manufactured in the United States of America

Frontispiece. Caxton’s device. The Eneydos, L7v.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

This book is printed on recycled paper.

List of Illustrations vii

PA RT I Capital and Literary Form

PA RT I I Authorship and the Chaucerian Inheritance

PA RT I I I Print and Social Organization

Symbolic Caxton is meant to accompany Caxton’s Trace: Studies in the His-

The University of Colorado provided a last-minute grant to cover the

Ultimately, however, two individuals shaped this book most of all:

It is to them that I dedicate Symbolic Caxton.

Works Cited in Short Form

Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.”

Carlson, “King Arthur and the Court Poems.”

Corsten, “Caxton in Cologne.”

Fisher, “Caxton and Chancery English.”

Harris, “The Evidence for Ownership.”

Lotte Hellinga and John Goldfinch, 124–37. London: British Library,

Painter, William Caxton.

Spearing, Medieval to Renaissance.

Sutton and Visser-Fuchs, Richard III’s Books.

The main biographies of William Caxton are epic romances. 1

service of Anthony Woodville, the Lord Scales, Queen Elizabeth’s

Book Buying: Consumption in the (Post)modern Library

On July 8, 1998, Christie’s London auctioned o± the Wentworth Chau-

printing were written: Thomas Frognall Dibdin’s extensive revisions of

sofas, chairs, tables, of every commodious form, are of course lib-

It is barely possible, even for the most uninterested visitor, to walk

Here the rooms, furnishings, artwork, books—even the bindings of such

Book Selling: Production in Caxton’s Chamber

The relationship between material and symbolic forms which we see

mentioning that the Wentworth Chaucer’s title page is missing. Caxton

And now at this tyme rudely translated out of ±rensshe in to En-

Caxton presents the book’s reproduction through a narrative of personal

connection between intellectual production and social consumption

Consideryng that wordes ben perisshyng / vayne / 7 forgeteful / And

Considerant que parolles sont 7 demeurent vaines et escriptures per-

a cleaning-up of the actual terms of labor for as several studies have

The Printer’s Mark: The Bibliography of Material Culture

We can further understand the book as an object of fifteenth-century cul-

Originating in craftsmen’s and merchants’ marks, the printer’s mark

Romanorum, and Walter Burley’s De vita et moribus philosophorum, all

The halting process that the Hellingas describe, anathema to a commer-

who works on deluxe manuscripts: he planned nine copper engravings for

commercial form of literary production, one that relies on scale to re-

The Boke of St. Albans’s rhetorical modes—taxonomy and instruc-

The passage suggests a system of analysis drawn from the process of

participation. The method is superficial but nonetheless profound; for

Figure 1.9. Johannes Froben’s device ( by Ambrosius Holbein). Desiderius Erasmus,

Thomas Littleton’s Tenures (STC 15721), and Nicholas Statham’s Abridg-

printed book is paradoxical, it is this simultaneous urge to proclaim the

English print production and importation, indeed, from what we can

risk—as coherent and institutionally a¤liated. We should not assert

Caxton’s biographers have sought to find something to cele-

to do: it had to produce his role as a commercial, indeed as the commer-

The early printed book’s authority is complex: a combination

The Fourmes of Commerce