Agency and Intention in English Print, 1476-1526 (Texts and Transitions) [Multilingual ed.] 9782503535760, 2503535763

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Agency and Intention in English Print, 1476–1526

Texts and transitions General Editors Martha Driver, Pace University, New York Derek Pearsall, University of York Editorial Board Julia Boffey, Queen Mary, University of London Ardis Butterfield, Yale University Phillipa Hardman, University of Reading Dieter Mehl, Universität Bonn Alastair Minnis, Yale University Oliver Pickering, University of Leeds John Scattergood, Trinity College Dublin John Thompson, Queen’s University Belfast

Previously published volumes in this series are listed at the back of the book.

Volume 7

Agency and Intention in English Print, 1476–1526

by

Kathleen Tonry

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

© 2016, Brepols Publishers n.v., Turnhout, Belgium All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. D/2016/0095/134 ISBN: 978-2-503-53576-0 e-ISBN: 978-2-503-56207-0 DOI: 10.1484/M.TT-EB.5.107209 Printed on acid-free paper

to my husband, Brian R. Lynch & for our other shared endeavours: Mary, Tommy, and Irene

Contents

List of Illustrations

ix

Acknowledgements

xi

List of Abbreviations

xiv

Citation Conventions

xv

Introduction: Agencies

1

Chapter 1. The Personality of Print

17

Chapter 2. Usurers and Printed Books: The Mercantile Contexts of Intention in Late Medi­eval London

71

Chapter 3. The Uses of Religious Printing by Merchants, for Merchants

109

Chapter 4. Print’s Experiments with Readerly Agency in Historical Writing

167

Conclusion: Intentions

211

Bibliography

215

Index 237

List of Illustrations

Figure 1.1. Example of printed text in the shape of a Eucharistic monstrance, from [Catherine of Siena], The Orcharde of Syon, printed by Wynkyn de Worde in 1519 (STC 4815). Bodleian Library, Douce D 274, sig. [us]2v. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63 Figure 1.2. Wynkyn de Worde’s concluding colophon, [Catherine of Siena], The Orcharde of Syon printed by Wynkyn de Worde in 1519 (STC 4815). Bodleian Library, Douce D 274, sig. B3v. . . . . . . . . 66 Figure 1.3. Title-page woodcut demonstrating how to keep tongues quiet, from [anon.], Of Euyll Tongues, printed by Wynkyn de Worde in 1525 (STC 10608). Newberry Library, Case Y 185 E96, sig. *ar. . . . . . 69 Figure 3.1 The title-page of The Golden Legend, with the text of Caxton’s translation of Jean de Vignay’s prologue, from Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend, trans. and printed by William Caxton in 1483 (STC 24873). Library of Congress, Inc. 1483. J33, sig. *1r. . . . . . . . . . . . . 119 Figure 3.2 The second opening of the Golden Legend, with Caxton’s own prologue, from Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend, trans. and printed by William Caxton in 1483 (STC 24873). Library of Congress, Inc. 1483. J33, sig. *2r. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 120 Figure 3.3 Title-page with xylographic title, from [anon.], Dives and Pauper, printed by Wynkyn de Worde in 1496 (STC 19213). Houghton Library, Harvard Uni­ver­sity, Typ Inc 9706, sig. A1r. . . . . . . . 143

x

list of iLLUSTRATIONS

Figure 3.4 Architectural title-page image, from [anon.], Dives and Pauper, printed by Thomas Berthelet in 1536 (STC 19214). Houghton Library, Harvard Uni­ver­sity, sig. A1r. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149 Figure 3.5 Example of printed marginalia, from [anon.], Dives and Pauper, printed by Thomas Berthelet in 1536 (STC 19214). Houghton Library, Harvard Uni­ver­sity, sigs g3v–g4r. . . . . . . . . . . . . 152–53 Figure 3.6 Andrew Chertsey’s ‘Prologue of the Translatour’, from Andrew Chertsey, trans., Floure of the Ten Commandementes, printed by Wynkyn de Worde in 1510 (STC 23876). Bodleian Library, Tanner 747, sig. A2r. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 158 Figure 4.1 Bifolio page design from the first edition of the Fasciculus Temporum, from Werner Rolewinck’s Fasciculus Temporum, printed by Arnold ther Hoernen in Cologne, 1474 (USTC 748574). Houghton Library, Harvard Uni­ver­sity, Typ Inc 935, fols. 11v–12r. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 184–85 Figure 4.2 Page design of the printer Peter Drach for the Fasciculus Temporum, from Werner Rolewinck’s Fasciculus Temporum, printed by Peter Drach in Speyer, 1477 (USTC 748576). Houghton Library, Harvard Uni­ver­sity, Typ Inc 2329, fol. 2v. . . . . . . . . . 200 Figure 4.3 Collage of woodcut images making up the frontispiece to the section of text entitled Fructus Temporum, from the edition of English chronicles printed by Julian Notary in 1515 (STC 10000). Bodleian Library, Wood 480, sig. a5v. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 202 Figure 4.4 John Rastell’s bifolio page design for his universal history, The Pastyme of People, printed by John Rastell in 1529 (STC 20724). Bodleian Library, Douce adds. C. 2, sigs D3v–D4r. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 206–07

Acknowledgements

I

am privileged to have incurred the debts I record here, and grateful for the chance to record them. This book has been helped by the financial support of an NEH summer stipend, a faculty grant from the Uni­ver­sity of Connecticut, and a junior faculty semester’s leave. Key parts of the argument have been sharpened by generous audiences at Harvard, Yale, Cam­bridge, and the Renaissance Center at the Uni­ver­sity of Massachusetts. I have also relied on the helpfulness and expertise of librarians at the British Library, Cam­ bridge Uni­ver­sity Library, the Bodleian Library (especially Alan Coates), the Huntington Library, the Houghton Library, the Beinecke Library, and perhaps most crucially, the patient interlibrary loan staff at the Uni­ver­sity of Connecticut’s Homer Babbidge Library. My interest in early print began at Notre Dame under the exceptional tutelage of Maura Nolan, Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe, Glenn Hendler, and Jesse Lander, all of whom nudged me to bring my interests in material culture to bear on the history of material texts. I was also lucky to have a graduate school experience that was shared with Siobhain Bly Calkin, Rebecca Davis, Shannon Gayk, Daniel Hobbins, Bonnie Mak, Scott Smith, Rebecca Stephenson, Jackie Stodnick, and Renée Trilling; their work continues to shape my own. Over the past few years, I have been fortunate to find a number of generous scholars willing to share their thinking and advice about the fifteenth century and late medieval books, among them Amy Appleford, Julia Boffey, Anne Coldiron, Alexandra Gillespie, A. S. G. Edwards, James Simpson, Daniel Wakelin, and Nicholas Watson. It was James Simpson’s Reform and Cultural Revolution that fired my first enthusiasms for the late fifteenth century and was the volume always within reach as I wrote. The work of turning ideas into written pages has been supported by the vibrant early studies community in UConn’s English department, including C. David Benson, Frederick M. Biggs, Robert Hasenfratz, Clare Costley King’oo,

xii

Acknowledgements

Gregory Semenza, Fiona Somerset, and our lively graduate students; I am thankful to share a hallway with colleagues so available for good conversations about old books. I am also grateful for the generosity and friendship of colleagues working beyond the margins of early print, including Pamela Bedore, Margaret Breen, Mary Burke, Ellen Carillo, Dwight Codr, Wayne Franklin, Serkan Gorkemli, Kathy Knapp, Ellen Litman, Tom Recchio, Shawn Salvant, Cathy Schlund-Vials, Chris Vials, and Sarah Winter. My work with UConn’s Writing Center has informed this book in key ways, reminding me of how rich and diverse the intersection between agencies and writing can be. I share that work with my colleague, Tom Deans, who is a model of faculty engagement and intellectual investment; it is hard to imagine how I would have finished this book without his support. I am also lucky to work with a talented staff of undergraduate and graduate students who have helped shape my sense of writing within the broader university. Margie Ouimette, and the Writing Center’s graduate assistants, among them Melissa Bugdal, Gordon Fraser, Kristina Reardon, Asia Rowe, and Mandy Suhr-Sytsma, have all been generous in their moral and practical support for this book and my writing process. I owe a special debt to three medieval colleagues outside UConn whose scholarship, guidance, and friendship I have come to rely upon. Conversations with Amy Appleford shaped blurry ideas into a defined project, and her work in reclaiming the ‘wild west’ of the later fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries as medievalist territory underlies the central chapters of this book. Daniel Wakelin supplied various witty details, material facts, and gentle corrections along the way, and introduced me through the example of his own work to the questions that could be asked of the archives. Nicholas Watson has been an invaluable, generous respondent at every stage of this project, from proposal to final chapters, and I owe a great deal to his kind guidance and support. Thank you. The existence of my idea as a material book at all is due to the guidance and expertise of Martha Driver and Derek Pearsall, the co-editors of the Texts and Transitions series; I am grateful for their early embrace of the project, their ongoing faith in it, and their insightful responses to the proposal and manuscript. Guy Carney, Rosie Bonte, and Shannon Cunningham shepherded the manuscript into print with patience and care. An earlier version of Chapter 4 appeared as ‘Reading History in Caxton’s Polychronicon’, in JEGP, 111 (2012), 169–98, and I am grateful to the Uni­ver­sity of Illinois Press for permission to publish it here. Any errors in this book are ones that reveal instances of my own unfortunate insistence. Several people from outside academia have supported me in finishing this book: I am grateful to Sarah Lacombe, Thomas and Patricia Lynch, Robyn

Acknowledgements

xiii

Hall, my sister Evelyn Tonry, and my father Alfred Tonry for their love, friendship, and interest in seeing me through this project. My deepest personal gratitude is to my husband and children for creating the necessary book-making space within a busy life together. Brian Lynch has supported my academic career as a shared endeavour, with good cheer and love, even while moving forward in a career with different but equally demanding pressures on his time and energy. The loveliest outcomes of our teamwork so far are Mary, Tommy, and Irene, who have lived their lives with this book and on the tenure track. While our children perhaps have not made this book quicker to write, they have made it worth writing and infused the work of doing so with joy, gleeful curiosity, and the delights of touching, reading, and making books.

List of Abbreviations

BMC xi Catalogue of Books Printed in the xvth Century now in the Brit­ish Library, Part xi: England, ed. by Lotte Hellinga (’t Goy-Houten: Hes & de Graaf, 2007) BodL

Oxford, Bodleian Library

BL

London, British Library

CUL

Cam­bridge, Cam­bridge Uni­ver­sity Library

EEBO

Early English Books Online

EETS

Early English Text Society

o.s. original series e.s. extra series

Hodnett Hodnett, Edward, English Woodcuts, 1480–1535, with Additions and Corrections (Oxford: Oxford Uni­ver­sity Press, 1973) MED

The Middle English Dictionary, ed. Hans Kurath and others (Ann Arbor: Uni­ver­sity of Michigan Press, 1952–2001)

ODNB

Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford Uni­ver­ sity Press, 2004)

STC

A Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland & Ire­ land and of English Books Printed Abroad, 1475–1640, first compiled by A. W. Pollard and G. R. Redgrave, 2nd edn, rev. and enlarged, begun by W. A. Jackson and F. S. Ferguson, completed by Katherine Pantzer, 3 vols (London: Bibliographical Society, 1976–91)

USTC

The Universal Short Title Catalogue (Uni­ver­sity of St  Andrews)

Citation Conventions

T

his study draws upon edited and unedited early printed texts, manuscripts, and legal documents; when possible, I have cited from modern editions. References to unpublished material cites specific book-copies or manuscripts, and I indicate folio or signature numbers as appropriate. In my transcriptions of this material, I have sought to preserve punctuation marks, capitalization, spelling, letter substitutions (i/j, y/i, y/þ, and u/v), and common orthographic abbreviations (such as yt and ye for þat and þe) with the following exceptions: I have used italics to indicate the expansion of abbreviations within words and in place of the tironian et and ampersands, omitted paragraph marks, and omitted markers of word divisions that occur from typesetting choices.

Introduction

Agencies ‘Caxton me fieri fecit’. (Caxton caused me to be made.)

W

illiam Caxton began using this brief Latin line as a colophon in late 1484, when it appeared at the conclusion to his first edition of the Directorium sacerdotum (STC 17720).1 He used it in many of the editions he produced afterward, and the line is a curious, wonderfully ambiguous choice. It seems as if the book is speaking, yet the name we have is Caxton’s own. Is it really the medium — the printed book — that we hear, or is this Caxton’s voice at one remove? Or perhaps the line simply acknowledges a busy shop where anonymous apprentices did most of the work under the direction of Caxton. Parsing this brief colophon reveals our own priorities in how and where we assume agencies emerge — from a text’s medium, out of the conditions of production, or from human actors — and this is partly what Agency and Intention is about. However, in thinking through agency and textual production, this study also makes an implicit argument for an approach that fuses intellectual and material inquiries about early texts. A further close reading of Caxton’s colophon demonstrates these arguments in brief. Leafing through a full copy of Caxton’s Directorium sacerdotum, we see that ‘Caxton me fieri fecit’ is actually the second of two colophons included in the edition, which itself is a collection of four discrete Latin texts that define and defend the set of English liturgical practices known as the Sarum 1 

The date of the Directorium is slightly uncertain; see BMC XI, 158–59. Others have traced Caxton’s first use of this imprint to his edition of Malory (1485, STC 801); see Painter, William Caxton: A Biography, p. 70. It becomes commonplace in Caxton’s editions after 1487, used in both his vernacular and Latin liturgical work.

Introduction

2

Use.2 The first text is a liturgical calendar, which is followed by two works by Clement Maydeston, the Directorium and the Defensorio directorii. At the end of the Defensorio, Caxton attaches a rather formulaic first colophon: ‘Impressum est hoc directorium cum defensorio eiusdem per william Caxton apud westmonasterium prope London’ (This Directorium with its Defensorio was printed by William Caxton at Westminster near London). 3 This first colophon is then followed by a blank verso, after which begins the fourth and last text, the Crede Michi, composed at an earlier date by John Raynton. ‘Caxton me fieri fecit’ occurs at the very bottom of the last recto page of text, and thus concludes both the Crede Michi text, and the whole edition. Read against the first colophon, what is striking about ‘Caxton me fieri fecit’ is its compact energy and the complex passive construction of the verb, both of which produce a sense of motivated making. In its material context, then, the second colophon advertises the keen, lively intelligence of a printer who deliberately gathered and bound these four texts together, giving intentional shape to his edition as both a text and a material book. These observations raise provocative questions around how print may have helped shape a specifically English liturgical practice in the years before the Reformation, and two chapters of Agency and Intention address religious culture and print. But what I want to emphasize here is more broad: reading Caxton’s colophon in its material context invites us to think of the intersection between agency and book production as one that brings together intellectual and material questions, and that balances the physicality of books with book-making as a generative, creative act. This approach brings England’s early press into alignment with a long medieval tradition of understanding the material and intellectual dimensions of textual production as closely intertwined. Some of the most familiar English writers of the late fourteenth century (who could anticipate their texts circulating only in manuscript) conflate the physical and imaginative registers of writing: Chaucer’s Knight outlines the scope of his tale by conflating the work of tale-telling with agricultural labour: ‘I have, God woot, a large feeld to ere, | And wayke been the oxen in my plough’;4 Thomas Hoccleve ruminates on the bodily effects of writing in the Regement of Princes; the metaphors of agrarian 2 

See BMC ix, 158–59, and for the history of Maydeston and the context of the Sarum Use, see Christopher Wordsworth’s introduction to the modern edition, The Tracts of Clement Maydeston, ix – xlvi. 3  STC 17720, BL, C.10.b.16, r10r. 4  The Riverside Chaucer, ed. by Benson, p. 36, ll. 886–87.

Agencies

3

work complexly inform the poetic identity of William Langland; Benedictines understood textual production as at once opus manuum and opus Dei, the work of hands and the work of God. The tradition is underwritten by an assumption that books were media shaped by both the creative and the bodily labours of their writers. Throughout this study, I argue that medieval writers, readers, and book producers were less ready than we are to distinguish between producing a book and producing a text, between scribal and literary efforts, between publishing and crafting a text.5 Indeed, the most familiar modern concepts of medieval book production are informed by a single, thirteenth-century scholastic model — Bonaventure’s academic prologue to Peter Lombard’s Libri sentiarum. The passage most cited in current scholarship is the one carefully and influentially explicated by Alistair J. Minnis, in which Bonaventure delineates the four categories of book makers as scriptor, compilator, commentator, and auctor: quadruplex est modus faciendi librum. Aliquis enum scribit aliena, nihil addendo vel mutando; et iste mere dicitur scriptor. Aliquis scribit aliena addendo, sed non de suo; et iste compilator dicitur. Aliquis scribit et aliena et sua, sed aliena tamquam principalia, et sua tamquam annexa ad evidentiam; et iste dicitur commentator non auctor. Aliquis scribit et sua et aliena, sed sua tamquam principalia, aliena tamquam annexa ad confirmationem et debet dici auctor.6 (The method of making a book is fourfold. For someone writes the materials of others, adding or changing nothing, and this person is said to be merely the scribe [scriptor]. Someone else writes the materials of others, adding, but nothing of his own, and this person is said to be the compiler [compilator]. Someone else writes both the materials of other men, and of his own, but the materials of others as the principal materials, and his own annexed for the purpose of clarifying them, and this person is said to be the commentator, not the author. Someone else writes both his own materials and those of others, but his own as the principal materials, and the material of others annexed for the purpose of confirming his own, and such must be called the author [auctor].)

In this schema, the processes of book production represent discrete categories of work with gradations describing a hierarchy between the physical work of production and the intellectual work of composing. Even taking Elizabeth Bryan’s corrective translation, which reads the phrase ‘mere scribe’ as ‘purely 5  On this point, see also Wakelin, Scribal Correction and Literary Craft, esp. 1–16, and Fisher, Scribal Authorship, 1–13. 6  Minnis, Medi­eval Theory of Authorship, p. 94.

Introduction

4

scribe’, the passage creates reproduction as a minor note to the elevated act of textual creation.7 Bonaventure’s scholastic schema built upon a long-standing subordination of the work of scribare (copying) to that of dictare (composing), a hierarchical model that Tim Machan argues remained relevant to vernacular practice through the later Middle English period.8 Yet as Minnis and Machan both illustrate through their separate readings of Gower, Chaucer, Hoccleve, and Kempe, the distinctions speak more urgently to claims for poetic authority than to the nuances of material book production. In other words, while the Bonaventuran schema had much to offer would-be auctores, it is a framework that leaves the physical work of textual production relatively untheorized, standing as merely, ‘purely’, a necessary function. Further, while the verb scribare refers broadly to the work of book production and reproduction, the agent of that work — Bonaventure’s scriptor — aligns uneasily with historical scribal practices which, as Bryan has demonstrated in her work on early English scribes, were often far more collaborative and ‘enjoined’ to the work of textual composition. Daniel Wakelin’s work on scribal corrections provocatively suggests a further kind of collaboration between scribes and readers in the fifteenth century, while Matthew Fisher has demonstrated that in some genres, especially historical writing, the distinctions between scribe and author were too blurred to be meaningful.9 And saliently, as Alexandra Gillespie reminds us about texts like the ones attributed to Cynewulf or the anonymous Life of St Margaret, ‘it is not possible to detach author and copyist in many of these texts: both are writers, both write the book and ask for the reader or listener’s prayers’.10 I propose that early printers, too, fit uneasily into the Bonaventuran role of scriptor. William Caxton is an illustrative example, and an overview of his self-presentation will introduce this study’s larger arguments. Caxton’s first substantial paratextual prose accompanies his first English edition, a translation of Raoul le Fevre’s Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye (1473/74; STC 15375). In the extended epilogue Caxton does evoke a vividly corporeal parallel between his own work and that of the scribe as he describes the physical aspects of his translation: 7 

Bryan, Collaborative Meaning in Medi­eval Scribal Culture, p. 19. Machan, Textual Criticism and Middle English Texts, p. 175. 9  Wakelin, ‘Instructing Readers in Fifteenth-Century Poetic Manuscripts’ and Scribal Cor­ rection and Literary Craft; Fisher, Scribal Authority and the Writing of History, esp. 1–58. 10  Gillespie, Print Culture and the Medi­eval Author, p. 12. 8 

Agencies

5

And for as moche as in the wrytyng of the same my penne is worn, myn hande wery and 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.11

This painstaking labour of the scribe’s body, this material work of making a book, overlaps (if miraculously) with the book’s printed form, as Caxton continues in his epilogue: therfore I have practysed and lerned at my grete charge and dispense to ordeyne this said book in prynte after the maner and forme as ye may here see; and is not wreton with penne and ynke as other bokes ben to th’ende that euery man may haue them attones. For all the bookes of this storye named the Recule of the Historyes of Troyes thus enpryntid as ye here see were begonne in oon day, and also fynysshid in oon day.12

That the book is not ‘wreton with penne and ynke as other bokes ben’ is the point, directing readers to recall the printer’s work as not the same but yet similar to scribal work, with Caxton inhabiting the same role even if the actual labour is a good deal compressed.13 Yet this attention to the scribal work of reproduction traces a tension already in play throughout fifteenth-century medieval literature. Caxton’s worn pen, shaking hand, dimming eyes, and aging body are signs of scribal work, but they are also the physical traces of the intellectual work he expended in translating the Recuyell — a work that traces the well-worn trope of conflating literary making with physical labour.14 Thomas Hoccleve, for example, presents his scribal labour quite similarly in the Regement of Princes: Wrytynge also dooth grete annoyes thre, Of which ful fewe folks taken heede Sauf we ourself, and thise, lo, they be: 11 

Caxton’s Own Prose, ed. Blake, p. 100. Caxton’s Own Prose, ed. Blake, p. 100. 13  As scholarship has shown, Caxton in fact obscures much of the physical labour that underwrote his printed editions. He elides both the time of the print process — current studies reveal that early wooden presses could produce a full run of about a single sheet per day; even if Caxton had access to two presses in Bruges, his 352-page edition would have taken more than half a year’s worth of working days to complete; see Hellinga, ‘Printing’. Further, Caxton suppresses the manpower needed to operate the press itself, which needed at least four specialized printmen to run efficiently, including a skilled compositor. 14  See Robertson, The Laborer’s Two Bodies. 12 

Introduction

6

Stommak is oon, whom stowpynge out of dreede Annoyeth sore; and to our bakes neede Moot it be grievous; and the thridde oure yen Upon the whyte mochil sorwe dryen. What man that three and twenty yeer and more In wrytynge hath continued, as have I, I dar wel seyn, it smertith him ful sore In every veyne and place of his bodye; And yen moost it greeveth, treewely, Of any craft that man can ymagyne.15

Caxton’s close echo of Hoccleve’s complaints about the manual labour of writing share in a tradition evoked by a range of other late medieval ‘clerkly’ authors, including Thomas Usk and George Ashby, as well as Chaucer and Langland. For these poet-scribes, the physical experience of reproducing texts was a foundation from which they launched more ambitious bids for literary status.16 Indeed, Caxton makes a very similar move; if the images of physical labour are striking, more persistent and expansive is Caxton’s recollection of his own intellectual work in producing the translation. Over the course of the epilogue, Caxton presents himself first as a reader, one who undertakes the project of translating the Recuyell in order to make a new text available for the ‘royame of Englond’. The full labour of that translation slowly emerges as a work that took place over a number of years with starts and stops, the intervention of Margaret, duchess of Burgundy, and in the cities of Bruges, Ghent, and Cologne. Throughout the epilogue Caxton plays with the idea of the press (and himself ) as a magical scribe, but his more obvious investments are in the work of translation he has produced. At the very end of his epilogue, he even appropriates and echoes the debate about sources that Lydgate used to legitimate the Troy Book. Just as Lydgate reveals his own careful evaluation of Guido delle Colonne as the most authentic source because of his proximity to the eyewitness accounts of Dares and Dictys (a move that itself echoes Chaucer’s own nod to the same sources in Troilus and Criseyde), Caxton too summons Dares and Dictys near the end of his epilogue. But while Lydgate reflects on the sources of the Trojan narrative as a way of writing himself into a genealogy of literary authority, Caxton’s citation has the opposite effect, disavowing rather 15 

Hoccleve, Regement of Princes, ed. by Blyth, ll. 1016–28. See Machan, Textual Criticism and Middle English Texts, pp. 172–76; see also Knapp, ‘Poetic Work and Scribal Labor in Hoccleve and Langland’. 16 

Agencies

7

than claiming that strain of auctoritas. Weighing the conflicting accounts of Dares, Dictys, and Homer, Caxton instead notes their obvious partisanship and shrugs off impulses to reconcile different viewpoints as he observes that: But all acorde in conclusion the general destruccion of that noble cyte of Troye and the deth of so many noble prynces […] whiche may be ensample to all men duryng the world how dredefull and jeopardus it is to begynne a warre and what harmes, and losses and deth foloweth. T[h]erfore th’apostle saith all that is wreton is wreton to our doctryne. Whyche doctryne for the comyn wele, I beseche God, maye be taken in suche place and tyme as shall be moste nedefull in encrecyng of peas, love, and charyte.17

The key to this passage is Caxton’s evocation of the ‘comyn wele’ in relation to St Paul’s dictum from Romans 15. 4: ‘all that is wreton is wreton to our doctryne’. As William Kuskin has argued, Caxton’s use of Romans 15. 4 is an appropriation of ‘what turns out to be a much larger discussion of appropriation in general’.18 Yet Caxton’s last lines suggest an important new use of the dictum. As he concludes the Recuyell edition, Caxton prays that the ‘doctryne’ of the Recuyell might be taken for the common good in all those places and times that it is needful, a prayer that has as its subject not what that doctrine is but, rather, its availability and dissemination to the ‘comyn wele’. Here, he subtly but assertively shifts from considering literary authority — questions about who told which Trojan story — to questions of readership and textual availability that the very fact of his edition implicitly answers. Just as he generalizes and redirects the opposition between Dares and Dictys into a broad agreement about the death and destruction of Troy, he pulls the Pauline dictum into a more generalized emphasis on the dissemination and circulation of writing from which good ‘doctryne’ might be winnowed. Caxton’s own role here is difficult to pinpoint: neither scriptor nor auctor, he instead claims an undefined book-centred posture that nevertheless has a distinct relationship to moral authority. Throughout his paratextual compositions to the Recuyell, Caxton gradually defines printing as work that is about textual reproduction, but certainly not ‘purely’ so. Instead, Caxton represents his work as, crucially, also about the intellectual processes of selecting an appropriate exemplar, translating, and correcting. The more narrow role of the Bonaventuran scribare is a poor ana17  18 

Caxton’s Own Prose, ed. Blake, p. 101. Kuskin, Symbolic Caxton, p. 208.

Introduction

8

logue for the work Caxton understands himself undertaking, nor does he align himself with that model’s older roots in the distinction between scribare and dictare. Alternatives to the Bonaventuran model are presented in a range of thinking about textual authority in relation to production from late medieval writers like Jean Gerson, Johannes Trithemius, and Richard de Bury. These three thinkers especially address the work of textual reproduction as work that entails both imaginative and material dimensions, and they offer more flexible frameworks in which to understand the varied capacities of late medieval text producers. Richard de Bury’s Philobiblon offers an especially compelling model for understanding Caxton’s work. The Philobiblon, composed c. 1345, was widely circulated in the fifteenth century in manuscript and print, in England and on the Continent. Of the thirty-five extant manuscripts, most appear to have been produced over the course of the fifteenth century, with the majority ascribed to the latter half. Perhaps especially germane to the context of the early English press, the Philobiblon made an extended appearance as an incunable, printed in Cologne (1473, USTC 748549), Speier (1483, USTC 748550), and Paris (1500, USTC 201829).19 The Philobiblon is an argument for the urgency of reproducing and collecting books. De Bury situates his appeal as an ethical one that relies, in no small part, on the ethos he constructs for his own voice in the text, an ethos that is sometimes spoken in the fictive voice of books themselves.20 The treatise as a whole works as an impassioned plea that everywhere gestures to the moral foundation of textual production. It seems to draw a thick line of separation between that moral purpose and commercial ambitions, consistently refusing any equivocation between money and books. Whole chapters of the Philobiblon are given over to the necessity of treasuring books for their wisdom over their monetary value, but it is the voice of de Bury himself that becomes particularly adamant on this point: ‘Sed revera libros non libras maluimus, codicesque plus dileximus quam florenos, ac panfletos exiguus incrassatis praetulimus palefridis.’21 But while this move away from the market-value of books finds a strong echo in Caxton’s investment in an extra-economic role, and reverberates throughout 19 

Richard de Bury, Philobiblon, ed. and trans. by Thomas, pp. xxxvii–lxxiii. Richard de Bury, Philobiblon, ed. and trans. by Thomas, pp. 40–41. 21  Richard de Bury, Philobiblon, ed. and trans. by Thomas, pp. 84–85: ‘We wanted manuscripts, not moneyscripts; we loved codices more than florins; and preferred slender pamphlets to pampered palfreys.’ 20 

Agencies

9

the prologues of early printers (which I will discuss further in Chapter 1), even more relevant is the extended rationale that de Bury offers for the making of books — both creating and propagating new texts and reproducing old ones. Of new books, de Bury adopts a traditional line of reasoning as he argues that these must be continually produced as a bulwark against heresy.22 It is de Bury’s argument for ‘renewing’ old books that begins to plumb a new and complexly rich vein justifying the cultural and intellectual work of book production. For the several themes it raises it is worth quoting at some length here: Verum quia omne quod servit mortalibus, per prolapsum temporis mortalitatis dispendium patitur, necesse est vetustate tabefacta volumina innovates sucessoribus instaurari, ut perpetuitas, quae naturae repugnant individui, concedatur privilegio speciei. Hinc est, quod signanter dicitur (Ecclesiastes, 12): faciendi plures libros nullus est finis. Sicut enim librorum corpora, ex contrariorum commixtione compacta, suae compositionis continuum sentient detrimentum sic per prudentiam clericorum reperiri debet remedium, per quod liber sacer, solvens naturae debitum, haereditarium obtineat substitutum et simile semen fratri mortuo suscitetur verificeturque statim illud Ecclesiastici 30: Mortuus est pater illius et quasi non est mortuus, similem enim sibi reliquit post se. (But because all the appliances of mortal men with the lapse of time suffer the decay of mortality, it is needful to replace the volumes that are worn out with age by fresh successors, that the perpetuity of which the individual is by its nature incapable may be secured to the species; and hence it is that the Preacher says: ‘Of making books there is no end’. For as the bodies of books, seeing that they are formed of a combination of contrary elements, undergo a continual dissolution of their structure, so by the forethought of the clergy a remedy should be found, by means of which the sacred book paying the debt of nature may obtain a natural heir and may raise up like seed to its dead brother, and thus may be verified that saying of Ecclesiasticus: His father is dead, and he is as if he were not dead; for he hath left one behind him that is like himself.)23

The role of book production described in this passage is quite distinct from the Bonaventuran model. De Bury first legitimates textual reproduction in terms that tie it to the temporal movement of Creation itself. The idea that book copies take part in the progressive degradation of the world and the true Word was 22 

Richard de Bury, Philobiblon, ed. and trans. by Thomas, pp. 146–47: ‘sic Ecclesiae militanti contra paganorum et haereticorum insultus operae pretium constat esse sanorum librorum multitudine communiri’ (so it is fitting for the Church Militant to fortify itself against the assaults of pagans and heretics with a multitude of sound writings). 23  Richard de Bury, Philobiblon, ed. and trans. by Thomas, pp. 146–47.

Introduction

10

a familiar trope in the fourteenth century, but de Bury works with it in a new way. Here, he uses the figure of the book as a type of corporeal body subject to degeneration to foreground the reproductive function of book producers. Figured as bodies, the responsibility for the continuance of that bookish body in perpetuity is the sacred work of the scribe, of the writer. This robust physical connection between the book and its publisher moves quickly beyond the carefully discrete Bonaventuran categories of scribare and auctore, offering instead a mode of textuality that is deeply personal — about the bodies of books and the bodies of book writers and publishers. The modern media theorist, Jan-Dirk Müller, offers some helpful language for the shift de Bury effects. As Müller understands it, the genealogical problem of reproduction is that the process is vulnerable to textual degeneration. This is precisely what casts textual transmission as ‘above all a moral problem […] the permanence of truth depends on the scrupulous scribe and his care and not on a philological reconstruction of a corrupted text or on hermeneutic efforts to regain an obscured meaning’.24 Likewise, for de Bury the scribe is not merely a copyist but an ethical agent, a writer whose work moves beyond categories of error and philological accuracy and into the moral responsibilities of textual transmission. This ethical purpose is what Caxton continually recuperates in his own prose additions to his work. In his prologue to the second edition of the Canterbury Tales (1483, STC 5083), for instance, Caxton describes his discovery of a better exemplar in the possession of a friend’s father. But this prologue also provides some little-noticed narrative drama that underscores the moral dimensions of Caxton’s choice to undertake a second edition. Caxton takes pains to explain his obligation to coax the better text from a reluctant owner: his friend tells him about this better exemplar even as ‘he wyst wel that hys fader wold not gladly departe for it’.25 In response, Caxton takes on a kind of moral culpability for his first edition, admitting that tofore by ygnoraunce I erryd in hurtyng and dyffamyng his [Chaucer’s] book in dyverce places, in settyng in somme thynges that he never sayd ne made and levyng out many thynges that he made whyche ben requysite to be sette in it.26

The ambitions that Caxton expresses here are not philological but ethical; Caxton is anxious to fulfill his moral responsibility to Chaucer. He under24 

Müller, ‘The Body of the Book’, pp. 40–41. Caxton’s Own Prose, ed. Blake, p. 62. 26  Caxton’s Own Prose, ed. Blake, p. 62. 25 

Agencies

11

stands his second edition as a correction for ‘hurtyng and dyffamyng’ the body of Chaucer’s book; it is not a project of textual recovery as much as it is a labour of regeneration and renewal. Caxton concludes his prologue with a reminder that was often repeated in the prefatory pieces of his other works and those of his fellow printers: that the reader ‘may so take and understonde the good and vertuous tales that it may so prouffyte unto the helthe of our sowles’. The commercial profits Caxton surely anticipated from his second edition are thus deliberately overwritten in the language of spiritual common profit. Although we may reasonably suspect that economic profit was part of Caxton’s motives for printing an improved second edition, my point here is that it is worth paying attention to how the printer articulates his investments in the extra-economic discourse of spiritual profit. Caxton’s own phrasing suggests that in shaping the cultural role of print, early printers might adopt a posture of ethical agency — a possibility and even an expectation within de Bury’s framework of textual reproduction. My focus on Caxton in the above overview is not meant to suggest that England’s first printer was necessarily representative of all early English printers; indeed, England’s early printers occupy a varied, lively range of postures toward their books. Similarly, the Philobiblon is one among many models of medieval book production; as mentioned earlier, thinkers like Jean Gerson and Johannes Trithemius, as well as groups like the Carthusians and Benedictines, present alternative configurations. Yet it is also true that most of these models share an understanding of the physical and intellectual aspects of book production as intertwined, and tend to foreground textual creation as an ethical act; we might also keep in mind that Caxton’s is the most voluble and expressive voice of early print. What my overview does claim is that the narrow limits of the Bonaventuran model are at odds with later models of textual production, and specifically anomalous for the printers and scribes working in the fifteenth century. Caxton’s voice, and the ethical claims he inhabits in his prologues and epilogues, returns us to the other main argument of this study and the key term of my title: agency. Modern scholarly interest in early print has tended to reinscribe a conceptual break between print and manuscript by assuming that printers had quite limited intellectual investments in the books they published.27 The field has largely focused on the commercial and technological aspects of 27 

There are several examples of recent work in the field that are notable exceptions to this trend: see, among others, Coldiron, Printers without Borders; Wakelin, Scribal Correction and Literary Craft; da Costa, Reforming Printing; Boffey, Manuscript and Print in London.

Introduction

12

early print: the handpress as a media innovation, the economics of publishing enterprises, the capacities and distribution networks of early print centers, the range of skills and workmanship evident from different presses, the physical attributes and bibliographical details of early editions, the work of the press as the work of capital, and the qualities that might define the technology itself (for instance, fixity, stability, and rapid dissemination).28 Missing from these discussions are the ways that printing was (and is) also an act of textual creation, of engaged, deliberate, intentional making, as well as interest in printers as agents of that making. Considering agency as part of the study of book production is not novel: constructivist scholars of book history have long advocated for an emphasis on print’s relationship to social and cultural spheres, relationships that often highlight individual printers and specific creative contexts.29 D. F. McKenzie argues for the recovery of human agency in the study of bibliography most pithily, perhaps, in his proposal for a ‘sociology of texts’ — that is, a model that recognizes the structures governing print but also ‘directs us to consider the human motives and interactions which texts involve in every stage of their production, transmission, and consumption’.30 Yet few of the established constructivist scholars work with a sustained or primary focus in the field of early print, and especially in the awkward decades spanning print’s arrival in England (1476) to the mid-1520s. These decades pose a serious challenge to a constructivist perspective precisely because they mark a period that is often overwritten by the powerful political and religious structural transformations of the Reformation. My use of agency thus emerges from D. F. McKenzie’s ‘sociology of texts’, but it also owes a direct debt to Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe and her exploration of agency in the context of another powerfully transformative historical moment, the Benedictine Reform.31 The concept of agency in this work is drawn from a sociological criticism that thinks historically through the dialectic between individuals and cultural structures, and is used as a corrective for structuralisms

28 

Elizabeth Eisenstein’s landmark study The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, as well as the terms it proposes as qualities of print, remains an influential study in the field which can be felt in Raven, The Business of Books, and Pettegree, The Book in the Renaissance. 29  The ‘constructivist’ school includes scholars like McKenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts; McKitterick, Print, Manuscript and the Search for Order; Johns, The Nature of the Book; and Warner, The Letters of the Republic. 30  McKenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts, p. 15. 31  O’Keeffe, Stealing Obedience, esp. pp. 9–15.

Agencies

13

that too tightly confine or delimit the efficacy of human action.32 As O’Keeffe is careful to note, however, agency is not itself limited to an oppositional relationship vis-à-vis the social structures in which it operates. Rather, agency is ‘not opposed to cultural structure, but is enabled by it. To exercise agency requires actors to have knowledge of the cultural forms within which they are enmeshed and some ability to affect them.’33 I do draw tangentially upon concepts of volition and subjectivity, but only as these are suggested by the specific historical discourses surrounding print; for instance, my discussion of agency in relation to the common profit in Chapter 1, or to mercantile morality in Chapter 2, both briefly rely on historical constructions of ethical action that are understood as subjective and intentional. An emphasis on agency invites two crucial perspectives into the field of early print. Prioritizing printers as agents enables us to identify important frameworks other than those generated (retrospectively) by the Reformation. In Chapter 3, for example, I find that religious texts printed over the first two decades of the sixteenth century are strategically engaged with contexts quite beyond the heterodox/orthodox binary that has tended to define that period in scholarship. Further, tracing the agencies of print also reveals cultural structures and contexts of the period that have gone unnoticed; in this vein, Chapter 2 demonstrates the unexpected emergence of usury as a crucial topic in the religious literature of mercantile readers. Emphasizing the agencies of printers and book production, in other words, opens new perspectives into years that have long served primarily as a context for Reformation-related events. In the chapters that follow, I will return to refine the question of agency in relation to the particular arguments at hand, with just one further note here about what might constitute agency itself. O’Keeffe suggests that in its broadest understanding, ‘agency is the capacity for responsible individual action’.34 Within the context of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century England, such action was often made visible through ethical discourses — discourses that were predominantly theological but often also civic, legal, social, and historical. As these discourses suggest, an understanding of agency requires a sensitivity and careful attentiveness to historical context; the agencies of early print are configured by distinctly fifteenth- and early-sixteenth century limitations, practices, and norms. In other words, the agencies expressed by England’s early printers 32 

Sewell, Logics of History, pp. 124–25. O’Keeffe, Stealing Obedience, p. 13. 34  O’Keeffe, Stealing Obedience, p. 9. 33 

Introduction

14

and through the books they produced do not necessarily yield narratives about political freedoms, autonomy, or subversive responses to authority; there are moments of self-fashioning in the arguments that follow, but these only rarely produce figures that might satisfy our contemporary desires for liberty and individual expression.35 Chapter 1, ‘The Personality of Print’, is focused on the relationship of manuscript and print to ethical discourses of book production across the fifteenth century. While Richard de Bury provides one model, as discussed in this introduction, there were many frameworks — secular and sacred — available to underscore the moral work of textual production in its material and intellectual dimensions. Yet scholars have traditionally walled off these ethical discourses from print because of assumptions about the inability of printers to engage in book production beyond considerations about profitability. By tracing the material circumstances of London book production into the later fifteenth century, I suggest that the deepest material division between manuscript and print is not the divide between non-commercial and commercial activity, but instead the place of anonymity and personality as qualities that foster (or limit) engagements with specific ethical discourses. My central example is the common-profit discourse, a familiar, commonplace framework for book production that extended throughout the fifteenth century. The wide-ranging uses of the common-profit framework — among the scribes of the ‘common-profit’ manuscripts, and by Caxton, Rastell, and de Worde — reveal not only the flexibility of that discourse but its reliance upon the dynamics of identity and agency. The remaining three chapters are dedicated to close readings in two genres that remain marginalized in early print scholarship: religious and historical writing. Together, these genres represent a large portion of overall early print production, but which have attracted sparse detailed attention. Early religious print tends to be situated in relation to Reformation interests around Protestantism, heresy, and orthodoxy; these currents certainly circulate in the textual culture of the period but are not the only — or even, at points, the most pressing — contexts for the genre’s printers and readers. Likewise, the remarkable investments of printers in compiling and writing historical material have been largely overlooked, or swept into a context for historical writing dominated by post-Reformation developments. For both genres, I present fresh contexts and detailed, local readings of texts that have been neglected.

35 

This also follows the caution O’Keeffe applies to her materials; see Stealing Obedience, esp. pp. 14–15.

Agencies

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In Chapter 2, ‘Usurers and Printed Books: The Mercantile Contexts of Intention in Late Medi­eval London’, I link the purposeful use of the press by printers with the strategic goals of London’s mercantile community. My argument here underscores the shared mercantile context of printers and a crucial portion of their readers. Using ‘intention’ as a term emerging out of a cultural discourse around commercial morality, I find that books formed one venue for debates about, and strategic representations of, the ethical intentions of the mercantile community. At points in the early years of the press, the Crown used the press to issue statutes that were often anti-mercantile. Religious print, however, opened another way for merchant printers and readers to represent their ‘good intentions’ within London’s cultural arena. The third chapter, ‘The Uses of Religious Printing by Merchants, for Mer­ chants’, extends the mercantile context of English print by identifying for the first time a stream of religious texts that were produced by London printers specifically for a mercantile readership. These include The Golden Legend, Dives and Pauper, the Kalender of Shepherdes, the Book of Good Maners, and the religious translations of Andrew Chertsey. I read each of these texts from its specific engagements with discourses of agency. For instance, I find that the most compelling expressions of agency in Caxton’s Golden Legend emerge in his own prologue and the interpolations he adds to the text; mercantile agency in Dives and Pauper, however, is most visible in the trajectory of that text across manuscript and print. The chapter as a whole reveals the wide range of intentions and agencies attached to late medieval religious texts by their mercantile readers and printers. Further, identifying these texts as a group builds an alternate context for religious print that moves beyond heterodox/orthodox models. The final chapter, ‘Print’s Experiments with Readerly Agency in Historical Writing’, turns more fully to the differences effected by manuscript and printed modes of production, and also to the readers imagined by printers and scribes. Because history-writing is such a wide genre, I focus on the example of chronicles, which allows a close reading of the remarkable original historical writing by Caxton, the St Albans printer, and John Rastell. I find that print does foreclose the open-ended traditions of diachronic history writing represented by the manuscript traditions of chronicles like the Brut and the Polychronicon. Yet the use of synchronic history writing in print — either through textual or visual parataxis — extended and expanded a vernacular chronicle tradition that emphasized readerly engagement and interpretation. While the printed chronicle marks a departure from the manuscript chronicle traditions, and one at least partly dictated by the technological capabilities of print and manuscript,

16

Introduction

the new printed chronicles of early print are also distinct from the chronicle forms that emerge in the post-Reformation period. William Caxton, William de Machlinia, the St Albans printer, Wynkyn de Worde, Julian Notary, Robert Copland, John Rastell, and Thomas Berthelet all have space within these arguments, which collectively move across the first half-century of print. I find that these fifty years of book production constitute an especially rich and intriguing moment with a wide variety of local, distinct contexts. Considering this half-century across the artificial divide of 1500, and beyond its traditional pre-Reformation orientation, reveals a wider and more complex field wider, and one that offers more intriguing cultural contributions than modern scholarship has often implied. In the end, my exploration of the agencies of book production finds its best evidence in the neglected corners and crannies of early English print — this is not a book that attends closely to the editions of Chaucer, Lydgate, or Malory. Instead, I have chosen those texts that are not typically the subject of close readings. But alongside the large histories, the legal editions, and pious treatises are a few of the archives’ surprises: playing cards, a nasty treatise on evil tongues, and, to begin, a sly, naughty book about merry widows.

Chapter 1

The Personality of Print

I

n 1526, Robert Copland — printer, poet, and translator — issued a slim book entitled The Seuen Sorowes that women haue when theyr husbandes be deade (c. 1526, STC 5734).1 The text presents a sequence of scenes from the life of a young, recently widowed woman, along with overheard snippets of her private thoughts — thoughts wildly incongruous with the occasion, and riddled with double entendres. It is, in short, expected fare from the period’s merry widow genre. More unexpected are the overheard private reflections of Copland himself, which appear in the hundred-line verse dialogue he composed as a preface. Here, Copland represents himself as a printer-bookseller exasperated with Quidam, the customer browsing his shop. As Quidam muses aloud about his search for ballads, songs, or political news of the day, Copland grumbles to himself in the background: Copland: Thus if our heades forged were of brasse Yet shoulde we wexe as dulle as any asse And al of baggage nought worthe in substaunce But bokes of vertue haue none vtteraunce As thus, syr, I have a very proper boke Of morall wysdome please ye their on to loke Or els a boke of comen consolation.

1 

The only extant copy is printed by William Copland as late as 1565. Mary C. Erler, Copland’s modern editor, argues for a lost first edition, c. 1525–26, based on the historical events that Copland references. See Copland, Poems, ed. by Erler, p. 110.

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Quidam: Tusshe a straw man, what should I do therewith Has thou a boke of the wydowe Edith That hath begyled so many with her wordes Or els suche a geest that is ful of bourdes Let me se, I wyll yet waste a peny Upon suche thynges and if thou haue eny.2

At the line ‘As thus, syr’, Copland shifts from his caustic interior monologue into a polite address to his customer. Yet Copland’s attempt to sell Quidam ‘a boke of comen consolation’ ultimately fails, as we already know by the very book we hold in hand. Instead, it is Quidam who finally persuades Copland to produce the little ‘geest’, and the prologue ends as Quidam prepares to dictate the text to the printer. Indeed, the comic contrast between the ‘very proper boke’ and the far more desirable ‘geest that is ful of bourdes’ takes a teasing measure of the gap between moral wisdom and marketability, between a perceived responsibility for promoting ‘wysdome’ and the profits of catering to popular demand. But Copland’s prologue works toward something more than a single comic tension. It is surprising that even as Copland reveals the market economics underwriting print production, he encourages us to overhear the counterintuitive assumption that is central to the joke: that printers might (or perhaps should) be motivated by extra-economic concerns, and even by an extra-economic ethics. This chapter explores that assumption, and I argue that a noncommercial ethos is not only a crucial cultural component of late medieval book production but one that moves across manuscript and print technologies. Copland’s own playful attitude toward the ethical sensibility he engages is also telling, and suggests that print’s extra-economic concerns are linked to a sense of the personal — to expressions of identity, individual agency, intention. The articulation, play, and uses of the personalities involved in textual production are thus also at the heart of this chapter. Both of these themes — ethics and personality — are interwoven throughout the Seuen Sorowes prologue, so before moving further I want to return to what Copland encourages us to overhear. Throughout the dialogue, Copland plays with the expectation that printers, collectively and individually, possess an ethical identity. For instance, at the beginning of the passage above, what Copland grumbles about is the collective loss of a professional identity — signaled by ‘our’ and ‘we’ — that is bound up with the moral tomes remaining unsold in his stall. Like those books, print2 

Copland, Poems, ed. by Erler, pp. 85–86, ll. 19–32. Italics mine.

The Personality of Print

19

ers themselves face the slide from oracular brazen heads to the dull asshood of mere weight, of baggage, of things that ‘haue none vutterance’. And ‘vtteraunce’ is the point, as well as Copland’s central pun. By the fifteenth century, ‘utteraunce’ referred to both the production of words or speech, and the marketing of goods.3 The two meanings are in constant contact throughout this prologue. On the one hand, utterance is certainly the rich, multilayered speech produced by Copland. But utterance also refers to the pressing issue of whether large, expensive, serious books can find buyers. Both senses of the term are uneasily conflated at the prologue’s end where, after marshalling a series of strenuous moral objections to publishing the Seuen Sorowes, Copland suddenly acquiesces. With a seeming shrug, he acknowledges ‘I care not greatly, so that I nowe and than | May get a peny as well as I can’ and readies himself to take the text by dictation, exchanging his own speech for that of Quidam’s but also exchanging one kind of utterance (his moral voice) for another (the sale of the book).4 The personality that Copland projects here is oddly dual — the person acting, manipulating, and choosing is at once a fictional persona and a historical printer. But this personality nevertheless enables the dialogue to present both the roles of savvy merchant and moral printer. Even if we are slightly unsure about which Copland, fictional or historical, finally makes the morally weighted decision about producing the Seuen Sorowes, or bears responsibility for the book’s moral effects, or profits from the edition, it is the strong sense of a guiding printerly agency that raises and engages these questions in the first place — and that makes this prologue at least partly about the ethics of book production. The quite opposite potential of anonymity, however, also circulates in the prologue through the figure of Quidam, who is allowed little purchase on any of the ethical frameworks raised around book production. In the prologue’s opening, Quidam combs the bookstall with an excitability that Copland memorably terms ‘the appetyte | Of wandryng braynes’.5 Quidam’s craving for new material proves to be all-consuming and completely indiscriminate, ranging from the weighty religious and political events of the day — Martin Luther, the capture of Francis I at the Battle of Pavia — to ballads, ditties, and ‘conceytes’. Likewise, his longing for a printed edition of Seuen Sorowes seems produced 3 

MED, s.v. utteraunce, n.(1) Copland, Poems, ed. by Erler, p. 87, ll. 89–90. 5  Copland, Poems, ed. by Erler, p. 83, ll. 2–3. 4 

Chapter 1

20

merely by the title’s absence among the volumes available in Copland’s stall. Quidam, as it rapidly becomes clear, is a figure utterly vulnerable to external pressure and suggestion; his lack of a specific identity (beyond gender) reflects an absence of internal stability. Juxtaposed against the purposeful agency embodied in the persona of Copland, the anonymous Quidam is at once everything and nothing, not unlike the anonymous market itself. As categories for thinking about the operation of agency in the work of book production, ‘anonymity’ and ‘personality’ are situated within the material contexts of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, as I will show (even if, lexically, the terms themselves are anachronistic). But I want to draw a distinction here between my use of these concepts in the field of late medieval book history, and the role of anonymity in the work of literary studies, especially of later periods. Marcy L. North, Donald Foster, and Mark Robson are among the scholars who have engaged with anonymity as a central feature of the many texts — primarily from the sixteenth century forward — whose authors either are not acknowledged, use pseudonyms, or are otherwise unidentified.6 Anonymity in this approach refers to a flexible functionality that centers on the lack of an author-figure. As North puts it, ‘early modern authors and book producers utilized anonymity as an alternative source of authority, privilege, control, text presentation, and even identity’.7 These interests lie near to what Harold Love has termed ‘attribution studies’, and both fields are predicated on the author-figure, whether present or absent.8 In this chapter, however, I am interested in the questions that accrue to the identity and agency of book producers — the scribes and printers and bookmakers. The agency of book production is not unmined territory. D. F. McKenzie and Jerome McGann, among others, have underscored the cultural significance of the kinds of agency inherent in the non-authorial spaces of textual production.9 This chapter extends that work in several ways, most centrally by tracing the multiple agencies of book production as these emerge from the early fifteenth century forward. This medieval perspective connects print with medieval scribal practices, and it is 6 

For a discussion of the full field that ‘anonymity’ embraces, see North, The Anonymous Renaissance, esp. pp.  12–24. See also Robson, ‘The Ethics of Anonymity’, and Foster, ‘Commentary: In the Name of the Author’. 7  North, The Anonymous Renaissance, p. 33. 8  Love, Attributing Authorship. 9  See McKanzie, The Bibliography and Sociology of Texts, pp. 9–28. See also McGann, A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism.

The Personality of Print

21

here that anonymity and personality provide a useful corrective to traditional scholarly divisions between manuscript and print. A few remarks about those divisions in the scholarship of book production will clarify my argument. Late medieval English book production was a sprawling activity encompassing a range of purposes, genres, materials, and labour contexts, which were in turn organized through bureaucratic, monastic, coterie, bespoke, and pecia systems, among others.10 Modern scholars have grouped these activities into various categories, some divided by use (private/public) or genre (religious/ secular). However, the most influential divide has been around the status of the book as a commodity — that is, into ‘professional’ and ‘commercial’ categories or, as Jean-Pascal Pouzet has more assertively claimed, remunerative and non-remunerative contexts.11 I want to focus on Pouzet’s observations briefly, both because he offers an innovative analysis of the connection between book production and ethical discourse that this chapter extends, but also because he voices a widely shared bias against print that this chapter works to dislodge. For Pouzet, the non-remunerative context provides a space for the richest ethical and aesthetic capacities of medieval book production. Even while he is careful to note that no book is ‘totally immune’ from commercial dynamics, Pouzet finds that ‘whenever it is liberated from the constraints of remuneration or profit, the making of books is freer to depend on individual talent and craftsmanship’.12 It is in this productive space beyond the market that book work — both sacred and secular — operates within alternative paradigms like that of monastic otium, which offers a model of mutually constitutive manual and spiritual labour. Otium or, as Pouzet suggests, the ‘hesychasmic impulse’, produces a dynamic for book production that emphasizes the ethical and communal utility of book work, constructs an ‘aesthetics of scribal space’, and cultivates books as sites of affective investment and self-fashioning.13 But Pouzet’s broader division between remunerative and non-remunerative book production also reinscribes the division between the commercial sphere 10 

The field of scholarship on late medieval book production is vast. The best overview is currently provided by Gillespie and Wakelin, The Production of Books in England, in which see especially Kwakkel, ‘Commercial Organization and Economic Innovation’, and Pouzet, ‘Book Production outside Commercial Contexts’. See also the volume it complements, Griffiths and Pearsall, Book Production and Publishing in Britain, as well as Mooney and Stubbs, Scribes and the City. Further bibliography will be cited below. 11  Pouzet, ‘Book Production outside Commercial Contexts’. 12  Pouzet, ‘Book Production outside Commercial Contexts’, p. 227. 13  Pouzet, ‘Book Production outside Commercial Contexts’, p. 230.

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and meaningful cultural discourses (especially those around ethics and aesthetics), a division that predictably widens the gap between manuscript and print. Pouzet explains that he excludes print from the potentialities of noncommercial book work because print is intrinsically, necessarily, market-driven; as he puts it, ‘from the first, printers in England were committed to processes of book production predicated on principles of speculative development, remuneration and profit’.14 Within this model, the non-authorial agents of book production are subsumed by the market. By enclosing printers within the dominating commercial dimension of their work, Pouzet extends a broader stream of scholarship, and so my response here is not to Pouzet’s categories as much as it is to the familiar divisions these underwrite — divisions that become problematic for both the manuscript and print contexts of the later fifteenth century. The alignment of non-remunerative and remunerative categories with the technologies of manuscript and print implies that the systems and technologies of manuscript production enabled and furthered the unique potentialities of book work: this was not necessarily the case. And excluding print from the most capacious discursive and cultural sources of book production walls off from view the agency of England’s early printers — an agency that responds to and reveals some of the richest cultural traditions of fifteenth century English book production. What I mean by ‘agency’ here draws on William Sewell’s description of an agency that becomes visible through its use and manipulation of cultural structures. As Sewell puts it, Agency arises from the actor’s knowledge of schemas, which means the ability to apply them to new contexts. Or, to put the same thing the other way around, agency arises from the actor’s control of resources, which means the capacity to reinterpret or mobilize an array of resources in terms of schemas other than those that constituted the array.15

Likewise, Copland finds the moral capacity of book production to be a valuable cultural resource; his knowledge of and ability to manipulate the ethical potential of his role makes an ethics of print visible to us. Commercial contexts are clearly relevant to early print — printers were interested in their books as commodities, and to run a press was to run a business. However, the intellectual and cultural potential of early printers was not shaped wholly by the commercial uses of print technology. Instead, I find that 14  15 

Pouzet, ‘Book Production outside Commercial Contexts’, p. 214. Sewell, Logics of History, pp. 143–44.

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the cultural space of extra-economic book work was available to printers as well as scribes, and indeed, was productively expressed through printed books. Rather than using the categories of remunerative and non-remunerative (or professional and commercial) work, then, I focus on the personal relationship of book producers to their work. The identification — or ‘personality’ — attached to a book by its producer, or the reverse, the anonymity of book production, were concerns that emerged out of the late medieval contexts around book production. Personality and anonymity further resonate within culturally important expressions of agency, as well as with a range of book production discourses. And finally, the openness of these categories to different technologies of the book allow manuscript and print to surprise us, revealing unpredictable narratives and relationships between the two forms of production. While these considerations about personality and anonymity might seem tangential to Copland’s concern with ethical printing, this chapter argues that the two strands of thinking are deeply implicated in the material history of print and manuscript books. It is precisely the intriguing extra-economic engagements of print, including print’s ethical discourses, which emerge when we pay attention to the printers themselves — to their agency, to the intentions they describe for their editions, to the personality they inscribe into printed books. Tracing the personality of print from Caxton to Copeland, in other words, reveals some of the most interesting uses (and editions) of the early English press, as well as less familiar connections between manuscript and print technologies. This chapter works from the categories of personality and anonymity into the details of manuscript and printed books, and specifically those books whose producers engage with extra-economic discourses of textual production. Yet because the late medieval period provided such a wide range of explicitly not-for-profit frameworks for book production — monastic otium, the work of political counsel and advice, the educational idealism of humanists, coterie publication, and books to serve the common profit, among others — I concentrate on texts that evoke the broadest and most familiar of these: the common profit. Indeed, the common profit is so familiar throughout the later fifteenth century that it has, at points, been seen as the most ordinary and workaday of tropes. Yet as I argue below, book producers who articulated their ambitions to serve the common profit situated themselves within a supple ethical discourse thickly tied to questions of agency and identity. My discussion begins with an overview of the extra-economic discourses available for book production in the manuscript context of the fifteenth century; the work of Reginald Pecock, John Shirley, and the example of the common-profit manuscript group demonstrate both the capacity and the material

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limits of manu­script modes of production in relation to the ethical demands of the common profit. I then move to a case study of one printed edition, the 1496 production of The Medytacyons of Saynt Bernarde by Wynkyn de Worde (STC 1916), as a way to explore print’s material traditions of identity, before expanding the discussion to consider the even more forceful expressions of identity and agency under the model of common profit available in the work of William Caxton and John Rastell, and in de Worde’s edition of The Orcharde of Syon (1519, STC 4815).

Books beyond Commerce, 1400–75 Several late medieval models for book production conceived of the work of bookmaking beyond a commercial context. Many of these were generated out of monastic practices. Pouzet has already noted otium monasticum, which can be understood as a complex negotiation of quietude that comprises asceticism as well as work, or a use of time for the work of God.16 Other claustral models include the bibliographical culture of the Carthusians, who nurtured what Jessica Brantley has described as a ‘commitment to spiritual community enacted through books’, one motivated by the famous justification of Guigo I in the Consuitudines: ‘ut quia ore non possumus, dei verbum manibus predicemus’.17 And in the later fifteenth century, the Benedictine abbot Johannes Trithemius, in his De laude scriptorum, valorizes not just the work of book production but the specific work of the hand — the scribal labour — of creating books. As we might expect, all of these monastic frameworks overtly privileged a non-commercial orientation; for instance, Trithemius pauses to note that scribal labour undertaken for monetary profit remains an acceptable work even though it takes on a more ‘servile’ quality: ‘quia lucris terrenis intentione deserviunt, et iccirco servile opus iudicatur’.18 The cloister, however, was not the only space available in which to imagine the extra-economic dimensions of book production. Instead, the ideal of the common profit provided a more powerful and familiar ethical framework for book production across the fifteenth century, across a wide range of genres, 16 

See Pouzet, ‘Book Production outside Commercial Contexts’, p. 230, as well as Leclercq, ‘Otium Monasticum as a Context for Artistic Creativity’, esp. pp. 66–67. 17  Brantley, Reading in the Wilderness, pp. 27–77, citation at p. 48, ‘so because we are not able to preach the word of God with our mouths, we may do so with our hands’. 18  Trithemius, In Praise of Scribes, ed. by Arnold, pp. 78–79.

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and for lay and religious audiences. In its classical, Aristotelian form, ‘common profit’ — the res publica — is a theory of the polity that imagines an ethics of governance by consent and on behalf of a common good. By the later medieval period, however, the common profit had become a quite broad ideal evoked by a range of discourses. Heuristically, to delimit this discussion to the use of common profit as a framework for book production, I want to draw the following overview through specific late medieval political and scholastic uses of common-profit discourse.19 What I am terming the ‘political’ use of the common profit is roughly parallel with what James Simpson locates (darkly) as a vernacular Aristotelianism, and what Daniel Wakelin embraces more optimistically as part of a vernacular fifteenth-century English humanism.20 It is Wakelin, however, who argues for the link between the political lexicon of the common profit and book production. Embodied by figures like William Worcester, the humanist commitment to common profit thinks beyond a pedantic philology to instead imagine reading (and producing) classical works as a process ‘suffused with civic commitment’.21 For instance, Wakelin works with Worcester’s prologue to the Boke of Noblesse to demonstrate that Worcester understands his textual production as itself a service to the res publica, but a res publica construed not as a static institution but rather as ‘an ethical imperative to act, namely, to do some intellectual activity — remembering, attending, and observing — as well as “deuoire and laboure” in the wider world’.22 Worcester’s perspective locates a dynamism inherent in not just the scholarly activity of recovery and reproduction of the classics but in the very processes of book production, circulation, and dissemination. Reading books by classical authors and, by extension, producing books that make more readers of these texts is in this model an act of political agency motivated by the common profit. I will return to this humanist sense of political agency as it was expressed through books further below, in the work of Caxton and Rastell. However, in the rest of this section I want to concentrate 19 

For the ways that religious and political uses of the common profit blurred, see Daniel Wakelin’s discussion of ecclesiastical book ownership patterns among men like John Russell and Whethamstede in ‘Religion, Humanism and Humanity’ and, in the same volume, Andrew Cole’s claims for ‘ecclesiastical humanism’ as part of ‘Staging Advice in Oxford, New College, MS 288’. 20  Simpson, Reform and Cultural Revolution, pp. 191–254, and Wakelin, Humanism, Reading, and English Literature. 21  Wakelin, Humanism, Reading, and English Literature, p. 126. 22  Wakelin, Humanism, Reading, and English Literature, pp. 93–125, at p. 123.

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on the scholastic model of the common profit, partly because it is less specific and thus far more generalized in its use across genres. What we might call a ‘scholastic’ understanding of the common profit is a derivation of the classic tradition’s roots in Christian thought, first by Augus­ tine, and then later by scholastic thinkers, most notably Albert the Great and his student, Thomas Aquinas. Scholasticism added lexical range (‘bonum commune, communis utilitas, utilitatem publicam’) to a concept that gradually formed into an ethical standard used to legitimate individual economic and social actions.23 Thematically, the ideal of a spiritual common profit emphasizes the movement of goods, ideas, and actions from an individual into a broader community. The outward-moving ambition of ideas circulated, of work done, and of goods distributed for a common profit proved to be an enduring discursive framework for medieval book production. Textual circulation and dissemination represent the movement of ideas into the broader world, and books themselves — especially religious texts produced with the intention of circulating beyond a single reader — became material instantiations of worldly gain and wealth converted into a spiritual common good.24 As an ethical motive for book production, the spiritual common profit diverges sharply in two ways from other religious frameworks that, like monastic otium, were embedded within monastic contexts. While the ideal of the common profit was not alien to monastic thought — indeed, as discussed later in this chapter, the common-profit goals of circulation and dissemination underwrote important streams of book production by the Bridgettine Syon Abbey — books produced for the common profit necessarily anticipated readerships more expansive than the walls of any single institution, or the experience of any single reader. In other words, the impulse to produce books for the spiritual good of many readers meant that the imagined readership was always a broad one that extended past monastic contexts. Books for the spiritual common profit were thus often lay oriented, even if they originated within a claustral context. Further, unlike monastic frameworks that rejected or demoted the entanglement of bookmaking with commercial aims, the common profit was an extra-economic discourse meant to mediate commercial activity. The ideal of 23 

Kempshall, The Common Good in Late Medi­eval Political Thought, pp. 1–25, at p. 10. The use of common-profit discourse as a model for textual dissemination has also been discussed by Scase, ‘Reginald Pecock, John Carpenter and John Colop’s “Common-Profit” Books’, and Robertson, The Laborer’s Two Bodies, pp. 78–118. Widespread usage of the term contributes to D. W. Robertson’s sense of it as communal spirit in decline throughout the fourteenth century; see his ‘Chaucer and the “Commune profit”’. 24 

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the common profit thus created a pathway for merchants and tradesmen to convert commercial labour into spiritual good works through book production. Books produced within the framework of a spiritual common profit became more commonplace in England from the late thirteenth century onward, largely as a response to the late medieval debates over lay theological education. In what would have been familiar usage, for example, the Benedictine John Gaytrygge cites ‘commune profet’ as the motivation for his own translation, in 1357, of a treatise for a reinvigorated parochial program of lay learning.25 Appearing slightly later, around 1382, the prologue of the Wycliffite Bible framed the work of book production, translation and dissemination as serving the ‘comoun profyt of Cristene soulis’.26 By the fifteenth century, the material book was a familiar representation of individual work or wealth that had been redirected toward the good of the broader spiritual community. Commonprofit phrasing especially accompanied texts intended to educate or reform a lay audience. In one of the most well-known examples of common-profit ambitions projected through book production, the mid-fifteenth century theologian Reginald Pecock envisioned a system of textual reproduction and circulation designed for the spiritual common profits of both readers and book producers. As Wendy Scase has observed, Pecock’s scheme as detailed in his Book of Faith (c. 1455) calls for richer men to subsidize and produce books for the less wealthy laity.27 Pecock is brightly confident in his sense that book production is a way that the spiritual common profit might be realized in material terms: therfore if prelatis and othere my[g]ty men of good have greet zele and devocioun into the hasty turnyng of the seid erring peple, forsothe thei musten, at her owne cost, do tho now seid bokis to be writun in greet multitude, and to be wel corrected, and thanne aftir to be sende, and to be govun or lende abrood amonge the seid lay persoonys, where nede is trowid to be. Wel were the man which hadde ricches, and wolde spende it into this so greet goostli almes, which passith ful myche the delyng abrood of clothis to greet multitude of pore persoonys, notwithstonding that bothe kyndis of almes ben good.28

Pecock’s vision is extra-economic without ignoring the world of commerce: these are books which must be produced ‘at her owne cost’, and the price is pre25 

Lay Folks’ Catechism, ed. by Simmons and Nolloth, p. 6. The Wycliffite Bible, ed. by Dean, p. 60. 27  Scase, ‘Reginald Pecock, John Carpenter and John Colop’s “Common-Profit” Books’, p. 266. 28  Cited in Scase, ‘Reginald Pecock, John Carpenter and John Colop’s “Common-Profit” Books’, p. 266. From Reginald Pecock’s Book of Faith, ed. by Morison, pp. 116–17. 26 

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cisely what makes the exchange constitutive of ‘so greet goostli almes’. The rich man’s material profits are therefore converted to spiritual ones, and the sponsored books themselves, as alms, realize the common good as they circulate ‘amonge the seid lay persoonys, where nede is trowid to be’. Pecock’s scheme was one of several that imagined the circulation of material books in the service of the common profit; evidence that at least some of these plans were realized is extant in the group of ‘common-profit’ manuscripts, which I will discuss below.29 What I want to emphasize here is that by the midpoint of the fifteenth century, the common profit was not only a frequent trope in English writing, but it was used to describe the ethical ambitions driving a robust tradition of English book production. This point complements and develops Pouzet’s observations about a strand of English bookmaking that carried with it an ethical posture: through the common profit, the work of manuscript book production in fifteenth century England expresses a potential ethos, one more familiar than rare, and one available to mediate financial and spiritual conceptions of profit. The ideal of book production for a common profit animated a range of bookmaking for secular as well as spiritual purposes, and informed even more idiosyncratic examples of book production. The work of John Shirley (1365–1456) provides an instructive example, and one that also brings common-profit discourse into contact with the categories of personality and anonymity, as we will see. Shirley served in the household of Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick as a clerk, diplomat, scribe and translator; at least twenty extant manuscripts were either owned, annotated, or copied by Shirley, or copied from a Shirley examplar.30 One of the most striking aspects of Shirley’s work is his sense of bookmaking as a labour conducted with a deep sense of moral purpose, and as a work that engages material and intellectual dimensions. In his preface to London, British Library, MS Additional 16165, he explains of his volume that þis litell booke with myn hande Wryten I haue ye shul vnderstande And sought þe copie in many a place To haue þe more thank of youre grace And doon hit bynde In þis volume Þat boþe þe gret and þe comune May þer on looke and eke hit reede 31 29 

For other ‘common-profit’ schemes, see Moran, ‘A “Common Profit” Library in Fifteenth-Century England’. 30  Connolly, John Shirley; for Shirley’s biography, see esp. pp. 10–16. 31  Connolly, John Shirley, p. 206, ll. 13–19.

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Shirley’s lines emphasize book production as a work of circulation and dissemination. His own labour is both scribal — he has written ‘þis litell booke with myn hande’ — but also that of the compiler and publisher who searches for, discerns, and selects the best exemplars to copy and ‘bynde In þis volume’. He neatly circles back to this physical work of compiling and book-binding near the end of the preface, infusing the recollection of his material labour with an imaginative, aesthetic dimension as he enjoins his readers to ‘ebounden’ the texts within their minds before ‘þat ye sende þis booke ageyne | Hoome to Shirley þat is right feyne’.32 The very physical aspects of copying and then binding books is thus claimed by Shirley, but so too is bookmaking articulated as an intellectual labour — and a work that is continued indefinitely through reading, remembering, and recirculating the book. The lending library Shirley seems to imply in the prologue above also speaks to his broader conception of scribal work in the service of a common profit. His ambition for his copied book to circulate to all — to ‘þe gret and þe comune’ — carries with it a sense of the book serving the good of the social whole. Indeed, Shirley takes pains to speak to the extra-economic value of his work, as in his preface now lost but surviving in a sixteenth-century copy — British Library, MS Additional 29729, where he explicitly brings up and then moves away from the question of payment for his skills: In French in engelishe and latine þat I haue wryt in this margin rede and persayue it by assye beseche I god þat to your paye and to your plesaunce it mought be whan yt ye red ther on or se ffor than my trauayle it welbe sett I ask of you no other dett.33

This is the opposite of the familiar ‘begging’ poem; instead of offering it to a patron in expectation of a financial reward, Shirley suggests his volume is for a generously imagined readership, and his own accompanying words move explicitly away from the expectation of individual gain or profit. This reading extends the dynamic that Ralph Hanna has noted, which is that Shirley’s three compilations were apparently accomplished not as part of his expected service

32  33 

Connolly, John Shirley, p. 208, ll. 92 and 97–98. Connolly, John Shirley, p. 210, ll. 59–67; citing BL, MS Additional 29729.

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but out of a sense of what Hanna terms ‘volunteerism’.34 For Shirley, the work of disseminating and circulating books moves deliberately beyond the market; his is a coterie publishing scheme, cloaked thinly with a sense of the common good. But while Shirley is one example of a broad secular interest in book production for a ‘common profit’, he is also and more rarely an example of a late medieval scribe who attached his personal identity to the books he produced. Shirley’s name appears above a version of his motto, ‘ma joye’, on the first folio of all the manuscripts he wrote. His script itself was recognizable enough to be imitated by those copying his work, and, as seen in the examples above, Shirley composed a number of original prefaces for his manuscripts. Shirley’s own identity is not only traceable but is very much part of his book production practice. In this aspect, Shirley joins a number of scribes and compilers — Roger Walle, Richard Hill, Robert Thornton, among others — who were vivid exceptions in a culture that more typically left the space of manuscript production anonymous.35 Still, in the fifteenth century, most English manuscripts were produced by unnamed scribes and compilers. Producers who named themselves in their books form an intriguing and significant but still minority group.36 In the next section I will argue that the personality of these scribes created an important precedent for print, but now I want to turn to consider the material conditions of production that made anonymity, and not personality, normative. Scholarship has shown that in late medieval England, the work of making books was often a quite diffuse affair.37 We have little indication of organized scriptoria in this period, especially in urban settings; instead, both professional and commercial scribes worked largely ad hoc out of their homes or other work­places.38 34  Hanna, ‘John Shirley and British Library, MS. Additional 16165’, at p. 103. See also Boffey and Thompson, ‘Anthologies and Miscellanies’, esp. pp. 285–87. 35  For some exceptions, see Pouzet, ‘Book Production outside Commercial Contexts’, and Connolly, ‘Compiling the Book’. 36  Daniel Wakelin suggests the fifteenth century saw a trend toward increasing scribal selfidentification; see Wakelin, ‘William Worcester Writes a History of his Reading’. 37  A short bibliography of a very full field begins with the recent work of Kwakkel, ‘Com­ mercial Organization and Economic Innovation’, and Mooney, ‘Vernacular Literary Manu­ scripts and their Scribes’. See also d’Avray, ‘Printing, Mass Communication, and Religious Refor­mation’. The seminal studies pertaining to the late medieval book trade more broadly, and from I draw my overview, include Rouse and Rouse, ‘The Commercial Production of Manu­ script Books’; Christianson, ‘The Rise of London’s Book Trade’; and Blayney, The Stationer’s Company before the Charter. 38  Mooney, ‘Locating Scribal Activity in Late Medi­eval London’.

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The organization of the book trade suggests that scribal work was often coordinated by a stationer, who further coordinated the correction, rubrication, decorating, and binding of the final product among specialized ‘bokemen’. This meant that, although a patron with specific connections to the booktrade might commission work from individual artisans, many book buyers likely had direct contact only with a stationer who himself oversaw rather than participated in the many types of work that made up a single volume’s production.39 Anonymity was not itself the goal of these production processes, nor was it complete. For example, a professional scribe serving in a household was presumably known to his patrons, while commercial textwriters were identifiable guildmembers within London’s civic and social structures. My point here, with caveats, is that the ascription of a book’s scribal work was not encouraged by the material realities of most late medieval manuscript book production, and the inscription of scribal names was, at this point, more noteworthy than routine. Even though exceptions exist, fifteenth-century manuscript books still bear the names of their owners, patrons, or authors far more often than the names of their scribes. Yet the anonymity of late medieval book production also carried with it an imaginative cultural potential that exceeded the material exigencies of the trade, a potential that was frequently expressed in ethical terms. Moreover, because anonymity tends to displace or disavow agency, it was strategically used within a set of ethical discourses that were quite distinct from those engaged by more personal modes of production. Some examples will illustrate this at work. An anonymous scribe’s ability to absorb responsibility for a text’s errors is perhaps the most obvious use of the unnamed space of late medieval book production. As Tim William Machan has shown, medieval theory understood that a work comprised both verba and res — the text on the page, and the idea or meaning prior to that text. Scribal responsibility for copying a text free of error was therefore a moral as well as a philological charge, and the attribution of errors to ‘scribal inexactitude’ was an ancient trope — one used by Cicero on forward — that deflected criticism away from a work and its author. 40 The faulty scribe was typically (and usefully) anonymous, with unlimited capacity for both error and blame. Perhaps the most well-known instance of the errorprone scribe in medieval English writing is the brief Chaucers Wordes unto Adam, in which Chaucer both conjures up and castigates his own scribe as foul, 39  See Doyle and Parkes, ‘The Production of Copies’; Mooney, ‘Locating Scribal Activity in Late-Medi­eval London’; and Mooney and Matheson, ‘The Beryn Scribe and his Texts’. 40  Machan, Textual Criticism and Middle English Texts, pp. 169–75, at p. 172.

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unscrupulous, and blameworthy for all that might be wrong with the poet’s texts. Chaucer’s Adam, we might be careful to note, is the figurative Adamic scribe more than the historical person, Adam Pinkhurst, who has been identified only through the intense labours of modern scholars.41 The moral lapses of unnamed scribes are also vividly figured by the early fourteenth-century writer Guillaume Deguileville, who paints an anxious picture of his dream vision, Le Pèlerinage de la vie humaine, stolen into the world and published by unknown scribes before its proper completion. His words are translated by John Lydgate in 1426, and then recopied throughout the fifteenth century: for al the wrytyng that I wrote Was me be-raffte, and how I not, Dyscured, stowe thurgh the world a brode, As God woot wel, and thus yt stood.42 (ll. 231–34)

In the lines that follow, Deguileville worries plaintively about a text that moves into the world beyond his control and ‘entent’.43 What his conjured and conjuring scribe steals is not only the manuscript but a certain authorial agency — an agency now usefully dissipated. The scribe of The Book of Margery Kempe further illustrates the strategic entanglement of anonymity, book production, and agency, but from a scribal perspective. In his revised long prologue, the scribe of Margery’s book narrates the messy, muddled process of producing Margery’s vision into an English book.44 The hurdles he encounters along the way — the temporal distance from Margery’s original revelations, the problematic tasks of both deciphering and 41  See both Mooney’s ‘Chaucer’s Scribe’, in which she lays out the evidence for her identification of Adam Pinkhurst as Chaucer’s primary scribe, and Gillespie, ‘Reading Chaucer’s Words to Adam’, for a persuasive argument about why readers must also keep the more figurative dimensions of Chaucer’s Adam in mind. 42  Lydgate, The Pilgrimage of the Life of Man, ed. by Furnivall, p. 7, ll. 231–34. 43  Lydgate, The Pilgrimage of the Life of Man, ed. by Furnivall, p. 8, l. 263. 44  The scribe’s narrative is as follows: Twenty years after her first vision, Margery finds a first writer who will transcribe her experiences. After his death, she finds a second writer — the priest and prologue’s author — whom she asks to continue her story; the priest finds that the original transcript is a muddled, indecipherable mix of German and English. He puts off the project for four years, and then refers her to a third scribe, who has some further experience in German. This third writer refuses the work, and finally Margery returns to the priest, who agrees finally to attempt it. His work is helped along by Margery herself. He encounters one last obstacle — a sudden failing of vision — which is lifted and the work proceeds, resulting in the full Book.

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translating the original transcript, and finally the sudden failing of his own sight — figuratively describe the long, deferred journey of a scribe who is finally able to ‘see’ his text clearly, although he himself chooses to remain concealed: Whan he cam ageyn to hys booke, he myth se as wel, hym thowt as evyr he dede befor be day lyth and be candel lygth bothe. And for this cause, whan he had wretyn a qwayr, he addyd a leef therto, and than wrot he this proym to expressyn mor openly than doth the next folwyng, which was wretyn er than this. Anno domini 1436.45

Through his evocation of sight, and his choice to reveal himself only as the unnamed writer of the book, Margery’s scribe mines the space that emerges between the material book and the textual author. He identifies himself in all but name, delivering an account of his relationship to Margery, his skills as a scribe and reader, the date, and his own physical state. Yet the permissible anonymity of his scribal role allows him to ultimately fade back into Margery’s narrative, leaving her as the text’s only agent. Margery’s scribe demonstrates how anonymity had the potential to recreate the work of textual production within the eremitic ideals of individual erasure and humility. Certainly the anonymous labour of book production as a sign of spiritual openness and non-agency informs a range of other late medieval texts. The Pore Caityf, for instance, makes a coy feint at the nexus of authorship, production and identity, both raising and deflecting the question of identity in the opening line, which merely states that ‘this tretise compiled of a pore caityf and nedi’.46 Similar moves occur at the more local level of the book copy. In the case of San Marino, Huntington Library, MS HM 501, compiled in the early fifteenth century and containing a miscellany of Wycliffite texts, verses on the original parchment cover begin ‘Iste liber est meus possum producere testes’. The following two lines have been made illegible by modern conservation practices, but since nowhere else does the text name its producer, it is likely that ‘meus’ remains the book’s most specific identifier. Moreover, as the Lollard resonances of some of the texts mentioned above might suggest, the uses of anonymity in the fifteenth century could also be a response to the pressures of censorship, whether those pressures were formal or informal. Yet it is important to note that even though texts associated with the Lollard movement may have been produced without revealing the identity of their publishers, their production was at best a secret of the open sort. 45  46 

The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. by Staley, p. 20, ll. 108–12. BL, MS 2336, fol. 1r.

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Examples of fifteenth-century Wycliffite Bibles show signs of mass production, and as the Bible’s wide circulation and aristocratic readership suggests, it was probably a regular commission for recognized booksellers and artisans.47 If book producers occupied a largely anonymous role in the fifteenth century, it was a role frequently constructed in complicity with writers and readers: the unnamed book producer served a useful, paradoxically public, function. These examples show that anonymity frequently had a strategic use within a range of moral discourses around authorial responsibility, religious humility, and orthodoxy, among others. However, for some ethical discourses of book production, anonymity was vexingly inadequate, and the ideal of the common profit is a case in point. To work toward the common profit or to produce a commodity meant to serve the larger good is, as scholastic thinkers discerned, part of a logic that ultimately relies upon intention. Good works, in other words, are initiated and made legible as the expression of good intentions, of an inner orientation toward the spiritual profit of the communalty.48 It is unsurprising, then, that books produced ‘for the commune profet’ likewise seem to trace their intentions carefully, and to necessitate the naming of their producers. Books created in the name of the common profit, in other words, needed an ethos in order to perform the ethical work they were tasked to do. What I mean by an ethos of book production is very close to what Adrian Johns has termed ‘epistemic credibility’ — that is, not merely a name associated with book production, but a trusted and culturally legitimate agency behind that name: a reliable person.49 The fifteenth-century group of common-profit manuscripts are an instructive example of how the personality or anonymity of production worked within this discourse. The five ‘common-profit’ books identified by H. S. Bennett contain a range of vernacular devotional texts that are broadly (but not wholly) reformist in content, including The Pore Caitif, Walter Hilton’s Epistle on the Mixed Life, several Lollard tracts, and lay treatises on topics like the Seven Deadly Sins and the Psalms.50 Four of the five manuscripts include a similarly worded scribal 47 

See especially Hudson, ‘Lollard Book-Production’, and ‘Five Problems in Wycliffite Texts and a Suggestion’, in which she suggests that many of the Bibles were produced in Oxford by Franciscans. See also Jurkowski, ‘Lollard Book-Producers in London in 1414’. 48  Aquinas, Summa Theologica, ed. and trans. by Lefèbure, 2a2ae, q. 77, a. 4, p. 229. 49  Johns, The Nature of the Book, esp. pp. 33–35. 50  Bennett, ‘The Production and Dissemitation of Vernacular Manuscripts’, and Scase, ‘Reginald Pecock, John Carpenter and John Colop’s “Common-Profit” Books’.

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colophon detailing the book’s production out of the material profits of a specific merchant’s estate, along with the stipulation that the book be circulated for the ‘common profit’ and passed on after each subsequent owner’s death: in return, the inscriptions ask for prayers on behalf of the merchant.51 These manuscripts thus effect the movement of individual to common profit by pointing the reader to the personal circumstances of their material production — these are books whose pages, bindings, and scribal labour were generated out of an individual’s personal profits, whose very material shape is indebted to one person’s will. And ‘will’ here certainly plays to both the sense of a person’s intent, as well as to the more documentary, material testament of a person’s death. The performance of common profit that these books effect is bound up in their pages as well. These are strikingly small, plain books written on what Erik Kwakkel has observed are, in at least one case, off-cuts, the very cheapest parchment available.52 I suggest that the material cheapness advertised by these books is part of their meaning. These unassuming objects insist that value relies not upon external signifiers of wealth but upon the good intentions of both publisher and reader: to find these volumes spiritually significant and profitable is to perform the exchange of material for spiritual value. Moreover, the expression of those intentions relies upon the strong ethos carried by these books, an ethos that emerges from the personalized nature of each book’s production. The men responsible for the production of these books — John Collopp, John Killum, Robert Holland, John Gamalyn — are all London merchants, a status which has been much remarked upon, and they may have been the very readers Pecock had in mind. But here their names assert not a mercantile identity but a moral one, an identity that participates in creating the ethical meaning of book production in the name of a common profit. One manuscript of the group reveals, via an absence, how reliant the discourse of the common profit was upon personality. Oxford, Bodleian Library, 51 

The colophon is cited by Scase, ‘Reginald Pecock, John Carpenter and John Colop’s “Common-Profit” Books’, p. 261: ‘This booke was made of the goodis of John Collopp for a comyn profite, that that persoone that hath this booke committed to him off the persoone that hath power to committee it haue the vse therof the teerme of his lijf prayng for the soule of the forseid John. And that he that hath he forseid vse of commyssioun, whanne he occupieth it not leene it for a tyme to sum other persoone. Also that persoone to whome it was committed for the teerme of lijf under the forseid condiciouns delyuere it to another persoone the teerme of his lijf, and so be it delyuered and committed fro persoone to persoone man or woman as longe as the booke endureth.’ 52  Kwakkel, ‘Commercial Organization and Economic Innovation’, pp. 187–88.

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MS Douce 25 is an anomaly within the group because it uses the commonprofit colophon but names no one, declaring itself made only from ‘the goodis of a certayne persoone’.53 Further, the last two lines of the colophon contain a dittography. Here, the text reads: ‘committid fro persoone to persoone [longe as the booke] man or womman as longe as the booke endureth’; the first instance of ‘longe as the booke’ is lightly crossed out.54 The date of the correction is uncertain, but what it corrects seems certainly to be a misreading of an examplar the scribe was working from. Together, these two features disrupt the performative aspects of the common-profit book by replacing personality with anonymity. This manuscript does not carry with it the intentions of a Collop or a Killum, and without those names the garbled colophon attests merely to a scribe copying a formula, and doing a rather poor job. We might even be tempted to lay blame at the feet of the anonymous scribe. Moreover, MS Douce 25 is a reminder that the four ‘personal’ common-profit manuscripts likely represent a unique thread, an experiment that did not become widespread practice and was indeed not replicable without the specific investments and curation of a singular group of London merchants. These common-profit books belie the form’s need for agented modes of production. And it was not just this manuscript group but the broader ethical framework of books produced for the common profit that proved vulnerable to anonymity. Pecock himself reveals this vulnerability in his Donet, a brief text instructing laity in the principles of faith and moral logic. Itself a text produced out of a common-profit logic, the Donet was revised by Pecock near the end of his career, when he was suspected for heresy. In the newer prologue, Pecock pairs his own call to circulate and disseminate books with an overt alarm that presses the issue of agency and intention in book production to the foreground: ‘The donet of cristen religioun’, and ‘the book of cristen religioun’ and othire suche of doctrine and of officiyng whiche, bifore the deuyce and setting of this present book, ben runne abrood and copied ayens my wil and myn entent, as y haue openli prechid at poulis, and that bi uncurtesie and undiscrecioun of freendis, into whos singuler sight y lousid tho writingis to go, and forto not haue go ferthir into tyme thei were bettir examined of me and approvid of my lordis and fadris of the churche, y wole to be as noon of myn; but in as moche as in me is, y wole thei be rendrid up

53 

BodL, MS Douce 25, fol. 72r. The text reads: ‘committid fro persoone to persoone longe as the booke man or womman as longe as the booke endureth’. The first instance of ‘longe as the booke’ is crossed out, to correct what is clearly here a misreading of the scribe’s exemplar. 54 

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ayen, and bettir formes of the same be to hem deliuered, whanne dewe deliueraunce thereof shal be made.55

Pecock’s obvious worry is that his text, his res, will be misconstrued, a worry that Pecock pleads against throughout the earlier parts of this same prologue. Predictably enough, Pecock shifts accountability for misreadings onto the shoulders of his illicit publishers. But this move reveals a deep contradiction within the logic of the common profit. Pecock needs rampant reproduction to fulfill his vision of books circulating to educate and enrich a spiritual communality — and these books must eventually circulate outside his personal purview, ‘wil’ and ‘entent’. Unknown scribes making potentially bad copies is, here, the limit point of common-profit book production. For how could a book intended for the spiritual profit of all be successfully restricted to the ‘singuler sight’ of friends, even by its writer, without undoing its moral purpose? The impossibility and self-contradiction of Pecock’s position are evident even at the level of language, in his emphatic insistence that his personal ‘wole’ still pertains. In two particularly vexed phrases, he disavows bad copies while emphatically trying to regain control over them: without modern punctuation, these read ‘y wole to be as noon of myn but in as moche as in me is y wole thei be rendrid up ayen’. The obvious desire to exert a personal, ethical agency expressed as ‘in as moche as in me is’ sums up precisely what Pecock is so frustratingly unable to attach to his own book. Pecock’s predicament draws attention to the ways that common-profit discourse relied upon an articulation of moral agency within the work of book production, as well as the desire it fomented for the attachment of a moral ‘entent’, an ethos, to a text throughout the processes of its reproduction, dissemination, and circulation. But until the end of the fifteenth century, this space existed in English book production largely as a lacuna — a space filled with ethical potential, yet only sparsely populated by named book producers who might be the agents of that potential.

The Credibility of Print A study of one early printed edition, de Worde’s Medytacyons of Saynt Bernarde (1496, STC 1916), demonstrates the ways that print was able to give shape to the sometimes blurry sense of personality circulating around English book production at the end of the fifteenth century. De Worde’s Medytacyons is an 55 

Pecock, The Donet, ed. by Hitchcock, p. 7.

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English translation of the Latin pseudo-Bernardine work, Meditationes piissimae de cognitione humanae conditionis. It is an intensely inward-looking, meditative text, as suggested by the Crucifixion woodcut de Worde adds to the verso of its last leaf, as well as the title it acquires in some earlier continental editions — Meditationes de interior homine.56 A relatively small treatise of thirty-two quarto leaves, de Worde first printed it in 1496, but reprinted it again quickly in 1498 (STC 1917), and then once again in 1525 (STC 1918). The text is similar enough to other meditative essays of its day; unusually, however, the edition carries with it the anonymous translator’s prologue, a text that is unexpectedly revealing about the dynamics of agency, manuscript and print. It is worth citing at length: FVll prouffitable ben to us traueylyng pylgrymes and freyll synners the fruytfull werkes and treatyses of holy faders. [lines of praise for the Holy Fathers] Wherfore amonge those sayd werkes and treatyses: I haue to thonoure of god and prouffyte of his people/ chose to translate fro latyn in to englysshe one swete and deuoute treatise: moche prouffytable/ both to the louers of this trowblous/ shorte and unsure lyfe: and also to the louers of the euerlastynge blysfull lyfe in the kyngdom of heuen: called the medytacyons of saynt Bernard. Wherof I forbede to unlerned presumptuous correccyon. And mekely submytte me and my werke to charytable correccyon. besechynge the reders to vouchesauf praye for me and the Inprynter or wryter herof to do theyr deuour dilygently And by cause I wolde haue so gode and so prouffytable a thynge comyn to many. And also by cause yt hastely after the translacyon herof: before it was duely correcte and ordred: it was by deuoute persones transumpte and copied I wote not how ofte/ ayenst my wyll: Therfore haue I now the yere of our lord Ihesu Criste. M.CCC.lxxxxv. and the .xij. daye of the moneth of Septembre / for to auoyde and eschewe the Ieoperdy and hurte yt maye come by that yt was not duely corrected: put it more dylygently corrected and ordred to the Inprynter: in lettynge and distruccyon of all other copied after ye forsayde uncorrected translacyon./ And I counsell and exhorte all yt haue those same/ to leue them as doubtfull and Ieoperdous: And take this more dyligently ordred and corrected. It is not harde to knowe the one fro the other for they dyfferre both in nombre of chapyters and in rubryshes of the same [continues with specific description of chapters].57

Nearly forty years after the revised Donet, this translator echoes Pecock on a number of levels. For one, like Pecock, the translator understands his work of textual production as an expression of a spiritual common profit. At every 56  BMC xi, 224. The Latin text was printed in 1475 in Augsburg by Anton Sorg (USTC 74343). 57  STC 1916, BodL, Tanner 178(2), sigs A1v–A2r.

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possible turn, the translator evokes the language of profit, piously emphasizing the text’s spiritual register: ‘FVll prouffitable ben to us traueylyng pylgrymes’; ‘prouffyte of his people’; ‘moche prouffytable’. This translation of the Medytacyons, as its writer asserts, is intended to make an overlooked patristic text linguistically more accessible, multiplying and circulating it expressly ‘by cause I wolde haue so gode and so prouffytable a thynge comyn to many’. Further, as Pecock experienced, this translator too has encountered the unwelcome issue of rampant anonymous copies. He lends a bit more dramatic flair to the point, suggesting a desire among the ‘deuoute’ so intense that the work was barely penned before it was ‘transumpte’ from the speaker’s oversight and, as he attests, copied ‘ayenst my will’. The assertive wish to recall and destroy those ‘doutfull and Ieoperdous’ copies is also familiar. Yet unlike Pecock, the translator has quite specific choices to make about his text’s future circulation, and indeed, his own self-presentation throughout the prologue is that of a deliberate decision-maker whose agency informs the whole arc of his textual production. The prologue itself unfolds as a series of choices that flow from the translator’s initial choice of the Bernard text: ‘Wherfore amonge those sayd werkes and treatyses, I haue to thonoure of god and prouffyte of his people, chose to translate fro latyn in to englys the one swete and deuoute treatyse.’ The rest of the passage is peppered with the syntactical markers of decisions made and defended — ‘because’, ‘therefor I now’, ‘wherof ’. But the central choice the translator makes, and the one that earlier writers did not have, is the decision between manuscript and print: the decision of this translator is resoundingly for print. But how did print fulfill his aims better than manuscript? How did print answer the seemingly intractable problem this translator shared with Pecock — the issue of unsupervised, anonymous manuscript copies that threatened a common-profit purpose? Noticeably, the translator is primarily interested not in the technology but the conduct of book production, and its cultural status and capacities. He mentions nothing about the press’s speed, or cheapness, nor even its ability to enduringly stabilize a text (as I will discuss below). The Medytacyons prologue moves toward one point: it matters who makes and circulates books, and it matters because book production for the common profit has a moral purpose that relies on agency, intention, and ethos — that needs a personality. It is print that offers this translator an answer to the question of who made his book, as well as the assurance that his ‘entent’ will continue to circulate with his text. Like the common-profit manuscripts, the penultimate leaf of the edition offers a name that bears responsibility for the book’s production. The edition’s colophon reads:

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Here we make an ende of this ryght prouffytable treatyse: the Medytacyons of saynt Bernard/ whyche for very fauour and charyitable loue of all suche persones as haue not vnderstondynge in latyn: hath be translatyd fro laten in to englyssh by a deuoute student of the vnyuersyte of Cambrydge/ And hath put it to be enprynted at Westmestre: by Wynkyn the Worth the .xi. daye of Marche: the yere of our lorde .M.CCCC.lxxxxvi.58

More culturally meaningful than the edition’s printed-ness is this slight, conventional paratext, which marks the only place in the edition that attributes responsibility for the book’s production to a named person. The colophon is in de Worde’s voice, and he assumes the ethical responsibility for book production that this translator emphasizes. Across the page divide, this edition contains one further reference to de Worde’s responsibility for the verba of the edition: de Worde’s Device C, which reproduces a modified version of Caxton’s device set atop de Worde’s own bouquet and within his floriated border. The two material features that mark the Medytacyons as de Worde’s — the printer’s colophon and device — were features that developed first among continental printers. Their tandem use as identity markers in printed editions conflates two distinct continental traditions, and because these material features are bound up with the emerging identity of English printers — as individuals and as a group — a brief overview of their development is appropriate. The printer’s device, as William Kuskin shows, has origins in mercantile identifiers like notarial signets.59 The first printer’s device, used by Peter Schoeffer and Johannes Fust in 1457, depicts two shields on a bough; this was appropriated without any distinguishing changes by Ulrich Han in 1470. From that point, however, printer’s marks were increasingly personalized in the sense that they often (but not always) incorporated the initials of the printer’s own name. As Kuskin notes, these were ‘biographical trademarks’, symbols of individual work that circulated in an otherwise anonymous market.60 Curiously, Caxton did not use his own device until 1487, although with a few early exceptions his editions do bear his name in prologues and colophons. Instead, the first English printer’s mark is that of the unnamed printer(s) work58 

STC 1916, BodL, Tanner 178 (2), sig. E5b. An important analysis of the symbolic work of the printer’s device is provided in Kuskin, Symbolic Caxton, esp. pp. 49–80. See also Davies, Devices of the Early Printers; McKerrow, Printers’ and Publishers’ Devices in England and Scotland; and Painter, ‘Michael Wenssler’s Devices and their Predecessors’. 60  Kuskin, Symbolic Caxton, p. 50. 59 

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ing at the Benedictine abbey of St Albans, who used it in the 1483 edition of the St Albans Chronicle. That device features an orb and cross, two symbols popular among Continental presses and first used by a German monastic press in 1476, whose printers likewise remained mute on the point of personal identity. Lotte Hellinga has noted that the St Albans press might be viewed as an extension of the abbey’s once-flourishing scriptorium, and the avid bookcollecting habits of Abbot Whethamstede (d. 1465).61 Congruent with that monastic tradition is the symbolic anonymity of claustral traditions of book production. In contrast, Caxton’s device, when he did begin using one, bore his own initials as well as allusions to his prior career in the wool trade;62 Richard Pynson and Julian Notary likewise employed devices using their initials or full names. Devices were also widely appropriated and shared among English printers. De Worde, for instance, used Caxton’s last device until 1499, as well as a range of new ones that all appropriated Caxton’s initials and personalized symbol; de Worde added his own name to a device — under Caxton’s initials — only in 1499. Together these English devices gather contradictions; as Kuskin notes of printers’ devices more generally, these signify identities at once generic and individual, craft, and mercantile.63 But these contradictions were instrumental to what we see in these early years — that is, the emergence of the device as representative of an identity for English print that was at once shared and highly individualized. More uniformly than the printer’s device, the English print colophon highlighted the identity of a book’s producer. De Worde’s Medytacyons colophon is a typical example: these paratexts were brief collections of information that typically included the date and place of publication, the name of the printer, and sometimes a short production narrative. These contents, however, reoccupied an older form — the scribal colophon — that had a far different function. The scribal colophon was a non-standard genre, often filled with information of a dizzying variety — dates and locations sometimes, but also expressions of complaint, quotidian observations, or, as with the common-profit manuscripts, specific cultural or devotional ambitions. Moreover, as discussed in the previ61 

Hellinga, William Caxton and Early Printing in England, pp. 90–99. Hellinga demonstrates, too, that Caxton’s device (produced for him in Paris) was an im­portant part of a his business strategy; see William Caxton and Early Printing in England, pp. 100–01. 63  For an excellent reading of the St Albans printer’s device, as well as for his note that the ‘orb and cross’ device was also used in 1476 by the Brothers of the Common Life, in the German town of Rostock, see Kuskin, Symbolic Caxton, pp. 62–67. 62 

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ous section, scribal colophons were voluntary additions, and many remained anonymous. The print colophon, on the other hand, rapidly developed into a standardized paratext by the end of the fifteenth century, one that almost always included the basic information of the printer’s name, the press’s location, and the edition’s date.64 For the most part, early printers seemed eager to identify themselves within their publications; Gutenberg and a handful of the very first printers are notable exceptions (and their obscurity drives a cottage industry of modern scholarship). The team of Fust and Schoeffer produced the first print colophon with their 1457 edition of the Psalms, and used the occasion to marvel at the press itself: this book ‘ad inuentione artificiosa imprimendi ac caracterizandi absque calami vlla exaracione sic effigiatus’ (has been thus fashioned by an ingenious invention of printing and stamping without any driving of the pen).65 Their awe at the technology of print was repeated in subsequent productions, and echoed in turn by a long series of Mainz printers. Venetian printers, on the other hand, gave the space of the colophon over to their professional correctors, and these men frequently appended brief verses that named the printers and heralded their own labours in producing a corrected text.66 The 1471 edition of Sallust produced by the immigrant printer Wendelin of Speier contains this verse: Quadringenta iterum formata uolumina nuper Crispi dedit Venetis Spirea Vindelinus. Sed meliora quidem lector, mihi crede, secundo Et reprobate minus antea quam dederat.67

Clearly, not all of the correctors attached to the Venetian press were also poets. What this somewhat clunky verse offers instead is a sense of how the print colophon emerged as a space for articulating identity as a marker of the quality of production. These regional traditions around the uses of the colophon coalesced over the first decades of printing, and by the last years of the century the basic biblio­ graphical information of name, date, and location had become an increasingly 64 

For the later development of related conventions, see Smith, The Title-Page. Pollard, An Essay on Colophons, p. 12. 66  Pollard, An Essay on Colophons, pp. 30–31. 67  Pollard, An Essay on Colophons, p. 39: ‘Wendelin of Speier to Venice now once more | Of printed Sallusts hath given hundreds four | But here all’s better, all may trusted be | This text, good reader, is from errors free.’ 65 

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standardized feature. There were some notable regional exceptions, of course, and Cologne — where Caxton first ventured into publishing — was one. Printing in Cologne, led by the Mainz-trained printer Ulrich Zell, underwent a distinct phase between 1470 and 1474, in which small quarto editions were issued for the university and monastic trade.68 These were apparently issued as collaborations between anonymous printers and a group of merchants, and some of the financial backers are mentioned in colophons. For the most part, however, the printers remain anonymous. It was in this context that Caxton published three folio Latin editions, all of them without a trace of his own name. Caxton’s early forays into print seem to follow regional traditions as far as identity: while he withheld his name in the very commercial context of Cologne, his productions for the Burgundian court adopt the more verbose, self-identifying prologues used by Colard Mansion, as well as the print colophon. For instance, Caxton’s first English-language edition, his translation of Raoul le Fevre’s history of Troy, entitled The Recuyell of the Histories of Troye (1473/74, STC 15275), features both Caxton’s own extensive prologue as well as a quite full colophon where, in the tradition of the Mainz printers, Caxton marvels at the technology of print; this book, he notes, ‘is not wreton with penne and ynke as other bokes ben to thende that euery man may haue them attones’.69 But when Caxton arrived back in England with his press, he used neither a device nor colophons. Until 1477, Caxton did not identify himself at all within his work, and seemed to follow the Cologne model; these first English books were mostly slim quarto volumes (with the exception of his first edition of the Canterbury Tales, in folio) and his marketing strategy seems to have been purely a commercial one. These were printed books selling simply as commodities for ‘good chepe’,70 as his early Advertisement famously proclaims. Yet from 1477 forward, Caxton’s editions are marked firmly with his name and often with his own long narratives — narratives in which he frequently strikes an extra-economic pose — and by 1478, he began using his personalized device. Caxton’s readoption of the self-identifying traditions of print suggests strongly 68 

For Caxton’s printing venture in Cologne, see Corsten, ‘Caxton in Cologne’, and Hellinga, William Caxton and Early Printing in England, pp. 26–32. 69  STC 15375, Huntington Library, 62222, sig. 3 K8r. On Caxton’s probably partnership with David Aubert for this edition, see Hellinga, William Caxton and Early Printing in England, pp. 40–51. 70  Caxton’s Advertisement (1476?, STC 4890).

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that not only were the personalizing material features growing up around print variable across regions, but that their use and attachment to print was neither habitual nor necessary for Caxton. Instead, Caxton’s turn to and amplification of the personalizing capacity of the printer’s prologue, colophon, and device can be seen as a deliberate extension of print’s emerging traditions, and a strategic response to the English context.71 Caxton’s colophons reflect the full range of the feature’s continental uses. For instance, in his early edition of Chaucer’s translation of Boethius (1478, STC 3199) we might hear the humanist interests of the Venetian printers resonate with the verse colophon Caxton adds at the end of the epitaph by Surigonus: Post obitum Caxton voluit te viuere cura Willelmi. Chaucer clare poeta, tuj Nam tua non solum compressit opscula formis Has quoque sed laudes. iussit hic esse tuas.72

Beyond self-identifying and perhaps evoking a specific Italian tradition, Caxton’s lines also offer an example of the new discursive role for book producers that print colophons could express. Often (but not always) print colophons suggest a printer’s role that is distinct from that of either scribe or author, a role that instead emphasizes the collaborative intentions of the printer and the author of the works he produces. In these original verse lines of his colophon, for instance, Caxton is not presenting the work of Chaucer to the reader, nor praising Chaucer. Instead, Caxton turns to address the posthumous Chaucer and articulates his own printerly role as that of extending and tending to the intentions of the poet around matters of poetic reputation and status. Caxton imagines himself in a collaborative relationship with his writer, one in which his own work as a printer goes beyond merely reproduction, but is not quite the work of an author. The print colophon’s capacity not only to identify the book producer but to articulate a collaborative role for book production brings us back to the 71  In England, before the routine use of title-pages (c. 1530), the print colophon often contained the most important identifying information about a book and could be quite long; production information was also frequently relocated or reiterated in prefaces and prologues. See Driver, ‘Ideas of Order’. 72  STC 3199, BL, IB.55018, sig.[m] 6b. Translation in Caxton’s Own Prose, ed. by Blake, p. 150: ‘After your death, renowned poet Chaucer, the care of William Caxton was that you should live, for not only did he print your works in type but he also ordered these your praises to be placed here.’

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Medytacyons, where it is precisely such a collaborative relationship that emerges between the anonymous translator’s prologue and the identifying print features of de Worde’s colophon and device. Two decades after Caxton’s first English colophon, de Worde uses a far more standardized colophon for the Medytacyons, but echoes of the Venetian correctors appear in the translator’s prologue. The relationship pivots around the central concern of the translator with the ‘correccyon’ of his text, both as an expression of religious teaching and as text or verba. In the first instance, the translator alludes to what Edwin Craun has termed ‘fraternal correction’, that is, an act of reproof undertaken as a compassionate response and a deed of spiritual mercy.73 Fraternal correction is what the translator anticipates as he ‘mekely submytte me and my werke to charytable correccyon’. But the translator is also preoccupied with the correction of the words on the page, and this is the sense in play as he details his discovery that the previously circulated text was not ‘duely corrected’, and his own labours to ‘putte it more dylygently corrected and ordred’. The nearly palpable worry about potential misreadings of the text is one, it is fair to say, that is also about prelatical correction — the disciplinary correction of the Church.74 The translator had some cause for unease; the same worry about ecclesiastical authorities misconstruing a bit of vernacular theology haunted Peock in his Donet, and as Pecock’s biography bears out, it was a prescient concern. In the Medytacyons, this same current is briefly visible as the translator cautions his readers about the ‘Ieopardye and hurte yt maye come by that yt was not duely corrected’. In the print edition of the Medytacyons, these two dimensions of correction — spiritual and textual, the openness to fraternal correction and the anxiety about prelatical correction — are inextricably bound together. Elizabeth Bryan has observed that for medieval writers, ‘the importance of making books correct was that books make people correct’,75 and these remarks help make visible the goals of this edition. What emerges through this prologue’s emphasis on correction is a necessary collaboration between the writer and the book producer, what might be called a bibliographic ego writ large — ‘me and my

73 

Craun, Ethics and Power, especially pp. 23–34. Craun, Ethics and Power, pp. 46–62. For the role of the corrector in both manuscript and print production, see also McKitterick, Print, Manuscript and the Search for Order, pp. 97–138. 75  Bryan, Collaborative Meaning in Medi­eval Scribal Culture, p. 13. In the discussion that follows, Bryan suggests that print stands apart from this model: her argument, however, is about a distinct and discrete moment in early English scribal production. 74 

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werke’, ‘me and the enprynter or wryter’.76 This sense of an author bound up with the production (and thus producer) of a text is not unique to print; David McKitterick suggests such collaborations might be read as the ‘corporately defined author’, one who depends ‘on collaboration (willing or unwilling ) between amanuenses, transcribers, censors, licensers, typographers, designers, illustrators, type-founders, compositors, paper-makers, master-printers, binders, booksellers, publishers, reviewers, etc’.77 In this space — the space of the bibliographic ego, the space of the ampersand — the writer and the producer of the book assume a shared responsibility for the res and the verba of the physical book that the reader holds. The print colophon constructs just such a collaborative space, and in the Medytacyons de Worde cultivates it with the simple pronoun ‘we’ — ‘here we make an ende of this ryght prouffytable treatyse’. It is de Worde’s voice and identity that amplify and extend the intentions of the unnamed translator. Identifying these dynamics through very close reading, as I have above, may seem too speculative, or to put too much pressure on a form as conventional and predictable as the print colophon. Yet the material history of the edition suggests that this kind of close reading was precisely what a text like the Medytacyons experienced. In the British Library’s copy of the 1498 edition, a contemporary reader has added copious marginal notes and textual underscores. The reader seems especially interested in Chapters 8 through 10, chapters in which the discussion turns to penance, the contemplation of one’s conscience, and habits of prayer. Many of the marginal annotations are echoes of the text, lending double emphasis to lines the reader also underscored.78 In the final chapter of the sequence, the text’s emphasis upon conscience and private reading results in a bold consideration of predestination. Here, even more boldly, the reader has underscored the relevant text and noted in the margin, ‘the predestynacion of mankynde’.79 This hints at a potentially ‘jeopardus’ reading, indeed. Over and against readings like these stand the powerful self-assertions of de Worde, and the printer’s strategic emphasis on intention. For instance, supporting the translator’s insistence in the prologue that the Medytacyons is ‘full 76 

The term ‘bibliographic ego’ is used in Loewenstein, ‘The Script in the Marketplace’. McKitterick, Print, Manuscript and the Search for Order, p. 226. 78  STC 1917, BL, Inc. C.11.a.22. For example, underscored in Chapter 9 is the line ‘Dyscusse and examyne well thy lyfe euery daye’. In the margins is ‘How man shule dyscusse & examyne well his lyfe every day’ (sig. B7v). 79  STC 1917, BL, Inc. C.11.a.22, sigs C1r–C2v. 77 

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prouffytable’, is de Worde’s affirming echo in the colophon: this book is ‘ryght proufytable’. Indeed, the colophon succinctly reiterates the common-profit framework expressed in the prologue, emphasizing the translation as part of the work of disseminating and circulating Bernard’s text ‘for the very fauour and charytable loue of all suche persones as haue not vnderstondynge in latyn’. The colophon thus assumes an ethical responsibility for the Medytacyons, projecting a distinct confidence and authoritative intention against an unpredictable reception. Further, de Worde’s self-identification explicitly meets the challenges outlined by the translator in the prologue — unlike the unnamed copyists working ‘aynste’ his will, de Worde explicitly aligns his production with the translator’s expressed intentions. This slight but revealing edition offers one further provocation to thinking about the choice the translator makes for print. While the writer might seem to imagine that print ‘fixes’ the text in a way that the processes of scribal copying could not, a closer reading offers crucial, and qualifying, nuance. First, the translator distinctly anticipates the text’s future circulation in manuscript as well as print, beseeching his readers to pray ‘for me and the enprynter or wryter herof to do theyr deuour dylygently’. Certainly, as Julia Boffey and Norman Blake have separately observed, printed books frequently served as exemplars for manuscript copyists.80 The equal potential of either scribe or printer to reproduce future versions of the Medytacyons is anticipated again in the translator’s closing remarks, where the guidelines he provides for discriminating between legitimate and illegitimate exemplars rely upon textual markers — and specifically upon the division and textual rubrics of chapters. That these are textual markers, not the material ones that might derive from de Worde’s edition (i.e., the translator makes no reference to the title-page or image, nor to paratexts like the colophon) indicates not only that the translator imagines his text moving into manuscript again, but also that ‘fixity’ — while highly desirable — is a quality that relies upon the resolve of copyists ‘to do theyr deuour dylygently’. Fixity emerges as an ethical rather than a technological feature, less a matter of ‘print versus manuscript’ than of the diligence of book producers: it matters, in short, who makes the book, and it is de Worde who provides a credibility extended, as Johns reminds us, by the person producing the book rather than by the book’s medium.81 80  See Boffey, ‘From Manuscript to Print’, esp. pp. 20–24. See also Blake, ‘Aftermath: Manu­script to Print’. 81  Johns, The Nature of the Book, esp. pp. 33–37.

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The Common Profits of Early Print If the identity of a book producer matters, in scribal as well as print modes of production, it is important to realize the diversity of identities, agencies and ethics embraced by England’s early printers. Like scribes, in other words, printers were far from univocal in the personalities they expressed through their books. Moreover, the degree of autonomy and agency printers claimed on their own behalf (and promoted for their readers) was also widely varied. In this section, I turn to explore that diversity through printers’ use of common-profit discourse. I argued earlier that the common-profit ideal not only comprised the most familiar ethical discourse for book production, but that it was inextricably bound up with the identity of producers — an identity print became able to provide in ways that manuscript methods of production often did not. It is no coincidence that the common profit, in both subtle and overt ways, weaves through so many of the prologues and colophons that also serve to identify England’s early printers. Yet the early printers’ embrace of a common-profit ideal amounted to more than merely a savvy ‘anti-market’ marketing strategy; attention to the different ways in which printers situated themselves within common-profit frameworks reveals the strikingly wide range of cultural interventions open to England’s early printers. Indeed, it is more appropriate to refer to the common profits of print, emphasizing the plural, since the framework itself was figured in multiple ways. For one, the term’s usage in print travelled across (and frequently blurred) its dual political and religious traditions. But more than that, there was also a great deal of diversity in the degree of agency expressed through appeals to the common profit, as well as variations between printers and even across individual printers’ oeuvres. For instance, in his edition of the Medytacyons, de Worde evokes the common profit to reinforce and blend his intentions as a printer with the desires and aims of the anonymous author; in his later edition of The Orcharde of Syon (1519, STC 4815), which I will discuss below, his own ambitions extend the aims of the author in creating a reading experience that underscores an especially passive sense of service to a spiritual common profit. John Rastell, on the other hand, uses the common profit as a forceful rationale for his own work as a printer, and the finds in the language of the res publica the key to a certain readerly autonomy that permeates his own prologues as well as his selection of texts to print. What the common profits of early print share is a broad sensibility that situates printers as agented actors; where they frequently diverge is in the readerly agencies the use of the ‘common profit’ is intended to foster or contain,

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and the forcefulness with which it informs the use of print itself. Examples from Syon Abbey and the work of John Rastell will demonstrate the multiple engagements of print, agency, and the ethics of a common profit. But the commonprofit posture was first adopted for English print — like so much else — by William Caxton. Further, it is in Caxton’s work that we can see a moral vision of print’s common profits shift and unfold in response to the English context, much like his adoption of the colophon and printer’s device. Caxton was certainly ‘garrulous’, as Hellinga has described him, and perhaps the most aggressively personalizing of England’s early printers. Many of his editions bear his name as well as his detailed production narratives, ruminations, ambitions, and aims as a printer.82 Caxton’s tendency to personalize his editions was present (apart from the pause mentioned earlier) from his very first English productions, The Recuyell of the Histories of Troy (1473/74, STC 15375) and The Game of Chesse (1474, STC 4920). Both editions were Caxton’s own translations from French texts and were likely printed in Ghent in collaboration with David Aubert.83 In these editions, a voluble Caxton intertwines the details of his personal biography with a full narrative about the books’ production. His prologue to the first of these, the Recuyell, threads readers through his upbringing in the Weald of Kent, his thirty years of experience abroad, and the gentle sternness of Margaret, duchess of Burgundy, who urged him to finish the long project of translation. The overall effect is of a single narrative blending autobiographical and bibliographical stories. Caxton dedicated his second English work, The Game of Chesse, to George, duke of Clarence (brother to Edward IV and Margaret). The prologue Caxton composes for this edition is personal, too, in the sense that Caxton himself is a constant narrative presence in the prologue as well as in the extensive interpolations, additions, and epilogue he adds to the text. But Caxton has different goals to accomplish here, among them persuading Clarence to become his patron. It is in this prologue that he first makes explicit the potential of English print in the service of a common profit. Caxton’s use of the common profit in this instance speaks to the term’s political register, and so it is useful to understand the political valence of the translated text it accompanies. First composed in the late thirteenth century by Jacobus de Cessolis, an Italian Dominican, the Liber de moribus hominum et officiis nobilium ac popularium super ludo scacchorum is an advice-to-princes treatise that uses the game 82 

Hellinga, William Caxton and Early Printing in England, p. 12. For the updated location and date of these two editions, see Hellinga, William Caxton and Early Printing in England, pp. 40–51. 83 

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of chess as a central allegory for legitimate rule and political responsibility. As Jenny Adams has observed, the chess allegory replaces (and at times challenges) the more traditional metaphor of the body politic: the latter suggests that members of a polity are subordinate to the whole, working together at the behest of the head (the monarch), while the former implies degrees of autonomy within the polity. That is, as Adams puts it, ‘if the chess king advances, the pawns are not beholden to do the same’. Further, within the logic of the chess allegory, each member moves within the constraints of his social role while being at once wholly visible in his actions and obviously ‘responsible for his own moral choices and ethical conduct’.84 De Cessolis’s Liber thus suggests that the political whole is in constant flux and comprises relationships that are constituted and reconstituted through negotiations of diverse individual agencies. In his prologue, Caxton gestures to the kind of agency implied in The Game of Chesse, as well as to the political ideal of a common profit. But his prologue also has to balance his desire to win the patronage of Clarence, and is a necessary deference to royal power: Right highe, puyssant and redoubted Prynce, for as moche as I haue understand and knowe that ye are enclined unto the comyn wele of the Kynge, our sayd soveryn lord, his nobles, lords, and comyn peple of his noble royame of Englond, and that ye sawe gladly the inhabitans of the same enformed in good, vertuous, prouffitable and honeste maners, in whiche your noble persone wyth guydyng of your hows haboundeth gyvyng light and ensample unto all other, therfore I have put me in devour to translate a lityll book late comen into myn handes out of Frensh into Englisshe, In which I fynde th’auctorites, dictees, and stories of auncient doctors, philosophes, poetes and of other wyse men whiche been recounted and applied unto the moralite of the publique wele as well of the nobles as of the comyn peple after the game and playe of the chesse. Whiche booke, right puyssant and redoubtid Lord, I have made in the name and under the shadewe of your noble protection not presumyng to correcte or enpoigne ony thynge ayenst your noblesse, for God be thankyd your excellent renome shyneth as well in strange regions as within the royame of England gloriously unto your honour and laude, whiche God multeplye and encrece, but to th’entent that other, of what estate or degre he or they stande in, may see in this sayd lityll book yf they governed them self as they ought to doo.85

The ethical resonances that Caxton locates between his work of book production and the de Cessolis text itself are clear: the printer offers his book for the 84  85 

See Adams, Power Play, pp. 135–55; for citation regarding de Cessolis, see p. 20. Caxton’s Own Prose, ed. by Blake, p. 85.

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‘moralite of the publique wele’, that is, the morality of the public or common good, and carefully acknowledges a range of social positions within his potential readership. Very much in keeping with The Game of Chesse is Caxton’s explicit acknowledgement of the responsibility of his readers to not only govern their own conduct but to evaluate that self-regulation within the larger context of the ‘publique wele’ — to ‘see in this sayd lityll book yf they gouerned them self as they ought to doo’. But what Caxton ultimately encourages is not quite parallel to the kinds of agencies implied by de Cessolis. Instead, the exception of Clarence himself makes all the difference. The printer is at pains to exempt Clarence from any of the scrutiny the text might imply: in a direct address to the duke, Caxton emphasizes that he is ‘not presumyng to correcte or enpoigne ony thynge ayenst your noblesse’, and further, his intent is ‘that other of what estate or degree he or they stande in’ may be guided by his ‘lytell book’. Caxton’s edition of The Game of Chesse is not for Clarence to read, but rather for Clarence to use as an instrument in governing his subjects, a tool to make the self-regulating responsibilities of ‘nobles and comyn peple’ alike more visible and evident. What Caxton offers Clarence most directly is not a political allegory about chess, but his own skills as a printer in selecting the most strategic texts to print, and the press itself as a potential instrument of royal authority. This model of the press as an instrument for royal use is one that Caxton does not carry with him to England; it is, however, a framework that emerges again in England from the religious and political controversies of the Reformation forward, as I will discuss briefly at this chapter’s conclusion.86 Caxton’s Bruges edition of The Game of Chesse represents an early and exceptional evocation of the common profit, and of print in political service. Upon his return to England, and his return to ‘personalizing’ his editions, a very different sense of the common profit emerged in the paratextual material Caxton added to his books. Over and again, he situates his printing as work that serves the well-being of the commonalty: his editions are produced for the spiritual health and profit of all the king’s subjects (The Chronicles of England, 1480, STC 9991); for the health of the common weal (William Worcester’s translation, Tullius de senectute, 1481, STC 5293); and to cure the ailing ‘common wele’ of London, whose illness is due to a pervasive focus on singular 86 

Caxton issued another edition of The Game of Chesse in 1483 (STC 4921), in which he replaced the dedication to Clarence, who had been executed by his brother Edward IV, with a pious dedication to the City of London. See Jenny Adam’s illuminating discussion of the politics of this second edition in Power Play, pp. 144–55.

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profit (Caton, 1484, STC 4853). Even more editions allude to the ways books might serve a spiritual common profit, for instance the Royal Book (1484, STC 21429), issued for the ‘wele of mannes soule’, and the Doctrinal of Sapience (1489, STC 21431), which in the vein of Pecock’s work is meant to help in the spiritual education of priests. Perhaps the most complex of Caxton’s common-profit prologues is the one he composed for his edition of Caton, and it is subsequently the most revealing in terms of understanding the revised relationship Caxton draws between book production and the multiple discourses of common profit. The edition this prologue prefaces is distinct from Caxton’s earlier versions of Cato’s Disticha; as Daniel Wakelin has noted, in the prose text the Disticha themselves are ‘overwhelmed by a version of Philippe de Pergamme’s enormous Christianizing commentary known as the Speculum regiminis (c. 1385)’.87 It is thus an oddly hybrid edition. The prose Caton is thus a classical text layered over with didactic Christian commentary, and a choice made even more curious by Caxton’s dedication of his edition to the civic entity of the City of London. Caxton’s dedication is part of the extensive prologue, and a brief passage near the beginning demonstrates some of the many dimensions at work: Unto the noble, auncyent and renommed cyte, the Cyte of london in Englond, I William Caxton, cytezeyn and conjurye of the same and of the fraternyte and felauship of the mercerye, owe of ryght my servyse and good wyll and of very dute am bounden naturelly to assiste, ayde, and counceille as ferforth as I can to my power as to my moder, of whom I haue receyved my noureture and lyvynge; and shal praye for the good prosperite and polecye of the same duryng my lyf. For, as me semeth, it is of grete need, bycause I have knowen it in my yong age moche more welthy, prosperous and rycher than it is at this day. And the cause is that ther is almost none that entendeth to the comyn wele, but only every man for his singuler prouffyte.88

One of Caxton’s innovations in this passage is his suggestion that striving toward a common profit might not be contrary to accruing personal wealth, but instead that wealth functions as the future inheritance of a civic body, the increased prosperity of generations to come. Perhaps this anticipates the fellow mercers he imagined would read his edition. But for whichever readers he anticipates, Caxton’s initial representation of the ‘comyn wele’ is, as Wakelin 87  Wakelin, Humanism, Reading, & English Literature, p. 151; see also pp. 126–59 for a reading of print’s relationship to humanism. 88  Caxton’s Own Prose, ed. by Blake, p. 63.

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argues, distinctly humanist in its classicizing moves: Caxton’s attention to the civic body — and directly after this passage, to Rome and the two Scipios — as well as his language around ‘comyn wele’ and ‘singuler prouffyte’, all echo the earlier Ciceronian text he printed, and reveal Caxton’s deep humanist influences.89 Yet there are strong countercurrents of scholastic piety circulating, too. Further along in the prologue, Caxton evokes the biblical metaphor of the wheat and the chaff, offers an alternate title for the text (‘The Regyment of the Body and Sowle’), and notes that the edition contains ‘some addicions and auctoritees of holy doctours and prophetes, and also many historyes and ensamples autentyke of holy faders’. The traditions in which Caxton locates the common profit are thus decidedly plural — humanist, but also what M. S. Kempshall would categorize as ‘political Augustinianism’, or something akin to the spiritualized thinking about polity that Paul Strohm locates in the work of Pecock.90 Indeed, the blurred but pervasive sense of common profit is perhaps what serves Caxton best, allowing him to claim a broad ethical ambition, and one that is well supported by the very identity that Caxton advertises. Certainly in the Caton prologue Caxton offers quite extensive details about himself. Beginning with the declarative ‘I William Caxton’, he lists his affiliations as a London citizen and member of the influential Mercer’s Guild in a nearly legal cadence before moving to a passionate claim upon London as ‘moder, of whom I haue receyved my noureture and lyvynge’. It is precisely these claims upon London — by right, but also by intimacy and personal experience — that legitimate the critiques Caxton offers to his fellow London citizens. But the prologue also moves further than simply lending a necessary critique. After he outlines the problems besetting London as a failure of the common profit, Caxton explains that ‘I entende to translate this sayd Book of Cathon. In whiche I doubte not, and yf they wylle rede it and understande, they shal moche the better conne rewle themself therby’.91 The work of translating and producing the edition is thus work that acknowledges and even cultivates a certain degree of moral autonomy among its readers, an autonomy that translates seamlessly to a political register with the suggestion that the edition’s readers will ‘better conne rewle themselves’. In these turns, Caxton has more than a passing kinship with the action-oriented political ethics of William Worcester; 89 

Wakelin, Humanism, Reading & English Literature, p. 152. Kempshall, The Common Good in Late Medi­eval Political Thought, pp. 1–25; Strohm, Politique, pp. 133–69. 91  Caxton’s Own Prose, ed. by Blake, p. 64. 90 

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he imagines his Caton as itself a work and service for a civic common profit that will move forward through the agencies of his readers. Moreover, Caxton’s own lengthy self-identification, and his construction of an identity deeply rooted in the civic ethics of a political common profit, is central to the efficacy Caxton envisions for his work. The humanist dynamics present in Caxton’s use of the common profit in Caton animate many of his other editions as well, but as we will see in the next two chapters, Caxton is also nimble in moving between the spiritual and political registers of the common-profit framework. His earnest and early engagement with Aristotelianism, however, marks an initial use of common-profit discourse for print that finds an energetic extension in the work of John Rastell. The extraordinarily inventive Rastell moved in an elite circle of London intellectuals defined in part by his famous brother-in-law, Thomas More.92 An inheritance and his own early success as a lawyer underwrote later ventures as diverse as printer, artisan, mathematician, playwright, theater-owner, and explorer. Rastell’s press was profitable, yet as E. J. Devereux has observed, the printer seemed free of any financial obligation to make his press a commercial success.93 What that meant in practice is evident from Rastell’s modest but remarkable output. Only fifty-six editions can be attributed with certainty over the course of his printing career (1509 to 1534), but these include the first printed one-stroke impression of musical notation (The Interlude of the Four Elements [1520], STC 20722), the only English synchronic-format chronicle (The Pastyme of People, [1529] STC 20724 ), playing cards (The Boke of the New Cardys [c. 1525–27], STC 3356.3), a series of coterie publications associated with More’s circle, a group of plays, and innovative legal publications. Yet Rastell was not merely a dabbler; in his enthusiasm and vision for the press, he was as optimistic and voluble as Caxton. Like Caxton, too, his printed editions included his own translation work as well as extensive prologues, many of which he used to situate himself and his press within a common-profit discourse. Rastell’s common-profit ambitions were firmly rooted in the humanist tradition, and his work is interested not in a generalized sense of spiritual commonalty but in the specific and political ideals of the res publica. In some ways, Rastell is the epitome of the distinctly English humanist practice observed by Wakelin; like Worcester in the Boke of Noblesse, Rastell turns to the vernacular 92  The following information is drawn largely from Devereux, A Bibliography of John Rastell. 93  Devereux, A Bibliography of John Rastell, p. 3.

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to advance the education of his readers in order that they might better participate in and serve the common profit. 94 But while Rastell articulates these ambitions in a series of prefaces and prologues that are fairly traditional, he realizes them through a series of texts that lay outside typical humanist materials. Rastell’s reapplication of humanist pedagogy is most visible in his legal productions. In several of these, his prologues extend and elaborate classical concepts of the common profit,95 only to pitch these up against the decidedly vernacular, non-classical concerns of English law. It is important to note, too, that Rastell’s legal editions were themselves innovations: his issue of Anthony Fitzherbert’s La Graunde Abridgment (1516, STC 10957), for instance, an enormous three-volume work which he issued in partnership with de Worde and Pynson, became the standard compilation of English common law, and it was Rastell himself who composed and issued a follow-up volume with a full index table. His larger reference works were issued in law French, but Rastell prefixed his own English prologues to several. Moreover, Rastell undertook the first series of English translations of basic legal texts — the Old Tenures (STC 2389.7) and Littleton’s New Tenures (STC 15759.5) — as well as the first law dictionary, Exposiciones terminorum legum anglorum (1524, STC 20701). These editions together comprised a significant intervention into legal study, and several remained influential up into the modern era. Rastell’s expressed motivations in printing them received the same wide readership. His extensive prologue to the Exposiciones is especially revealing. He begins by emphasizing that the law must be accessible: ergo it folowyth that ye law in euery realme shuld be so publysshyd declaryd and wrytton in such wyse that ye peple so bound to the same myght sone and shortely come to the knowlege therof or ellys such a law so kept secretly in the knowlege of a few persones and from the knowlege of ye great multytude may rather be callyd a trape and a net to brynge the peple to vexacion and trobyll than a good order to bringe them to pease and quietnes and for as mych as the law of thys realme of englond is ordeynyd and deuysyd for the augmentacion of iustyce and for the quietnes of the peple and for the comyn welth of the same ergo it is conuenient yt euery one within this realm bound to the same may haue ye knolege therof.96

94 

See Wakelin, Humanism, Reading, and English Literature, pp. 93–125, and also his ‘Humanism and Printing’. 95  Wakelin cites three of these prefaces; see ‘Humanism and Printing’, p. 5. 96  STC 20701, CUL, Syn. 5. 52.2, sig. A2r.

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Publication — and by extension, Rastell’s very edition — is the instrument that insures a law functioning in the interest of the people and for their ‘comyn welthe’. But this passage also underscores a political system that relies on a degree of mutuality and personal agency: the law protects the people, but only if the people take up the responsibility of knowing the law. The agency of the English people as subjects — a people figured in this prologue as a readership — is what potentially holds the law in check, preventing it from turning into ‘a trape  a net’ controlled by a ‘few persones’. Further, as Rastell goes on to suggest, the national tradition of law French is not adequate for the responsibility of what ‘publication’ means here; his project is to ‘declare and expown certeyn obscure and derke termes’ into an English available to all. The ever-widening scope of his work rings throughout the final passage: but yet I haue not enterprysyd thys for yt that I thynke my selfe sufficient and able to expowne them as substancially as other depe lernyd men can do but to the entent that som ease and furtheraunce of lernyng may com to yong studentys by redyng of thys same And also I haue compylyd and indytyd thys lyttyll worke fyrst in the frenche tong as is vsyd in the bokys of our law and after translatyd thys same compylacion in to our english tong to the entent that such yong studyent may the soner atteyne to ye knowlege of the frenche tong / which knowlege so had shalbe a great helpe and furtheraunce vnto them whan they shall study other higher workes of the law of more dyfyculte as be the bokys of yerys and termys and other bokes which be writtyn in the frenche tong whereby they shall come to ye more knowlege of the law which knowlege of the law so had and ye trew execucion of the same law shalbe grealy to the augmentacion of ye commyn welthe of thys realme.97

In these lines, Rastell vividly imagines his own agency in printing the book as engendering rings of ever-expanding readerly agencies. Through the Exposicione, readers might learn French, might study ever more difficult subjects, might reach eventually the ‘the trewe execucion of the same law’ and be of greatest service to the ‘commyn welthe of thys realme’. It is a lofty, energetic, and deeply faithful vision of the agencies expressed and enabled by the press in the service of a generously imagined common profit. Rastell’s optimism in the common profits achievable by printers and print’s readers is evident across the range of genres he printed, with perhaps the most intriguing example being his The Boke of the New Cardys (c. 1525, STC 3356.3).98 Only one fragment of this work remains, but it suggests that Rastell 97 

STC 20701, CUL, Syn. 5. 52.2, sig. A2v. The Boke of the New Cardys is currently held at the British Library (C.189.c.13); it was part of Dartmouth Library’s Nash Collection. Rastell’s project has been only slimly 98 

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produced a printed playing card deck to educate a mature, illiterate, or semiliterate ‘popular’ audience. The extant portion of The Boke of the New Cardys — an introductory paragraph and a partial table of contents — provides just a glimpse of the whole, but enough to see that Rastell intended to instruct players in basic alphabetical and numeric literacy: ‘playeng at cards one may lerne to know hys lettres and to spel and to rede and how one shuld wryte englysh trew’.99 The table indicates that instruction would be provided at a quite rudimentary level, covering rules of spelling such as the use of the final e, and the unusual forms of y and w. This was a project, in other words, concerned with a need among the full res publica for the kind of basic accessibility that a text like the Exposiciones imagines but cannot pretend to meet. Rastell’s project was not an entirely novel use of playing cards. Indeed, the German Thomas Murner, a Franciscan jurist and humanist who became well known for his pre-Reformation satires, had published the Logica memorativa chartiludium logice in 1509, a book that detailed an elaborate card game meant to teach the art of reasoning.100 Murner travelled to England in 1523 at Thomas More’s invitation, and so perhaps introduced the genre of the pedagogical card game to Rastell. However, Rastell’s project seems to address a very different audience. While Murner’s Latin text anticipates, playfully, a fairly learned audience, Rastell is interested in playing cards as a printed form able to reach nonreaders and the uneducated.101 Rastell’s project extends a humanist pedagogical vision to imagine not just readers but the agency of the person who will become a reader. In this, Rastell demonstrates a humanist practice that is unique in trying to realize through the press the fullest possible ‘commons’ implied by the common-profit ideal. Rastell is relevant to the discussion of common profit and the ethics of print here not only because he so fully engaged his press in an Aristotelian political ideal of the common profit, but also because the arc of his career is a helpful reminder of the diverse uses of that same Aristotelian tradition. In 1532, after addressed: see Devereux, A Bibliography of John Rastell, p. 129, and Nash, ‘Rastell Fragments at Dartmouth’, at p. 69. 99  STC 3356.3, BL, C.189.c.13, sig. a1r. 100  See Stoffers and Thijs, ‘A Question of Morality’. 101  Cards were popular across Europe from the last quarter of the fourteenth century, and were imported in large numbers into England throughout the fifteenth century; indeed, the importation of playing cards was banned in an apparently protectionist measure, and a futile one, in 1461 (3 Edward IV, c.4). On playing cards in Europe, see Smoller, ‘Playing Cards and Popular Culture’; on cards in England, see Tosney, ‘The Playing Card Trade’.

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a prolonged conversation with the reformer John Frith conducted through a public exchange of argumentative treatises, Rastell abruptly converted to the Protestant cause. His switch alienated his family as well as his influential social circle; this same year, of course, saw his brother-in-law, Thomas More, resign the chancellorship. Rastell’s conversion earned him little lasting grace with England’s most powerful administrators. Cromwell became a cool patron, and that relationship cooled even further after Rastell’s disastrous encounters with the Carthusians at the London charterhouse, which included a series of ridiculed preaching efforts and a clumsy attempt to seize their books.102 By 1535, Rastell was taken into the Tower and held without charge; he died, still imprisoned, in 1536. What is especially notable about Rastell’s conversion is his attendant shift in attitude toward his own press and the kind of agencies that he had cultivated so assiduously. Writing to Cromwell from his imprisonment, Rastell proposes ‘to do somewhat for the commyn welth’ through a printing scheme, in which the Crown would sponsor four to five thousand copies of his own Book of the Charge, a text designed to instruct the people in ‘true lernyng’, to bring them ‘from ignorauns to knolege of the true feth’. 103 Rastell admits that it might be difficult to ensure that all the people read such a book, and suggests a way to make it ‘compellyd’ reading: ‘Therfor when the matter in englyssh is put in primers which they vse to brynge with them to the church the shalbe in a maner compellyd to rede them.’104 Rastell’s previous commitment to common profit as political praxis has shifted, clearly, to a more authoritarian model that demands service to the state, as the institutional embodiment of the commonwealth.105 His perspective on the press is resituated as well, and in this letter he has moved from a vision of the printed book as a way to foster the agency and autonomy of readers as full participants in the common profit, into an understanding of print as an instrument available to use in controlling and constraining those same readerly agencies. (It is an arc that, intriguingly, reverses the trajectory we saw earlier between Caxton’s two editions of The Game of Chesse.) While this shift may seem to resonate tidily with revisionist literary and political histories of the 102 

Geritz and Laine, John Rastell, pp. 24–25. Devereux, A Bibliography of John Rastell, p. 171, notes that if the Book of Charge was printed, no extant copies remain. 104  Devereux, A Bibliography of John Rastell, p. 20. 105  For the movement in political terminology from ‘common profit’ to ‘commonwealth’, see Watts, ‘Public or Plebs’. 103 

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period, and particularly those that understand the press as an agent of politico-religious suppression and constriction, the fact that it is part of Rastell’s personal narrative is instructive.106 The quite individual experience of Rastell suggests that print during the Reformation was a powerful tool to produce books, and inseparable from the visions of agency and politics that animated individual printers and scribes. Further, we might note, bids like Rastell’s quite often ended up submerged within the very structures they intended to serve. At the moment Rastell offers his press and his voice to the commonwealth, it is his own voice that becomes restrained and controlled in the interest of that same state. The diversity of print’s common profits were not confined to the concept’s Aristotelian political use; for a quite different example, I turn lastly to Syon Abbey, and specifically to de Worde’s 1519 edition of The Orcharde of Syon (STC 4815). The mission of the Bridgettines, like that of many other monastic foundations across the Continent and in England, included a commitment to the cura pastoralis that translated easily to the spiritual common profits of textual dissemination and, by extension, to an embrace of print.107 The Bridgettines in England were early adopters and owners of printed books, as the Syon registrum attests, and the Abbey formed an early collaborative relationship with England’s native press.108 Syon’s engagements with print occurred in two phases. The first, which took place over the incunable period and likely involved the support of Margaret Beaufort, is marked only allusively in a series of editions that include texts with strong Bridgettine connections.109 In these editions, however, Syon Abbey itself is unnamed. The possible exception is the last of these, The Ryght Profitable 106 

See especially Simpson, Reform and Cultural Revolution, pp. 191–254, and Burning to Read, esp. pp. 222–59. 107  On Syon’s dedication to a cura pastoralis, see da Costa, Reforming Printing, pp. 52–79; on the monastic embrace of print, see Clark, ‘Print and Pre-Reformation Religion’, p. 79; and on Syon especially, see Gillespie, Syon Abbey. 108  Syon Abbey’s openness to print follows the Brigettine continental tradition; Vadstena, for instance, operated its own press. For a helpful list of Syon-related print productions, see da Costa’s overview as well as her reassessment in Reforming Printing, pp. 10–12. For arguments in favour of Syon sponsorship, see Powell, ‘Syon Abbey as a Centre for Text Production’ and ‘What Caxton did to the Festial’. Also see Driver, ‘Nuns as Patrons, Artists, Readers’ and ‘Pictures in Print’. 109  On the connections between Margaret Beaufort, print and Syon Abbey, see Powell, ‘Lady Margaret Beaufort and her Books’.

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Treatyse (1500, STC 1978), an edition of pastoralia and instructions for religious life compiled and sponsored by the Syon librarian Thomas Betson, whose name appears in a brief coda above de Worde’s device. But even this treatise, which seems to anticipate lay readers in its first part but those ‘that be come or shall come in to relygyon’ in its second half, merely names Betson and not his affiliation with the Bridgettines. After publication of The Ryght Profitable Treatyse, the collaboration falls quiet for nearly twenty years: no editions clearly linked with Syon Abbey were produced by English presses between 1500 and 1519. The link between Syon and the press was re-established with the publication of The Orcharde of Syon in 1519, a text that de Worde records was brought to him by the Syon steward Richard Sutton. This second phase of Syon’s interest in print was far more extensive, lasting about fifteen years and including both editions from older manuscripts as well as at least eleven new texts composed by William Bonde, John Fewterer, and Richard Whitford, all Bridgettine brothers.110 Moreover, these were editions that advertised their connections with the Abbey — many incorporated a woodcut image of Bridget of Sweden that Martha Driver has described as an ‘imprimatur’ — and sought to disseminate distinctly Bridgettine practices and models of faith.111 The spur for this new phase of production was the Lutheran challenge; as Alexandra da Costa argues, Syon Abbey’s response to the rising debates around reform and heresy was to claim a public position of carefully reforming orthodoxy. 112 The Bridgettine commitment to ‘named’ printing at this moment, then, was a purposely visible extension of their commitment to cura pastoralis. Yet, as The Orcharde demonstrates, the service of the printed book to a broader spiritual common profit did not necessarily keep the buoyant faith in readerly agencies that animated thinkers like Pecock. Even though The Orcharde of Syon was issued in print to foster pastoral education, it is a text fiercely hostile to expressions of lay agency. This hostility is present even in the very earliest versions of The Orcharde, which was composed — likely by a Syon brother — in the early fifteenth century as a translation of Catherine of Siena’s account of her own ecstatic experience, preserved as the Dialogo.113 In a shrewd move, the anonymous English translator adds to his 110 

Da Costa, Reforming Printing, pp. 1 and 171–72. Driver, The Image in Print, pp. 148–49. 112  See Powell, ‘Syon Abbey as a Centre for Text Production’, p. 62; see also Grisse, ‘“Moche Profitable unto religious persones”’; and da Costa, Reforming Printing. 113  See also the discussion by Denise, ‘The Orchard of Syon’. 111 

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source the allegory of the orchard, and restructures the text into seven parts of five chapters each; in his prologue, he instructs readers to ‘disporte you and walke aboute where you wyll with youre mynde and reason in what alaye you lyke’.114 But as the translator develops his governing metaphor, it becomes clear that it is not primarily a metaphor about walking and movement, but is instead an elaboration of the alimentary metaphor of consuming and digesting a text: the translator describes his ‘orchard’ as a redirection of the vineyard imagery Catherine herself uses, and the English text encourage readers to ‘taste of suche fruyte and herbes reasonable after your affeccyon and what you lyketh beest afterwarde chewe it well and ete therof for helthe of youre soule’.115 The familiar trope of consuming a text, as Shannon Gayk has shown, signals a mode of reflective, passive textual reception; to taste and chew devotional texts is to adopt a singularly contemplative, self-directed reading practice.116 Enclosed within this guiding metaphor, the ecstatic features of Catherine’s Dialogo are wholly contained, and the potential responses of the reader are carefully circumscribed — The Orcharde is a text that only offers itself as an object of consumption, discouraging the range of affective and imitative acts the vivid Dialogo may have inspired. Other aspects of The Orcharde of Syon’s deep conservatism have been noted, as have the text’s investments in controlling readerly agency.117 Yet de Worde’s material elaboration and extension of this response have received little attention, even though his edition reintroduces The Orcharde of Syon at a moment when religious agency was freshly contested. For instance, de Worde opens his edition by emphasizing the translator’s alimentary metaphor; the title he provides offers a volume ‘with ghostly fruytes and precious plantes for the helthe of mannes soule’.118 More significant, however, is the extensive additional prologue de Worde attaches, which appears in none of the three extant manuscripts.119 This added prologue is nearly twice the length of the translator’s own prologue. The only scholarly notice of this material is by Sister Mary Denise, who sug114 

STC 4815, BL, C.11.b.6, sig. 3v. STC 4815, BL, C.11.b.6, sig. A3v. 116  Shannon Gayk provides a helpful overview in ‘“Ete this book”’, pp. 91–99. 117  See Schirmer, ‘Reading Lessons at Syon Abbey’, at p. 347. See also Despres, ‘Ecstatic Reading and Missionary Mysticism’. 118  STC 4815, BL, C.11.b.6, sig. *1r. 119  STC 4815, BL, C.11.b.6; the additional prologue is the first to appear, and runs from sig. *2r to *3v. 115 

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gests it may be from the first Latin printed edition of 1496.120 However, I have discovered that it is, in fact, a fresh English translation of an letter from Marcus Civilis Brixianus that was part of a group of testamentary material surrounding Catherine’s text published by Bernardinus de Misintis in Brescia, Italy.121 In the English translation, Marchs addresses himself to ‘men now adayes (and that relygyous)’ and chides the ill habits that inform his contemporaries, and especially the half-hearted turn to spiritual matters. While the letter holds up Catherine of Siena as a model of submission, praising her life as an example of how to ‘subdewe the bodyly affeccyons’, and ‘kepe us under the bondes of reason’, the epistle’s overall tone is severe, invested in admonishing ‘all you þat be louers of youre owne helthe (and not onely you) but onely al you þat haue lytell feythe and affeccyon to heuenly thynges you that be ylecte and snarled in the dysceyuable pleasures and lustes of the flesshe and the worlde’ to take heed.122 De Worde’s selection of this letter as the introductory text for his edition sets a far more corrective tone than that offered by the original English translator’s prologue, and it frames Catherine’s work within a decidedly masculine authority. The printed Orcharde is thus an edition that reinscribes an often-dynamic feminine spirituality within more traditional authoritative models, even as it anticipates a readership beyond the Bridgettine nuns themselves. It is worth noting, too, the exaggerated layering effect this additional epistle lends to the edition as a whole. For each piece of text that surrounds the main body of Catherine’s Dialogo, de Worde provides a centred title in a larger font, so that the accumulated prefatory and concluding pieces are quite clearly marked. The order of his edition is as follows, with de Worde’s captions in parentheses: a letter; translator’s prologue (‘Another prologue’); a ‘kalender’ of the chapters; the second part of the translator’s prologue (‘here foloweth a prologue’); the translation of Catherine’s Dialogo; concluding remarks from the translator and his ‘helper’, whom he names as Dane James (‘Lenuoye of Dane James the translater’); and de Worde’s own extended colophon. Far more than the English manuscript versions, this onion-like edition insists that reading

120 

Denise, ‘The Orchard of Syon’. The original letter can be found in the printed colletion Liber divinae doctrinae. The letter is composed by Marcus Civilis Brixianaus and is recorded in BodL, Auct. Q. sup. 3.10, sigs. a2r–a3v. In his translation, de Worde names ‘Marcus Civilis (a Bryxian)’, and the letter is addressed to the Franciscan Paul Sauche from Aragon (STC 9815, BL, C.11.b.6, sig. *2r). 122  STC 4815, BL, C.11.b.6, sig. *3r. 121 

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Figure 1.1. Example of printed text in the shape of a Eucharistic monstrance, from [Catherine of Siena], The Orcharde of Syon, printed by Wynkyn de Worde in 1519 (STC 4815). Bodleian Library, Douce D 274, sig. [us]2v. Reproduced by permission of the Bodleian Library.

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Catherine of Siena’s own text must be a guided, passive experience, submissive to the (male) authorities that frame it. What has attracted the most bibliographical attention to the printed Orcharde, however, is not its elaborate paratextual envelope, but its aesthetic qualities.123 And The Orcharde of Syon is one of the brilliant typographical examples from its period, and certainly the most elaborately designed of de Worde’s editions. De Worde uses red and black ink to fine effect, includes a series of new and well-wrought woodcuts, and employs a range of fonts and skillfully cut ornamental initials. Most arresting, however, are the image-texts that de Worde constructs throughout, and these are most elaborately at the end of each section. Some are simple and elegant text-blocks tapering to a single word, while others are arranged to resemble textual crosses and monstrances (see Figure 1.1). Together, these careful and detailed aesthetic investments create a rare example of a printed book that also functions as a contemplative religious object, fostering precisely the kind of passive and reflective posture that the translator’s alimentary metaphors encourage. Indeed, as the religious images that preface nearly every section of the text suggest, readers are expected to pause, to reflect, and to meditate even before engaging with the text through reading. The manuscript copies of The Orcharde of Syon are also exceptionally gorgeous productions, all three of them finely made and illuminated with gold leaf, even though they were copied and assembled by different hands and at different moments.124 The emphasis that de Worde adds, then, in his aesthetic attention to the text is not a function of print but of the text’s own tradition. Indeed, the presentation of The Orcharde as an object of beauty and contemplation was perhaps more difficult to achieve in print than in manuscript. Similarly, the paratexts and additional prologue that de Worde adds are not specific to the technology of print; any scribe could have added the same. In other words, the added emphasis that de Worde lends to the thematics already present in The Orcharde — its presentation as an enclosed, meditative, and restricted experience of reading — are neither enabled by, nor a function of, print. Instead, what de Worde adds as a printer becomes clear in his colophon. De Worde’s extended colophon is set entirely in the slightly larger font he uses for his section titles and is the last text of the edition, appearing on the verso of the leaf opposite the edition’s concluding image of the book (a duplication 123  124 

See Plomer, Wynkyn de Worde and his Contemporaries. Denise, ‘The Orchard of Syon’, pp. 270–72.

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of the St Bridget woodcut that appears on the verso of the opening leaf ) (see Figure 1.2). Here, de Worde harnesses his edition to the ethics of the spiritual common profit and to the work of textual dissemination. He first recounts how Sutton discovered a manuscript copy of The Orcharde ‘in a corner by it selfe’, and wyllynge of his greate charyte it sholde come to lyghte / that many relygyous and deuoute soules might be releued and haue conforte therby / he hathe caused it at his greate coste / this booke to be printed / trustige that moche fruyte shall come therof / to all yt shal rede or here of it / desyrynge none other thige therefore / but only ye rewarde of god and theyr deuoute prayers / for helthe of his soule.125

This colophon emphasizes not the thematics of the text, but the familiar common-profit logic in which a material religious book represents the conversion of worldly wealth into spiritual profit. Indeed, the phrasing de Worde chooses to describe Sutton’s investment is not unlike the language of the formulaic colophons accompanying the common-profit manuscript group. In this instance, however, the gorgeous quality of the printed edition, with its obvious investments of effort, care, and expense, works in tandem with its printed nature: the common profits realized by The Orcharde recognize Sutton’s wealth, and the call to multiply and disseminate texts in the interest of the spiritual commonalty. The colophon is also the only moment in the text that specifically locates the agents responsible for the text’s production: de Worde, Sutton, and, more broadly, Syon Abbey. (The original translator remains anonymous, referring to himself only as ‘I synfull unworthy to bere ony name’.126) In conclusion, even though both the text and the printed edition of The Orcharde keep readerly agencies carefully in check, the edition also emphasizes the ways that de Worde, his sponsor, and the authorizing institution of Syon Abbey are deliberately serving the spiritual needs of a variety of readers through The Orcharde’s printed production. The range of uses to which the common profit is put in the examples of this section — and the freedoms that are both configured and constricted — may seem to tip toward a rather restrictive depiction of printers and their relationship to agency. (More open-ended examples are ahead.) But my selection of examples here is also an attempt to avoid at once a flattened portrait of printerly agencies and intentions, and an overly optimistic reading of print’s inclination to foster independent readerly agency in this period. My claim is for a continuity between manuscript and print as agented technologies — and both 125  126 

STC 4815, BL, C.11.b.6, sig. B3v. STC 4815, BL, C.11.b.6, sig. *3v, sig. A3v.

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Figure 1.2. Wynkyn de Worde’s concluding colophon, [Catherine of Siena], The Orcharde of Syon printed by Wynkyn de Worde in 1519 (STC 4815). Bodleian Library, Douce D 274, sig. B3v. Reproduced by permission of the Bodleian Library.

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scribes and printers were equally apt to be forceful and controlling, and to present to our modern perspective less appealing uses for books, and shorter reins for readerly freedoms.

‘Euyll tongues’ A focus on the personality of early print makes visible the ethical traditions and extra-economic discourses that figures like Robert Copland so coyly pressed into service. Although my argument above has centred upon the common profit, there are certainly other frameworks that underscore the agencies of early printers and showcase the printerly intentions that inform their editions; several of those will be discussed over the remaining chapters. But in closing this initial claim for an understanding of early English print as an ideas-led venture, I want to revisit Copland’s Seuen Sorrowes a final time to think about its historical moment — the year 1526 — as a boundary for the argument of this chapter, and of this book.127 Copland’s playful yet wistful portrayal of the fading role of printers as purveyors ‘of morall wysdome’ might look back quite specifically to the previous year, during which the politico-religious pressures of the building Reformation began to be expressed through and around the English press. That year, 1525, saw William Tyndale print a partial run of his New Testament abroad, in Cologne (STC 2823) at the press of Peter Quentell. Tyndale had to flee before the run was completed, but it must have been a busy (and non-partisan) shop: concurrently, Quentell also issued John Fisher’s Defensio regie assertionis contra Babylonia captivatatem (USTC 632189). It was in 1525, too, that the English press was first censored: the London bishop Cuthbert Tunstall summoned de Worde and ordered him to recall the copies of the devotional text, Ymage of Love (STC 21471.5), which had appeared that year before being submitted to the new processes of ecclesiastical approval. The complex and charged range of publications represented by these texts alone signals the kind of weight accruing against the still-emergent identity of English printers. Indeed, the connections between print and identity were themselves becoming destabilized: the 1520s saw the London book market become suffused with books printed abroad, printed anonymously, issued under false imprints, and pseudonymous authorships. The relative autonomy of 127 

Susan Powell has also used this year to demonstrate the astonishing range of English print and books available to a London readership at the cusp of the Reformation. See her ‘After Arundel but Before Luther’.

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printers to use their presses as they liked was also undergoing new restrictions. The shop of Richard Pynson, who held the title of King’s Printer, at moments became wholly dedicated to publishing royally directed defenses against the Lutheran heresy. These were uses of print that not only did not require the agency of printers to provide either ethical agency or moral authority but frequently found such claims unnecessary. As Susan Powell has noted, by 1537 the Syon writer Richard Whitford could insist on the necessity of his own name accompanying the print edition of his A Dayly Exercyse and Experyence of Dethe (STC 25414): ‘And by my poore aduyse rede nat those bokes that go forth without named auctours. For (doutles) many of them that seme very deuout and good werkes: ben full of heresyes.’128 But Whitford speaks as an author, and an especially bold one. The full turn between Whitford’s posture and the posture of the deliberately anonymous translator of The Medytacyons reveals that what had been the ethical capacity of the book producer has, by this point, been relocated to the text producer. A small and curious piece of rough verse issued by de Worde and dated tentatively to 1525, the year he was summoned by Tunstall, perhaps offers one glimpse of an astute printer’s awareness of his new context. Of Euyll Tongues (STC 10608) is a reprint of a bitter piece that Julian Notary, de Worde’s one-time partner, had issued in 1510 (STC 24115.5). An ill-rhymed verse lament in twenty-three stanzas, the poem lists all the predictable evils that can be produced by speech: lies, treachery, treason, misunderstanding, theft, slander, and so forth. But the last stanza is more suggestive, with its acknowledgement of silence’s value: He that can kepe his tonge and beware Laude unto hym shall euer increase And where that euer he go he nede not to care For he is sure of reste and pease More of this mater I need not reherse For to take these wordes for a conclusyon That yll tonges is euer mannes confusion.129

The final eerie silence of the speaker’s voice is perhaps the lesson of the gruesome woodcut de Worde chose to use as on the title-page: only used once, it depicts two women lashing a man bound to a tree, and another ‘boring a hole through the tongue of a man in stocks’ (Figure 1.3).130 128 

Cited by Powell in ‘Syon Abbey as a Centre of Text Production’, p. 62 (sig. *4v). STC 10608, sig. A4r. 130  See the description in Hodnett, p. 279. 129 

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Figure 1.3. Title-page woodcut demonstrating how to keep tongues quiet, from [anon.], Of Euyll Tongues, printed by Wynkyn de Worde in 1525 (STC 10608). Newberry Library, Case Y 185 E96, sig. *ar. Reproduced by permission of the Newberry Library, Chicago.

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The year 1525 marks, I suggest, the gradual disintegration of the personality of early English print, at least insofar as printers like de Worde found it necessary, useful, or efficacious to promote a personal ethical agency through the press. As the Reformation moved forward, the identities and voices of printers collapsed into the identity of print technology itself: the post-Reformation era for printers was one that celebrated the printer as philologist, as businessman, as craftsman, as artist, and sometimes as scholar. But there was little cultural need, space, or expectation for the kinds of agencies expressed in medieval book production — agencies that early printers inhabited and expanded. But my argument is located deliberately in the half-century before 1525. Removing the horizon of the Reformation, and working from the perspective of the printers themselves — that is, forward from the fifteenth century — the rest of this book traces the diverse agencies and intentions of England’s early printers. That these are often most richly expressed through textual categories that were also shifted, repurposed, and reshaped by the Reformation — religious and historical writing — is a purposeful part of my narrative.

Chapter 2

Usurers and Printed Books: The Mercantile Contexts of ­ val London Intention in Late Medie

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han I consydre the condycions and maners of the comyn people whiche without enformacion and lernyng ben rude and not manerd, lyke unto beestis brute (acordyng to an olde proverb he that is not manerd is no man, for maners make man), thenne it is requesite and necessary that every man use good and vertuous maners. And to th’ende that every man shold have knowleche of good maners, an honest man and a specyal frende of myn, a mercer of London named Wylliam Praat, which late departed out of this lyf on whos soule God have mercy, not longe tofore his deth delyverd to me in Frenshe a lytel book named the Book of Good Maners, whiche book is of auctoryte for as moche as there is nothyng sayd therin but for the moost parte it is aledged by scrypture of the Byble or ellis by sayeng of holy sayntes, doctours, philosophres and poetes, and desyred me instantly to translate it into Englyssh, our maternal tonge, to th’ende that it myght be had and used emonge the people for th’amendement of their maners and to th’encreace of vertuous lyvyng. Thenne I, at the request and desyre of hym whyche was my synguler frende and of olde knowlege, have put myself in devoyr for t’accomplysshe his desyre and have after the lytel connyng that God hath lent me translated out of Frenshe into our Englyssh this sayd Book of Good Maners; besechyng Almyghty God that it may prouffyte bothe the redars and herers therof, for that is th’entent of hym that was fyrst cause that brought the boke to my hande and also of me that have accomplysshed it; prayeng al them that shal rede and here it to correcte where as they fynde faulte and to holde me excused of the rude and unparfyght Englyssh. And I beseche Almyghty God that it so may be understonden that al they that shal rede or here it that they may the better lyve in this present lyf that after this lyf they and I may come to the everlasting lyf in heven where as is joye and blysse perdurable. Amen. William Caxton, prologue to Book of Good Maners (1487, STC 15394)1 1 

Caxton’s Own Prose, ed. by Blake, pp. 60–61.

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T

he opening lines of Caxton’s prologue to his 1487 translation and edition of the Book of Good Maners suggest that it is an edition meant to participate in the self-fashioning of its readers, to make available and inculcate the ‘maners’ that are the outward markers of social class, elite learning, and civility.2 As a book dedicated by one member of the elite Mercer’s guild (Caxton) to another (Pratt), this reading supports long-held modern assumptions about mercantile investments in social mobility and external markers of class. Yet as the prologue continues, Caxton makes it clear that this text is not a conduct book in the tradition of texts like his earlier edition of the Boke of Curtesye (1477/78, STC 3303) Instead, the central concern of the Book of Good Maners is in spiritual conduct: it is an instructional guide to Christian life that for the most part replays traditional pastoralia as well as biblical and theological exempla.3 Moreover, the full prologue demonstrates that Caxton’s own interest in producing the Book of Good Maners lay with the potential of the edition to represent a series of pious interior intentions. The most familiar sense of intention circulating in his prologue is the divine will that Caxton invokes toward the end: this is, he tells us, a text of divine ‘auctorytes’ that communicate the spiritual manner in which all men are intended to conduct themselves, so ‘that after this lyf they and I may come to the everlasting lyf in heven’. But there are more individual intentions layered onto this commonplace invocation of the divine, foremost of which is the last intention of William Pratt; Caxton situates his edition as the poignant fulfillment and material realization of Pratt’s final wishes. Further, the prologue announces yet a third sense of intention, the doubled ‘entent’ of both Caxton and Pratt in producing a book that will continue to work its spiritual profit among new readers. ‘Maners’ here do not stand as external markers of social class, but rather reveal the interior intentions and spiritual truths of the edition’s producers and readers. Caxton’s prologue demonstrates the central arguments of the previous chapter: it establishes the work of printed book production as an expression of ethical agency, one marked by an insistence on spiritual rather than financial profit, and on the use of the printer’s own identity to underwrite the edition’s moral value. But the Book of Good Maners also provides a specific term, entente, 2 

For this reading, see Amos, ‘“For Manners Make Man”’, p. 45. It is Caxton’s own translation of the French Livre de bonnes moeurs, a text originally composed in the early fifteenth century by the Augustinian humanist Jacques Legrand. Legrand’s text itself is a redaction of his earlier Sophiligium, and the abbreviated version was translated three times independently into English over the course of the fifteenth century. See Lindstrom, ‘The English Versions’ and ‘Some Remarks on Two English Translations’. 3 

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that moves into broader territory to take up the exercise of printers’ agency within the context of late medieval London. Indeed, the Middle English ‘entente’ and its modern equivalent, ‘intention’, offer an opportunity to historicize the concept of agency.4 For contemporary social theorists, agency is most simply defined as ‘the capacity for responsible individual action’.5 I suggest that intention offers a useful refinement and description of agented action, of what agency does. As the social historian William H. Sewell explains in his reading of agency and its active relationship to social structures, To be an agent means to be capable of exerting some degree of control over the social relations in which one is enmeshed, which in turn implies the ability to transform those social relations to some degree. As I see it, agents are empowered to act with and against others by structures: they have knowledge of the schemas that inform social life and have access to some measure of human and nonhuman resources. Agency arises from the actor’s knowledge of schemas, which means the ability to apply them to new contexts. Or, to put the same thing the other way around, agency arises from the actor’s control of resources, which means the capacity to reinterpret or mobilize an array of resources in terms of schemata other than those that constituted the array.6

Intention, as I use the term here, describes the strategic action of agency — that is, the manipulative force of agency as it seeks to reinterpret, mobilize and reveal cultural logics. The relationship of agency to intention is analogous to that of the capacity to act, and the purposeful action itself; it is not merely agency, but agency’s intentions and work in the world that recasts cultural structures and makes them visible.7 Below, I use intention as an essential complement to the theme of agency. A focus on intention, I argue, makes visible a set of crucial but often-neglected cultural structures of fifteenth-century London as these are revealed by the strategic work of printers. Intention is not only a methodological term but, as Caxton’s prologue suggests, a central ethical and spiritual concept of the late fifteenth century, and especially for the readership of the Book of Good Maners. The question of why this was so is at the heart of this chapter. Why did two mercers choose this text 4 

MED, s.v. entente, n.(1a). O’Keeffe, Stealing Obedience, p. 9. 6  Sewell, Logics of History, pp. 143–44; see also O’Keeffe, Stealing Obedience, p. 13. 7  Or, as I noted in the Introduction, tracing the agencies of print assumes not merely the existence of such agency, but its ability and interest in affecting ‘the social forms and cultural structures within which it is enmeshed’. See O’Keeffe, Stealing Obedience, p. 13. 5 

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to produce in print, and what cultural work did they hope their edition might accomplish? What were their intentions for the edition, and what can their faith that a printed religious text might represent interior entente tell us about the social structures of late medieval London, and the ability of print to impact those structures? This chapter, in short, moves from how early printers situated printed book production as an expression of ethical agency to that claim’s action within the broader cultural arena. The readership and genre of the printed Book of Good Maners provides a provocative opening to these questions. For one, it is an edition that anticipates a mercantile readership, produced by one member of the elite Mercers Company for another. This reminds us that printers were themselves part of a crucial anticipated readership: London merchants. The category of ‘mercantile readers’ at the end of the fifteenth century is a porous one. To follow Anne Sutton’s lead, merchants are those men who engaged in overseas trade, ‘the only way to make serious profits’.8 For the purposes of this chapter it is not necessary to draw very fine distinctions between the wealthy overseas traders and those who made their profits from successful English-based trade; ‘merchants’ here refers to wealthy, urban men engaged with the more complex financial instruments of late medieval commerce, and successful enough to be householders and participants in civic governance. ‘Mercantile’ acknowledges this group’s social lability; many became landowners and married into the gentry, and the elite among them exercised as much (or more) social and political influence as the less wealthy baronage.9 Caxton stands out as a member of the most elite mercantile group, the Mercers, but all the prominent early printers were similarly men whose work with books took place within London’s broader mercantile social sphere and extended beyond the business of printing. Printers were heavily involved in the business of imports, exports, and luxury goods, and were readers as well as producers of the books they printed.10 A discussion of the 8 

Sutton, ‘Merchants’, p. 7. For this basic definition of a merchant, and on Caxton’s engagements with London merchants, see Sutton, ‘Merchants’, as well as her ‘Caxton was a Mercer’, and Keiser, ‘The Mystics and the Early English Printers’. On late medieval mercantile culture, see Barron, London in the Later Middle Ages; Sutton, The Mercery of London; and Thrupp, The Merchant Class of Medi­eval London. 10  There are some exceptions to the printer-as-merchant argument, of course: the press at St Albans, for instance, was certainly not a commercial operation or, perhaps more specifically, not a very successful one. My point here, however, is that the printers who operated the larger and more influential presses were also engaged in urban mercantile work. 9 

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agency and intention of printers must embrace their status as merchants and be situated within the mercantile reception and uses of early printed books. Secondly, the Book of Good Maners reflects the lively and engaged interest of a mercantile readership in religious texts, a genre crucial to print yet underexplored in terms of its cultural uses. Religious print constitutes nearly one quarter of incunable editions, and at least 120 religious texts were produced in print in the two decades after 1500. 11 However, work on these books has tended either to look forward, to broader narratives arguing for (or rebutting) the notion that print itself was the technology that enabled the Reformation, or, alternatively, to look back to the religious struggles and repressive currents of the early fifteenth century generated around the Lollard movement.12 For instance, it is the sectarian potential of print that underlies Lotte Hellinga’s identification of Wynkyn de Worde’s pre-1500 devotional output as a ‘vanguard’ program, both innovative and risky.13 And current work on the relationship between the early press and Syon Abbey appropriately foregrounds the Bridgettine embrace of orthodox reformist movements and, later, the foundation’s resistance to the Reformation.14 Religious print, more than any other genre of print production, has thus remained embedded within the interpretive horizon of heterodoxy/ orthodoxy that is the most prominent frame for the long fifteenth century. It is at this juncture — at the specific intersection of religion, mercantile readership, and print represented by Caxton’s edition of the Book of Good Maners — that the concept of intention can provide a corrective nudge. The medieval concept of intention, as I show below, embraces the active agency of printers as they sought to shape their editions both within and against social and political structures. Moreover, exploring the resonance of intention as a 11 

See BMC xi, ‘Introduction’, pp. 36–70; and Erler, Women, Reading and Piety, pp. 116–18, where she notes that religious books (including those that were devotional) accounted for 38 per cent of English incunable production. The count of editions after 1500 is based on the titles gathered in Duff and others, Handlists of Books Printed by London Printers. 12  See here Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, pp. 367–78. Also, Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars, pp. 77–87. On the lack of scholarship on religious and specifically devotional print, see Gillespie, ‘Caxton and After’, esp. p. 313, as well as the recent corrective work by Gillespie and Powell, A Companion to the Early Printed Book in Britain. 13  Hellinga, William Caxton and Early Printing in England, p. 156. 14  Among those who explore in depth the print editions associated with Syon are Gillespie, ‘Syon and the English Market for Continental Printed Books’; da Costa, ‘From Manuscript into Print’; Powell, ‘What Caxton did to the Festial’; and Grisse, ‘“Moche Profitable unto religious persones”’.

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key ethical concept among mercantile printers and readers provides not only a nuanced intellectual context for the period but reveals a series of concerns that are far removed from the political and sectarian horizons of either Arundel’s Constitutions or the Reformation. The argument below does not pertain to every early printer, nor to every printed religious text, but instead situates the uses of print in ways that are more closely historicized and locally textured than our familiar narratives of the period. My exploration of ‘th’entente’ of Caxton and Pratt’s Book of Good Maners begins with building an extended context around the resonances of intention for London’s late medieval merchants. I find that this context is informed by religious and ethical traditions as well as political and social ones, and so my first section takes up the deep discourse concerning mercantile morality that Giacomo Todeschini has recently termed ‘theological economics’. I show that this discourse produces a specific framework for evaluating mercantile conduct that, by the fifteenth century, becomes centred upon the concept of intention. Of course, debates over the morality of mercantile work were never confined to scholastic arguments or to the pulpit, but instead were widely disseminated and influenced the cultural status of London’s merchants.15 Ethical questions regarding mercantile intention thus became ever more relevant — and political — as the complexity and importance of London trade grew over the course of the fifteenth century. My argument follows the debate over mercantile intention into the political and social spheres, and the middle sections of the chapter are devoted to the cultural resources London merchants used to represent their intentions. In the final sections I turn again to the history of material texts and to the role of manuscript and print in the on-going struggle for autonomy waged by London’s merchants across the fifteenth century. I emphasize the sparsely addressed conflict between the Crown and London’s mercantile communities — a conflict in which both sides sought to shape and represent mercantile intention. During the course of this low-intensity but significant contest, which peaked during the reigns of Richard III and Henry VII, I find that the Crown turned to the early press as an instrument to control and delimit mercantile autonomy, yet merchants continued to promote their interests through a strategic use of religious printed productions. 15  Several studies have explored the representation of merchants in medieval literature and the dynamics of market thinking and morality as shaping effects within texts, but my emphasis here on the uses of books by merchants — an approach that underscores the operation of agency — is distinct. For the latter, see Ladd, Antimercantilism in Late Medi­eval English Literature, and Farber, An Anatomy of Trade in Medi­eval Writing.

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Throughout, I assume that merchant printers and merchant readers belong to the same textual community. However, the texts I explore here do not always take the shape of material books. Instead, I focus on the full variety of discursive structures available to London merchants, and especially those that have not yet found a place in our modern scholarship on the period: the cultural practices of the guilds, but also the 1421 usury trials, guild ordinances and charters, and the legislative acts of Richard III, Henry VII, and Henry VIII. This chapter thus also expands the traditional evidence and horizons that have shaped our view of print and the fifteenth century.

Theological Contexts for Mercantile Intention In reflecting on the cultural status of mercantile work in the later fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, we might recall the witty ambiguity with which Copland disavows and then embraces his own profit motives as a bookseller and printer in Seuen Sorowes, playing on the perceived ethical blurriness of the trading professions: ‘I care not greatly, so that I nowe and than | May get a peny as wel as I can.’16 Yet even at the moment of its composition (1526), Copland’s wry, familiar caricature of the unscrupulous merchant lay alongside a deeper intellectual tradition of grappling with the boundaries of moral profit-making. This tradition of theological economics, as described by Giacomo Todeschini, is a centuries-long discourse invested in identifying the limits of legitimate commercial exchange, and the ethical character of the relationships such exchanges create between an individual and the larger community.17 Rooted in scholastic and especially Thomist thinking about value, need, profit, and use, theological economics moved up through the late medieval period through multiple routes and thinkers. These routes include the so-called Franciscan school and alternative receptions of Aristotelian thought.18 Individuals such as Jean Gerson also wrote on mercantile ethics in treatises that were widely influential.19 My interests here, 16 

Erler, Women, Reading and Piety, p. 87, ll. 89–90. Todeschini, ‘Theological Roots’. 18  On the debate around a specifically Franciscan economics, see Little, Religious Poverty and the Profit Economy, and Kaye, Economy and Nature, p. 130. 19  See especially Hobbins, Authorship and Publicity before Print, pp. 213–15. For instance, Gerson authored a widely disseminated tract on usury, De contractibus; yet this work is at least as equally concerned with theology and canon law as with the pragmatic parameters of acceptable mercantile conduct. The tract was also less widely distributed in England and Italy, and was not printed. 17 

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however, are necessarily circumscribed and best illustrated through two central thinkers, Thomas Aquinas and John Duns Scotus, and a more minor one, Johannes Nider. Together, the contributions of these three thinkers form the branch of the tradition most relevant for fifteenth-century English merchants. These three are also figures whose writing and economic thinking was demonstrably available to English merchants through print (in the case of Nider), and in the canon law tradition (Aquinas and Scotus) that form the backdrop to several of the printed editions discussed in later chapters of this book. In this section, I focus on the lexicon of terms and concepts produced by theological economics. The tradition consistently invokes practices and ideals — especially common profit, usury, and idleness — which come to function as markers of legitimate and illegitimate commercial behaviour. Yet as the tradition wrestled with increasingly complex scenarios, discerning the ethical legitimacy of mercantile conduct came to rely upon appeals to individual agency and intention. The emergence of intention as the litmus test for determining whether a merchant was acting for the common profit, for example, or was guilty of usury or idleness, is the main narrative of the history below. But theological economics is a complex discourse used in sophisticated ways, and it is worth beginning with an overview of its most basic question: the question of value.20 Value was a central preoccupation for early scholastic economic thought, which was engaged in a re-evaluation of the mechanisms that set market values for commodities. In Aristotelian thinking, value had been related strictly to individual need. Writers like Albert the Great shifted the framework of value to one of common estimation (aestimatio communis), whereby the public, social utility of a thing became the most relevant measure in assessing its market value — a social evaluation Albert termed ‘opus in communitatis usum’.21 Albert’s student, Thomas Aquinas, further recalibrated the ethical framework of value and profit to centre not on the static quality of profit but instead on the dynamic question of profit’s use: Lucrum tamen, quod est negotiationis finis, etsi in sui ratione non importet aliquid honestum vel necessarium, nihil tamen importat in sui ratione vitiosum vel virtuti contrarium. Unde nihil prohibet lucrum ordinari ad aliquem finem necessarium 20 

This overview of economic thought is drawn from Todeschini, ‘Theological Roots’, as well as Farber, An Anatomy of Trade in Medi­eval Writing; Davies, Medi­eval Market Morality; Wood, Medi­eval Economic Thought; Kaye, Economy and Nature; Langholm, Economics in the Medi­eval Schools; and Smith, Arts of Possession. 21  Kaye, Economy and Nature, pp. 72–76, 152–58. See also Smith, Arts of Possession, p. 115.

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vel etiam honestum. Et sic negotiatio licita reddetur. Sicut sum aliquis lucrum moderatum, quod negotiando quaerit, ordinat ad domus suae sustentationem vel etiam ad subveniendum indigentibus; vel etiam cum aliquis negotiation intendit propter publicam utilitatem, ne scilicet res necessariae ad vitam patriae desint et lucrum expetit, non quasi finem, sed quasi stipendium laboris.22 (Nevertheless, profit, which is the point of commerce, while it may not carry the notion of anything right or necessary, does not carry the notion of anything vicious or contrary to virtue either. There is, therefore, nothing to stop profit being subordinated to an activity that is necessary, or even right. And this is the way in which commerce can become justifiable. This is exemplified by the man who uses moderate business profits to provide for his household, to help the poor; or even by the man who conducts his business for the public good in order to ensure that the country does not run short of essential supplies, and who makes a profit as it were to compensate for his work and not for its own sake.)

This influential Thomist passage understands profit itself as value neutral, and even potentially positive through its participation in the utilitatem publicam, the common profit. Moreover, Aquinas’s emphasis on use and the public benefit of profit turns attention to the public community as a necessary context in which the ethical use of profit might emerge. For instance, even in this brief passage Aquinas identifies a range of communities that benefit from and thus legitimate profit, extending from the very local community of the household (domus) and the instance of the poor neighbour (indigens) all the way to the polity (patria). The common profit as an economic term thus becomes, from Aquinas forward, capacious enough to create a legitimating orientation for individual mercantile transactions, as well as for merchant groups seeking validation within a national context.23 The Franciscan John Duns Scotus, writing slightly later, similarly locates common profit as the legitimating orientation of economic activity, but adds an emphasis on the value of the merchant’s service to a wide-ranging social sense of community, which Scotus construes most broadly as the polity. The conflation of common profit with the polity emerges out of Scotus’s reflections on Aristotelian concepts of political authority: ‘Auctoritas vero politica, quae est supra extraneos, sive in una persona resideat sive in communitate, potest 22 

Aquinas, Summa Theologica, ed. and trans. by Lefèbure, 2a, 2ae, q. 77, a. 4, p. 229. See, for example, Aquinas, Summa Theologica, ed. and trans. by Lefèbure, 2a, 2ae, q. 77, a. 1–3, pp. 212–27. For a more full reading of the complex traditions out of which common profit emerged through Aristotle and Augustine, see Kempshall, The Common Profit in Late Medi­eval Political Thought, esp. pp. 1–25. 23 

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esse iusta ex communi consensu et electione ipsius communitatis’.24 For Scotus, then, the authority of the commonwealth state is an expression of a community’s consent, and the appropriate repository of common profit. The standard of an ethical profit for an individual is thus met if that profit is gained from an act demonstrably useful to the polity (‘habet actum utilem reipublicae’).25 Moreover, perhaps because the polity reflects communal consent, Scotus attributes responsibility for evaluating the ethical status of particular acts of trade to the political whole; it is a civic authority who is responsible for either directly rewarding those merchants whose work contributes to the national good or allowing those merchants to pursue a just reward, while the same authority is also responsible for censuring and expelling those merchants whose profit-seeking undermines or compromises the state’s interests.26 Thus, more assertively than Aquinas, Scotus sees the ethical standard of common profit as met unequivocally only at the determination of the community, a community whose authority is exercised most appropriately as the powers of a political state. Even as questions of economic licitness were answered by appealing to a sense of common profit that directed mercantile activity toward the service of the broader community, the tradition of theological economics also explored negative constructions of mercantile behaviour through the question of usury. Ancient traditions defined and prohibited usury as simply any loan in which more than the sum of the loan was expected in repayment. However, thinking around this basic prohibition produced a series of rationales, qualifications, and attendant terms that continued to develop through the late medieval period.27 For a group of scholastics, including Aquinas, the problem of usury was a primarily a problem of illicit use: money, in Thomist thought, is essentially a medium and thus meant for exchange and not to be sold in itself.28 Further, the usurious loan potentially relies on another’s duress. As Aquinas put it: He who pays usury suffers injustice not from himself but from the usurer, for granted that the usurer does not apply absolute force he nevertheless applies a cer24 

Scotus’ Political and Economic Philosophy, ed. and trans. by Wolter, pp. 33–34: ‘Political authority, however, when it is exercised by those [outside the family], whether it resides in one person or in a community, can be just by common consent and election on the part of the community.’ 25  Scotus’ Political and Economic Philosophy, ed. and trans. by Wolter, pp. 56–57. 26  Scotus’ Political and Economic Philosophy, ed. and trans. by Wolter, p. 59. 27  Kaye, Economy and Nature, pp. 80–85. 28  Aquinas, Summa Theologica, ed. and trans. by Lefèbure, 2a, 2ae, q. 78, 1, a. 7, p. 235.

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tain mixed force on him, in that the necessity of having to accept the loan imposes a serious condition so that he returns more than he is given.29

This emphasis on use reveals usury as a damaging inversion of the principles expressed in Aquinas’s earlier thought: here, the dynamic potential of utilitas is turned precisely against the possibility of being indigens of the earlier example, a turn which tidily undermines the licit orientation of profit and money toward the common good. Usury’s perversion of use, however, was only one of the rationales explored by scholastic writers. A second, and ultimately more influential, line of thinking underscored the actual operation of the usurious transaction, noting that a usurious loan created profit for the lender without any of the lender’s own investment of labour.30 Duns Scotus, for instance, in his observations about loan contracts, first refers to the Thomist position but then extends it by adding that money ‘only bears fruit because of some one’s industry, namely that of the user’, but that in the case of the usurious loan, Industria autem huius non est eius qui concedit pecuniam; ergo ille volens recipere fructum de pecunia, vult habere fructum de industria aliena, quam tamen non dedit ille alius sibi, ex hoc quod accepit mutuum ab illo alio.31 (But the industry of this user does not belong to the one who loaned the money; hence, to want to receive the fruit of the money is really the desire to have the fruit of another’s industry but which the other has not given to him.)

Understanding usury as a question of labour (or non-labour) was increasingly common in the sophisticated distinctions that developed around trade contracts. While Roman law recognized the right to lend and borrow by contract for prearranged amounts — the mutuum — in canon law such contracts were only allowed by creating a distinction between the usurious contract, and the contract which protected a person’s legitimate financial stake in what happened over the term of the loan: inter esse.32 ‘Extrinsic titles’, as they came to be 29 

De Malo, q. 13, 4, ad 7, cited from Langholm, Economics in the Medi­eval Schools, p. 247. See Diana Wood, who notes that ‘the informal definition of usury came to be making a profit without working for it’. Thinkers in this tradition include Thomas of Chobham, William of Auxerre, Albert the Great, and Richard of Middleton (Wood, Medi­eval Economic Thought, pp. 177–80). 31  Scotus’ Political and Economic Philosophy, ed. and trans. by Wolter, pp. 49–50. Also cited in Wood, Medi­eval Economic Thought, p. 179. 32  Kerridge, in Usury, Interest and the Reformation, is the contemporary scholar to insist most sharply on this distinction between usury and interest. 30 

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known, protected lenders’ interest by compensating lenders for losses emerging through the loan (damnum emergens) and for profits withheld (lucrum cessans), that is, gains the lender may have reasonably made over the term of the loan. Both of these also implicitly recognize fiscal activity as itself a kind of labour, with exertions of risk, time, and work. As the language of licit contracts developed, the illicit loan, usury, gradually became more closely associated with idleness. Indeed, over the course of the fourteenth and fifteenth decades, idleness migrated from one lexicon — the ecclesiastical debates between otium monastica and the purported otium negotiva of the new mendicant orders — into the vocabulary of mercantile ethics, where idleness became conflated with usurious practice and the non-work of the merchant lender.33 Certainly the conflation of idleness with usury is notable in Pope Leo X’s declaration at the Fifth Lateran Council, in 1515, that ‘usury means nothing else than gain or profit drawn from the use of a thing that is by its nature sterile, a profit that is acquired without labour, cost, or risk’.34 The year 1515 marks a further crucial turn in theological economics worth noting. Leo’s statement about usury was partly inspired by the Franciscan-led montes pietatis in Italy — a controversial system of pawnshops and lending operations specializing in low-interest loans for the poor.35 Leo X threw his own support behind the montes pietatis, and thus his definition of usury allows for profit as well as implicitly relying upon the intention of the loan-maker. In doing so, Leo X paralleled the thinking of Johann Eck, the German scholastic who, that same year, published the Tractates contractu quinque de centum. In this treatise, Eck argues for 5 per cent as an ethically defensible interest rate, adding a specific calculus to the central emphasis on intention in determining whether or not a loan or contract was usurious.36 But this gets a few decades ahead of our narrative. By the mid-fifteenth century, common profit and usury were functioning in canon law and common practice as the ethical parameters of mercantile conduct — common profit as the legitimating horizon of commercial exchange, and usury as its opposite, the negative pole of market morality. But these two 33  On otium monastica, see Vickers, ‘Leisure and Idleness in the Renaissance’; le Goff, Time, Work, & Culture in the Middle Ages. 34  Wood, Medi­eval Economic Thought, p. 204. 35  For a quick synopsis see Wood, Medi­eval Economic Thought, pp. 202-5. The first of these was founded in Perugia in 1464. 36  Jones, God and the Moneylenders.

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were increasingly imbricated with a third concept: intention. While individual intention had a role in theological economics from an early moment, by the fifteenth century the issue of merchant intention began to claim an increasingly central ethical space. Indeed, this is the precisely the space within theological economics where a fifteenth-century sense of mercantile agency becomes intriguingly visible, and increasingly active. Like so many aspects of theological economics, the thread of mercantile intentio emerges from Aquinas, for whom subjective intention played a necessary role in discriminating between activity for individual or for common profit: ‘Quamvis et ipsum lucrum possit licite intendi, non sicut ultimus finis, sed propter alium finem necessarium vel honestum, ut dictum est.’37 Thomist thinking was easily translated forward. The writer of the Fasciculus Morum, a preachers’ handbook circulating widely in England throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth century, offered this synthesis of Aquinas and twelfth-century canonists on the subject of intention and usury: Unde nota pro omnibus istis et aliis quod grat oblatum et acceptum non inducit usuram, dum tamen non sit intencio corrupta, quia sola spes sive intencio facit usuram. Qui ergo sub tali spe mutuant, quicquid supra sortem acceperint, usura est.38 (Notice, then, that in all these and other cases, what is freely given and freely accepted does not lead to usury, as long as there is no corrupt intention, for usury always rests upon such expectation, whatever profit he makes is usury.)

Over the course of the fifteenth century, the role of intention became ever more central to theological thinking about commercial morality, and by the 1460s the question of intention underwrote the montes pietatis, mentioned above, and began to play a more central role in the genre of pragmatic manuals concerning commercial practice.39 One of these, the De Contractibus mercatorum, composed by the Dominican Johannes Nider, is particularly relevant to our story of print because its material history closely follows the trade itinerary of English traders like the Merchant Adventurers — and like Caxton and Pratt. 37  Aquinas, Summa Theologica, ed. and trans. by Lefèbure, 2a, 2ae, q.77, a.4, pp. 22829: ‘Even profit-making can become justifiable, as we have just seen, provided this is not the ultimate aim and is meant to fulfill some necessary and worthy purpose’. 38  Fasciculus Morum, ed. and trans. by Wenzel, pp. 352–53. 39  Todeschini, ‘Theological Roots’, makes this point about the importance of commercial manuals for conveying the practical application of commercial morality, and for Johannes Nider specifically.

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First issued in 1468 by Ulrich Zell in Cologne, the tract was quickly reprinted in five more incunable editions, in Antwerp and Esslingen, and circulated throughout the Low Countries and the series of merchant hubs occupied by the international trading community. Nider’s work is a deeply pragmatic rumination on the contracts governing not just loans, but ethical mercantile activity more broadly. The treatise argues for the centrality of intention from the very first chapter, which is devoted to the relationship between individual intention and the just sale: for a merchant, a seller, to engage in a just act of sale, it is required that he must habitually have the intention, if he has truly recognized that a thing was not as it should have been […] to refund or correct the deal in reasonable fashion.

Moreover, we see slightly later that for Nider, the responsibility for determining whether or not profit is ethical can only rest with the merchant himself: a merchant ought to receive with caution a profit reasonably apportioned to the nobility, seriousness and usefulness of the care, exertions, industry, and costs which he undertakes, as well as with thought to the size, number, and value of the services which he performs for me. I say ‘with caution’, because as judge of his own case, he ought often to be an object of suspicion to himself when he has to appraise values.40

Nider not only reminds his readers of the labour that constitutes mercantile work — the care, exertions, industry, and costs of doing business — but also emphasizes that the necessary moral responsibility for upholding ethical business practice can only reside in the conscience of the good merchant. In other words, it is not Nider’s reader who is asked to exercise caution or scepticism about mercantile practice; rather, the merchant himself polices the boundaries of ethical mercantile behaviour. To make the practice of doing so visible — to be publically cautious and well intentioned — was the burden of the fifteenthcentury merchant. In some ways, the subjective space that intention creates in relation to the external market practices which it helps to legitimate is comparable to other late medieval social and theological situations that ultimately rely on the unknowable alignments between inner intention and outer action — confession, penance, labour, and indigency among them. But the bifurcation that intention created in economic thinking was also powerfully instrumental. As Joel Kaye has suggested, the external titles — damnum emergens and lucrum cessans — that 40 

Nider, On the Contracts of Merchants, ed. by Shuman, p. 19.

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permitted exceptions to the strict, arithmetical definition of usury were a way of insisting that a loan should be made without hope of receiving further gain, while at the same time recognizing instances where a lender was entitled to precisely such gain. This doubled thinking insists on ‘an idealized ethical economic stance’ even as it proposes a pragmatic compromise to that same ideal.41 Unlike the penitent or the beggar, then, whose interior motives were constantly vulnerable to the scepticism of idealized external expectations, intention provided the merchant with an idealized interior motive for a suspect external practice. The gap between the interior intentions of merchants and mercantile commercial practice was precisely the space exploited by both England’s fifteenth-century merchant communities and those seeking to control those same communities. As the next section demonstrates, the representation of mercantile intention — specifically through scenarios concerning common profit, usury, and idleness — became a potent instrument for the expression as well as the constraint of mercantile agency and political autonomy.

Representing Mercantile Intention in Fifteenth-Century London As noted above, hostility toward mercantile work was a persistent presence in late medieval urban English life. This section primarily addresses the cultural arenas in which that hostility was directed at (and countered by) London’s merchant community. The place of England’s layered legal system, only lightly explored in terms of its influence upon merchants, is of particular interest. So too is London, which was the centre of early English print, and in the fifteenth century was a city whose articulated interests were often metonymous with those of its governing mercantile elite.42 And while my emphasis will be on textual forms writ broadly and not always as material books, there are a number of significant bookish intersections, especially around the printing of the legal statutes discussed near the end of this chapter. But we might begin with the anti-mercantilism of a text that, although quite widely circulated in manuscript throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, was never selected by England’s early printers: the Fasciculus Morum.43 The Fasciculus Morum dis41 

Kaye, Economy and Nature, pp. 82–85, and p. 83 n. 19. For the mercantile governance of London, see Barron, London in the Later Middle Ages, and Sutton, The Mercery of London. 43  For more comprehensive treatment of the theme of anti-mercantilism, see Ladd, Antimercantilism in Late Medi­eval English Literature. 42 

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plays a quite open scepticism about the intentions that motivate commercial activity. In one passage, the text not only echoes the familiar biblical prejudice of Ecclesiasticus 26. 28 but brings that patristic suspicion forward into an ominously timeless present tense, cautioning readers: [De] prodicione autem et dolo et mendacio, que specialiter consistunt in emendis et vendendis, est sciendum quod dolendum est quod vix sunt mercatores moderni iam in aliquo factum suum facere scientes nisi fiat fraus, in emendo vituperando quod melius est, et in vendendo nimis laudando quod peius est; et hoc sive mensurando sive ponderando sive quicquid aliud faciendo, ut sic propter lucrum tale false proximos decipiant.44 (With regard to treachery and tricks and lies that occur particularly in buying and selling, we should realize how deplorable it is that merchants in our days can hardly carry out a single business transaction without fraud, whether they degrade below its value what they want to buy, or extol beyond its worth what they want to sell, so that for the sake of gain they deceive their neighbours with their falsehood.)

Here, in this depiction of wicked mercatores moderni, mercantile enterprise on any scale is linked to individual mendacity and an on-going violation of the social trust. Spread through sermons and handbooks like the Fasciculus, such blanket condemnations had, on the one hand, little practical impact on the busy commercial life of late medieval England; on the other hand, texts like these did keep active a range of cultural suspicions around commerce, suspicions that prompted an on-going response from England’s mercantile communities. Indeed, it is the rest of this chapter’s argument that the project of representing their interior motivations became a central part of English mercantile identity in the fifteenth century: London merchants used a range of cultural structures and textual forms to refute charges of usury, publically demonstrate their usefulness to a common-profit ideal, assert their ability to police the ethical boundaries of trade, and otherwise express their commitments to spiritual over financial incentives. The powerful medieval craft guilds were instrumental in constructing mercantile identity and wonderfully adept at manipulating available cultural structures to underscore the legitimacy of mercantile intention. These guilds drew generously from the language of theological economics. As Lianna Farber has noted, nearly all the London craft guilds purported to work in the service of 44 

Fasciculus Morum, ed. and trans. by Wenzel, pp. 344–45. For additional examples, see pp. 155, 165, 343–47, 373, 437, 459, 557, 697.

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the common profit, and their founding documents typically record a commitment to remedy the kind of mendacity and communal disruptions identified in texts like the Fasciculus Morum.45 The skinners, for instance, request a charter on the grounds that a regulated skinners company would, ‘for the advantage of the people of our realm’, prevent the deceptive practice of mixing old and new furs. 46 Similarly, the London ordinance granted to the glovers promises to end the sale of gloves of rotten and bad leather ‘to the great profit of all the common people’.47 These rather grand assertions about the relevance of gloves and fur for the ‘common profit’ of the larger English community, repeated on behalf of nearly every trade commodity in the charters and ordinances of London craft guilds, became part of the public identity of corporations and individual guild members alike. It was an identity carefully tended, cultivated, and tirelessly publicized. The prominent career of Richard Whittington, a wealthy mercer who served three terms as mayor of London, attests to the sincerity with which the ideal of the common profit was held: during his life he was noted for his public charitable works, and upon his death, in 1423, his bequest was used by the Mercers to establish an almshouse, a college, and the Guildhall Library.48 As Anne Sutton observes, Whittington’s charity is notable not for its originality but rather for its exceptional size and impact within the city of London.49 The visibility and legacy of that charity realized what the language of the guild ordinances promised; that is, the conversion of mercantile wealth into the common profit of London. As a later poet marvelled, ‘what profit hath been of his riches.’50 Thus the good intentions of English merchants were represented through the lives and deeds of exemplary individuals, as well as at the collective level through the institutional frameworks of guilds. But perhaps the most potent, yet under-explored forum for both the representation and control of mercantile intention is the civic legal arena of fifteenthcentury London. Late medieval legal discourse, too, drew upon the lexicon of theological economics and focused closely upon the concepts of usury, idle45 

Farber, An Anatomy of Trade in Medi­eval Writing, pp. 161–64. Memorials of London, pp. 153–54. 47  Memorials of London, p. 245. 48  Appleford and Watson, ‘Merchant Religion’, p. 206. For an incisive look at Whittington, see Appleford, ‘The Good Death of Richard Whittington’, and Learning to Die in London. 49  Sutton, The Mercery of London, p. 163. 50  Libelle of Englishe Policye, l. 490; cited in Sutton, The Mercery of London, p. 161. 46 

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ness, and the common profit in adjudicating mercantile morality. Throughout most (but not all, as we will see) of the fifteenth century, the complexly layered English legal structure provided an unparalleled venue for public acts of selfdefinition and discipline on the part of London’s mercantile community. The London usury trials of 1421 are a notable example of how merchants strategically used the legal arena in the years before the press. The following discussion provides a fresh analysis of these trials which, while little known, provide crucial context and evidence for an understanding of print’s later intersection with mercantile interests and uses of the law. In brief, the ‘event’ of the 1421 trials comprised an unusual series of cases over the course of a single summer. Between May and August of 1421, under the mayoralty of William Cauntebrigge, the London Plea Rolls record twenty-four cases of usury brought before the city’s civic tribunals.51 Defendants included members of the city’s most influential guilds — fishmongers, vintners, grocers, and mercers — and the cases themselves involved large sums of money; this was a prosecution of usury in large-scale business practice, instead of the more frequently remarked issue of usury in cases of small loans to individuals. By August, convictions had been achieved in twenty-one of the twenty-four cases, an unusually high rate. Punishments included restitution, fines, and imprisonment, but it seems that apprentices rather than the more prominent defendants bore the harsher terms. Yet once the summer ended, the spate of trials seemed to leave no lasting effect on either the mercantile community or London business practices; there were only four more single cases tried outside ecclesiastical courts before the Tudors. These trials have been cited as evidence of both a pervasive English antimercantilism, and old-fashioned score-settling within London’s mercantile factions.52 However, my reading suggests that the event marked a distinct cultural use of the legal system — a deliberate manipulation of the city’s available cultural structures — by London’s mercantile community. The London usury trials were engineered by the city’s leading merchants, and, moreover, what was on trial was not only usury but the issue of mercantile entente itself. There are two telling anomalies that support this reading. Most notably, these cases were tried in civic courts, which marks a sharp departure from the traditional eccle51 

The following basic outline of the usury trials is informed by the work of Seabourne, ‘Controlling Commercial Morality’. The Plea Roll cited is Roll A49, Calendar of the Plea and Memoranda Rolls, pp. 95–109. 52  On the trials as part of a pervasive antimercantilism, see Sutton, The Mercery of London, pp. 163–64; Farber, An Anatomy of Trade in Medi­eval Writing, concludes that these trials were part of internecine guild rivalry (pp. 164–69).

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siastical jurisdiction over usury upheld in English law. Indeed, the civic form of these trials — the tribunal form itself, the justification of civic jurisdiction, and the London-controlled documents of the trials — together attest to a powerful moment where London merchants appropriated the legal structures through which mercantile intention was defined and adjudicated. As the records note, the 1421 usury cases went before carefully configured tribunals consisting of the mayor, four commoners, and between six and fourteen aldermen. The recorded names suggest that all of these positions were held by members of the city’s mercantile elite.53 The tribunal composition itself pointedly underscored that the trials were an extension of a legal conversation about usury conducted between the Crown and London from the mid-fourteenth century forward, and it is important to understand this background. By the fourteenth century, political concern about the practice of usury in England, as elsewhere in Europe, was on the wane. Indeed, Edward III’s Parliament of 1341 acknowledged the Church’s priority in trying cases of usury, emphasizing that cases of living usurers belonged to the ecclesiastical courts precisely because usury was a spiritual, ethical matter: acorde est qe le roi eit la conissance des usurers mortz, et les ordinaires de usurers vifs. Et ce par cause q’ils ount afaire compulsions as ditz usurers vifs defair restitucion des usures q’ils ount malement pris, come autrement coreccion de lour almes ne put estre fait.54 (it is agreed that the king shall have cognisance of deceased usurers, and the ordinaries of living usurers. And this is because they have to force the said living usurers to make restitution of the usury which they have evilly taken, as otherwise their souls cannot be corrected.)

Yet Londoners voiced a different perspective on their responsibility to judge such matters, and the city records trace a consistent series of pleas and petitions to the Crown for jurisdiction over usury, pleas that highlight the language of common profit in relation to London’s mercantile community. The most productive of these was brought to Edward III in 1365, where the Londoners claimed ‘grauntz meschefe esclandres & damages’ to the city on account of usury, and were answered by a royal writ that effectively ceded authority over usury to the London leadership.55 The result was a document drawn up and 53 

See Calendar of the Plea and Memoranda Rolls, esp. p. 98. Edward III: April, 1341, item 33, in The Parliament Rolls of Medi­eval England (online) 55  Letter-Book G, fol. 117, in Calendar of Letter-Books of the City of London. Quoted in Seabourne, ‘Controlling Commercial Morality’, p. 132 . 54 

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issued by civic leaders — not royal ones — as a London ordinance, entitled Ordinatio contra usurarios. This ordinance sets up an elaborate and careful system of oversights and penalties, including detailed forms for civic tribunals to deal with offenders. The ordinance justifies its claims by framing usury as destructive to the spiritual and financial profits of both London and England: Qe plus verroiement serroit appelle ‘meschaunce’, qar ele perte lonhour et lalme de chevisour, et ravise les biens et la teysance de celuy qi semble ester chevyz, et destruit tout manere de droit et leal merchandise, par quele, sibien en toute la terre come la dite cite, deussent principalement estre sustenuz et meyntenuz.56 (It [usury] might more truly be called wickedness, seeing that it ruins the honour and soul of the agent, and sweeps away the goods and property of him who appears to be accommodated, and destroys all manner of right and lawful traffic, whereby, as well throughout all the land as the said city, they ought principally to be upheld and maintained.)

This ordinance became a prized precedent, one that was invoked again by the city in 1391 with the Declaratio usurae, a ‘clarification’ of usury as well as a renewal of the city’s authority to investigate and penalize usurers.57 It is within the context of these precedents that the tribunals of 1421 take place. Indeed, in 1421 the Plea Rolls record a moment when the mayor, aldermen, and commons were called to defend their right to conduct the trials in front of the King’s Council at Westminster.58 The collective reply of the city’s merchant leaders painstakingly retraces the authorities granted by the ordinances, and invokes the 1365 writ and Ordinatio contra usurarios. London’s merchant leadership thus claims an authority over usury that is materially documented, but also one derived directly from the Crown. The very procedures of the 1421 tribunals thus reinscribed the authority of Londoners over and against that of the Crown, declaring through both performance and written record the ability of London merchants to police and maintain their own economic and ethical boundaries.

56 

Munimenta Gildhallae Londoniensis, i, 344; translation from Liber Albus, trans. by Riley, p. 319. 57  Munimenta Gildhallae Londoniensis, i, 399; translation from Liber Albus, trans. by Riley, p. 344. 58  The struggle of London’s civic leaders to maintain civic jurisdiction over the matter of usury in 1421 is detailed in Seabourne, ‘Controlling Commercial Morality’, p. 118..

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If the civic setting of the trials is a telling act of mercantile self-assertion and community definition, equally so are the contents of the trials themselves. Unusually extensive records of these trials cumulatively demonstrate rather scant actual harm to the broader London citizenry; these are cases between merchants, and sometimes between their apprentices. There are a few cases where it seems loans were being made to fellow merchants who sought them ‘out of anxiety and necessity’ — precisely the kind of violation of use identified by Aquinas. But the large majority of the cases allege false chevisance — that is, usury disguised through disproportionate prices — and their adjudication therefore relies on assessments of individual intention. Given the lenient penalties, it seems most merchants on trial were found to have good intentions. Indeed, the only real outcome seems to be the memory of the event itself, a documentary record, and the traces of a collective mercantile voice loudly protesting against usury. These were, in the end, trials of merchants by merchants, public events that were orchestrated and closely supervised by prominent London businessmen who pointedly used existing structures to lay claim to a doubled sense of intention: the efficacy of their intentions to police and patrol usurious intentions within their own community. The merchant community’s multiple bids to represent their own intentions — through the guilds, the public actions of representative individuals, and community actions like the usury trials of 1421 — are striking not only because of the concerted focus on common profit and usury to emphasize the role of intention in adjudicating ethical commercial conduct, but also because these are instances of merchants using and shaping the very structures within which mercantile intention itself is made visible. It is through these strategic uses that we might construe a historicized sense of agency at work within the particular ethical horizons of the fifteenth-century urban English merchant.

Merchants, the Crown, and London Texts: Conflict in the Legal and Political Arenas Material texts — and the mercantile trade in books — played an essential role in a more overtly political struggle to characterize the intentions of both merchant readers and merchant book producers. As discussed in Chapter 1, earlier productions like the common-profit manuscripts constitute key sites through which London merchants displayed their good intentions in books — for example, in using the material instantiation of a text like Hilton’s Scale of Perfection to demonstrate the conversion of individual financial profits into

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a spiritual common profit. But the role of the material book was by no means fixed. Indeed, later in the century it was the printed text that constrained and threatened the mercantile community’s own presentation of its good intentions — although, as I argue at the end of this chapter, London printers and their merchant readers claimed religious textual production as an alternate venue through which to express mercantile intention and agency. In reading the work of merchant printers for their merchant readers, it is it is crucial to emphasize again the overlap between the representation of mercantile intention, and what Caxton describes as his printerly entente: both printers and their mercantile readers sought to promote their business activities as beneficial for both producer and consumer, and to claim a morally responsible agency. The savvy expressions of mercantile intention and agency emerging through the first half of the fifteenth century were dramatically resituated after the reign of Edward IV. Even though English merchants encountered no small amount of public scepticism and hostility over the 1400s, the relationship of mercantile communities with the Crown was amicable and often friendly. Edward IV, for instance, cultivated notably comfortable ties to England’s mercantile elite in a number of cities including London. Not only had Edward been personally invested in mercantile exploration and innovation, but he relied on the leading London merchants especially for political and financial support. In return, as Charles Ross has noted, Edward ‘courted, honoured, flattered and rewarded the leading London merchants more assiduously than any king before him’.59 Yet the span of years from 1485 until the Reformation saw significant changes in the relationship between the Crown and London merchants, changes signaled in two crucial shifts that used material texts, and specifically printed texts, as vehicles to assert Crown control over London merchant communities. First, both Richard III and the first two Tudors demonstrated a fresh legislative interest in topics of commercial morality — that is, usury, idleness, and the common profit — as expressed in the lengthy texts of their statutes. Secondly, all three of these monarchs made strong innovations in the material form of legislative authority as they moved the public records of Parliament from manuscript to print. These shifts begin during the brief, tumultuous reign of Richard III. When Richard III claimed the throne, he quickly found that the mercantile support enjoyed by his predecessor was not easily transferable. The example of Buckingham’s Rebellion in the fall of 1483 made that clear; many of London’s leading merchants, including the prominent bookmen William Caxton and John Russhe, were connected to this short-lived initial uprising 59 

Ross, Edward IV, pp. 351–70, at p. 351.

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against Richard III. Richard III’s response was to make what seemed like an overture to London’s merchant community, represented by the statutes of his sole Parliament in 1484.60 The status of foreign trade was of particular import to London merchants and involved a complex knot of long-standing royal ties to Italian houses that was in constant tension with the vastly unpopular Italian presence in London. Richard III addressed the Italian situation specifically through a lengthy bill that offered native trade protections against the Italian merchant communities resident in London. In some ways the resident Italians were a relatively easy target: they were already a focal point of English xenophobia and a scapegoat for English economic problems. The bill seeks to both limit imports of foreign crafted goods and protect the local English trade by insisting that aliens use English manufacturers.61 Anne Sutton has noted that this legislation was likely unenforceable; however, even so, it records a royal position that seems calculated to soothe Londoners, and especially London’s merchants.62 The bill’s apparent overtures to English mercantile interests, however, are entirely undone by the attachment of the well-known proviso providing an exemption to those involved in the book trade. The nuanced political and economic context of this legislation and its meaning for print has been explored by William Kuskin; my interests here extend to the discursive register of the intersection between law, merchants, and print, an intersection that is best revealed by looking again closely at the language preserved in the record of Richard.63 The lengthy bill against the resident Italian traders begins with a series of framing claims against the moral conduct of merchants from all corners of Italy. An important but so far little-remarked part of their effectiveness is the way these claims suggest serious moral breaches of commercial morality. For instance, in the opening passages of the bill, the petitioners accuse Italians of hoarding goods to drive up prices, keeping merchandise ‘in their said warehouses and cellers deceyvably pak, medle and kepe unto the tyme the prices therof been greatly enhaunced for their most lucre’. This accusation carries with 60 

Richard III: January 1484, item 27, in The Parliament Rolls of Medi­eval England (online). See Given-Wilson, ‘General Introduction’, in The Parliament Rolls of Medi­eval England (online). 62  Sutton and Visser-Fuchs, Richard III’s Books, pp. 243–64, at p. 249. 63  Richard III: January 1484, item 27, in The Parliament Rolls of Medi­eval England (online). For a treatment of the Parliament as it was recorded in the printed statute, see Kuskin, ‘“Onely Imagined”’, esp. pp. 209–20. 61 

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it two strong ethical condemnations. First, such practices harm the common profit and the community, as underscored by thinkers from Duns Scotus to Nider. There are echoes between the bill and this passage from Duns Scotus condemning the individualistic profit motives of hoarding: ut scilicet illi qui nec transferunt nec conservant nec eorum industria melio ratur res venalis, nec certificatur aliquis alius simplex de valore rei emendae, sed modo emit, ut statim sine omnibus istis condicionibus requisitis vendat, iste esset exterminandus a republica, vel exulandus: et vocatur ille in gallico regratier quia prohibet immediatem communtationem volentium emere.64 (but those who neither import, export, conserve, improve by their industry, or set any fixed price for the value of what they offer for sale. Rather they buy up directly for immediate sale to corner the market and ignore all these conditions for doing a legitimate business. The French call these hucksters, who should be immediately banished from the country.)

But even more than these charges of huckstering and damage to the community is the spectre of mercantile work as a dangerous misuse of time. The Italian merchant who packs, stores, and keeps a good ‘unto the tyme’ that prices rise ultimately derives a profit from time rather than from his own labour. This particular kind of profiting through the use of time was long prohibited in canon law and one of the hallmarks of usury. Also linked to — but not quite constituting — usury is the bill’s second assertion that the dealings of the Italians are furtive, involving ‘many private and secrete contracts and bargains with the same people as to their great profit and benefit and to the intolerable harm of your said subjects’.65 As the petition gains momentum, these insinuations about secrecy and the misuse of time are soon married to a more charged discourse about mercantile non-labour, expressed at length in the bill’s key passage: 64 

Scotus’ Political and Economic Philosophy, ed. and trans. by Wolter, pp. 58-59. On the injury inflicted by hoarders on the larger community, see also Nider, On the Contracts of Merchants, ed. by Shuman, Rule 19 (p. 45) and Rule 7: ‘Moreover, anyone at all who lives in any community is bound as much by reason of that divinely enjoined charity as by reason of material advantages, namely comfort, defense, and similar things which he has from it [the community], to be useful to that same body in accordance with his status, and most of all not to be harmful to it […]. From these premises it becomes evident that it is unlawful for some men to buy up all the stock of grain or pepper in order that afterward they may be able at their pleasure to sell dearer’ (p. 18). 65  Richard III: January 1484, item 27, in The Parliament Rolls of Medi­eval England (online).

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[The Italians] wilnot take uppoun theym any laborious occupacion, as cartyng and plowynge and other like besynes, but use makyng of clothe and other handcraftis and easy occupacions, and brynge and convey from the parties of beyonde the see greate substaunce of wares and merchaundises unto faires and merkettis and all other places of youre realme at their pleasure, and there theym selle aswell by retaille as otherwise as frely as any of youre said subgiettes useth for to do, to the greate hurte and empoveryssyng of youre said subgiettes; and in nowise woll suffre nor take any of youre subgiettes to werk with theym, but they onely take in to their service people borne in their owne countreis, wherby your said subgiettes, for lacke of occupacion, fall to idelnesse and been theves, beggers, vagabundes and people of vicous lyvyng, to the greate trouble of your said highnesse and of all youre said realme.66

It is here that the bill fully reanimates the anti-mercantilism of texts like the Fasciculus Morum, and it does so by collapsing the image of London merchant communities with the charge of dangerous idleness. The movement of the passage parses ‘work’ into two categories that map modes of labour onto a hierarchy that prioritizes moral over economic value. At the top of this hierarchy, and at the beginning of the passage, are the ‘laborious’, specifically agrarian, tasks of carting and plowing. These activities solely constitute ‘busyness’, which emerges as the moral opposite of the socially degenerative ‘idleness’ named at the end of the passage. The activity of trade is introduced, by contrast, as a type of non-labour. ‘Bringing and conveying’ are not work but suspect leisure (‘easy occupations’), and the import and export of goods, and exchange between the ‘parties from beyond the sea’, creates only a social chaos that produces, in turn, a ‘lack of occupacion’ for the native English labourer. The aggregate ‘idleness’ at the end of the passage is represented as the root of England’s social instability and unrest, and ‘idleness’ becomes a social, economic, and moral disruption threatening England and the English. As this complaint points out, idleness is a disease with a pointedly mercantile etiology, troubling in its capacity to spread outside the merchant community, and suspiciously close in character to usury.67 Perhaps what is most striking about this complaint, however, is the contradiction of Richard’s response, which is attached to the record as the royal proviso mentioned above. In answering the complaint of his subjects, Richard assents but adds the now-famous exemption for England’s bookmen: 66 

‘Richard III: January 1484, item 27, in The Parliament Rolls of Medi­eval England (online). For further discussion on mercantile non-labour, and the specific contexts of Richard III’s statute in relation to other legislation problematizing mercantile occupations, see Robertson, The Laborer’s Two Bodies, pp. 81–89. 67 

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Soit fait come il est desire. Provided alwey that this acte, or any part therof, or any other acte made or to be made in this present parliament, in nowise extende or be prejudiciall, any lette, hurte or impediment to any artificer or merchaunt straungier, of what nacioun or contrey he be or shalbe, of and for bryngyng in to this realme, or sellyng by retaill or otherwise, of any maner bokes writtene or imprynted, or for the inhabitynge within the said realme for the same intent, or to any writer, lympner, bynder or imprynter of such bokes as he hath or shall have to sell by wey of merchaundise, or for their abode in the same reame for the excercisyng of the said occupacions; this acte or any parte therof notwithstondyng.68

A close reading of this proviso reveals that even while it offers an ostensible royal protection to the book trade, and to English merchants associated with that trade, it also works to undermine and contradict that same trade (albeit without the overt restrictions that were imposed by later kings). As Chris Given-Wilson notes, a more appropriate place for the proviso would have been at the conclusion of a complaint recorded later, one more strongly related to protections for London merchants.69 Instead, attached to this charged complaint against the Italians, the proviso singles out English bookmen as a category comprising many legal aliens. Indeed, the simple juxtaposition of the book trade proviso against the lengthy complaints about mercantile labour creates a potentially dangerous space for London’s native as well as alien merchant printers. It puts within too-easy recollection Caxton’s initial wonder and enthusiasm at the erased labour of printed book production, for books ‘begonne in oon day and also fynysshid in oon day’, and the international origins of so many of London’s pressmen: Wynkyn of Woerden, near Leiden; Richard Pynson of Normandy; Julian Notary, from Vannes in Brittany; William de Machlinia, of Mechelen in Brabant. Pragmatically, too, the proviso creates a substantial loophole for Italian and other alien merchants, since the book trade was markedly diffuse. For instance, Paul Needham’s study of the London Petty Customs Rolls between the 1460s and 1492 finds at least twenty-three merchants associated with fifty-eight book cargoes — cargoes that frequently included clothes, furs, and a range of other merchandise.70 In addition, Venice remained the leading 68 

Richard III: January 1484, proviso to item 27, in The Parliament Rolls of Medi­eval England (online). 69  See Given-Wilson, ‘General Introduction’, in The Parliament Rolls of Medi­eval England, ed. by Given-Wilson et al. 70  Needham, ‘The Customs Rolls as Documents for the Printed-Book Trade in England’, p. 153.

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source of imported printed books, with Rome and Milan also significant contributors.71 If Richard III intended to protect the current London presses, or even London merchants more broadly, his proviso instead created a wide-open side door to London markets. At once, then, the combined bill and proviso drew London’s bookmen into proximity with a full-throated indictment of mercantile labour, while also offering a lucrative outlet for continued alien economic freedoms so long as foreign merchants included books in their cargoes, bringing more competition to a fledgling London industry. Rather than supporting mercantile interests, Richard III’s proviso is a discursive and practical challenge to the interests of London merchants, and one that is staged through the trade in material texts.72 Richard III’s statute makes one further intervention into the intersection between merchants and textual expression; this statute was the first to appear in print.73 Up until 1484, the sessions of Parliament were recorded in the manuscript rolls, and then organized as statutes translated into law French for dissemination in manuscript copies to the sheriff of every English county for public proclamation. Richard III maintained the tradition of translating his statute into law French, but it was his innovation to have it printed in London, at William de Machlinia’s press. As Kathleen Pantzer notes, the decision to maintain the custom of law French was a curious one; the law French creates a document quickly reproduced, yet ‘impenetrable to the ordinary citizen’.74 But if we are willing to move away from thinking of the press merely through its capacity to reproduce, and shift our gaze instead to the merchant printers using those presses — and to the educated merchant readers who would be affected by the legislation — a more subtle and interesting dynamic emerges. The moment Machlinia releases the statute marks a deliberately disingenuous communication between Richard III and the London mercantile community. Machlinia and his fellow London merchants would have been among the few 71  Ford, ‘Importation of Printed Books in England and Scotland’, p. 189. See also, in that same volume, Wakelin, ‘Humanism and Printing’, p. 235, for Theodoric Rood’s verses against the Venetian printed trade, see his Eloquentissimae Phalaridis tyranny epistolae (1485, STC 19827). 72  For a similar reading with very different conclusions, see Kuskin, ‘“Onely Imagined”’, p. 210: ‘where the 1484 act regulates alien labour in London, the proviso deregulates it; when combined, these two statements articulate a contradictory stance toward English production, which itself is compressed into an actual product, de Machlinia’s printed statute’. 73  Statutes of I Richard III, printed by William de Machlinia (1984, STC 9347). 74  Pantzer, ‘Printing the English Statutes’, pp. 71 and 75.

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men (apart from the legal class) able and interested in reading 1 Richard III. These readers would have been confronted with a folio volume that, in its very material form as a printed text, spoke to a new royal interest and control over London textual production, control over the discourse of theological economics, and control over the city’s mercantile community. Not only did the statute reinforce negative perceptions of mercantile morality with its open suspicion of merchant idleness and ill-intentions, but it communicated the power of the Crown to control (and penalize) merchant trade interests. That Richard III issued his statute through a textual form that was owned and operated by London merchants — the press — suggests that the Crown, too, had a savvy investment in and purchase upon London’s relevant cultural structures. For Richard III’s statute, neither London’s merchants as a whole, nor the printers specifically, seem to have had a ready response or counterclaim. The new character of the relationship between print, the Crown, and London’s mercantile elite was not undone by the accession of Henry VII but instead was reconfigured and consolidated. There were obvious key differences in Henry VII’s reign: Henry VII had far less need for the financial support of London merchants than his predecessors, a fact which enabled him to embark at an early moment on an effective project of centralization. Henry VII’s more authoritative style of governance also saw the liberties of cities, and especially the fair degree of autonomy enjoyed by London, dramatically curtailed. 75 Further, Henry VII expressed a new confidence in the capacity of Parliament to express royal will, a confidence which can be seen in his renewal of the statute as a more direct instrument of sovereign authority.76 Provocatively enough for many of his subjects, what this meant in real terms was a program of enforcing a series of long-dormant penal statutes, and especially ones entailing fines payable to the Crown. This fresh attention to the letter of the law was accompanied by financial incentives for the citizenry to help identify violations. (While this last technique was not Henry VII’s innovation, he enthusiastically embraced it.) This newly vigorous interest in statute law was thus experienced by many as intrusive and threatening to the kind of social cohesiveness that united the nation’s stronger urban communities. Further, Henry VII’s independence from the financial support of London merchants was reinforced by his own scepticism about the group’s political 75  See Barron, London in the Later Middle Ages, and Horowitz, ‘“Contrary to the liberties of this city”’. 76  See Baker, The Oxford History of the Laws of England, pp. 76–77; and Cavill, ‘The Enforcement of the Penal Statutes’.

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affiliations. He ascended the throne amidst deep suspicions regarding the Low Countries as a harbour for Yorkist supporters and plots — suspicions which rapidly spread to London merchants with their obvious alliances, connections, reliance upon, and enthusiasm for trade with Bruges, Antwerp, Ghent, and Louvain. Over the thirty years between 1490 and 1520, the interests of English merchants and their king became even more overtly misaligned.77 One of the many flashpoints between Henry VII and London’s merchants occurred in 1493 when, as the threat from Perkin Warbeck became more fully realized, Henry VII began to constrict trade between England and Emperor Maximilian’s lands. He issued a series of embargoes on trade, safe-conducts, and licenses to attend major Continental annual markets, to which there were counter-embargoes — and serious economic damage to English merchant interests. A treaty of 1496 restored a fragile peace, but against a shifting and unstable political backdrop; the damage to the royal-merchant relationship remained. The early 1500s saw a series of lay subsidies and customs charges levied, as well as royal encroachments on long-standing liberties of the City to grant charters and elect leaders. Against this complex and tense context of Crown-merchant relations spanning the period between 1485 and 1520, Henry VII was first to demonstrate a fresh interest in bringing London merchants under more direct royal control, and the Parliament of 1487 is a case in point. This Parliament and its resulting statute, 3 Henry VII, contained a total of five acts directly controlling or restricting trade and urban autonomy and, like 1 Richard III, also used the potent language of mercantile ethics as part of its legislative rationale and agenda. Most boldly, however, the statute is notable for the confident reassertion of royal jurisdiction over usury, a remarkable break of an English precedent as old as Glanvill.78 Analysis of the bill itself reveals its ambitions. As recorded in the Rolls of Parliament, item 29 is unlike the majority of petitions brought to the 1487 body, in that the petition is represented as the king’s and not as a petition originating with the Commons. It is thus Henry VII’s personal outrage which is expressed in the bill, which begins ‘For somoch as ymportable damages, losses and enpoverysshyng of this realme ys had, by dampnable bargayns groundyt in usurye’. It is language that makes the unusual claim for royal prerogative over usury clearly a personal one. Further, after a lengthy attempt to define acts of usury (not entirely successful, as future statutes suggest), the bill announces a penalty of 100 marks, of which ‘the kyng to have the one halfe 77  78 

See Sutton, Mercery of London, pp. 317–69, for detailed discussion of this period. Helmholz, ‘Usury and the Medi­eval English Courts’.

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and he that will sue the oder halfe’. The penalty is therefore also an attractive inducement to informants and enforcers. But the most audacious part of the bill follows directly after this combination of financial penalty and incentive, and attacks the heart of civic precedents regarding usury: And for somuche as theies corrupt bargaynes be most usuelly hadde within citees and burghes, havyng auctorite to trye all maters and causes growen and had within the same citees and burghes, and yff eny suche defautes shuld ther be tryed, perjurie by lykelynesse therby shuld growe and lytell of the premesses to be founde, therfor yt be ordeigned by the seid auctorite that aswell the chaunceller of Inglond for the tyme beyng have auctorite and power to examyn all maner corrupt bargayns.79

While the bill as a whole reasserts the royal interest and jurisdiction over usury, with this passage Henry VII not only forecloses but impugns civic involvement in policing usury. City authorities, he claims, are so necessarily implicated in the economic ambitions and ‘corrupt bargaynes’ of their wards that they not only lack ethical objectivity, but ‘by lykelynesse’ will be guilty of perjury given the opportunity to try usurious cases. It is an accusation that undermines the centerpiece of fifteenth-century mercantile autonomy — that is, the ability of merchant communities to police their own ethical boundaries, and to define, protect, and publicize mercantile good intentions. For London merchants — printers and print readers among them — this was a ‘dampnable’ situation, indeed. Yet three years after Richard III’s statute, London’s merchant leaders were quicker to react, and their response reveals an astute awareness of the scope of the bill. The records of Caxton’s guild, the Mercers, capture the overall sense of alarm as well as the broad impression on the part of Londoners that the justconcluded 1487 Parliament was moving against not only merchants but the City itself: where at the last parlement, grete grudge and displeasure was had ayens corporacions of Felishippes of this Citie for sellying of dere stuffe excedying price reasonable, saying that by means of ordenances whiche that everyche withyn them self by reason of theire corporacions do make ordenances and statutes in comen hurt of the Kynges liege people, with muche saying on the same more to grete rebuke of this Citie.80

Moreover, London leaders understood the clear implications for the City’s tradition of merchant-led autonomy. In Letter Book L, we see evidence that the 79  80 

Henry VII: November, 1487, item 29, in The Parliament Rolls of England (online). Thrupp, The Merchant Class of Medi­eval London, p. 96 n. 183.

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material copies of the ‘ordenances’ discussed here — ones like the Ordinatio contra usurarios — were quickly marshalled together and put under heightened security, with strict orders not to yield them up to the Crown. It was a strategy that was used again and again throughout Henry VII’s reign.81 By locking away their ordinances, the guilds were attempting to keep the textual evidence and details of their privileges under their own control. The political struggle had clearly turned into a documentary one, and specifically into a battle over texts with the capacity to represent, characterize, and support mercantile autonomy and morality in both its historical and cultural dimensions. While the merchants met royal control and surveillance by locking away their ordinances from royal surveillance, Henry VII’s own strategy was one of strategic textual dissemination and use of the press. By the end of 1490, the Statutes from his first three Parliaments were issued from Caxton’s press by royal commission, marking the first time the Statutes were disseminated in English. As was the case for Richard III, the press seemed vulnerable to royal control, and in spite of — or perhaps because of — its mercantile roots, was used by the Crown to exercise authority over London’s mercantile community. There were signs of subtle resistance on the part of printers, and an example we might turn to one more fifteenth-century Parliament, which was of special relevance to both print and London merchants. Henry VII’s eleventh Parliament, convened in October of 1495, was unusually ambitious; as Cavill notes, the twenty-seven statutes enacted are the most numerous of any of Henry VII’s Parliaments, and they are statutes that together participate in a comprehensive program of reform and centralization.82 Usury was on the agenda again. The bill concerning usury appears as a petition aimed at ‘clarifying’ the terms of the 1487 statute, and its inclusion was foreshadowed by the chancellor’s opening sermon to the Parliament. The bill itself is shorter and more direct than the one of 1487, and it leaves aside the earlier animosity toward civic jurisdictions. What it accomplishes best, perhaps, is keeping the topic of mercantile conduct as part of the scope of broader governmental initiatives around the reform of corruption. More intriguing is the material history of 11 Henry VII, the printed statute recording the 1495 parliament. Wynkyn de Worde printed three editions of 81 

Calendar of Letter Book L, reproduced in Thrupp, The Merchant Class of Medi­eval London, p. 96 n. 183. Regarding the struggle for control over and access to City documents, see Horowitz, ‘“Contrary to the liberties of this city”’, p. 52, and Sutton, The Mercery of London, pp. 352-53. 82  Cavill, ‘The Enforcement of the Penal Statutes’, p. 484; and on Henry VII’s assertive use of Parliament more generally, see Baker, The Oxford History of the Laws of England, pp. 34–39.

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this statute in folio format, and Richard Pynson produced a fourth edition. The folio statute edition was a form distinct from the emerging practice of adding new statutes to the growing collection of the Nova Statuta, and the rapid reissuing of separate folio-format editions suggests that this statute was in particularly high demand. De Worde’s splendid copy for the king is preserved as part of the Old Royal Library.83 This copy is on vellum, with gorgeous illuminated initials and a border worked in pen by highly skilled artisans, who were likely Continental. In addition, each leaf is carefully ruled and enclosed in red pen, producing a visual hallmark of deluxe manuscript production. De Worde includes his device, a new one with a sprig of leaves and a vine border, on the recto side of the last page. Even with his device, however, the book’s finishes produce the overwhelming aesthetic impression that one is holding a manuscript instead of a printed folio volume.84 Perhaps this was a case of London’s most prominent merchant printer — de Worde — simply bending to the royal will, producing his finest work for a royal commission even though the statutes themselves no doubt worked against his own interest. But we might also read de Worde’s elaborate production as a deliberate repression of the press’s complicity in disseminating the statutes. De Worde’s presentation edition represses its printed materiality, carefully ‘forgets’ the press and its printer, in a way that we might read as a subtle, strategic response to the pressure Henry VIII exerted. Anne Sutton characterizes the policies of both Henry VII and Henry VIII toward merchants as one of steady harassment that only became more pronounced in Henry VII’s later years and was forcefully extended by his son. Certainly the project of merchant harassment and control found the press quite useful. By 1512, the anti-mercantile subsidies enacted by Parliament were being printed as broadsides and thin folio-format volumes for rapid distribution (and enforcement). In 1513, de Worde issued a curious single-sheet form with two blanks — for the name of the addressee and the date — to be distributed to the commissioners in charge of collecting the new taxes; and in 1515, Pynson issued at least two more forms with similar blanks, one detailing the very fine-grained information required, and the other demanding a full list of wards surveyed.85 The blank printed form had previously been used as a feature 83 

STC 9354, BL, IB.55195; printed in 1496. See Hellinga, ‘Printing’, for an overview of the kind of books printed no vellum; it was used quite sparingly by English printers. The Parisian publisher, Anthoine Vérard, presented several vellum copies of editions to Henry VII; in addition, Caxton printed at least two copies of devotional texts on vellum. 85  Neville-Sington, ‘Press, Politics and Religion’, p. 583. These are: de Worde, 1513 (STC 84 

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of the familiar printed indulgences that were a mainstay of the early English press. Yet the two genres assert a polarized understanding of their readers in terms that resonate within the broader framework of theological economics. The printed indulgences were terrific revenue-generating products for both the presses and the institutions sponsoring them.86 But they work in part because they so adamantly disavow the machinations of commercial exchange and financial profit, insisting only upon the spiritual profits accruing to the bearer.87 The forms issued from the authority of Henry VII, however, neatly reverse that dynamic: these imply hidden monetary profits that must be revealed. Pynson’s 1515 form demands that every penny of income from lands and premises be made visible, and presented as quite earthly financial liabilities. The distinction is clear: the indulgences veil their bearer’s intention toward financial profit; the subsidy forms seek only to unmask their readers’ intention to gain financial profit as far as possible. The contexts traced above allow us to return more fully to the intersection between agency, intention, and print. As this section demonstrates, over much of the fifteenth century there were a range of civic and legal structures available through which merchants could express their good intentions and exercise the kinds of agency — cultural, political, and social — afforded by the ability to control and police their own ethical boundaries. Yet by the end of the century, print made those same structures also available in new ways to the Crown. Tracing the line of material textuality through this struggle tells a seemingly familiar story: certain freedoms allowed by script were curtailed by those permitted in print; likewise, merchants produceed and controlled manuscript productions — their civic records, the common-profit books — while the Crown used the press to disseminate the very statutes restricting expressions of mercantile agency and self-determination. We should not be surprised that the early English press was capable of producing at once legal texts, like the statutes, that circumscribed the autonomy of merchants, while simultaneously producing religious texts that prioritized and foregrounded the legitimating intentions of that same community; this doubled use of the press is less a sign of contradiction than a validation of print’s capacity to express a range of agen7764); Pynson, 1515 (STC 7766); and Pynson, 1515 (STC 7767). 86  The best treatment of the printed indulgence remains Needham’s The Printer and the Pardoner. 87  Needham, The Printer and the Pardoner, pp. 62–63, for a transcription of the St Mary Rounceval indulgence, and p. 42 for a translation.

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cies and intentions, to be used to reveal as well as manipulate many cultural structures and authorities. Even amid these contradictions and duelling uses of the press, however, the mercantile desire and need to express their good intentions was not easily put aside, and it was through print that both merchant printers and merchant readers found an alternative, to which I now turn.

The Good Intentions of Religious Print Agency in any local or general sense remains unpredictable in its expression, and merchant readers and printers discovered an unexpected venue that proved quite adequate to the expression of their good intentions: the printed religious text. The chronology of early printers’ interest in producing religious texts is itself suggestive. Caxton largely ignored religious texts until his grand production of The Golden Legend, finished and issued over the course of the 1484 Parliament. The Book of Good Maners appeared, in Pratt’s memory, in 1487. De Worde produced his multiple editions of 11 Henry VII at the same moment that he prepared his edition of Dives and Pauper. Indeed, the early print editions of religious texts that most strongly and specifically suggest a mercantile readership — that is, religious editions that concentrated on household instruction, pastoralia, and demanded an educated and informed readership — were produced during the early years of Tudor regulation just outlined and on through the sixteenth century up to the Reformation.88 While the chronological evidence suggests the printers’ deliberate cultivation of a merchant readership, it is the content of these religious editions that provide the most provocative evidence for their deliberate use as expressions of mercantile ethical identity and good intentions. While most of the printed religious editions of this period are based on texts that were composed at an earlier date in either English or French, these are not merely reproductions but new books, resituated and reshaped by their printers. In the hands of merchantprinters like Caxton, de Worde, and Pynson, this specific stream of religious printed editions tends to draws upon the discourses of mercantile morality and the now-familiar concepts describing the limits of ethical commercial behaviour — common proft, usury, idleness, and above all, the good intentions of merchants. The traces of this collective good intention are everywhere visible, 88 

The following chapter will address what constitutes a mercantile religious text. Recent scholarship on the topic includes Amy Appleford’s Learning to Die in London; Appleford and Watson, ‘Merchant Religion’; and notes by Sutton, in The Mercery of London.

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not only in the texts themselves but in the shapes the printers chose for those texts — in the frontispieces, paratexts, and prefaces, through textual additions and omissions, and sometimes in contemporary reader’s marks still legible in the margins. The following chapter identifies and analyses a range of these religious editions, but here I want to turn back to the Book of Good Maners and the intersection of Caxton’s entente with the discussions of this chapter. The English printed edition of the Book of Good Maners follows a French text first composed in Paris (c. 1410) by the Augustinian friar and master of theology, Jacques Legrand. The original Le Livre des Bonnes Meurs is a redaction and French translation of Legrand’s own longer, more rigorously theological Latin work, the Sophilogium.89 Legrand’s translation was widely read in France, as attested by sixty extant manuscripts, and that popularity spread to an English audience from an early moment. By the time it was produced by Caxton — translated in 1486 and printed on 11 May 1487, as he tells us in his colophon — it had already been translated three different times into English. 90 Caxton follows his French source closely, and his Book of Good Maners comprises material in the broad imitatio clerici tradition of lay instruction and reflection. The five sections treat familiar topics including the seven deadly sins, the vices and virtues, the temporal and spiritual estates, and reflections on the end of life. This particular text was obviously quite popular among its English print readers: Caxton’s edition was reprinted in 1494, 1498, 1500, 1507, and 1526, and then finally once more by Robert Wyer between 1531 and 1534.91 So what was the appeal of this instructional text? What was the entente of Caxton in publishing it? The one section that might speak to the specific interests of Caxton (and Pratt) as merchants is also the only slightly irregular section of the text in relation to its French source. It consists of an interpolation of a chapter that 89 

See Raymo, ‘Works of Religious and Philosophical Instruction’, p. 2265. For Shirley’s translation, and an overview of the text’s contents, see the discussion by Connolly in John Shirley, pp. 122–26. 90  Caxton’s translation has been judged the best by Lindstrom, ‘The English Versions’. The other translations are all earlier, manuscript versions: London, British Library, MS Additional 5467 (by John Shirley); London, British Library, MS Harley 149; Glasgow, Glasgow Uni­ver­ sity Library, MS Hunter T.3.16; San Marino, Huntington Library, MS HM 39872 (the Hunter and Huntington manuscripts share the same text). 91  Caxton’s Book of Good Maners was reprinted by Pynson in 1494 (STC 15395) and 1500 (STC 15396); by de Worde in 1498 (STC 15397), 1507 (STC 15398), and 1526 (STC 15399); and by Wyer in 1531 (STC 15399.5).

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addresses the social estate of merchants, and begins with a discussion of usury and the simple, declarative statement that ‘Marchaundyse ought faythfully to be gouerned and mayntened withoute fraude and withoute vsure’.92 The topic of usury occupies most of the chapter and is treated largely through a string of stern biblical and patristic citations. But the chapter makes an intriguing departure as it extends its attention from usury to fraud: here, the reader encounters not the didacticism of the previous part but instead a debate taken from Cicero’s De officiis between the classical figures of Diogenes and his student Antipater. Diogenes suggests (‘by maner of dysputacyon’) that it would be foolish for a merchant to fully disclose every fault he knows about his merchandise; Antipater insists on the more rigorous standard of full disclosure. The debate quickly becomes framed as one between the values of ‘honestie’ and ‘prouffyt or vtylite’. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this brief little scene concludes with the adamant embrace of honesty. But the passage then continues on to address the merchant community itself, citing the proverbs of Ecclesiasticus 31 to insist that habits of ethical exchange ought to be mimicked in merchants’ conduct to one another, so that merchants address ‘eche other in trouthe and in faythfulnes’. The chapter as a whole thus brings up the issue of usury only to overwrite it by valorizing trust — trust as the bond between merchants and the broader community, and trust as the bond that creates merchants themselves as a community. Caxton’s interpolated passage selects and foregrounds terms that resonate richly against the discursive and historical context of 1487. This was the year of Henry VII’s bold reassertion of royal control over usury, a move that encapsulated the renewed ‘rigor’ of the Crown’s relationship with London merchants. The printer’s addition reshapes the Book of Good Maners as a text with a pronounced emphasis on merchant conduct, one that brings up the spectre of usury only to displace it by foregrounding and revealing the inner ‘trouthe’ binding the merchant community. The incorporation of this new material suggests not only a savvy recognition of the capacity of religious print to register a response to Henry VII but also the deliberate use and strategic manipulation of discourses concerning mercantile morality. As Caxton’s own prologue to his edition shows, ‘th’entente’ of this edition is indeed manifold, registering both the good intentions of merchants like Caxton and Pratt, as well as revealing the alternative cultural uses of religious genres and discourses.

92 

STC 15394, BL, IB.55125, sigs. g6r–g7v.

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Although I believe Caxton’s Book of Good Maners is primarily an edition produced by merchants for a merchant readership, I am not suggesting that it was only read by merchants: certainly, several features of its prologue and estates-oriented content situate it as a text that would have also appealed to an aristocratic audience. (Perhaps that crossover appeal was even part of Caxton’s intent.) More to the point, however, is the instructional religious genre to which the Book of Good Maners belongs. Religious texts at this moment constituted an expressive forum not obviously political, and not yet precluded by the polarizing controversies that inflected every religious publication in the period after about 1524. And religious texts with a heightened sensitivity to themes of commercial morality were texts that could be shaped in print as instantiations of a mercantile ethos emphasizing the values of self-regulation, autonomy, and an orientation toward the common profit. This is the work Caxton’s careful prologue does in preparing the merchant reader to encounter the quirky passage about usury and trust in the Book of Good Maners. * * * This chapter has traced a complex and closely historicized answer to the question of Caxton and Pratt’s entente for the Book of Good Maners. It is an answer that does not always demonstrate the triumph of printerly agency and expression: history is rarely so tidy. Instead, I have sought to emphasize the variety and richness of the cultural structures revealed through print, and in this narrative, agency was not always owned by printers but equally available to the Crown and — as we shall see in the chapters ahead — to readers as well. Print is, in this argument and in the broader theme of the book, merely a tool and an instrument for the expression of agency. Further, the centrality of entente as a term for Caxton and Pratt, two mercers, itself makes visible the agency of merchants and mercantile expression throughout the fifteenth century, the inseparability of the interests of merchants and printers, and the crucial role that mercantile culture had upon shaping the early English press.

Chapter 3

The Uses of Religious Printing by Merchants, for Merchants

A

s one example of a religious text printed for merchant readers, the Book of Good Maners merely suggests the capacity of religious genres to represent the concerns of London’s mercantile community. Indeed, the early religious editions that speak specifically to the interests of a merchant readership have not yet been considered as a group; in this chapter, I identify a stream of such editions and explore the diverse ways these promote the good intentions of their producers and readers. The editions I analyse — Caxton’s edition of the Liber Festivalis (1483, STC 17957); his translation of The Golden Legend (1484, STC 24873); the multiple editions of Dives and Pauper by Pynson (1493, STC 19212), de Worde (1496, STC 19213), and Berthelet (1536, STC 19214); Andrew Chertsey’s translation of Floure of the Ten Commandementes (1510, STC 23876); and de Worde’s production of the Kalender of Shepherdes (1508, STC 22409) — represent a range of religious genres, including vernacular instructional texts, hagiographies, collections of pastoralia, and miscellanies. That late medieval religious texts — printed or in manuscript — engage with the field of theological economics and attendant issues like usury, common profit, and idleness is perhaps not itself especially notable; these were, after all, spiritual matters as well as economic ones. However, the editions discussed here not only display a strategic interest in commercial morality but develop this interest in ways that are adjacent or exceptional to prior textual traditions. For instance, Caxton’s unique interpolation of material on usury in his edition of the Book of Good Maners connects Legrand’s work to merchant readers in ways that are neither anticipated nor precipitated by earlier versions of the text. My readings in this chapter thus detect the discourse of theological economics,

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but I argue these are not rote recitations of a Christian ethical discourse about merchants; instead, these editions have been purposely shaped by printers to recall that discourse in ways that make its central terms available to the broader mercantile community. The merchant context that printers shared with a crucial segment of their readers allows this book’s governing terms — agency and intention — to stretch across the divide between printers and readers, producers and consumers. It is my argument below that the printed religious editions that speak to mercantile concerns do so with a purposefulness that reveals itself through interpolations, omissions and additions, paratexts, images, and the selection of specific textual traditions. Moreover, these editions deliberately anticipated certain readers and readings. My ‘anticipated’ reader draws close to Wolfgang Iser’s idea of the ‘implied reader’. For Iser, the space of reading is ‘something like an arena in which reader and author participate in a game of imagination’, and his account is helpful here because it presents a media theory model that emphasizes the dialectical relationship between production and reception.1 Yet I use ‘anticipated’ rather than ‘implied’ because Iser’s implied reader is distinctly not an empirical one, nor is the agency and intentionality produced within his arena bounded by history, as the spaces of reading in this chapter must be. In the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century, as Chapter 2 demonstrates, the concept of ‘intention’ itself in relationship to mercantile identity emerged out of a discursive theological tradition that excludes many of the modern notions we associate with agency and intention, and that Iser’s model assumes. Moving forward with a sensitivity to historical difference, the category of anticipated readers for these editions — merchants — are worth noting in more detail that begins with some preliminary remarks about merchants as readers of religious texts in the late medieval period. 2 That merchants formed a distinct category of reader through their pious reading habits is not obvious through a first glance at the material evidence. Rather, as we might expect, the reading habits of elite merchants in the later 1400s frequently overlapped with those of aristocrats across a range of genres.3 Further, the religious reading habits of both English merchants and aristocrats 1 

Iser, The Implied Reader, p. 275. On Caxton’s readership more broadly, see especially the evidence cited in Trapp, ‘Literacy, Books and Readers’, as well as Bennett, English Books and Readers. For Caxton’s gentry readership, see Wang, ‘Caxton’s Romances and their Early Tudor Readers’, and Radulescu, The Gentry Context for Malory’s ‘Morte Darthur’, pp. 54–60. 3  For a helpful list of known mercantile ownership, see Scott, ‘Past Ownership’. 2 

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tended to mirror the texts circulating in and through the monastic foundations of the London and Sheen charterhouses and Syon Abbey.4 For instance, manuscripts of the careful and conservative English translation of the Meditationes vitae Christi by the Carthusian monk Nicholas Love, entitled The Myrrour of the Blessed Lyfe of Jesu Criste and composed in the first decade of the fifteenth century, bear evidence of readers not only among the Carthusians and Bridgettine communities but also in the aristocratic households of the Nevilles and Beauforts; by the end of the fifteenth century, manuscripts of Love’s translation were also circulating through the households of wealthy London merchants.5 In one sense, English printers merely extended the overlapping manuscript audiences for religious writing, especially in those editions that spoke simultaneously to multiple readerships. As Mary Erler has noted, Nicholas Love’s Myrrour was printed by Caxton in 1484, and eight subsequent times before 1535; the extant copies reveal a print readership that closely echoes the interlaced audiences of the manuscript tradition.6 Other print productions, like that of de Worde’s 1494 combined edition of Walter Hilton’s Scale of Perfection and Mixed Life, suggest that printers quite deliberately shaped editions in ways that courted and even extended the range of readerships already extant for specific texts. These two texts by Hilton are not an obvious pair: while the Scale offers an uncompromising valorization of the contemplative life, the Mixed Life presents a far more pragmatic and flexible ideal for those who choose an ‘active’ life, advising readers that ‘thou schalt not utterli folwen thi desire for to leuen occupacioun and bisynesse of the world, whiche aren nedefull to vsen in rulynge of thi self and of alle othere that are undir thi kepyng’.7 Indeed, until de Worde’s edition, these texts tended to circulate independently, although there was some precedent for the two circulating together in the examples of the mercantile common-profit manuscripts, and a volume recorded in the Syon 4  Indeed, as Vincent Gillespie has shown, Syon Abbey was an institution that up until the 1520s played a large role in cultivating London interests in print and what Gillespie terms the ‘new learning’ — the humanist-led interest in theological scholarship and orthodox teaching. See most recently his introduction to Gillespie and Powell, A Companion to the Early Printed Book in Britain, pp. 1–9, at p. 5, and da Costa, Reforming Printing. 5  Erler, ‘Devotional Literature’, pp.  515–16; see also Love, Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, ed. by Sargent. For the intermingling of monastic and lay reading, see too Westphall, ‘Reconstructing the Mixed Life’. 6  Erler, ‘Devotional Literature’, p. 518. 7  Catto, ‘Shaping the Mixed Life’. See also, Walter Hilton’s Mixed Life, ed. by OgilvieThomason, p. 9, ll. 89–91.

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Abbey library.8 De Worde’s edition both replicates the pairing and anticipates its decoupling with a uniquely flexible construction that suggests a kind of ready-made Sammelband. The edition opens with an introduction of the Scale only, presented as two books with separate tables. The second book of the Scale concludes on a recto with a verse envoy naming Margaret Beaufort as the edition’s sponsor, creating a potentially tidy ending to the volume. After a blank verso, however, the Mixed Life seems to continue the volume as simply a ‘thyrde book’, prefaced with a table so that it precisely mirrors the presentation of the Scale’s two books. The resulting edition is a volume whose two texts could easily be split apart, as they apparently often were; only five of the fifteen extant copies of de Worde’s edition contain both the Scale and the Mixed Life. De Worde’s flexible edition is thus available to all permutations of the varied readerships signaled in Hilton’s manuscript tradition. Here, too, the evidence suggests that this strategy was quite astute. Print copies of the full edition were owned by Syon readers, as well as the royal household, while partial editions found a number of lay readers; it is telling as well that De Worde’s flexible-use format became the standard for five subsequent early reprintings of Hilton’s works.9 My point, however, is not that late medieval merchants had divergent or wholly singular religious reading habits — they clearly did not. Further, as the above examples illustrate, religious printing was a frequently supple, flexible enterprise designed to meet the interests of various readerships. But as I show below, even with these caveats the pious reading habits of mercantile readers do emerge with increasing distinction throughout the fifteenth century, and as a group the contours of merchant readers become more, not less, discernible in print. The most compelling evidence for this emergence lies in the nuanced cultural dynamics of the texts themselves. These dynamics have been traced in research by Amy Appleford on mercantile piety, by Nicole Rice on lay pastoral reading, and by Carol Meale, Julia Boffey, and Susan Powell on the contours of late fifteenth century mercantile literary culture. This work has revealed the theological sophistication of England’s late medieval merchants, as well as the deep interests of the wealthy urban laity in religious texts that supported their responsibilities as householders and churchwardens in educating and guiding those under their supervision (a group that often included clergy).10 This was a readership that sought out 8 

Sargent, ‘Walter Hilton’s Scale of Perfection’, esp. pp. 206–07. See Erler, ‘Devotional Literature’, p. 521. 10  Appleford and Watson, ‘Merchant Religion’; Rice, Lay Piety and Religious Discipline; Meale, ‘The Libelle of Englyshe Polycye and Mercantile Literary Culture’, esp. p. 190; Boffey, 9 

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challenging texts, texts that often emphasized the habits of what Nicole Rice has termed imitatio clerici, a pious posture offering ‘the priestly life and the Bible as a model and rule for Christian conduct, encouraging […] lay readers to imitate clerical modes of biblical study, preaching and pastoral care’.11 Texts in this tradition employ a distinct set of strategies which emphasize and foster lay spiritual authority. Hallmarks include the use of free-flowing dialogues, which tend to push the responsibility of interpretation back to the reader; attention to the parallels between clerical authority and authority in the secular institutions of the household and civic sphere; treatment of the Bible as a rich and productive source for the on-going project of theological interpretation; the identification of Christ with Scripture (as opposed to the more affective tradition of emphasizing Christ’s wounded body as a source for emotional reflection and imitation); and a cultivation of the individual conscience.12 Imitatio clerici, then, was a spiritual posture suited to nuance and close reading, and one that carved out a role for pious men busy in the world. This was also a posture that drew the attention of early printers, and in the first half-century of the English press we can detect an accelerating interest around those texts that emphasize this practice of imitatio clerici: these are the texts that together constitute a stream of merchant-directed religious print. Among others, these editions include William Litchfield’s Remors of Conscience (1510, STC 20881.3), which makes complex connections to a mercantile pious posture; the imaginative, dialogic Rote or Myrour of Consolacyon and Conforte (1496, STC 21334); and The Chastising of God’s Children (1493, STC 5065), one of the first texts published by de Worde that is concerned with the unmediated lay apprehension of religious truth. Even the widely circulated preacher’s handbook, John Mirk’s Liber Festivalis (1483, STC 17957), appears in print as an edition that includes the Hamus Caritatis, a guide intended for wealthy householders responsible for religious instruction.13 Indeed, the group of imitatio clerici texts making their way into English print include some of the most Manuscript and Print in London; Powell, ‘The Secular Clergy’. 11  Rice, Lay Piety and Religious Discipline, p. xi; and Appleford, Learning to Die in London. 12  Rice, Lay Piety and Religious Discipline, pp. 49–80, and Appleford and Watson, ‘Merchant Religion’. 13  Several of these texts are little-noticed in modern scholarship. For helpful discussions, see the following: Watson provides a brief discussion of Chastising in ‘Censorship and Cultural Change’, p. 848; also see Sutherland, ‘The Chastising of God’s Children’. For the Liber Festivalis (also known as the Festial), see Ford, ‘The Autonomy of Conscience’. On the Rote or Myrour of Consolacyon and Conforte, see Gray, Later Medi­eval English Literature, p. 294.

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challenging and nuanced religious editions produced by the early press, and are among those editions we know were sponsored by London merchants in a position to astutely foresee a ready market among their peers. The London merchant John Russhe, for instance, partnered with Richard Pynson to produce the unusual dialogic treatment of the ten commandments that defines Dives and Pauper; William Pratt was responsible for the Book of Good Maners as well as The Royal Book (1484, STC 21429); Hugh Bryce is named by Caxton as the sponsor of his Mirroure of the Worlde (1481, STC 24762), which, alongside its advice on geography and natural history, offers advice to the laity on the demands and complexities of confession. Nor were mercantile religious interests restricted to vernacular texts; in 1510, the London grocer William Bretton sponsored a Parisian edition of the Pupilla Oculi (STC 4115), a thirteenth-century work of highly refined Latinity, canon law, and pastoral instruction, for a print run that was sold largely to London lay readers.14 Further, the emphasis on conscience, lay authority, and self-taught pastoralia indicative of mercantile reading habits is also evident in the body of newly translated religious texts that printers introduced to their English readers. While some of these translated texts were likely motivated by fashionable interests in the devotio moderna tradition and related Bridgettine Continental texts — such as Margaret Beaufort’s own translation of Mirroure of Golde for the Synfull Soule, printed by Pynson in 1506 (STC 6894.5), and the lives of St Catherine and St Elizabeth, printed by de Worde in 1492 (STC 24766) — a less-recognized pattern among the French imports are those texts that lend themselves to the mercantile spiritual posture. These include the editions of pastoralia and spiritual guidance sponsored by Pratt and Bryce, mentioned above, but also the striking line of commissions given to Andrew Chertsey by De Worde, which comprise in miniature the kind of personal library a wealthy London merchant may have assembled: The Floure of Ten Commandementes along with the Ordynarye of Christian Men (1502, STC 5198), are pastoral guides, useful to London’s wealthy householders; the Craft to Live Well and to Die Well (1505, STC 792) draws on a group of texts used by guildsmen; the prose Passyon of Oure Lorde (1521, STC 14558) replays biblical material, and the Lucydarye (1507, STC 13685.5) translates the early fourteenth century Second Lucidaire, composed by a Dominican, which invites readers to engage with a series of dialogic exchanges between a disciple and a master.15 14  See Boffey, Manuscript and Print in London, p. 149–51. For more on the Pupilla Oculi, see da Costa, Reforming Printing, p. 60 n. 32. 15  My thanks to Nicholas Watson for pointing this program out to me. Also, see Appleford,

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As the above dynamics reveal, although merchants were attentive to theological subtleties and controversy, as a group their pious reading habits drew from a varied range of religious postures. What emerged was an investment in religious texts distinct enough to be discernible, and that remained aloof from reformist agendas. In some ways, the quality of mercantile piety evidenced by these texts echoes the commitments to self-governance and civic autonomy that were broader features of London’s late medieval merchant culture. Amy Appleford and Nicolas Watson have already observed that it is precisely the ‘richness of mercantile religiosities’ that pushes beyond the traditional religious partisanship through which this moment is often viewed: my argument extends those observations chronologically forward and into the field of religious print.16 The categories of ‘merchant communities’ and ‘mercantile readers’ as I use them below remain deliberately broad ones. While this may flatten the difference and particularity of the period’s London context, it is also true that ‘mercantile’ is a term already near the limit of detail that the extant material evidence of readership will support. Other evidence based on textual dynamics, such as the observations about imitatio clerici as a textual and spiritual posture, do suggest that the interests of London merchants were indeed very wide ranging, and so perhaps the umbrella term of ‘mercantile’ is suitable enough. However, if we want to say anything about the uses of books by printers and readers half a millennium removed from us, we must be willing to speculate. Detailed differentiation does emerge in this chapter, but through the editions themselves. Reading for intention encourages a different process and produces distinct, localized results for each of the texts I discuss below. The first, Caxton’s 1484 translation and edition of The Golden Legend, reveals Caxton’s juxtaposition of his own mercantile experiences with the themes of agency and idleness. But Dives and Pauper engages with intention partly thematically, and partly through a long tradition of collective selection that unfolded over the course of the century, moving the text into a mercantile milieu. And the two post-incunable translations from French, the Floure of the Ten Commandements and the Kalender of Shepherdes, hint at their new mercantile horizons through a layered series of subtle paratexts and interpolations. The intentions of readers and printers, glimpsed through their religious editions, are far from univocal — as holds true for the readings that follow. Learning to Die in London, and Ruhe, ‘Savoir des doctes et pratique pastorale’. 16  Appleford and Watson, ‘Merchant Religion’, p. 206.

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Idle Hagiography: Caxton’s Golden Legend The Latin compendium of temporale and sanctorale material known as the Legenda aurea was originally assembled by an Italian Dominican priest, Jacobus de Voragine, between 1260 and 1290. From its inception, it proved to be an extraordinarily fecund and malleable text for other writers. Translations appeared quickly in nearly every European vernacular, with versions shedding and accruing material, morphing from sermon handbook to lay collection (and back again), and shifting from clerical to lay readerships. By the second half of the fifteenth century, the distinct collections of the Liber Festivalis and The Golden Legend represented the English tradition’s most prominent vernacular extensions of the Legenda aurea tradition.17 Caxton brought versions of both texts into production over the summer and fall of 1483, a period that also marked a distinct turn in his press’s output. Between 1483 and the end of 1484, Caxton printed twenty-three different texts, many of them large editions — a remarkably productive number and nearly a quarter of his entire career’s production. Among these books were eight new editions of religious texts that together mark his robust entry into the religious genre.18 And among these, The Golden Legend and Mirk’s Liber Festivalis became the most successful books in early print, reissued by a range of English printers up until the Reformation. Yet while these two editions had an obvious broad appeal, my interest here is in how Caxton shaped them against the cultural moment in which they were produced. The English backdrop during that same period comprised startling political events: Edward’s death in April, Richard’s July coronation, Buckingham’s Rebellion that October, the meeting of the twice-deferred Parliament from 23 January to 20 February 1484, and the emergence of Henry Tudor as a real contender for the throne. But my context is not the detailed landscape of the usurpation, nor am I pursuing a causal historicism. Rather, my interest here lies with the more nuanced effects of that political change and the charged cultural conversation it joined and provoked around English merchants — and more specifically, about the moral conflation of mercantile work with foreignness and with idleness. 17 

For the textual tradition of the Liber Festivalis, see Mirk’s Festial, ed. by Powell. For the textual tradition of the Legenda aurea, see D’Evelyn, ‘Saint’s Legends,’ pp. 430–39, and Seybolt, ‘Fifteenth Century Editions of the Legenda aurea’. 18  The religious books are: Court of Sapience (1483, STC 17015); Lydgate’s Lyf of oure ladye (1484, STC 17023); Pilgrimage of the Life of Man (1483, STC 6473); Liber Festivalis (1483, STC 17957); The Golden Legend (1484, STC 24873); Life of Winifred (1484, STC 25853); Death-bed Prayers (1484, STC 14554).

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Caxton’s two productions of Legenda aurea material — The Golden Legend and the Liber Festivalis — were both printed within months of each other, and his editions offer a provocative pause. Caxton’s editions of the Liber Festivalis have been most carefully analysed by Susan Powell, who details textual and material traces that point to an intriguing relationship between Caxton and Syon Abbey.19 As noted earlier, London religious readerships tended to overlap, and merchants were eager consumers of Bridgettine piety; identifying a Syon connection does not necessarily preclude a mercantile one. And the Liber Festivalis certainly speaks to the religious posture of imitatio clerici: Judy Ann Ford has shown, for instance, how the Liber Festivalis’s images of confession emphasize a sense of the sinner’s own agency and relative autonomy.20 Even more ‘mercantile’ than this emphasis on lay authority, though, is Caxton’s own interpolation in an early edition (1483, STC 17957) of material specifically relevant to commercial conduct. Caxton uses a B version of the manuscript tradition, and while he does not meddle much with the text itself, he does add, between the text’s temporale and sanctorale divisions, a brief treatise on usury not found in any other extant copy of the Liber Festivalis.21 It is a short piece, spread across four pages, and it is fairly traditional: it identifies twelve instances of usury, which seem to be applicable to loans as well as to general business practice. It is, however, the tract’s very presence in Caxton’s edition of the Liber Festivalis that I want to stress. Enclosed within a larger book that gestures to lay autonomy, these few folio pages imply that usury, too, is under the purview of a well-educated lay reader. Indeed, Caxton’s insertion is a material interruption to a printed book that has already redirected its text from a priestly audience to a lay readership; these pages extend, and perhaps insist upon, lay readers’ authority to judge the ethical boundaries of commercial conduct in their own communities. Caxton tells us in his colophon that he printed the Liber Festivalis on the last day of June 1483; its sister text, Caxton’s grand translation of The Golden Legend, was printed just a few months later, between November 1483 and March 1484. The Golden Legend is an altogether spectacular book. It is one of the largest productions from Caxton’s press, comprising 449 leaves on the 19 

Powell, ‘What Caxton did to the Festial’. Powell also emphasizes the parochial uses of the Festial; see most recently her excellent analysis in ‘The Secular Clergy’. 20  Ford, ‘The Autonomy of Conscience’. See also Ford, John Mirk’s ‘Festial’. 21  STC 17957, sigs e4b–6b. I have not yet identified this treatise. As is noted in BMC xi (p. 141), Caxton also adds some materials related to the feast of Corpus Christi — the Council of Basel’s 1434 decree and the associated pardon.

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only royal size paper stock Caxton used — a paper that generously accommodates the fifty-five-line, double-column mise-en-page. To illustrate his book, Caxton commissioned nearly seventy new woodcuts, many of them designed to fit the larger page dimensions. The impressive physical format of the edition is matched by the tremendous intellectual energy demonstrated in its pages. Apart from translating and compiling the text from at least three sources in English, Latin, and French, Caxton translated one prologue and composed a second, added his own epilogue, constructed two finding aids (a table of contents and an alphabetical index), added his translations of ‘storyes of the Byble’ from the Old Testament, and gathered his own material into at least fourteen original interpolations, some of them extensive.22 This is distinctly Caxton’s energetic intervention into the textual tradition of the Legenda aurea. The nature of that intervention has attracted critical debate, centred largely on the relationship between Caxton and his many sources. While early scholars suggested that The Golden Legend was a consolidation, a centralizing and straightening of a tradition grown unwieldy, more recent studies understand it as an altogether messier and more idiosyncratic production, an edition cobbled rather than woven together. As Norman Blake notes, The Golden Legend in Caxton’s hands became more inclusive but less homogeneous; the result is not a ‘structurally satisfying whole’, but a volume whose joints are everywhere visible.23 Yet those joints, I suggest, are precisely where Caxton’s explorations of agency, print, and mercantile work emerge. Two of Caxton’s most energetic interventions come with the bookish curiosities of the prefatory material. With its two prologues and two finding aids, the book’s introductory pages present readers with a series of frames and choices. The emphasis on self-directed readerly choice is nudged along by Caxton himself, who implies such choices. In a brief note after the second prologue, for instance, Caxton includes a short note to readers as they look to negotiate the enormous volume ahead of them: And to thende eche hystoryy lyf  passyon may be shortely founden I haue ordeyned this table folowyng / where  in what leef he shal fynde suche as shal be desyred /

22 

Caxton drew from three main sources: a Latin Legenda aurea, the Middle English Gilte Legende, and the French Jean Vignay’s Legende doree, from a printed edition of 1475 by the Paris printer Jean Batallier. For a discussion of his use of sources, see BMC xi, 147–48, and Kurvinen, ‘Caxton’s Golden Legend’.  23  Blake, ‘The Biblical Additions in Caxton’s Golden Legend’.

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Figure 3.1 The title-page of The Golden Legend, with the text of Caxton’s translation of Jean de Vignay’s prologue, from Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend, trans. and printed by William Caxton in 1483 (STC 24873). Library of Congress, Inc. 1483. J33, sig. *1r. Reproduced by permission of the Rosenwald Collection, Rare Book and Special Collections Division of the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

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Figure 3.2 The second opening of the Golden Legend, with Caxton’s own prologue, from Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend, trans. and printed by William Caxton in 1483 (STC 24873). Library of Congress, Inc. 1483. J33, sig. *2r. Reproduced by permission of the Rosenwald Collec­ tion, Rare Book and Special Collections Division of the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

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and haue sette the nombre of euery leef in the margyne.24

By explaining how his finding aids work, Caxton seems to assume a novice audience. But his note has little to say about the most baffling quality of these aids, which is that there are two, and each facilitates a distinct use of the book. I discuss this below more fully in relation to the Polychronicon, but The Golden Legend works similarly.25 The first finding aid is a table of contents and follows the order of the volume. This assumes a reader familiar with the structuring framework of the liturgical calendar. For such a reader, the table simply reveals the already-present organizing structure of the material into temporale and sanctorale groups, making the sequences readily available for use in sermons, or to follow the order of the liturgical cycle. The second finding aid is a (roughly) alphabetical index. Here, the external order that the alphabet imposes upon the material obscures the patterns generated by the content itself. Instead, the index anticipates a reader who is familiar enough with the material to use the volume in a far less predictable way — to browse and search, to ultimately ‘fynde suche as shal be desired’. The doubled finding aids thus provide an especially open kind of book, one available to different readers as well as to different readerly desires. By simply explaining to his audience how a finding aid works, Caxton invites his readers to choose between them, opening his full edition as well as a full range of bookish tools to the freedom of his readers. The dual prologues, too, present a series of intriguing framing terms for the volume. The doubleness of these prologues has not been much noted, and modern editions tend to print them co-extensively; however, Caxton’s layout makes it clear that these are two distinct texts (see Figures 3.1 and 3.2). The first prologue is Caxton’s translation of Jean de Vignay’s prologue to the Legende doree (de Vignay’s fourteenth-century French translation of the Legenda aurea). It is a close translation, with the exception of two brief interpolations by Caxton. The second prologue is Caxton’s original composition, and details the circumstances of the book’s production under the encouragement of William Fitzalan, earl of Arundel. Caxton leaves a gap where the first prologue ends on sig. *1b, creating a page break between the two texts. The prologues are further divided by the insertion of a woodcut depicting the Arundel arms and motto at the top of sig. *2a. There is thus a close visual echo between the two recto pages, one that keeps them discrete but nonetheless suggests that Caxton’s prologue is a minor but parallel image of his translated source. 24 

STC 24873, Library of Congress, Inc. 1483. J33, sig. A2r. 25  See Tonry, ‘Reading History in Caxton’s Polychronicon’.

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This visual relationship, in turn, invites a reading that juxtaposes the two prologues, placing them in conversation with one another — and it is through this ‘joint’ that we see Caxton exploring his own relationship as a printer to the themes of labour and agency. De Vignay’s prologue underscores the work of translation as a cure for the besetting sin of ‘idleness’, a key term appearing no less than nine times in Cax­ton’s rendering (and eight times in the original French). The cure for the idleness afflicting Vignay and, in turn, Caxton is the moral work of translation. Translation, indeed, becomes a distinct category of work, the intellectual ‘laboure and suche ocupacion as I haue be acustomed to do’.26 Caxton’s first interpolation into Vignay’s text is a catalogue of his own prior translations from French texts, a passage that concludes with Caxton’s worry about falling idle again (‘I nyste what werke to begynne and put forth after the said werkys tofore made’).27 For Caxton, then, the intellectual work of translation emerges as the kind of labour that constitutes a legitimate response to the moral threat of idleness. Yet intellectual labour has a moral register precisely because it emerges out of a particular sense of agency, what Caxton translates as ‘souerayn fraunchyse’. Following de Vignay’s words closely, Caxton writes: as saynt austyn aforesayd sayth vpon a psalme / that good werke ought not be doon for fere of payne /but for the loue of rightwysnesse / and that it be of veray and souerayn fraunchyse / and by cause me semeth to be a souerayn wele to Incyte and exhorte men and wymmen to kepe them from slouthe and ydlenesse.28

The term fraunchyse had layered meanings in the late fifteenth century.29 As it obviously does in this passage, it refers to the spiritual freedom to make ethical choices with autonomy. But that meaning is extended in the next phrase, where it is a sense of fraunchyse that provides the ‘cause’ and the ‘souerayn wele to Incyte and exhorte men and wymmen’. At this point, fraunchyse as spiritual freedom layers onto its meaning in the social and even political register — it is

26 

STC 24873, Library of Congress, Inc. 1483. J33, sig. *1v. STC 24873, Library of Congress, Inc. 1483. J33, sig. *1v. 28  STC 24873, Library of Congress, Inc. 1483. J33, sig. *1r. De Vignay’s text reads ‘Et que cest uraie et souueraine franchise. Et pour ce que il mest ains que cest souuerain bien faire entrendre as gens qui ne sont’, as it appears in Caxton, The Prologues and Epilogues, ed. by Crotch, p. 72. 29  MED, s.v. fraunchise(e), n. 27 

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precisely fraunchyse that endows one with both the liberty and the responsibility to work for the greater common profit. Part of how Caxton sees himself working for that greater good is by providing a translation with specifically national aims, and in a second interpolation he appropriately leaves aside his French source once again to explain his work further. Speaking to those who might ‘saye that thys legende hath be translated tofore’, Caxton defends the utility and necessity of his edition by emphasizing the additional translation of new sources and new legends — as he says, gathering ‘those whiche were not in the English book’. Caxton’s edition thus effectively participates in the nationalist work of hagiography, translating saints ‘from the geography and languages of Christian history’ into ‘England and English’ — his edition includes a bevy of native saints like Thomas a Becket, Swithun, Oswald, and Rock.30 Caxton’s saints together comprise a specifically English volume, serving the ambitions of the English nation. We might hear fraunchyse echo again in its broader political sense. This first prologue, then, figures the work of translation as a moral labour, a labour that emerges out of ethical autonomy and in turn serves the greater good and the national interest. These terms and themes resonate in the second prologue, but in ways that challenge, question, and interrogate their previous framework. This second prologue is Caxton’s original composition and consists of an animated, quite emotional production narrative. Caxton tells the story of how he undertook the ambitious task of translating and printing The Golden Legend, but was quickly overwhelmed by the immensity of the task, and, ‘halfe desperate to haue accomplisshed it / was in purpose to haue lefte it’, he nearly abandoned the project.31 It was only at the command of Arundel that he resumed his work. Yet the terms through which Caxton describes Arundel’s interest seem to reverse rather than extend the emergent fraunchyse of the first prologue. Arundel insists, requests and desires that Caxton complete his translation, sends a servant to underscore that the printer ‘shold in no wyse leue it but accomplisshe it’, and Caxton ultimately presents his printed book to Arundel ‘as chyef causer of the achyeuyng of hit’.32 While the first prologue equated moral labour with moral agency, here Caxton rewrites himself as a quite hesitant worker, mired in doubt, able to complete his edition only at the directive and then constant urging of Arundel. 30 

Simpson, Reform and Cultural Revolution, p. 403. STC 24873, Library of Congress, Inc. 1483. J33, sig. *2a. 32  STC 24873, Library of Congress, Inc. 1483. J33, sig. *2a. 31 

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Indeed, the second prologue offers no vocabulary to describe the immaterial labour of book production, nor the moral potential of intellectual work. Instead, book production is work that takes place within conservative models of patronage and feudal exchange. Abstractions of labour — and especially around market worth and value — are evoked only to be quickly submerged again. For instance, William FitzAlan, earl of Arundel, is unmistakably Caxton’s patron and not his customer: Arundel’s promise to ‘take a resonable quantyte’ of the edition hardly suggests he is a bookseller in the mold of John Russhe. Instead, the exchanges between Caxton and Arundel seem to strenuously avoid the spectre of market value and commerce: Caxton tells us that Arundel provided support for him to finish his edition that was not monetary, but instead a ‘yerely fee’ of a ‘bucke in somer / and a doo in wynter’.33 Far from imagining the circulation of The Golden Legend in a market economy, this anecdote envisions an alternative — and ultimately nostalgic — feudal model of exchange, where textual production is rewarded through systems of patronage. It is a fee, Caxton says, with which he can ‘hold me well contente’.34 Caxton thus recreates book production and the work of his press precisely within the nostalgic bonds of feudal exchange that Richard’s statute valorizes. In sum, these prologues articulate two distinct models of labour that might be applied to Caxton’s own work of translating and printing The Golden Legend. Both avoid addressing the economic value of an edition like The Golden Legend and its circulation as a commodity. But the first, itself a translation, offers a theory of immaterial labour that validates textual production as intellectual work, creating translators (and by extension, book producers like Caxton) as workers with the autonomy necessary to create spiritual value. In this model, the autonomous, intellectual work of producing The Golden Legend is represented as labour that is potentially very productive indeed, yielding spiritual profits for the English nation. The model of the second prologue does not so easily accommodate immaterial labour, and indeed, seems to resist it at every turn. Written quite literally under the sign of Arundel, whose combined arms and motto — ‘My Truthe Is’ — sit atop the page, this second theory also implicitly challenges the connection between immaterial labour and spiritual fraunchyse. Instead, textual production is situated, like other feudal work, as an instrument of social and material exchange. Books in this model may be instruments for prayer, but they also represent labour converted into the material expression of 33  34 

STC 24873, Library of Congress, Inc. 1483. J33, sig. *2a. STC 24873, Library of Congress, Inc. 1483. J33, sig. *2a.

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future contracts, promises, and bonds — or annuities paid in bucks and does. The juxtaposition of these two prologues, like the choice of the two finding aids, pushes the readers’ interpretive investments by giving them an explicit choice to make: How should readers understand immaterial work as it is represented in the reading and translating of religious material? Caxton’s own answer is visible in the charm and energy of the numerous cameos he makes throughout the body of the text. His interpolations are frequently drawn from his own experiences abroad, and thus consistently conflate his intellectual labours as a translator of religious practice and stories with the immaterial and distinctly mercantile labour of travel and commerce. His appearances reveal his overlapping and otherwise invisible labours as a merchant, a printer, and a translator — and together offer their own claims about the value of immaterial labour. Caxton’s interpolations share subtle but discernible consistencies. He does not, for instance, add any of his own material to the seventeen English saints’ lives he draws from the Gilte Legende collection. (We might assume that he ‘Englished’ them enough by gathering them into his edition.) Instead, he weaves his personal anecdotes and experiences into narratives that span the full breadth of the collection, adding to the Feast of the Circumcision, to the Old Testament stories, to the cycle of Mary, and to several saint’s lives. Most significantly, of his seven major interpolations, five of them are recollections and stories gathered during his own merchant adventures in Cologne, Bruges, Ghent, and Antwerp. These locations in the Low Countries all had complex commercial relationships to England at the end of the fifteenth century, relationships with a strong impact on English economic and foreign policy as demonstrated by the ongoing diplomatic negotiations with the Hanseatic League and agreements like the Treaty of Utrecht.35 These are, therefore, sites that clearly signal Caxton’s personal mercantile connections and experiences. A brief account of these five interventions will illustrate how keenly consistent they are as translations of mercantile experiences into English religious use, and as translations of 35 

See especially Sutton, The Mercery of London, pp. 282–83, for Caxton’s own role in finalizing the treaty and his prominence in the Low Countries as Governor of the English Nation at Bruge. See too, Sutton, ‘Caxton was a Mercer’, and Hellinga and Hellinga, ‘Caxton in the Low Countries’. For the political relationships of England to the Low Countries, see Barron and Saul, England and the Low Countries in the Late Middle Ages, especally Barron’s introduction, pp. 1–28, and Johnston, ‘Traders and Playmakers’. On Caxton’s printing apprenticeship, the most recent work has been done by Lotte Hellinga in her illuminating William Caxton and Early Printing, esp. pp. 26–32.

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information gathered through foreign commercial contacts into a collection of English spiritual knowledge. To the Feast of the Circumcision, Caxton relates his personal witness of a unique expression of the Body of Christ ‘in the chirche of our lady at andwarp in braband’.36 There, he says, the ‘flessh of our lord’ is venerated, and he joins his own eyewitness account of the solemn processions (‘though I be vnworthy haue seen dyuerse tymes’) to material about the miracles effected by the relic itself.37 The city of Antwerp also provides Caxton with an opportunity to extend the miracles recorded by Augustine, marvelling a little about why it had not been recorded in his sources — a point which, of course, underscores both the value of Caxton’s experience, and the story’s attraction: but among other correction I wylle sette here in one myracle / whiche I haue sene paynted on an aulter of saynt Austyn at the blacke Freres at Andwerpe / how be it / I fynde hit not in the legende myn exampler / neyther in Englysshe / frensshe / ne in latyn.38

The story itself is an extensive exemplum that relates Augustine’s encounter with a child on the sea shore who teaches the saint about the boundlessness of the Trinity. Together, these two anecdotes do the important cultural work of resituating Antwerp — a city emerging into considerable international prominence, replacing the English stronghold of Calais as the centre of the wool trade — from a foreign center to one familiar to English readers. Two further interpolations feature the city of Cologne, another site intimately familiar to English merchants and, as Sutton puts it, ‘determinedly proLondon’ throughout even the tense period of late fifteenth-century trade negotiations between London and the Hanse. Cologne also features prominently in the story of English print, as the site where Caxton had learned the art of printing from Johannes Veldener in the early 1470s. Caxton draws openly upon his Cologne experience to furnish a new anecdote in his account of the Nativity of Our Blessed Lady: ‘It is so / that I was at Coleyn / and herd reherced there by a noble doctour / that the hooly and deuoute saynt Ieromme had a custome to vysyte the chirches at Rome’.39 And Caxton goes on to relate the experience of Jerome before an altar there dedicated to the Virgin Mary. Cologne, too, is 36 

STC 24873, BL, C.11.d.8, sig. a8a. STC 24873, BL, C.11.d.8, sig. a8a. 38  STC 24873, BL, C.11.d.8, sig. K3b. 39  STC 24873, BL, C.11.d.8, sig. L6b. 37 

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the city in which Caxton is attains fresh archaeological information about the slaughter of the virgins, as told in the life of Ursula. Here, Caxton add to his legend details about the discovery made in that city of the remains of fifteen thousand virgin men buried alongside the eleven thousand virgin women — information that adds a new, material dimension to English knowledge about a popular saint.40 And finally, in the most well known of his interpolations, Caxton adds a striking turn to the biblical story of David’s penance. 41 Caxton’s entry on David is part of his original translation of an Old Testament series, but it is the sole place where he extends biblical tradition quite so far. In Caxton’s addition, David does penance by burying himself repeatedly in the earth, ‘standyng nakyd vnto the heed so longe that the wormes began to crepe in his flesshe’, a position he maintains as long as it takes him to compose one verse of the fourth psalm.42 David repeats this again and again, until the composition of the psalm is complete. Caxton is careful in detailing the source of this addition, which he tells us was related to him by the knight, Sir John Capons, during a trip between Ghent and Brussels: For as I ones was by yonde the see Rydyng in the companye of a noble knyght named Syr Iohn Capons and was also doctour in bothe lawes / and was born in malyorke and had ben viceroye and gouernour of Aragon and Catelone / and that tyme Counceyllour vnto the duc of bourgonye Charloys […]. Thus thys noble man told me rydyng bytwene the toun of Gaunt in Flaundres and the toun of Bruxellis in Braband.43

Caxton is perhaps self-serving here as he identifies his aristocratic companion, but nevertheless the story serves as an interesting counterpoint to The Golden Legend’s second prologue: in this passage, Caxton’s high-born acquaintance authorizes rather than compels the telling of the narrative. Underscored, too, is the journey itself as occasion — the travels of two well-connected men, passing between two great commercial hubs in the counties of Flanders and Brabant. Nowhere in these intriguing cameos does Caxton provide a personal context deeper than simply his presence abroad — his own quite successful political 40 

STC 24873, BL, C.11.d.8, sig. R7b. For an excellent reading of Caxton’s David within the psalmic form, see King’oo, Miserere Mei, pp. 123–24. 42  STC 24873, BL, C.11.d.8, sig. i6a. 43  STC 24873, BL, C.11.d.8, sig. i6a. 41 

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and mercantile history abroad forms the unnamed backdrop. But his mercantile work is translated in other ways. The ‘easy occupacion’ of international commerce is, in these anecdotes, gently replaced with the work of spiritual experiences and narratives imported to the profit of the English devout — translated, as it were, geographically and linguistically for the English reader. Together these passages remind readers at points throughout The Golden Legend that the translation of Continental religious practices is a project made possible, visible, and comprehensible through mercantile trade and travel. Translation in this practice retraces the familiar routes of commercial importation — only here Caxton imports not cloth or books or paper, but saints from Cologne, devotional practices from Bruges, Old Testament stories from the road between Brussels and Ghent. As James Simpson observes about the reforming practices of hagiography more generally, these passages create Caxton’s Golden Legend as a medieval text ‘unembarrassed about explicitly locating the presence and interests of the writing reader in the present’.44 For his English readership, Caxton’s pious work in translating the saints not only recognized and ‘translated’ Continental and English experiences, but provided an alternative register within which to understand mercantile labour. Within the material volume of The Golden Legend, this work of commerce, exchange, and travel is available for further material circulation in service of the common good. Just as the volume consistently conflates the immaterial labour of translation with the invisible labour of international mercantile transaction and travel, Caxton consistently and usefully marries his work as a translator and producer of hagiographic texts with his mercantile experiences. The Golden Legend is, at the end, a hallmark of one merchant’s busy-ness, indeed.

Reading Dives and Pauper across the Fifteenth Century My reading of Caxton’s edition of The Golden Legend is an argument, in part, for a certain kind of intentionality and agency on Caxton’s behalf — that is, for Caxton as a deliberate, purposeful architect reshaping a hagiographical text in response to cultural pressures and expectations. But to extend this chapter’s argument is to look more closely at the uses of printed books like The Golden Legend — in other words, to explore the question of intention within reception histories. Was The Golden Legend read by London’s merchant community? 44 

Simpson, Reform and Cultural Revolution, p. 64.

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And if so, how might we understand questions of agency and intention within those acts of reading? As scholars are all too aware, the evidence for readership available through empirical bibliographical methods serves a limited range of inquiry. Extant traces of reading are typically slim, book provenance difficult to establish, and details about ownership and circulation remain murky. This is the case with the Legenda aurea, whose particularly broad appeal and use make it difficult to reconstruct specific threads of readership. We know that versions were owned in manuscript throughout the fifteenth century by English aristocrats and wealthy lay readers, and by at least a few London merchants. The text also had the parochial connections we might expect.45 The evidence for ownership of Caxton’s Golden Legend is more sparse, and seems to merely suggest a continuation of that varied manuscript readership — hardly conclusive evidence either for or against the kind of mercantile resonance I am claiming here.46 Yet while extant copies of The Golden Legend may not produce many specific insights into print or mercantile audiences, another religious text, Dives and Pauper, offers a quite different set of materials that together suggest a more capacious approach to the complexities of early book reception. The evidence in the case of Dives and Pauper is both bibliographical and historical. Several extant manuscripts and printed copies contain marginalia, traces of reading, and ownership marks that indicate mercantile readers; further, we know that London merchants were familiar with Dives and Pauper through legal records detailing the joint production of the first edition by Pynson and John Russhe, the London mercer and bookseller.47 But the text’s own history also prompts 45 

For a helpful overview of what we can trace of The Golden Legend’s owners, see Sutton and Visser-Fuchs, Richard III’s Books, pp. 64–66. On the inadequacy of the available evidence especially for merchant book ownership as recorded in wills, see Sutton, most recently ‘Merchants’, at p. 131. 46  The printed Golden Legend also retained the parochial affiliations of the manuscript Legenda aurea, as supported by the ownership inscription of Robert Howssun, a cantor priest at the Lincoln cathedral, in a copy of de Worde’s 1493 edition (STC 24875), as cited by Powell, ‘The Secular Clergy’, p. 157. See also the case of extracts from The Golden Legend copied back into manuscript: O’Mara, ‘From Print to Manuscript’. 47  The evidence we have for John Russhe’s interest in Dives and Pauper is preserved in records of a lawsuit brought by Russhe’s heirs against Pynson, and it is clear that the production of Dives and Pauper was a business collaboration; we cannot infer that Dives and Pauper was of interest to Russhe as a reader. For the records of the lawsuit, see Plomer, ‘Two Lawsuits of Richard Pynson’ and ‘Pynson’s Dealings with John Russhe’. A detailed discussion of the relationship between Russhe and Pynson is provided in Kuskin, ‘“Onely Imagined”’.

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us to think about reading as a key component of the selection processes that brought it through the fifteenth century. The very selection of Dives and Pauper by Pynson and Russhe — and later, by De Worde and then Berthelet — is itself unusual, as it represents one of the very few native religious texts ushered into print. Further, while Dives and Pauper is a work of pastoral instruction composed outside the London context, it is permeated by economic themes that make it of strikingly prescient use to London’s late medieval mercantile community. A consideration of Dives and Pauper’s reception thus encourages an expanded sense of ‘reading’. In this section I find evidence of the text’s mercantile readership by first offering a reading of Dives and Pauper that locates its own investments in economic discourse. Reading evidence is also present in the traces that fifteenth-century readers left behind in the manuscripts and printed leaves of individual book copies, as well as in a broader analysis of the collective reception of the text across the fifteenth century — a reception that begins to favour one audience and one version of the text over another. Ultimately, as I show by reading assertively for traces of merchants, the printed editions of Dives and Pauper were shaped for and offered within an emerging tradition of religious printed books culturally useful for London’s late fifteenth century merchant readers. Like other texts that engage with vernacular theology, Dives and Pauper demonstrates a lively and spirited pedagogic aim that is met through a deeply dialogic, rather than didactic, mode. This is most apparent in the anomalous use to which it puts the late medieval catechetical tradition: although the teaching of the Ten Commandments forms the work’s loose framework, the eponymous characters of Dives and Pauper assume their roles as student and teacher slowly. Dives, a wealthy man striving to live a good life, is an argumentative and frequently recalcitrant pupil; Pauper is his opposite, a quietly confident, learned man living the mendicant ideal. Pauper is accepted as the teacher only at the end of the prologue, and the question of which man is qualified to instruct the other is dramatized when Dives reveals that he already knows the Ten Commandments well enough to challenge the hierarchy of their order that Pauper presents.48 Moreover, both figures lead worldly lives profoundly shaped by the possession or lack of wealth. These are active participants in the 48  Dives and Pauper, i.1, pp. 67–69. All citations of Dives and Pauper are from the edition by Priscilla Barnum, which includes the edited text in Volume i, parts 1 and 2, and Barnum’s introduction and explanatory notes in Volume ii. Citations begin with the volume and part, followed by the page and line number as appropriate. I also follow Barnum’s convention in referring to the Holy Poverty Prologues A and B as HP-A, HP-B, and HP-A/B.

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world, nor do they wish to be otherwise; Dives explicitly has chosen the path of ‘less perfeccioun’ like that which ‘Crist specifyid to þat ȝonge riche man’.49 It is unsurprising that, by the end of the prologue, the ensuing explication of the Ten Commandments is offered not as pastoral instruction but rather as the most appropriate moral reinforcement for those choosing to lead lives in the world. In the lengthy body of the work the writer, likely a Franciscan in the service of a prosperous household, wades unabashedly into some of the central controversies of his day: he inveighs against restrictions on preaching, insists on the necessity of vernacular biblical translation, and critiques various aspects of ecclesiastical wealth and practice.50 Thus, even though the text’s two interlocutors adopt a range of theological stances, the text as a whole — at specific points as well as in its overall posture of assertive inquiry — poses precisely the kind of vernacular challenge that ecclesiastical authorities of the early fifteenth century were keen to contain. This theological boldness overlays an already provocative textual history. The religious ‘tretys’, as the author later terms his work, was composed around 1407, on the eve of Arundel’s Constitutions, and survives in twelve manuscripts and manuscript fragments as well as in three printed editions, with the last being Thomas Berthelet’s imprint of 1536 at the conclusion of the Reformation Parliament.51 The historical weight of Arundel’s Constitutions in particular has bent critical attention heavily towards the text’s early reception, and indeed that context confirms the controversial nature of the work: in 1431, ownership of Dives and Pauper was cited as evidence in a heresy trial at Bury St Edmunds that implicated a network of lay readers.52 It would be reductive, however, to understand Dives and Pauper as a heretical text. Even as it was cited in the Bury St Edmunds heresy trials, a copy was commissioned by the powerful and fiercely orthodox Abbot Whethamstede of St Albans. This tangle of heterodox and orthodox interpretation points to the central role of readerly intention in determining the text’s posture: as Jennifer Summit argues, Dives and Pauper was only construed as an aggressive ‘lay incur49 

Dives and Pauper, i.1, quoted from discussion on lives of less and more perfection; at p. 66, l. 27, and at the discussion’s conflusion, p. 69, l. 73. 50  Hudson, ‘Wyliffite Prose’, p. 263. 51  An expanded list of copies and discussion is provided in Dives and Pauper, ed. by Barnum, pp. liv–lxxxiii; for authorship, see Hudson and Spencer, ‘Old Author, New Work’. The printed editions are as follows: Pynson (1493, STC 19212); de Worde (1496, STC 19213); and Berthelet (1536, STC 19214). 52  See Hudson’s synopsis in ‘Wycliffite Prose’, p. 263; Carlson, ‘Whetehamstede on Lollardy’.

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sion’ into theological matters when it was in lay hands, unmediated by the institutional authority of the church.53 Not unlike the Wycliffite Bible, then, the orthodoxy of Dives and Pauper was contingent upon the intentions signaled by (or assumed of ) its readers. Indeed, while conflict between heterodoxy and orthodoxy constitutes a powerful interpretive frame for Dives and Pauper — and one sharply relevant to the first decade or so of the text’s reception — it is not the horizon most anticipated by the text, nor the one that is related to its reception over the later decades of that same century. For instance, despite adopting several Lollard positions, Dives and Pauper is generally supportive of clerical and ecclesiastical authority, and relatively dispassionate on the subject of large-scale reform. Instead, the text’s most lively energies spark around its cultivation and exploration of lay self-regulation through the figure of Dives. For example, the conclusions of points frequently are turns where we see Dives persuaded rather than instructed: ‘I am out of doughte. I can answeryn þerto myself be þin declaracioun,’ Dives asserts in a typical move.54 And there are numerous examples of Dives balking at practices and arguments that impinge upon his autonomy. He finally sees the folly of astrology, for example, largely because ‘þer can noon astronomyen be his craft tellyn me mynne thoughtys ne what I purpose to doon in tyme comyng ne how I shal ledyn my lyf. þey knowyn nought my counseyl, alþow þey see me and speykn wyt me’.55 These are moments in which lay autonomy extends into the kind of ethical self-regulation that Dives and Pauper consistently presents as crucial to the worldly life of ‘lesse perfeccioun’, as well as to lay relationships with clerical authority. The concerns that centrally animate Dives and Pauper — questions about ethical self-regulation, a forceful interest in autonomy and intention, and a moral framework for leading a devout-yet-worldly life — are also part of the fabric of the discourse of theological economics. The text’s frequent allusions to and engagements with issues of commercial morality have been underscored by studies in economic history (yet still neglected in literary scholarship).56 But these are not only a central part of the text’s own engagements, but of germane interest to the mercantile audience for Dives and Pauper that took shape over 53 

Summit, Memory’s Library, pp. 27–28. Dives and Pauper, i.1, p. 109, ll. 4–5. 55  Dives and Pauper, i.1, p. 139, l. 307. 56  See Wood, Medi­eval Economic Thought, who refers to the text in examples many times (although it does not appear in her bibliography), and also Davies, Medi­eval Market Morality. 54 

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the second half of the fifteenth century. My analysis thus begins with a reading of the text that underscores the centrality of a theological economic lexicon to Dives and Pauper, making the selection of the text itself compelling evidence of the mercantile readership anticipated by Pynson and de Worde. The text’s earnest engagement with the ethics of economics — and its admixture of Franciscan, Wycliffite, and Thomist thinking about wealth — emerges in the prologue and particularly infuses the lengthy treatment of the seventh commandment, the two sections to which I now turn. The opening chapters of Dives and Pauper, known as the Holy Poverty prologue (HP), plays an important role in the text’s history; extant copies are divided into two main groups by their modern editor, Patricia Barnum, on the basis of distinctions between an early A version of that prologue (HP-A) and a later, mostly post-1450 B version (HP-B). The prologue’s opening passages, in both versions, reflect on the basic Christian similarities between the wealthy and the poor in the eyes of God, but then they quickly diverge. In HP-A, the first speaker is neither Dives nor Pauper but an antagonistic voice that denounces the meanness and scepticism of the rich toward the poor. A mediating Pauper then speaks, and although he softens that opening tone, he is followed by an arrogant Dives whose opening lines seem to justify that previous speaker’s hostility: ‘And þu myghtist, þu woldyst be weye of elmesse han al þat I haue,’ he accuses Pauper.57 By contrast, in HP-B, the initial lines are far more neutral, and the introduction of Dives is deferred. Instead, Pauper is initially the sole speaker, introducing himself as a ‘pore caitiff ’ who occupies a middle ground between the absolute refutation of wealth and the desire for worldly gain: he does not want to ‘no vtterly caste alle temporal goodis awei’ but also to ‘holde me content and neuer bisie me to hepe togidre aboundance of worldli richessis’.58 It is not until the second section of the HP-B prologue that Dives enters, and he enters swaggering as a rich man in full dramatic dress. He wagers a hundred pounds that he can prove the person a fool who does not pursue riches, and for good measure clarifies precisely the kind of wealth at issue: ‘And þat þou be not in doute of what richessis I speke, worldli richessis or goostli, I do þee out of doute — I speke of worldli richessis.’59 His entrance adds more dynamic depth to the framing dialogue, but it also, more subtly, emphasizes the opening message of Pauper: the central concern of HP-B is not 57 

Dives and Pauper, i.1, p. 52, ll. 37–38. Dives and Pauper, i.1, p. 71, ll. 48–53. 59  Dives and Pauper, i.1, p. 71, ll. 4–5. 58 

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about renouncing possessions and money, but about negotiating a place for ‘worldli richessis’. In this later version, it becomes increasingly clear that Pauper’s goal is to offer a corrective modification for Dives, rather than to shift his status or social position. The relative modesty of this goal comes into focus when we compare the last points at which the A and B versions are distinct. In HP-A, Pauper undermines his own lengthy speech about cooperative mutuality with a smug reminder that he and Dives are still in competition: ‘The ryche man and the pore been too thynggys wol needful iche to othir. And, as I seyde ferst, the ryche man hatȝ more need of the pore mannys helpe þan the pore of the ryche.’60 The two speakers thus remain at odds, with the concepts of need and mutual reliance neatly criss-crossed but not quite settled. However, at the same place in the text, HP-B arrives at a very different point. In this later version, Dives has become quite anxious about his wealth — ‘I was afered þat god hadde not loued riche men’61 — and it is Pauper who quickly reassures him ‘þat þe faute is not in þe richessis but in hem þat kunnen not vse her richessis in dw maner’.62 The characters of Dives and Pauper are, in this version, engaged in a collaborative project, and one that emphasizes the familiar key term of a mercantile ethics — that is, the appropriate use of wealth. The distinct new framework that the HP-B prologue offers Dives and Pauper also emerges through the material which this post-1450 version omits. HP-B is shorter than HP-A by about a quarter, and sections that profess a rigid commitment to the principles of mendicancy, or that idealize Franciscan poverty, are consistently excised.63 The overall effects of the two prologues are thus markedly different. The HP-A prologue introduces a series of questions and overlapping concerns — about mendicancy, the tension between paths of less and more perfection, the friction wealth generates against the ideal of Christian perfection, themes of mutuality and need — any of which can be picked out in the following treatment of the Decalogue. The HP-B prologue, by contrast, arrives at a more singular point, preparing the reader to think about the main text as a response to how an active life — and one of ‘worldi richessis’ — might pragmatically negotiate Christian principles. In the terms offered in HP-B, that negotiation takes place through the deliberate alignment of personal agency with the ethical principles governing the social and spiritual commonalty. 60 

Dives and Pauper, i.1, p. 63, ll. 31–34. Dives and Pauper, i.1, p. 77, ll. 40–41. 62  Dives and Pauper, i.1, p. 78, ll. 10–11. 63  Dives and Pauper, ‘Introduction’, ii, p. lxxvii; see also Doyle, ‘A Survey’, i, 96. 61 

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In the rest of Dives and Pauper, the appropriate use of wealth in ecclesiastical and social arenas is a common theme, but never so much as in the lengthy treatment of the seventh commandment regarding theft, where the emphasis of HP-B is particularly equipped to meet with an eager, searching exploration of mercantile conduct. The treatment of the seventh commandment outstrips in length the coverage dedicated to the other commandments except the first. In all, the chapter comprises twenty-eight sections, twelve of which are relevant to laity and often specifically to merchants. Indeed, moving very much with the tide of late medieval attitudes toward mercantile work, these dozen sections offer a pragmatic, nuanced, and often generous guide to market realities and the conduct of the wealthy merchant reader, and frequently appeal to the guiding concepts of common profit, usury, and intention. The chapter’s economic concepts emerge through a variety of named and unnamed sources, some of which are the product of the text’s engagement with disputes of the day. As Barnum notes, the seven sections of the chapter that take up simony and tithing clearly resonate with Wyclif ’s reflections on ecclesiastical wealth and property in his De mandatis divinis.64 Of more durable interest, I suggest, and typical of the deep tradition of theological economics, is the writer’s citation of Augustine and Thomas Aquinas; his heavy reliance on the canon law tradition, as seen in his citation of the Dominican canonists Raymond of Penafort and Henricus de Segusio; and the unnamed but still palpable influence of scholastic economic thinkers like Duns Scotus, Thomas de Chobham, and Nicholas de Lyra. Whatever is Wycliffite about Dives and Pauper in its economic thinking is enmeshed within the more commonplace resonances and reflections of the scholastic tradition.65 For instance, the exchanges devoted to the everyday business of commerce reveal close echoes of the Aquinas passage cited earlier in this chapter, echoes which emerge as Dives asks very basic questions about the legitimacy of profit-making: Dives: May a man sellyn a þing derere þan he boute it? Pauper: Ellys myȝte no man lyuyn be hys merchaundye ne be his craft. He must takyn up his costis  susteynyn hym  hese  worchepyn God  holy chirche  helpyn þe pore, and for þis ende it is leful  nedful to þe chapman and to þe warcman to sellyn þing derere þan he bouȝte it to.66 64 

Dives and Pauper, ‘Introduction’, esp. pp. xviii–l. And, I might add, considerably softened. Wyclif, for instance, was uncompromisingly stern on the topic of usury, with narrow accommodations for extrinsic titles: see Select English Works of John Wyclif, ed. by Arnold, iii, 154–55. 66  Dives and Pauper, i.2, p. 155, ll. 68–74. See also the preceding chapters five through ten, 65 

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Pauper’s response quite neatly rehearses Thomist reflections on justifiable commerce, holding up Aquinas’s standard of the common profit as a gauge of the social good a merchant might do. His family, the Church, and his ability to ‘helpyn þe pore’ are the measures of legitimate mercantile profit.67 The familiarity of the market morality prescribed in this chapter is evident again several sections later, as the writer turns to the question of usury. While usury is named in an early part of the chapter as a key concern, its full treatment is reserved for the chapter’s closing five sections.68 These sections are also among the least dialogic, consisting of brief prompts from Dives and lengthy responses by Pauper. But the didacticism one might expect is missing. What takes its place is a far more nuanced defense of everyday commercial activity. Indeed, it is worth noting that on the topic of usury Dives and Pauper departs quite dramatically from Wyclif, whose own treatment is both far less scholastic and less tolerant of quotidian commercial practice. Instead, Pauper defines usury in a traditional Thomist vein — as the misuse of money — and the main problem these sections grapple with is how to discriminate usury from legitimate profit-making. As we might now expect, usury is also deeply intertwined with an emphasis on intention, as in this passage which deals with the question of loan terms that change: ‘ȝif þe intencion of þe lender be nout corrupt þou his dettour ȝeue hym somþing for þe lendynge or for to kepyn it stille lengere, þe lendere doth non vsure.’69 Usury is here a fairly flexible category, and these chapters treat a range of business scenarios from simple loans to stockpiling, market speculation, and the uses of contracts and interest. Nearly all of the instances of usury are treated by distinguishing between the merchant acting with good intentions, and the one acting only in self-interest. In an example that foreshadows the Ricardian legislative context of the 1480s discussed in a previous section, Pauper provides an overview of legitimate and illegitimate practices of stockpiling: Ȝif men in tyme of plente byyn corn or oþir nedful þingis to sellyn is forth mor dere in tyme of derþe of nede, ȝif it be don pryncipaly for fals coueytyse it is synne. But which discuss the basic conditions of fair commerce, including ethical loans, the concept of the just price, and disclosure of faults in merchandise. 67  The goal of converting financial profit to spiritual profit — a prevalent concern of England’s merchants, as discussed earlier in the example of Richard Whittington — is revisited in the Ninth Precept, on covetousness; see Dives and Pauper, i.2, pp. 255–56. 68  Usury is defined in Dives and Pauper at i, 135, l. 18. 69  Dives and Pauper, i.1, p. 198, ll. 12–13.

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ȝif it be don pryncipaly for comoun profit  for sauacion of þe contre it is medful, for Ioseph, gouernour of Egypt, dede so for to sauyn þe peple in tyme of hungyr, Genesis xlvii.70

This example, which makes the sinful ‘fals coueytyse’ only one possibility set against the equally plausible scenario of the merchant who stockpiles ‘for comoun profit  for sauacion of þe contre’, brings the standard for determining sin repeatedly back to the question of motivation and intention. This example also clearly draws on the contours of Thomist and Scotist justifications for trade, and especially on the scholastic sense of the state as the appropriate repository of the common profit. Further, in another very traditional move, the citation of Genesis 47. 13 predictably follows the canonists. Moreover, by choosing the example of stockpiling corn, the writer also reveals the ways that the broader discourse of theological economics might intersect with very specific historical contexts. In this case, charges of corn- and grain-hoarding were the cornerstone of an often-vitriolic contemporary indictment of merchants that took place over the decades spanning the late fourteenth and early fifteenth century. James Davies has recently detailed these views in the widely circulated sermons of Robert Rypon and John Bromyard, as well as in texts like Winner and Wastour, Jacob’s Well, Handlyng Synne, and John Gower’s Mirour, all of which portrayed English merchants as withholding basic goods — specifically corn — from the market when they suspected that scarcity would increase their profits.71 Against these complaints, the writer of Dives and Pauper deploys the wide history of theological economics as an apologia for the kinds of local, highly visible authority over basic goods that merchants exercised in their communities — appealing reading, we might assume, especially for those merchants. Usury and common profit are two key terms in theological economics; the third, intention, plays perhaps the most crucial role in the treatment of the seventh commandment, and in important ways informs the whole of Dives and Pauper. The quotation above, for instance, on the topic of usury, relies on the discernment of mercantile intention to determine whether or not an individual has committed usury. But the focus on intention in Dives and Pauper is more complex — and potentially more useful for later readers — than its work as a marker of economic legitimacy: intention here also opens a unique space for self-representation. An example of how that space is constructed is available in the lengthy discussion of various arrangements of ‘cheuysaunce’ — practices of 70  71 

Dives and Pauper, i.1, p. 201, ll. 24–28. See Davies, Medi­eval Market Morality, pp. 117–18.

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borrowing and loaning — that return repeatedly to not only ‘þe intencion of þe lender’, but to the external representation of that intention.72 At one revealing point, Pauper cautions Dives about entering into contracts that are legitimate but which might appear otherwise: And þerfor it is good to flen swyche comenantis for alþey hys intencioun be good ȝit þe doynge þe maner of comenant semyth wyckyd slaundrous to folc þat knowyn nout his intencion.73

As we have seen, this awareness of a split between an interiorized intention and the external, social perception of that intention emphasizes — and at moments necessitates — the project of representing a subjective intention. This project has broad implications, among them an emerging mercantile claim to a sense of agency in both the political and theological arenas. James Simpson has recognized just such an emerging lay agency in Dives and Pauper in an argument about the discussion of images in Book i. Here, Simpson argues, the orthodox distinction Dives makes around the use of images turns around ‘the very fine, purely psychological, distinction between imagining and believing. The distinction may be exceptionally fine; it may be maintained only be especially self-conscious agents. For all its fineness, this distinction is not less than the distinction between orthodoxy and heresy’.74 These claims can and should be extended beyond the analogies Simpson makes between imagining/believing and orthodoxy/heresy: the acute selfawareness of Dives in the first book is certainly present in the seventh, and indeed throughout the whole of the work, which everywhere emphasizes, expects, and fosters the sense of Dives as an ‘especially self-conscious agent’. Certainly, the text’s very form — its dialogic core — attests to the agency embedded in the character of Dives. The back-and-forth he initiates with Pauper is not the pedagogical posture of the typical student in pastoral debates; Dives gives voice instead to the questioning, challenging, and often provocative lay determination that was the hallmark of the late medieval mercantile pious reader. It is hardly a coincidence that the necessity of interior discrimination around images, cited by Simpson, takes place as part of an unfolding lesson in how to read a book: ‘On þis maner, I preye the, rede þin book and falle doun to grounde and thanke þin God þat wolde doon so mechil for the,’ Pauper instructs Dives, but his instruction is part of an extended answer to Dives’s question, 72 

Dives and Pauper, i.2, p. 198, l. 11. Dives and Pauper, i.2, p. 201, ll. 9–12. 74  Simpson, ‘Orthodoxy’s Image Trouble’, at p. 105. Italics original. 73 

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‘How shulde I rede in þe book of peynture and of ymagerye?’75 Dives is the lay reader of Dives and Pauper — a wealthy layman, as we will see below — and the text as a whole is a response to his demands, anxieties, and questions. The book of religious instruction, and especially Dives and Pauper, emerges here as a space that registers lay authority at the same time that it represents, over and over, the good intentions of the wealthy layman, drawing back the curtain to reveal the sincerity of his effort to reconcile piety and prosperity. Dives and Pauper is thus a text whose invocations of commercial morality were instrumental to its exploration of lay agency and made it an exceptionally useful book for its later mercantile readers. Indeed, by the closing decades of the century Dives and Pauper had largely shed a receptive framework organized by questions of orthodoxy, and joined the stream of texts representing the religious and ethical commitments of English merchants as well as that community’s capacity for ethical self-regulation. To read Dives and Pauper into this moment is to extend ‘reading’ to encompass the processes of selection as these resituated the text across the fifteenth century. Evidence for a collective shaping of Dives and Pauper begins with the preferences of its increasingly mercantile, London-based readers, and the distinctions that grew between the Group A and B manuscripts — and thus between versions of the text that, respectively, either de-emphasized or prioritized the expression of personal agency and the cultivation of right-minded intentions. The nine extant Group A manuscripts of Dives and Pauper comprise the text’s earliest versions, and these are primarily East Anglian in origin and almost all written in the first half of the fifteenth century (with three exceptions discussed below). This textual geography fits well with modern scholarly conclusions about that region’s decades-long tradition of free-spirited theological thinking. The ownership evidence of Group A copies, too, strengthens the potent argument Nicholas Watson has made about the restriction of vernacular theology to a social elite in the wake of Arundel’s Constitutions.76 Because of the early dating and regional affiliation, for instance, we can reasonably assume that the copy which aroused heretical suspicions in Norwich was a copy from Group A.77 75 

Dives and Pauper, i.1, p. 85, ll. 49–51 and i.1, p. 83, ll. 1–2. Indeed, Watson makes this point through a comparison of the author’s pre-Constitution Dives and Pauper, with the post-Constitution Longleat Sermons; see ‘Censorship and Cultural Change’, p. 857. See also the portait of class and heresy in Jurkowski, ‘Lollardy and Social Status in East Anglia’. 77  Hudson, The Premature Reformation, pp. 417–19; and the records of the trials in Eng­lish Historical Documents, ed. by Meyers, pp. 866–68. 76 

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In the Norwich trials, which took place from 1428–31, the lollard-hunting bishop Alnwick cites the ownership of Dives and Pauper as part of his charges against the priest Robert Berte. Under interrogation, Berte revealed a chain of ownership and copying around Dives and Pauper that implicated gentlemen (a ‘Sir Andrew Boteler’ is noted) as well as more ordinary scribes and lay readers. The quick suppression of the text’s less privileged readership — readers like Berte himself — is attested by that group’s invisibility as we follow the evidence forward: Sir Richard Carbonell, a member of an aristocratic East Anglian family, owned a copy; and as discussed above, John Whethamstede, abbot of St Albans, commissioned one between 1420 and 1440.78 John Bale notes in his Itinerary that he saw copies in the libraries at Gloucester College, Oxford, founded by the Benedictines, and at the Norwich Cathedral; another manuscript copy was bought in 1464 by Sir John Howard, who became duke of Norfolk.79 The Group A version did move out of East Anglia by the last quarter of the century, and there is some evidence that it circulated among London parishes as part of compilations for preaching and private use. For instance, a handful of folios from the Group A version made their way into one such compilation — London, British Library, MS Additional 10053 — that was owned by the Augustinian John Pery while he served as canon at Holy Trinity without Aldgate; the two chapters of Dives and Pauper are found among a collection of pastoralia as well as selections from popular theological texts including Hilton’s Eight Chapters of Perfection and an abbreviated version of The Prick of Conscience.80 A second later version, which can be classified as neither A nor B, since the Holy Poverty Prologue is missing, Barnum describes as a ‘free’ variation on the text. The third Group A text composed in the second half of the century is London, British Library, MS Royal 17.C.xx, inscribed with the name ‘John Wellys’. ‘Wellys’ is also the name of Cecily, daughter of Edward IV (d. 1507) and wife to John Welles (d. 1499): the copy of her booklist in London, British Library, MS Royal 15.D.ii suggestively notes a copy of Dives and Pauper among twelve other volumes. Whether or not Cecily’s book might be Royal 17.C.xx, the booklist alone reminds us that aristocrats remained among the readers of Dives and Pauper, and the text’s later audience often enlarged rather than entirely displaced its early-century readership.81 78 

On Carbonell, see Doyle, ‘A Survey’, i, 95. See Doyle, ‘A Survey’, i, 96. 80  Dives and Pauper, ‘Introduction’, ii, p. lxxi. 81  Similarly, Doyle finds evidence of a parish priest owning Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 295 in a bequest of 1502 (‘A Survey’, i, 96). 79 

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A pronounced shift in the readership history of Dives and Pauper, however, is detectable with the emergence of the Group B manuscripts as the text’s primary vehicle. HP-B, as we saw earlier, provides a thematic frame for the text privileging the dynamics of agency, and so it is significant that this version appears in tandem with evidence for mercantile readers. Of the three manuscripts that comprise Group B, the earliest, Lichfield, Litchfield Cathedral Library, MS 35, was composed in the mid-fifteenth century but is incomplete, and we know nothing about its provenance. The other two manuscripts are far more suggestive. New Haven, Beinecke Library, MS 228 is dateable to 1465, as indicated by a colophon that also reveals its production in St Katherine’s monastery in Lisbon, Portugal. The text was apparently produced for a resident English cloth merchant; his business accounts for ‘blew medley’ on the verso of the last folio, in an English hand, are the concerns of a London Mercer or Merchant Adventurer abroad. That a copy of Dives and Pauper would be commissioned abroad suggests that it was well known enough to be recommended to — or for — this far-away merchant reader, and is at least circumstantial evidence of a close-knit, active reading network among the international English mercantile community that strongly identified with and invested in individual texts. The third and chronologically latest manuscript of Group B, Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Eng.th.d.36, is the copy which Margery Morgan has demonstrated was the copytext for all three subsequent early printed editions.82 We also know it was owned by John Russhe, the merchant co-producer of Pynson’s 1493 edition. The text is carefully copied in a hand of the last quarter of the fifteenth century, and at several points it is clear that the scribe deliberately corrects his work. Among these corrections is one — an erasure of an entire sentence that was covered with the same floreation decorating the opening page of the prologue — that strongly suggests a discerning scribe working between different copies and omitting portions that did not fit his purposes.83 This copy of Dives and Pauper was shaped as it was being produced, with an eye for content rather than textual accuracy. 82  Morgan, ‘Pynson’s Manuscript of Dives and Pauper’. See also Sheeran, ‘Printing Errors in the Texts of Dives and Pauper’, and Plomer, ‘Two Lawsuits of Richard Pynson’. 83  The omitted sentence reads ‘But þese dayys þe part of þe chirche is comounly lytil or nout, for þe chapel beryth awey þe part þat longith to þe chirche’ (see Dives and Pauper, 1.2, p. 168, ll. 19–20), and comes in Chapter 14 as part of a discussion of tithes to smaller rural outposts in a parish (chapels) as opposed to the parish centers. That it was a contemporaneous correction is bolstered by the fact that the omission is seamlessly incorporated into all three of the print editions set from this manuscript.

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Even more germane are the rare traces of a contemporary reader who left sparse notations in the manuscript margins. On folio 159r, for instance, in the treatment of the seventh commandment, the text uses Latin to distinguish between ‘raueyn’ and usury. ‘Raueyn’ is defined as the Latin rapina — that is, theft of material goods by force and in the open — as opposed to the more veiled, subtle theft that constitutes usury or usura. Here, the reader carefully follows along, noting usura in the margin. This same place is marked in the manuscript by a placeholding straw, which is provocative but ultimately undatable.84 Together, these small and suggestive traces point toward a late fifteenthcentury reader and/or owner attentive to the writer’s treatment of usury at a moment very near and perhaps even at the point of its transition into print — a transition to which I now turn. The other three early printed editions derive from Pynson’s work, and thus from Bodleian MS Eng.th.d.36. As Dives and Pauper moves into print, then, it extends the reading trajectory we see with those Group B manuscripts — that is, from an original regional audience of clerics and aristocrats into an increasingly cosmopolitan and mercantile context. The extension of this readership is detectable in the shape of the editions themselves, even as some components of the bibliographical evidence (provenance, ownership marks) grow more faint. The first edition, by Richard Pynson in 1493, ran at least six hundred copies, and it is the Pynson edition with the largest number of surviving books (thirtythree copies are extant). The book, which is a folio printed in double-columns, runs to 244 leaves and is thus a substantial volume. But Pynson includes no illustrations, and even his initial letters are small and at times consist of substituted type. He does append a non-alphabetical table, a lengthy one that follows the order of the commandments, and provides brief narrative excerpts of each chapter. The table itself is thus a redaction of the full text, and makes up the first eleven leaves; the blank leaf between the table and the beginning of the Prologue is also separated (and separable) from the rest of the book. Together, these details indicate that Dives and Pauper in its first print edition was a workaday book, one that anticipated a relatively large demand and a highly literate audience, but not necessarily an aristocratic one. Clerics might have made up a portion of that readership, but Pynson’s decision to include a lengthy narrative table rather than an index does not create an edition that works as an easy reference for exempla or sermon construction. Most of the run was probably purchased by men (and women) who shared the social context of Russhe and 84 

My thanks to Hannah Ryley for checking this notation for me, and for calling attention to the placemarking straw.

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Figure 3.3 Title-page with xylographic title, from [anon.], Dives and Pauper, printed by Wynkyn de Worde in 1496 (STC 19213). Houghton Library, Harvard Uni­ver­sity, Typ Inc 9706, sig. A1r.

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Pynson themselves — urban, mercantile, pragmatic, and with a taste for challenging theological texts. The ownership evidence moves toward that conclusion. The booklist of James Morice (to be discussed further below), an energetic member of the merchant class who worked his way up through the ranks of Margaret Beaufort’s household, was a likely owner; John Goodyear, of Monken Hadley outside of London, is another ‘gentleman’ with some land and probably a prosperous merchant background.85 Three other names in an Oxford copy — Edmund Wright, John Brown of Holy Island, and William Bretyn of Woodforde — have been noted by Lotte Hellinga, and while their connection to one another is impossible to know, both the list and the early hands resonate with the kind of circulation imagined in the common-profit manuscripts.86 Readership traces are also quite slim, and as with many incunables, the generous margins of extant copies have been cut away. However, one book copy contains a single, striking exception. On the page beginning the treatment of the seventh commandment, at the opening discussion defining usury, is a note in an early hand, partially cut off, reading ‘ to […] men was found the crft to print bokes’.87 This reader locates quite precisely — at the level of the page — the intersection of print and religious reading with the moment in Dives and Pauper that marks its fullest discussion of ethical mercantile conduct. The success of Pynson’s edition is supported by de Worde’s issue of a second edition just three years later, in 1496. De Worde’s edition is a direct copy of Pynson’s, except for the addition of three woodcut illustrations: the choice and placement of these woodcuts are a crucial key to the audience de Worde imagined for his book. The first woodcut is a new commission, and serves as the volume’s title-page. As seen below, the woodcut with its xylographic title is one block commissioned especially for Dives and Pauper (see Figure 3.3). This represents a relatively lavish investment for de Worde, given his tendency to repurpose the majority of his woodcuts across different productions. De Worde does use it more than once within the edition itself. The title woodcut appears again on the verso of the page concluding the table (a page that was left blank by Pynson), where it seems to serve two purposes: it opens the text proper as another title-page, but it also works as an endpage to the 85 

BodL, MS Arch. G.d.24; BMC xi. BodL, MS Arch. G.d.24; BMC xi, 67. 87  STC 19212, München, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Chatsworth copy, fol. 171r. My thanks to Daniel Wakelin for his assistance with the transcription. 86 

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table, thus creating the table as a potentially discrete redaction of the full book. De Worde’s third and final use of the woodcut, on the verso side of the book’s last leaf, employs it in just this way to construct, as Martha Driver has noted, a complete and enclosed visual identity for the book.88 The title woodcut becomes, then, a material and metaphorical framing device for Dives and Pauper that situates the reader in relation to the text. We might notice that, for one, the image itself is surprisingly secular: the two eponymous figures debate in a meadow, with a city on the hills in the background — neither wears religious vestments, and the frame is wholly without the typical religious symbols that frequently introduce spiritual texts. The posture of the two men are notable as well. Dives is depicted respectfully, as a traditionally wealthy merchant wearing a belted houppelande with a hat and a gently forked beard. His stance is that of an active — even authoritative — speaker. Pauper, on the other hand, appears rather as Dives perceives him in the opening scenes of HP-B; bareheaded, with tattered clothes and a supplicant stance, he is hardly recognizable as the authoritative teacher he becomes in the text. The image as a whole encourages readers to identify as Dives, to adopt that same initial stance of scepticism toward Pauper. De Worde’s imagined audience here are those who find, in his carefully commissioned title-page, a public reflection of themselves — worldly lay men who are earnest, authoritative, self-composed. The two additional woodcuts de Worde chooses for Dives and Pauper are both ones he used earlier, and are both vividly pious. Martha Driver has recently discussed one of these, an indulgence image of a monk kneeling before the Virgin and Christ Child that de Worde places on the recto of the endleaf; he had used it previously in his Scala perfectionis (STC 14042).89 The second woodcut is an image of Jerome and the Assembly of Saints, which de Worde uses on the verso of the first leaf. The Jerome woodcut had appeared in de Worde’s previous editions of the Vitas Patrum (1495, STC 14507) and the Polychronicon (1495, STC 13439). Interpreting the reuse of woodcuts is a necessarily speculative project: de Worde’s choices to recycle illustrations could simply be a matter of a limited supply of woodcuts that fit a larger page size. However, as Driver has argued, de Worde’s reuses of woodcuts might also represent not simply an economy of production, but a visual lexicon linking texts thematically across his oeuvre.90 Read in this way, the reappearance of the two religious woodcuts in Dives and Pauper 88 

Driver, ‘The Illustrated De Worde’. Driver, ‘Woodcuts and Decorative Techniques’, p. 96. 90  Driver, The Image in Print. 89 

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suggest that de Worde was especially alert to the interests of mercantile readers. The overlapping mercantile, cloistered, and aristocratic audiences for Hilton’s Scala perfectionis are discussed in this chapter’s introduction; it was also one of the texts copied in the merchant common-profit books. The resonance of the Jerome image with a mercantile readership is just as rich. It had been used by de Worde the previous year, in his 1495 edition of the Polychronicon, where it appears on the title-page as the frontispiece. On the verso of that title-page (the woodcut’s place in Dives and Pauper) is an original five-stanza introductory poem added by de Worde, in which he relates a brief production narrative that ties his edition to the influential mercer and book-owner, Roger Thorney.91 The two opening stanzas express commonplace sentiments but also neatly articulate the purpose of a book printed specifically for a merchant readership: What thynge maye sowene / to gretter excellence Than morall / vertue / hyghly to preferre And vyce oppresse / with besy dylygence That ydlenesse approche / ne come ne nerre Redyng of bokes / slouthe wyll ay forberre In sondry wyse / whiche gyue Instruccioun As dothe this boke / of Polycronycon Whiche Roger Thorney Mercer / hath exhorted Wynken de worde / of vertuous entent Well to correcte / and greatly hym comforted This specyall boke / to make and sette in prent This is the grounde / of all that he hath ment Reders to glade / and voyde all ydlenesse Trustynge to please / bothe god and man I gesse.92

These lines offer the Polychronicon as a remedy not just for idleness but for the idleness that threatens both mercers and printers — the ‘vyce’ of those whose occupations are not immediately construed within traditional models of labour. In the second stanza, de Worde and Thorney become the joint subjects of ‘vertuous entent’, making the work of setting the volume ‘in prent’ the outcome of their shared agency. And what Thorney especially ‘ment’, as de Worde emphasizes, is a book that continues to circulate as a remedy against the idleness of its 91  On Roger Thorney’s connections to print, see Gillespie, Print Culture and the Medi­eval Author, and Boffey, most recently in ‘From Manuscript to Print’. 92  STC 13439, BL, C.11.b.2, sig. aa1b. For de Worde’s authorship of these verses, see the strong argument by Blake, ‘Wynkyn de Worde: The Early Years’, p. 66.

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readers. While the Polychronicon is, of course, a different book from Dives and Pauper, the visual repetition of the Jerome woodcut (which otherwise has little to recommend it for Dives and Pauper) creates a potential connection between the expressed investments and ‘vertuous entent’ of Thorney and de Worde, and the readers anticipated for Dives and Pauper. In this network, inspired by the ‘entent’ of a named mercer patron, books are bulwarks against the charge of idleness whose work is shared among printers and readers. The mercantile reading networks evoked through the woodcuts of de Worde’s Dives and Pauper are, on at least one occasion, inscribed into the volume by a reader. The Oxford copy of de Worde’s edition — a copy now only extant in digital form — bears on its title-page the lines of a Latin commonplace written in an early hand: Si quis sentiret quo tendit aut vnde venire Nunquam gauderet sed omni tempore flere(t).93

This quick bit of verse appears in several other manuscripts dating back to the thirteenth century, and is a well-worn, anonymous commonplace popular among collections of sententiae. But by the end of the fifteenth century, its most frequent appearance was as part of the Prick of Conscience, a text known to have circulated among London’s merchant readers. The epigraph is one further suggestion of Dives and Pauper’s place within a broader stream of texts that anticipated a specific mercantile audience. Indeed, that audience comes into sharper focus briefly at the bottom of the endleaf of one book copy of de Worde’s edition in the British Library, where Richard Sodan situates Dives and Pauper and himself within one such mercantile network of mercers and their apprentices: ‘this booke pertaynythe unto Ricahrde Sodan gevyn hym by Jno Fillde servaunte with Jesper allyn merchaunt’.94 The transition of Dives and Pauper from manuscript to print is one of continuity; the printed editions extend and heighten the text’s original investments in theological economics as a discourse useful for exploring intention and ethi93  STC 19213, BodL, S.Seld. d. 14 (2), sig. a1r (copy lost). Available on EEBO [accessed 20 June 2012]. Thank you to Daniel Wakelin for his assistance with the transcription. The Middle English translation of the Prick of Conscience, ed. by Hanna and Wood, renders these as: Whoso wole undurstonde and se Whethen he coom and whidur shuld he, He shulde not joy bot hit forsaake And ever wepe and sorowe make. (ll. 518–21) 94  STC 19213, BL, C.11.b.4, fol. 196b.

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cal self-regulation. Through their choice of woodcuts, their selection of the B version of the text, and their own sense of their editions as part of a like-minded stream of religious productions, Pynson and de Worde fully imagine the merchant readers that are suggested by the faint traces left on the printed copies of Dives and Pauper. But the appearance of both these editions in the 1490s evokes a historiographical tension around context in the modern scholarship on both London merchants and religious print, and I want to address this tension now to mark the broader implications of offering agency and intention as governing interpretive terms. As I observed earlier, the reception horizon of Dives and Pauper (for both medieval and modern readers) is vulnerable to the pressures of the religious controversies marking the fifteenth century, and the text has frequently been read within a defining framework of heterodoxy or orthodoxy. The modern historiography of London’s merchants reveal similar pressures, and mercantile readers especially have been cited for their reformist views or ‘advanced opinions’ (a revealing phrase). Susan Powell is the most recent scholar to yoke these together, citing the mercantile connections of the de Worde and Pynson editions along with its third issue, in 1536 by Thomas Berthelet, as confirmation of the text’s ‘unorthodox status’.95 Reformist books and London merchants certainly did intersect, most obviously in the 1520s: a group of London merchants were the likely sponsors of William Tyndale during his sojourn in Antwerp; a number of city parishes and families were vocally reformist; London merchants were conduits and sponsors of Lutheran books printed abroad and entering into England.96 But there is sparse evidence to suggest that London merchants on the whole were reformist or, even more relevant here, that reformist tendencies among merchant groups much predated the 1520s. Indeed, Anne Sutton has shown that the reception of Lutheran ideas among the mercers was decidedly mixed, concluding that there was ‘no greater predisposition to reformist thought among mercers than any other group of Londoners’.97 I suggest, further, that the English printers who worked across the reigns of Henry VII and Henry VIII — primarily de Worde and Pynson — demonstrated little interest in the reformist movement. This, too, began to change with the 1520s, and is clearly not the case with England’s third generation of printers and men like Thomas Berthelet. 95 

Powell, ‘The Secular Clergy’, p. 171. Powell, ‘The Secular Clergy’, p.  171; see also Sutton, The Mercery of London, pp. 380–407. 97  Sutton, The Mercery of London, p. 384. 96 

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Figure 3.4 Architectural title-page image, from [anon.], Dives and Pauper, printed by Thomas Berthelet in 1536 (STC 19214). Houghton Library, Harvard Uni­ver­sity, sig. A1r.

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More to the point of this chapter, however, the interpretive horizons most relevant for both merchants and religious print in the 1490s were very different from those of the 1530s, or the 1520s. In the 1490s, religious controversy is potentially the less relevant context. For instance, as Powell notes, the years 1494–96 saw book burnings, abjurations, and the persecution of heretics in London.98 But how this official interest in heresy might have been perceived by London’s mercantile community is uncertain, and Sutton’s work indicates that merchant reaction was not likely to be uniform. Further, the production and circulation of any text commonly read as reformist — let alone two thick folio editions of Dives and Pauper produced by well-known printers in England — would have been a dangerous and foolish provocation. Instead, no records record Dives and Pauper as a book thrown into the burning piles at St Paul’s (steps away from de Worde’s shop), nor being used as evidence for heresy at this point in the century. This does not mean that Dives and Pauper posed no challenge to authority. It did. But that challenge is revealed not through its status within the milieu of religious instruction and reading, but rather in its legislative and political context, detailed in an earlier section of this chapter. Pynson and Russhe issued the first edition as the full force of Henry’s renewed interest in the penal statutes was rippling through London. The 1487 act against usury had already marked the royal interest in controlling and constraining the autonomy of London’s mercantile community — an interest renewed in the ambitious 1495 Parliament. And at Henry’s request, the very records and books defining the privileges of London’s mercantile communities were under pressure. A book like Dives and Pauper, giving voice to a vision of responsible lay autonomy through the language of commercial morality, moves very much within the long mercantile tradition of using religious books to express and register their investment in the common profit. It makes an insistent and bold enough claim for self-determination and autonomy, but within the long-accepted parameters of lay piety. What this context and these terms allow is that Dives and Pauper, merchant readers, and the 1490s are together far more supple than any debate over its degrees of the horizon of heterodoxy or orthodoxy permits. The exception to this argument for Dives and Pauper is telling. The very last early edition was printed in 1536 by Thomas Berthelet, the King’s Printer; it was not printed again until Patricia Barnum’s modern scholarly edition of 1976–2004. Like the earlier editions, Berthelet’s edition ultimately descended 98 

Powell, ‘The Secular Clergy’, p. 159.

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from Bodleian MS Eng.th.d.36 and follows Pynson’s, but in its material features it represents a radical departure. Berthelet chooses an octavo format and uses no images except for a title-page illustration and ornamental capitals at the beginning of every commandment. The title-page is not unique to this edition — it is an architectural border, likely a metal cut, with a cherub and a blank space in which the date 1534 has been inscribed. W. W. Greg traces its use into 1536, a year during which Berthelet was extraordinarily busy.99 This year, at the conclusion of the Reformation Parliament, saw his shop issue Dives and Pauper along with a series of treatises and proclamations on the king’s behalf, including the infamous broadsheet (STC 7787) calling for the delivery to Thomas Cromwell of any ‘writing or boke, wherin shalbe conteyned any errour or sclaunder’. Clearly, Dives and Pauper carried no such possibility of ‘sclaunder’. Berthelet’s presentation of the text itself presents another departure from the incunable editions. The octavo format disallows the double columns of the previous editions, but Berthelet designs the pages with a narrow space available for printed marginalia. He extracts each Latin source embedded in the text — canonical, biblical, and patristic references — and arranges them as highly abbreviated marginalia in a Roman font. The resulting page presents the text proper in a black-letter font, visually enclosed within authoritative marginalia that often require advanced literacy skills. This mise en page has a complex effect on the reading experience. While Dives and Pauper as a text mobilizes competing interpretations and privileges readerly autonomy, Berthelet’s edition quite literally encloses that text within a layer of authoritative citation. His Dives and Pauper anticipates a new kind of reader — one who is interested in textual sources, and whose interpretive energies are clearly circumscribed and controlled within broader layers of authority, even during the private reading experiences anticipated by an octavo edition. That Dives and Pauper was a text remarkably ill suited to this task is evident in its disappearance from English literary history directly afterwards (see Figures 3.4 and 3.5).

Englished Devotions, 1500–20 While Dives and Pauper addresses a mercantile audience especially well, it was also a quirky selection for England’s early printers simply because of its status as a native religious text. Indeed, the bulk of English pre-Reformation religious printing is made up of contemporary translations from French texts, a 99 

Greg, ‘Notes on the Types, Borders, etc., used by Thomas Berthelet’.

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Figure 3.5 Example of printed marginalia, from [anon.], Dives and Pauper, printed by Thomas Berthelet in 1536 (STC 19214). Houghton Library, Harvard Uni­ver­sity, sigs g3v–g4r.

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field of production that is only just beginning to come into scholarly focus.100 Of Caxton’s religious editions, for instance, French translations include the Book of Good Maners and (at least partly) The Golden Legend, in addition to Royal Book (1484, STC 21429), Art of Dieing (1491, STC 789), Doctrinal of Sapience (1489, STC 21431), and Mirror of the World (1481, STC 24762). All of these continued to be reprinted up until the 1520s, and some beyond. Even less noticed, however, are the French inflections of the post-incunable moment — and especially a group of translations of French religious texts commissioned by Pynson and de Worde from Andrew Chertsey and Robert Copland, respectively: the Kalender of Shepherdes, the Ordinary of Christian Men, the The Floure of the Ten Commandementes, the Passyon of Christ, the Lucidary, and further editions of ars moriendi texts. This sizeable group appeared more or less concurrently with the production of Parisian editions of the same texts during the decades between 1500 and 1520. These commissioned translations into English — and particularly Copland’s Kalender and Chertsey’s Floure — are the focus of this final section. As books shaped by their English printers to emphasize contemporary mercantile interests, these later religious French translations reveal new perspectives on mercantile uses for religious print, registering a response to the increasingly complex cosmopolitan horizons defining merchants and print. While my focus here is on a small group of religious translations, I want to first emphasize the full impact of French texts in translation across the genres represented in English print. French texts were not merely influential upon, but were constitutive of English print production: apart from the religious works mentioned above, the press produced in translation texts by Christine de Pizan, Pierre Gringoire, Jean d’Arras, and Alain Chartier, as well as range of anonymous romances, verses on women, and odd cross-generic pieces like Robert the Devil (de Worde, 1500; STC 2107), a ‘devotional romance’ translated from the Roberte le diable. This French inflection intersects with the French literary and print connections openly embraced by the first Tudor court: the Frenchman Bernard Andre was Henry VII’s royal poet, and Henry accepted presentation copies of select texts designed for the English market by the Parisian publisher Anthoine Vérard. 101 100 

Notable exceptions of work on early print’s international and especially French connections (beyond religious texts) is the scholarship of Coldiron, Printing without Borders and English Printing, Verse Translation. See also Boffey, especially ‘Wynkyn de Worde, Richard Pynson, and the English Printing of Texts’. 101  See Winn, Anthoine Vérard, Parisian Publisher.

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But as Anne Coldiron reminds us, a ‘language-based definition of French’ represents, in practice, a variety of contexts. The French-language texts that found themselves translated into English print editions are associated with a range of places — Burgundy, Calais, Paris, Lyon, Bruges, Louvain — that carry local, highly variant political and economic meanings in relationship to England and London.102 And these are relationships that often cut against the grain of narratives describing the English press’s embrace of French texts. For instance, French presses created a persistent pressure upon the fledgling English print industry from an early moment. Almost a decade before Caxton’s arrival in Westminster, presses in Paris, Louvain, and Bruges (as well as Basel, Cologne, and Antwerp) had established lucrative links to London stationers and provincial monasteries to provide printed religious material tailored to the new English readership.103 By 1500, English printers still faced competition in this arena, particularly from English-language books produced in Rouen and Paris. Indeed, many of the French-produced volumes designed for the English market were coordinated by Vérard, who launched what Julia Boffey has characterized as ‘an assault on the English market’ between 1503 and 1508, issuing several liturgical books for English readers alongside two Scots-inflected English translations of religious texts.104 (The two translations considered below were part of the English press’s response to that incursion.) Overlaying these economic skirmishes was a current of English xenophobia connected specifically to the press. In a now well-known incident of 1500, Pynson (a Norman) along with several apprentices was attacked outside his shop by an angry mob directly citing their fury at ‘ffrenchman’ and ‘flemmyng’ Londoners.105 That event foreshadowed the gradual restriction and, finally, revocation of foreigners’ involvement in England’s presses. The proviso of 1484 protecting aliens associated with the book trade had technically been repealed along with the rest of Richard III’s statute by Henry VII’s first Parliament, even though the repeal seems to have had little impact. Henry VIII, however, began a process of gradually segregating and marginalizing foreigners from the English printing industry. As Coldiron has recently recounted, by 1515 oner102 

Coldiron, ‘French Presences in Tudor England’, esp. pp. 246–48. Clark, ‘Print and Pre-Reformation Religion’. 104  Boffey, ‘Wynkyn de Worde, Richard Pynson, and the English Printing of Texts’, pp. 174–75. 105  The juridical record of the event as it proceeded in the Star Chamber is edited and recorded in Plomer, ‘Richard Pynson v. Henry Squyr’. For a reading of the event, see Kuskin, ‘“Onely Imagined”’, pp. 202–03. 103 

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ous subsidies and taxes were levied on foreigners; in 1523 the number of alien workers per printing house was restricted; in 1529 foreigners were prohibited from establishing presses; and the Act of 1534 fully marginalized aliens from the English book trade.106 The resulting knottiness around the intersection of French texts and English printing was frequently expressed as what Coldiron has termed ‘marks of friction, traces of English culture resisting or modifying French materials even while appropriating them’.107 These frictions are visible within many of the translations of the post-incunable period, within and outside of the religious genre. Pynson and de Worde, for instance, bring several of Vérard’s books into English but retain the French prologues and paratexts, and mimic the Frenchproduced woodcuts and page layouts. These are English books that cannot help recalling their French origins, even as they compete against the same: here, ‘translation’ is both the metaphor and cultural enactment of French books in their English setting. Yet two of the translations commissioned by de Worde from Andrew Chertsey — the Floure and the Kalender — add a further complicating layer for what is already a complex moment. These editions address themselves to a specifically mercantile readership, a readership that was continually frustrated and often damaged by the political currents of the period (as discussed in Chapter 2). The three Tudor decades between 1490 and 1520 simmered with tensions around England’s relationship to the Low Countries, frequently expressed through foreign affairs and trade issues. A deep royal scepticism of London’s wealthy merchant community was the direct outgrowth of these tensions, and it resulted in suspensions of trade agreements with the Low Countries, embargoes on English merchant attendance at crucial continental markets, and attempts to force London-based merchants to align more closely with the English interests already established at Calais. The legal and administrative initiatives concerning merchants and trade, for both Henry VII and Henry VIII, were motivated by an open suspicion of mercantile intentions, as expressed in directives that assumed London’s merchants were hiding wealth and profits; holding foreign allegiances; harbouring alien interests, money, and labourers; and putting profit motives ahead of the Crown’s own diplomatic prerogatives.108 Against this horizon, I suggest, ‘translation’ reaches its limit as 106 

Coldiron, ‘French Presences in Tudor England’, p. 252. Coldiron, ‘French Presences in Tudor England’, p. 257. 108  See Anne Sutton’s detailed account of the antagonistic relationship between the early 107 

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a description of the cultural work French texts might perform for merchant readers. Instead, these texts might be more richly considered not as translation, but as French material deliberately overwritten and reshaped to strategically represent the good intentions of English merchant readers. Little is known about Andrew Chertsey outside of the five or so translations he produced for de Worde, translations that we are able to credit to him only because of another de Worde translator, Robert Copland.109 In a 1521 verse prologue to The Passyon of our Lorde (STC 14558), Copland introduces the text as Chertsey’s translation ‘out of frensshe at Wynkyn de Wordes instaunce’, joining four previous translations that Copland identifies as the Floure of the Ten Commandments, the Lucidary, the Ordinary of Christian Men, and the Craft to Lyve well and to dye.110 With this list, both the French and mercantile contexts of Chertsey’s translation work become visible. The very grouping of these editions together form the kind of library we might expect to belong to a London merchant: three are collections of pastoralia, the Craft to Lyve well and to dye intersects with what Amy Appleford has identified as mercantile death culture, and the later Passyon itself is an odd mixture of contemplative piety rehearsed within a dialogic form. Their French roots are underscored by Copland himself at a moment slightly later in his prologue when, like Pynson, he chides the rough Scots-English of the Vérard edition as ‘in langage was to rude’.111 The text I want discuss here in more detail — the Floure of the Ten Commandments — provides the richest exploration of this group’s engagement with its multi-layered context because it is the only one with an extended prologue by Chertsey himself. Clearly the Floure — a full account of the Ten Commandments, each followed by a thick portfolio of exempla — is far more conventional in its pedagogical aims than Dives and Pauper. Designed as a pastoral guide for the welleducated layman who bears the responsibility of educating a household, the text is straightforward, didactic, and earnest in fulfilling that need. Yet while the text itself is fairly commonplace, the shaping of it by de Worde and Chertsey rewards further scrutiny. Chertsey attaches nine original stanzas as a prologue (see Figure 3.6).

Tudors and the Mercers, in The Mercery of London, pp. 317–69. 109  Boffey, ‘Chertsey, Andrew’. 110  Copland, Poems, ed. by Erler, p. 71. 111  Copland, Poems, ed. by Erler, p. 74.

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Figure 3.6 Andrew Chertsey’s ‘Prologue of the Translatour’, from Andrew Chertsey, trans., Floure of the Ten Commandementes, printed by Wynkyn de Worde in 1510 (STC 23876). Bodleian Library, Tanner 747, sig. A2r. Reproduced by permission of the Bodleian Library.

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The first two stanzas present a typical humble plea for ‘grace and connynge’ in the work of translation and a devout appeal for salvation on behalf of his readers. As Chertsey continues, however, he moves from the ‘I/they’ that describes himself and his readers into a collective ‘we’ that begins to construct a broader Christian commonalty coming into being through the reading and use of the Floure. For Chertsey, the project of learning and reading is decidedly collective, as the third stanza shows: Upon the payne / of eternall dampnacyon To lerne and knowe / ye commaundements ten We all be bounde / without excusacyon And in especyall / we crysten men

Further, the Christian community he addresses is rooted strongly in the present moment, as Chertsey emphasizes in the fourth and fifth stanzas. The fifth stanza begins: Wherfore whyles we ben lyuynge here Hauynge tyme / oportunyte / and space Serue we god / with herte entere

In the present tense, the poem then moves to consider the problem of idleness, a problem perceived with shared opprobrium through the newly formed ‘we’ of reader and translator: ‘we’ see how Solomon fell into idolatry and David into adultery through an ‘ydlenes’ that was ‘the rote and cause of all theyr foly’. Apart from his assumption that the reader participates in the writer’s indictment of those who are idle, Chertsey’s invocation of idleness is fairly well worn and also connects with key moments in the main body of the text, as I will discuss below. The emphasis remains on idleness as a governing theme in the proem’s last two stanzas, where Chertsey takes pains to frame his own labour as a bulwark against the sin of idleness and, as the final stanza points out, undertaken not for ‘sylver’ or ‘other temporall gayne’ but instead for the adamantly spiritual sense of profit present in the ‘welthe of soules’. The overall effect of Chertsey’s preface is to create a community of readers that share the aims of the book’s producer — a community ready to engage with not only the spiritual guidance offered by the Floure but also with the moral questions surrounding work and profit that seem to spur the book’s production. This sense of community may feel subtle, but it becomes more pronounced when read against the original French prose prologue that the edition preserves directly after Chertsey’s preface. Here, the anonymous French author adopts a decidedly different posture towards the reader, not crossing

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but maintaining clear demarcations between himself and his audience — he guides, exhorts, and explains, but never invites the reader to identify with him or share his authority in declaring what is sinful or what is not. Instead, the prologue opens with St Bernard’s directive that ‘thou shalt be better and more to alowe yf thou knowe thy selfe than yf thou knewe the cours of the sterres / the foundementes of ye erthe / the strengthes of herbes / the complexyons of men’.112 The emphasis begins and remains upon the individual reader and the project of self-study. Chertsey’s printed translation thus swaddles the essentially inward-facing original French text with layers that construct an English reading community grounded in its own sense of moral authority, a community prepared to negotiate a directive text like the Floure with the same authority and agency as the book’s producer. It is an attractive posture for the reader, a flattering mirror, and one underscored in the edition’s title-page presentation. Martha Driver has recently noted how the English title-page is a close approximation of its French precedent, and one that de Worde uses multiple times over the next two decades.113 The design presents the text enclosed within a strong situating image. In this case, the dominant image is the Ten Commandments themselves, with Moses on the left, gesturing to the tablets, and on the right a group of richly dressed men led by an (anachronistic) bishop who together gaze toward the tablets and Moses. This scene unfolds again in a smaller tableau below, where the five commandments of the church are framed by the pope on the left, and a king with attendant men on the right. In both illustrations, the left-to-right visual trajectory moves from an individual — Moses, the pope — through binding laws and into the ecclesiastical or political community. This visual reminder of the text’s community of readers is related back to the common profit in the title itself: the full title ends, after a virgule, with the concluding phrase, ‘the whiche is moche utyle and prouffytable unto all people’. The translated Floure appropriates the French edition, both in text and image, even as it underscores the active presence of its London readers as members of a cosmopolitan community in the service of a common profit. Even with its English prologue and title-page, however, the main body of the Floure remains a decidedly quotidian text. It comprises commonplace treatments of the commandments, as well as added verse compositions on the vir112 

STC 23876, BodL, Tanner 747, sig. A2v. Driver, ‘Woodcuts and Decorative Techniques’, p. 106. A reproduction of the image is provided in her essay as well. 113 

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tues, vices, mercy, and other compilations of lay-oriented pastoralia. These are illustrated by a separate and lengthy section of exempla. The one part that resonates more fully with Chertsey’s prologue is a section on usury discussed as part of the sixth commandment. Usury is defined in very traditional terms as money earned in the absence of labour and through the selling of time: For god wyll not that a man sell the tyme yt he hathe gyuen in communalte. That is to saye yt whan a man lendeth ony thynge god defendeth that he take ought ouer for dylacyon of tyme. For in suche manere a man selleth yt tyme / wherefore he is an usurer. For without labourynge they wyll haue prouffte / whiche is agayne the wyll of god as he sayed by his prophete Dauyd.114

The mercantile idleness suggested here fits suggestively against the historical context of the moment — these were years in which London merchants were under suspicion and duress from the Crown, and were the subject of timeworn suspicions about the invisible labour of commerce. But while this passage repeats those charges, it does so within a book whose readers already stand free from such accusations themselves: Chertsey’s readers are the ‘we crysten men’ of his prologue, and with Chertsey have already called out idleness as not only a risk but one remedied partially by reading the very book they hold. The Floure’s treatment of usury as idleness is not particularly sophisticated, and nowhere does the text mine the expansive discourse of theological economics. Other Chertsey translations do — the Ordynary, for instance, thinks far more complexly about the relationship between pastoral practice, intention and autonomy — but the Floure offers standard fare. And that is the point. I am not suggesting that every religious printed edition that anticipated mercantile readers engaged fully with the rich discourse of theological economics. Rather, these texts are quite varied in their treatment of commerce. Yet as books they worked to represent their mercantile readers as pious men whose very reading material represented their good intentions — whether in rich and emphatic ways, like Dives and Pauper — or within less sophisticated frameworks, as in the Floure. The merchant owner of Chertsey’s edition might be well satisfied with a book situating him as a reader within a community of like-minded men collectively looking askance at idlers and usurers. The Kalender of Shepeherdes, published in the milieu of the Chertsey translations, presents both a very different kind of text as well as a distinct reading of mercantile intent. First printed in 1493 as Le Compost et Kalendrier des Bergiers from the Parisian press of Guy Marchant, it was quickly translated for 114 

STC 23876, BodL, Tanner 747, fol. 75v.

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the English market by Vérard in 1502 as a rough Scots-English version. English printers mounted a counter-response, and by 1506 Pynson had retranslated and issued the text again. Pynson’s edition is accompanied by a very rare preface composed by Pynson himself, in which he registers his indignation at the inadequacies of the Scots-English version: Here before tyme thys boke was printed In parys In to corrupte englysshe and nat by no englysse man wherfore these bokes that were Into Ingloude no man coude vuderstonde them perfetly and no maruayll for hit is vnlekly for a man of that countrey for to make hyt Into perfyte englysshe as it shulde be. Newely nowe it is drawne out of frensshe ito englysshe at the instaunce and coste and charge of .Rycharde Pynson and for by cause he sawe that men of other countres intermedellyd with that that they cowed no skyll in/ and therefore the foresayde .Rycharde. Pynson and shuche as longethe to hym hath made it into playne englysshe to the entente that euery man may vnderstonde it/ that thys boke is very profitable bothe for clerkes and laye people to cause them to haue greate vnderstondyng and in espessyall in that we be bounde to lerne and knowe on peyne of auerlastinge deth.115

This unusual preface is pragmatic and strategic on two counts, both of which rely on Pynson’s explicit expression of ‘entent’. First, we might note that Pynson situates his retranslation as a contribution to the nation; his printed edition delivers a necessary text in the English language, to English readers, which ‘men of other Countrees’ are not equipped to do. But his expressed entente also extends the familiar extra-economic discourse discussed in this book’s first chapter. Pynson, at his own ‘cost and charge’, undertakes a labour that converts the financial meaning of that cost into the spiritual work he openly hopes his edition performs. The intentions motivating this first English Kalender, then, belong to a printer whose very edition advertises the press as an instrument for the use of the nation, and as an extension of its printer’s earnest spiritual — not commercial — entente. After Pynson’s editon, the Kalender was translated and retranslated by English printers in rapid succession: de Worde commissioned Copland to retranslate it in 1508, and Julian Notary issued his own slightly distinct edition in 1518 (STC 22410). All in all, it moved through nineteen editions until 1631.116 But what, precisely, is the Kalender? 115  STC 22408, BL, G.10246, sig. A2v. It is interesting to note that Pynson continues to make refinements to his own ‘englysshe’ preface throughout the next two reprints, in 1510 (STC 22409.3) and again in 1517 (STC 22409.7). 116  Driver, ‘When Is a Miscellany not Miscellaneous?’.

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As Driver has noted, the Kalender is a miscellany more miscellaneous than most, and it works as a kind of folk history containing a shifting assortment of discrete genres including medical guides, phlebotomy diagrams, astrological charts, and conduct advice. It also functions as a compilation of religious instruction, with a central section devoted to basic pastoral education and largely comprising catechetical instruction in the Ten Commandments, the canonical prayers, the vices and virtues, and ars moriendi material. That its English printers and readers understood it as a religious text is articulated in Pynson’s prologue, but yet, as Pynson’s own lines point out, the very generosity of the Kalender makes it difficult to locate a precise audience. Eamon Duffy has cited the Kalender as exemplary of a late medieval ‘popular’ religious practice that blurs sacred and secular spheres, high and low culture. Sandra Hindman, however, has demonstrated that the text — in manuscript and print — circulated among an aristocratic readership that may or may not have included a more generally ‘popular’ audience.117 Indeed, the range of Pynson’s ‘clerkes and laye people’ would be too expansive to suggest that the Kalender might be discussed as a merchant-oriented religous text, except for the evidence of one edition: de Worde’s. At Copland’s own urging, de Worde commissioned a new translation (from Copland, of course) in 1508 which was reprinted in c. 1516.118 The material format marks this edition’s most obvious departure from its antecedents; de Worde chooses to produce Copland’s translation as a quarto instead of as a folio volume, a detail that in combination with this edition’s more workaday woodcuts suggests a non-elite readership. But the real innovation lies in Copland’s textual departures and additions, which begin with a prologue that replaces the earlier one composed by Pynson. Copland’s approach feels familiar — we might recall Caxton’s prologue to the Polychronicon, in which Caxton draws a quick sketch of himself reading in a study surrounded by books. And like Caxton, Copland evokes the trope of idleness as his prompt in this passage: Not longe tyme passed I beynge in my chambre where as were many pamfletes and bokes whiche in auoydynge ydlenes moder of all vyces I ententyfly behelde / thynkynge to passe the longe wynters nyght / and sodeynly there came to my hand 117 

Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars, pp. 80–82; Hindman, ‘The Career of Guy Marchant (1483–1504)’. 118  Boffey, ‘Wynkyn de Worde, Richard Pynson, and the English Printing of Texts’, pp. 177–78. The text of the Copland’s prologue and an extended bibliographic summary of his edition is provided by in The Kalender of Shepherdes, ed. by Sommer.

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one of the sayd bokes of the shepeherdes kalender in rude and scottysshe language / whiche I redde / and perceyuynge the mater to be ryhht compendious / and remembrynge howe the people desyre to here and se newe thynges I shewed the sayd boke vnto my worshipful mayster Wynkyn de worde.119

What is different is the way that commercial motivations are unmasked within the trope of eschewing idleness: there is a serendipity Copland wants us to see here, as he selects the Kalender randomly from ‘many pamfletes and bokes’ and identifies it as at once both ‘ryhht compendious’ and precisely the type of ‘newe thynge’ that people desire to hear and see — and buy. Copland is unembarrassed about the book as a commodity, and its appeal as that ‘newe thynge’, even as he marries it to a discourse of moral labour and his righteous work as a reader and textual producer. The clear confidence Copland expresses in the moral validity of the market moves through the additions he inserts into the body of the text. He composes, for example, four interpolations — on judges, merchants, masters, and women — for a section of the text outlining the social estates. Of merchants, Copland writes: O you marchauntes that neuer sayth ho Of lukerous wynnynge ye haue grete pleasure Lete conscyence gyde you were euer ye go Vnto all men gyue weyght and mesure Dysceyue no man / of falshode take no cure Swere none others people to begyle All sleyght and vsury frome you exyle.120

These lines are at once teasing and exhortatory. The first lines present merchants as men unable to control their desires — ‘you marchauntes’ are unable to stop yourselves, and harbour incontinent desires for the pleasures of ‘wynnynge’. Yet the rest of the verse sketches a quick framework within which mercantile work might be recuperated. A compressed business ethics begins at the appeal to ‘conscyence’, and ends with a righteous exile — not of the merchant from the social order of the estates, but of the merchant himself from the spectre of usury. The work of the Kalender’s most recent editor, Oskar Sommers, suggests that throughout his translation, Copland reincorporates pieces from the French texts and the 1503 edition that were omitted by Pynson exploring the uses of wealth and profit in spiritual matters.121 But it is through Copland’s own 119 

The Kalender of Shepherdes, ed. by Sommer, p. 32. Copland, Poems, ed. by Erler, p. 50. 121  For an example, see The Kalender of Shepherdes, ed. by Sommer, Appendix, p. 171. 120 

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verse compositions that the potential moral framework for mercantile activity is most confidently expressed. Copland’s vision consistently presents the commercial and spiritual spheres working in harmony, regulated by the individual conscience. For instance, in a slight, original poem he inserts near the end of his translation, Copland uses commerce as a metaphor for confession: O mortall cretures saylynge in the wawes of mysery Auayle the sayle of your consyence vnpure Fle fro the perylles of this vnstedfast whery Dryue to the hauen of charyte moost sure And cast the ankers of true confessyon Fastned with the grete cable of contrycyon clene Wynde vp thy marchaundyse of hole satisfaccyon Whiche of true customers shall be ouer sene And brought to the warehouse of perfeccyon As perfyte marchauntes of god by eleccyon.122

While the ‘mortall cretures’ Copland addresses are surely meant to signify all Christian men, the poem’s central imagery relies on a series of metaphors specific to the work of England’s international merchants. The reader is like a merchant shipman, driven toward confession by the winds of conscience. At port, he is greeted by increasingly specific commercial scenarios — the unloading sale and storing of ‘marchaundyse’ — until the final line, when the ‘perfyte marchuantes’ are also the well-confessed readers. The Kalender is, obviously, a very different text from the Floure; in many ways, because of its topical range, if demands a more engaged reader with a broad knowledge base and readerly interests. But the Copland/de Worde edition also joins the Floure within the capacious category of religious texts reshaped and produced in anticipation of a mercantile audience; and like the Floure, this edition of the Kalender constructs that readership within a flattering and contextually useful ethical discourse. The nature of the French–English connections in print is a complex one and involves a wide range of texts that move far beyond the religious genre. Nevertheless, the picture grows no less complicated when we consider specifically religious books — indeed, these have the potential to reveal new points of contact with the historical contexts discussed throughout this chapter, as well as new tensions and chiastic relationships that make these religious translations worth our exploration.

122 

Copland, Poems, ed. by Erler, p. 52.

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Conclusions Not every religious printed edition anticipated a mercantile readership, of course, and nor did the stream of religious printed texts I am identifying speak evenly to mercantile investments in autonomy and the expression of ethical intention. Rather, the category of mercantile religious print provides a way to explore the genre in the decades before it was pulled into the hypercharged atmosphere of religious and political revolution. What appears is precisely that which, like agency itself, is unpredictable. Religious texts, even at the close of the fifteenth century, did not always work within frameworks defined by heterodoxy or orthodoxy, or even popular pious practice, but instead formed a genre capacious in its uses — and in print, this capaciousness was extended, not narrowed. To repeat the argument of this chapter as part of the broader claims of the book: it is not print that emerges as an agent of change — print is not agential in its quantitative capacities of reproduction, nor its ability to proliferate Protestant texts, nor the greater access it provides to books, nor even its vulnerabilities to institutional control. Rather, agency in my model lies with the printers and readers who adopted and shaped the new technology to their purposes. Exploring early religious print from this angle reveals local dynamics and cultural structures which, because of the enormous weight of the Reformation, have been long neglected. Specifically, a focus on the agencies of early printers in their context as merchants makes visible the strategic use of an important cultural lexicon around commercial morality — a lexicon quite distinct from the one of heterodoxy/orthodoxy that would replace it as the Reformation took hold.

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Print’s Experiments with Readerly Agency in Historical Writing

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axton introduces his impressive, original edition of the Polychronicon (1482, STC 13438) with an extended prologue. Just a few lines in, this prologue moves into an extensive rumination about the effects that historical writing has on readers: Yet he is more fortunat, and may be reputed as wyse, yf he gyve attendaunce withoute tastynge of the stormes of adversyte, that may by the redyng of historyes conteynyng dyverse customes, condycyons, lawes, and actes of sondry nacions come unto the knowleche of and understandynge of the same wysedom and polycye. In whiche hystoryes so wreton in large and aourned volumes, he syttynge in his chambre or studye maye rede, knowe, and understande the polytyke and noble actes of alle the worlde, as of one cyte, and the conflyctes, errours, troubles, and vexacions done in the sayd unyversal worlde in suche wyse as he had ben and seen them in the propre places where as they were done. For certayne it is a greete beneurte unto a man that can be reformed by other and straunge mennes hurtes and scathes, and by the same to knowe what is requysyte and prouffytable for his lyf and eschewe suche errours and inconvenytys by whiche other men have ben hurte and lost theyr felycyte.1

As imagined by Caxton, this reader’s selection and consumption of historical texts provides him with an affective, nearly experiential education in ‘the polytyke and noble actes of alle the worlde’. Crucially, however, although the reader is physically passive — ‘syttynge in his chambre or studye’ — his reading con1 

Caxton’s Own Prose, ed. by Blake, p. 129.

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stitutes active, engaged work, work that requires his own continuous discretion and judgement, and an agency that discriminates between examples that are ‘requysyte and prouffytable’ and those that illustrate ‘errours and Inconvenytys’. In other words, to read history requires the exercise of an ethical faculty in response to the examples and events recorded.2 Caxton’s history reader is one whose agency is both evoked by and integral to historical writing itself. This final chapter explores what this quotation and the previous chapters have implied: that the agencies and intentions of book producers were often imaginatively bound up with the agencies of their readers. This relationship is expressed intriguingly through the genre of historical writing. Medi­eval historiography especially provides a strong sense of writerly intention and purpose, as well as an expectation that readers might assume responsibility for the copying and continuation of historical texts. This extends just slightly what Matthew Fisher has observed about medieval vernacular historiography’s relationship to scribes, which is that as a field, history ‘invited textual alteration, addition, supplementation, and other forms of composition’ in the process of copying and dissemination.3 By recognizing scribes as writers and readers of history, Fisher emphasizes both the intentional quality of history production as well as the porous boundary between the processes of producing and consuming historical texts. But what Fisher notes about the scribes who wrote histories is equally true of early printers; indeed, the original work of William Caxton, the St Albans Printer, and John Rastell as historians remains under-recognized. The materials at the core of this chapter — Caxton’s Polychronicon, the Chronicle of the St Albans printer, and Rastell’s Pastyme of People — are new historical compositions, and they each anticipate a high level of interpretive engagement and independence on the part of their readers. The innovations of early printers within the field of historiography emerged out of a late medieval moment already witnessing, as Alfred Hiatt has remarked, a bloom of experimental historical writing, a bloom that included new investments in translated work, brief exemplary narratives, the increased use of parataxis, and the innovation of new material formats like rolls and the visual layouts of synchronic histories.4 These new modes placed different demands on history writers and invited (or foreclosed) specific kinds of readerly interaction and par2 

This is not Caxton’s novel formulation, of course; the ethical uses of history have an extremely long tradition. See, for example, Isidore’s Etymologiae, i.xliii. 3  Fisher, Scribal Authorship and the Writing of History, p. 28. 4  Hiatt, ‘Historical Writing’.

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ticipation. Situating printers within this stream of experimental writing raises two of the three central questions this chapter will explore: to what extent did the historical texts of Caxton, Rastell, and the St Albans printer mark a response to or turn from late medieval forms of historical writing? And how is readerly agency encouraged or restricted in the histories produced by early printers? Some of these questions have been asked by scholars looking back across the Reformation. Daniel Woolf, for instance, has argued that the press had a severely attenuating effect on medieval historiography: his quantitative analysis of prices and folio pages correlates the demise of the compendious chronicle volume with the economic limits the press faced in producing large-scale editions.5 But such wide-angled studies tend to submerge moments — some decades long — that produced alternative forms and historiographical modes. Approaching the press’s engagement with history writing from the fifteenth century forward to the Reformation emphasizes late medieval historiography as a field already in transition. This perspective also reveals printers as innovative participants in that transition, driven by the same forces as scribes — that is, by new forms of history writing and thinking that were not necessarily motivated by the market. Looking from the fifteenth century forward to the intersection of print and history writing also allows a revealing comparison of how both print and manuscript technologies physically shaped the forms of historical thinking. As a genre, history writing relies in a pronounced way on the material form of the text. For instance, many medieval historical texts acquired material traditions around elements, like chaptering, indexes, prologues, illustration, and rubrication systems; all of these shaped the reader’s experience of the text and were elements likely to be influenced by the choice of print or manuscript modes of production. Indeed, the energy of late medieval history writing was expressed primarily through innovations to the material structures of texts, rather than to their historical content — the most famous example is perhaps the structured, titled book Caxton created out of Malory’s less focused collection of Arthurian cycles.6 But to push further, I suggest that in the last two decades of the fifteenth century, the period’s two major historiographical modes — the synchronic and the diachronic — found distinctly different limitations and capabilities in manuscript and print. The shift away from chronicles that Woolf notes is also a shift away from a deeply diachronic mode of history writing. 5  6 

Woolf, ‘From Hystories to the Historical’. See Crofts, Malory’s Contemporary Audience.

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The third and most central question this chapter addresses arises precisely from this crux: what impact did the medium of print have on the forms of history writing? Yet rather than assuming that the technology of print itself changed the material structures of history writing, I explore how printers deliberately turned to new historiographical modes in response to the capacity of their medium, even as they remained committed to the period’s emphasis on the agency of history readers and the cultural role of history writing. The chapter begins with a selective overview of fifteenth-century English history writing, focusing on the relatively narrow genre of chronicle writing in order to trace patterns and shifts in detail. Moving from the great vernacular chronicle traditions — the Brut, the London civic chronicles, and John Trevisa’s translation of Ranulf Higden’s Polychronicon — to the relatively neglected impact of imported histories, primarily Werner Rolewinck’s Fasciculus Temporum, this chapter explores the material demands of diachronic and synchronic modes of history writing in both manuscript and print. I find that, as historians and chronicle writers, Caxton, Rastell, and the St Albans printer use print’s capacity to reshape the material structures of these traditions, re-emphasizing the role of the history reader in ways that are at once new and familiar.

The Readers and Writers of English Chronicles The master form of medieval English historiography was the chronicle, which might be defined most simply as the use of chronology to structure narrative history.7 The three late medieval vernacular examples discussed in this section — the Brut, the London civic chronicles, and Trevisa’s Polychronicon — are all sources used by Caxton in his historical work and so have specific relevance to our context. However, these chronicles were also deeply influential texts throughout the fifteenth century and served as both sources for and widely read examples of that period’s history writing well before (and after) Caxton. All three represent the diachronic historical perspective that the chronicle form encourages; these narratives move forward in linear fashion, tracing continuities that anticipate their own extension into the present time. Yet in their manuscript traditions, each of these texts accrued distinct material signatures that helped structure the reading experience, and these are the focus of the discussion below. 7 

On the medieval chronicle broadly, see Given-Wilson, Chronicles: The Writing of History.

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The Brut was translated from Anglo-Norman into English in the early fourteenth century, and its amalgamation of royal genealogy and the history of Britain made it one of the standards of vernacular historical writing, as well as one of the most frequently extended historical narratives of the period. 8 The mass of narrative material is divided and organized quite simply through the use of chaptering, a technique that remained consistent across the Anglo-Norman and English versions of the Brut. The chapters are typically denoted by narrative headings written as phrases or sometimes even full sentences that summarize the content of a given entry. These headings can themselves be quite extensive and chatty. For example, in Chapter 30 of the Brut’s Common Version, the chapter heading prefaces and, in effect, synopsizes the entry: ‘Of Artogaill that was Grandobodianus sone how he was made kyng and afte putte a doune for his wikkednesse.’9 Sometimes the Brut text is prefaced by a table which merely collects these summary headings together, serving as a sort of attenuated narrative. In at least one case, this kind of table appears to have functioned as a substitute for the full text: a fifteenth-century reader of London, British Library, MS Additional 10099 uses the list of summary headings to comment on events and make various annotations.10 Readers, and often professional rubricators, also frequently add marginal notations and paratexts such as chapter numbers and either regnal or calendrical dates as aids in negotiating the narrative material. Yet while these additions indicate a range of uses for the Brut, its most consistent structural feature is quite simple — just a single narrative divided into chapters which have summary headings alongside numerical ones. The Brut’s ‘bookish’ structure thus has a narrative momentum that encourages the reader to move through the text 8 

For the full manuscript history of the Brut, see Matheson, The Prose Brut. The English Brut survives, according to Matheson, in 181 manuscripts; together with composite manuscripts, the total is close to 215. Grouping these texts has proven challenging, and is an ongoing process. In general, the Anglo-Norman version goes to 1333 (Battle of Halidon Hill) and gives rise to all others with the exception of John Mandeville’s independent translation from the Anglo-Norman Long Version. In modern scholarship, it is convention to refer to texts up to 1333 as comprising the Common Version. The English texts end at the following points: 1333, 1377, 1419 (Siege of Rouen, under Henry V), 1430, and 1461. These late date continuations are (retroactively) derived from Caxton’s text; see also Matheson, ‘Printer and Scribe’. 9  New York, Columbia Uni­ver­sity, MS Plimpton 262, fol. 10v. This summary heading is replicated by Caxton in his 1482 edition of the Chronicles (STC 9991), as is his typical practice with the Brut material outside of the Liber Ultimus. 10  BL, MS Additional 10099, fols 1r–8v.

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chronologically, from start to finish, at more or less the pace of the book itself, even if the reader is able to speed up a bit with the aid of the summary headings, or the addition of individualized paratexts in a specific book copy. The English civic chronicles, appearing at about the same time as the English versions of the Brut, share the Brut’s forward-moving, diachronic logic but reveal a quite different historical sensibility — one more secular, less narrative, and more reliant on a reader’s interests and interpretative commitments. The most developed of the civic chronicles is the collection known as the London Chronicles, a set of texts further distinguished by its mercantile readership and Yorkist sympathies. This group appears to have a composition date in the 1420s during Henry VI’s minority, although the ‘common’ city chronicle tradition imagines an earlier origin in the later twelfth century; the date 1189 is a consistent, albeit fictive, beginning point for a majority of these texts.11 The material of the London Chronicles, organized in annals, is linked by connections to civic interests and the broad concerns of London citizens. The entries themselves tend to relay a variety of information swiftly, without much attempt at narrative coherence: only a few verbal signals — item, in this year, and also — glue disparate material together. For instance, the entry for the year 1444 in the version of the London Chronicles, known as the Great Chronicle, describes London’s reception of the new queen Margaret and dwells on the displays of livery, wealth and pageantry. The next year’s entry leaves that event completely behind, instead offering details about a feud between the prior of Kylmayn and the earl of Urmound.12 These are knit together only by the loosest connection around London and the disparate social and political interests of Londoners. The London Chronicles rely not on discursive structures, but on a physical organization that emphasizes the common civic fabric of the material. Composed of entries organized by civic year, the annals move from October to October, with records of London’s elected officials — sheriffs, mayors, bailiffs — registered distinctly at the close of each entry. These annals are accompanied by a robust paratextual apparatus — running heads, marginal annotations indicating the year, larger writing marks the beginning of new entries, and regnal and calendrical dates are arranged in the margins. Like the narrative reading of history encouraged by the Brut’s summary chapter headings, these material structures suggest a specific posture on the part of the reader. Here, it is the 11  On the city chronicle tradition, see McLaren, The London Chronicles of the Fifteenth Century. While McLaren disputes the common tradition thesis, see also Hiatt, ‘Historical Writing’, and The Great Chronicle of London, ed. by Thomas and Thornley. 12  See The Great Chronicle of London, ed. by Thomas and Thornley, pp. 178–88.

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reader’s responsibility to identify meaningful similarities and differences over the course of mayoralities and of years, and to pick up the threads that link entries to the concern of London and London-centric interests. Further, the annal format itself anticipates an on-going participation and recording of those events, a consistent and energetic addition of annal entries into the present and beyond. Indeed, the civic chronicle’s confidence in its own continuation is itself an optimistic expectation of the ongoing health of the city and its community. It is unsurprising that the volumes within which the London Chronicles are recorded physically anticipate continuations, additions, and updates, often leaving blank spaces and leaves for imagined future authors — authors likely to have been invested readers of the Chronicles. The national ambitions of the Brut and the city-centric outlook of the London Chronicles both find a place within the all-encompassing aims of the period’s great universal chronicle, the Polychronicon. The Polychronicon was first compiled by Ranulph Higden in the mid-fourteenth century.13 As a universal history, it draws upon hagiography, geography, and natural science in a sweep from the Creation to 1348, a date nearly contemporary with Higden’s own writing.14 In 1387, the cleric John Trevisa translated Higden’s text into English.15 While the Latin text remained well known into the fifteenth century, it was Trevisa’s English translation that moved the Polychronicon into the orbit of 13 

Emily Steiner has emphasized the profound appeal of the Polychronicon to the historio­ graphical imagination of late medieval writers in ‘Radical Historiography’. For the influence of the Polychronicon on late medieval historiography, see also Lavezzo, Angels on the Edge of the World, pp. 71–92; Kennedy, ‘Chronicles and Other Historical Writing’; and Edwards, ‘The Influence and Audience of the Polychronicon’. 14  Higden follows the patterns of continental sources, as well as native writers like Nicholas Trevet in his Historia and Cronicle in organizing his history into seven books, a structure meant to recall numerologically several overlapping systems: the Ages of Man, the biblical Genesis, and Christian history: the first book presents the geography of the world, and concludes with a section on English topography and customs; the second book runs from the Creation to the destruction of the Jewish temple; the third book moves from the Babylon captivity to the birth of John the Baptist; the fourth book recounts the life of Christ and begins an ecclesiastical history that gradually narrows to the matters of Britain and Vortigern; and the last three books are devoted to the increasingly political history of Britain. The Polychronicon thus offers several different thematic and narrative perspectives, moving from the macrocosm of the universe to the microcosm of man, from sacred to political, from cosmic to local. See Gransden, Historical Writing in England, pp. 44–46. 15  Apart from Trevisa’s translation, the Polychronicon was translated at least twice more inde­pendently. On the continuations of the Polychronicon, see Taylor, ‘The Development of the Polychronicon Continuation’, and Matheson, ‘Printer and Scribe’.

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writers as diverse as Geoffrey Chaucer, John Lydgate, William Langland, John Mirk, Henry Bradshaw, and, of course, William Caxton. While the Brut and the London Chronicles are histories without conclusions, the Polychronicon is unfinished in an even more pronounced way. A hallmark of its tradition is an openness and availability to the processes of extension and addition; even at the end of the fifteenth century, it remained a historical text open to continuations and appropriations, as the discussion of Caxton’s edition below will demonstrate. The incomplete quality of the Polychronicon is partly a function of its universal claims, which invite more information and ongoing chronological coverage, and this invitation is underscored by its discursive structure. The Polychronicon is framed within seven books that follow the outline of sacred time, moving from the Creation towards the eschatological end-time. The final three books record human experience and focus increasingly on the political history of Britain. While each book can accommodate new information, the seventh book — which begins with the coronation of William the Conqueror and proceeds onward into the present time of its readers — is the most obviously extendable, with a scope that reaches as far into the future as there are writers available to compose it. Indeed, from its first appearance, the seventh book of the Polychronicon invited continuations: Higden himself revised and extended his own original compilation, adding material up to 1352; Trevisa added a continuation to 1360, and six fifteenth-century manuscripts attest to additional continuations.16 This forward and necessarily open-ended trajectory reveals the present as the ever-moving goal of the Polychronicon; it is a text that courts updates, extensions, additional material, that invites its readers to become its writers, and that takes on the burden of bringing the past ever forward.17 Moreover, the Polychronicon seems to anticipate a relatively sophisticated readership, as the text’s material traditions suggest. By the early fifteenth century, most vernacular copies of the Polychronicon included generous paratextual finding aids not unlike those found in other encyclopedic texts (the De proprietatibus rerum of Bartholomaeus Anglicus, for instance, and the Legenda aurea): an alphabetical subject index keyed to books and chapter divisions, often paired with a separate index in Latin; running heads on every page that identified the 16 

Taylor, ‘The Development of the Polychronicon Continuation’; Matheson, ‘Printer and Scribe’; and Waldron, ‘Caxton and the Polychronicon’. 17  BMC xi, 128. Of further interest in Caxton’s development of the index, note his use of multiple kinds of indexes in the (slightly) later Golden Legend of 1483 (STC 24873). Both the subject and alphabetical indexes in that later edition use pagination rather than the system of books and chapters as finding aids.

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individual books; chapter headings clearly set apart in the mise-en-page and numbered, usually with arabic numerals; a system of foliation; and frequently, columns of regnal years and dates added along the margins of the last three books concerned with the historical matter of Britain.18 In several instances the marginal additions set up extremely complex systems of historical accounting using corroborated ecclesiastical and regnal frames.19 Together, these organizing material structures work to chapter and divide the Polychronicon into specific stories, micro-narratives, events, and categories of general knowledge — all easily locatable, citable, and presumably available even across different manuscript copies. The consistency of these paratexts suggests not only that they became engrained as part of the Polychronicon’s discursive content, but that the text’s use was unfixed and available for a quite wide range of readerly interests and applications. The consistent incorporation of an alphabetical index especially belies both the sophisticated readership anticipated by the Polychronicon’s scribes, and the text’s own defining quality of incompleteness.20 Unlike guides or tabulae organized to follow the sequence of the book (like those appended to many of the Brut texts, discussed above), an alphabetical index defers to the knowledge its reader already possesses. Under the fascicle ‘D’ in the Polychronicon’s typical manuscript index, for example, we find the following series of entries: ‘David a saint’, ‘David king of scots’, ‘Danes coming’, ‘Batail of the Danes’, ‘Danes teach English to drink’, ‘Delon an island’.21 Such a list is only useful — or even usable — in the hands of a fairly skilled, independent reader searching for specific items and topics within the text; that is, a reader who is able to construct her experience of the Polychronicon through her own past experiences as a reader, who is more likely to be confirming or extending (rather than stumbling across for the first time) information about the intersection of Danish and English drinking habits. Further, in the Latin and Middle English manuscript traditions, the indexes almost always precede the entire work, offering the book 18 

See San Marino, Huntington Library, MS 28561, fols 104v–105r. See Cam­bridge, Harvard Uni­ver­sity, Houghton Library, MS lat. 116, fol. 33r. 20  For the development and use of the alphabetical index, see Rouse and Rouse, Preachers, Florilegia and Sermons, pp. 26–35, and Parkes, ‘The Influence of the Concepts of Ordinatio and Compilatio’. 21  Caxton’s index follows the same typical arrangement as the manuscript tradition. This example is drawn from Caxton’s index (STC 13438). With some frequency, the indexes to the manuscript tradition are arranged in alphabetical order by book within each fascicle; Caxton’s index follows a more comprehensive alphabetical ordering with the exception of his references to the Liber Ultimus. 19 

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up to independent reading choices before the guiding prefaces of Trevisa and Higden. Readers encountering the book, therefore, are invited to turn to a specific passage or section of interest, rather than moving through any material that might instruct them on how the book ought to be used. Many of these indexes, though not all, evoke the Polychronicon’s tradition of continuation by leaving blank spaces or even full pages between fascicles in anticipation of future extensions that will likewise expand the index.22 The material signatures of the three chronicles discussed here all work to construct and shape the experiences of history readers, even as the expertise and degree of readerly agency these anticipate vary widely. The readers of the Brut have perhaps the least burden, merely asked to follow, chapter by chapter, a grand narrative; the London Chronicles place a great deal of interpretive responsibility onto readers who are, presumably, educated London citizens of a certain class and occupation; and the Polychronicon is available to a range of readers already well versed in several kinds of historiography and who are expected to choose for themselves how to use the vast material of the volume. Yet however (and whichever) readers negotiate these three texts, all three chronicles together assume at least one type of readerly agency: continuation. The on-going annal entries, the forward-moving history of Britain, and the seventh book of the Polychronicon all express a diachronic logic that implies readers who at some point also become the writers who record additional information and historical experience. The English vernacular chronicle in manuscript is a form of history writing that imagines active, engaged readers. That the chronicle remained, at the end of the fifteenth century, a highly dynamic and popular historical genre is a testament to the readerly energy the genre continued to inspire.

The First Histories in English Print The dynamism and popularity of chronicles is presumably what attracted the interest of Caxton, who made a significant investment in the chronicle genre quite early in his Westminster career — an investment that remains relatively unnoted in modern scholarship. Between June of 1480 and October of 1482, 22 

My observations here are not meant to represent an exhaustive survey of the Poly­ chronicon’s manuscript tradition, but rather to make visible the more prominent trends and traditions. For manuscripts that include especially prominent examples of contingent spacing in the index, see BL, MS Additional 62451; BL, MS Additional 24194; BL, MS Additional 12118; and BL, MS Stowe 65. BL, MS Stowe 65, however, is an manuscript where the index comes after the whole of the Polychronicon text.

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Caxton issued four editions of three chronicle texts; two of these include large sections that are Caxton’s original compilations. The first of these, the Chronicles of England (1480, STC 9991), was a version of the Brut with the addition of original material. Sometime during that same year, Caxton issued the Description of Britain (STC 13440a), his redaction of the topographical descriptions of England, Ireland, and Wales contained in Book x of the Polychronicon. In 1482, Caxton printed the Polychronicon (STC 13438) in full and added an entirely original eighth book of his own making, entitled the Liber Ultimus. A few months after issuing his Polychronicon, Caxton published a second edition of the Chronicles of England (STC 9992), fully reset, with corrections and updates throughout. Part of the significance of these editions is that they represent the first time print grappled with the diachronic dynamics of the manuscript chronicle; how did Caxton express in print that sense of incompleteness that was embedded within England’s vernacular historiographical traditions? In his first history edition, the Chronicles of England, Caxton simply replicates the manuscript structures and traditions of the Brut, closely enough that Daniel Wakelin has been able to identify the printer’s manuscript exemplar.23 Caxton’s prologue is brief and simply notes the table he appends (a table which follows the standard tables attached to the Brut). The edition concludes with a brief prayer for the realm and king, and a standard colophon. The single departure Caxton effects — and the considerable personal investment and skill it demonstrates — is itself in keeping with the Brut’s own dynamics: Caxton composes a continuation that draws the Brut forward from 1419 to 1461.24 Caxton does not refer to this continuation but instead adapts his new material to the Brut form seamlessly, adding new chapter headings and integrating his continuation into the prefatory table. For his sources, Caxton draws on the Fasciculus Temporum and the London Chronicle, but in this case, the material remains shaped under narrative chapter headings.25 In other words, none of the dynamics of the manuscript Brut are disrupted in print; Caxton’s first edition of vernacular historiography is hardly an innovation but, rather, a careful imitation of a long-standing manuscript tradition. 23 

Wakelin, ‘Caxton’s Exemplar for The Chronicles of England?’. As Wakelin notes, the manuscript exemplar does not contain Caxton’s original addition for the years 1419–61, which supports the scholarly consensus that the addition was in fact Caxton’s own composition. 24  Lister Matheson makes the first and most complete argument for Caxton’s authorship of this continuation: see The Prose Brut, pp. 123–64, and ‘Printer and Scribe’. 25  BMC xi, 116–17.

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Two years later, however, Caxton demonstrates a far different strategy in his edition of the Polychronicon, which will be the focal point for the rest of this discussion. Caxton’s sole edition of the full Polychronicon was an immense book of 450 folio leaves — larger even than his editions of the Morte Darthur or the Golden Legend — and one of the spectacularly substantive productions of the incunable press. Caxton introduces his volume with a prologue suggesting the ways his print edition improves upon the already-popular English translation by John Trevisa; here the work is ‘a lytel embelysshed fro tholde makyng’, Caxton offers, and he has also ‘added suche storyes as I coude fynde’.26 These rather modest claims are true until one encounters the material evidence of the printed edition itself, which is overlaid with a thick series of additional paratexts, among them a lengthy prologue, an epilogue, the first English printed index, and finally the Liber Ultimus — not only Caxton’s longest original compilation, but it is uniquely located as the eighth and final book of the Polychronicon. I will discuss the content of the Liber Ultimus further below, but here I want to concentrate on the effect of Caxton’s addition upon the forwardmoving historical dynamics of the Polychronicon. In compiling his Liber Ultimus, Caxton seems to understand himself as working within long-established historiographical methods that understood the work of the historian as one of embellishing, adding to, and compiling older historical materials. Certainly Higden himself models this mode of history writing as source gathering and extension, explaining his use of sources in his second preface as both derivative and original: ‘Et quamvis alienum sit quod assume, meum tamen facio quod meis aliquando verbis antiquorum saepe sententias profero’.27 In creating the Liber Ultimus, Caxton is Higden’s fellow compilator.28 Caxton also adopts, for his printed Polychronicon, many of the material hallmarks of the manuscript tradition. He employs chapters and running heads, and follows patterns similar to the manuscript tradition for hierarchizing Arabic, Roman, and written numerals.29 His printed index is tidy and leaves no 26 

Caxton’s Own Prose, ed. by Blake, p. 131. Cited from Higden, Polychronicon, ed. by Lumby, i, 18–21. Trevisa’s translation reads ‘And þei I take it of oþer menis, I clepe þis storie myn; and for þat I write oþer whiles myn owne wordes and sentens of olde men.’ 28  See Higden’s second preface, see Polychronicon, ed. by Lumby, i, 21–27. On Higden and historical compilatio, see Gransden, Historical Writing in England, pp. 47–49. 29  The Polychronicon seems to have been systematically rubricated and supplied with marginal calendrical marks as part of the hand-finishing process in Caxton’s own shop, a detail that underscores the close attention Caxton paid to the manuscript traditions; see BMC xi, 128. 27 

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empty spaces, which is not in itself a significant deviation from the manuscript tradition: well planned or more formal presentation manuscript versions do the same. In its numbering and ordering system, too, this index mirrors those of the Polychronicon manuscripts — with one important exception. The Liber Ultimus remains distinct throughout the index as the sole book bearing an initialed title (Caxton chooses ‘UL’), whereas the other books and chapters are represented by Arabic numerals. Moreover, the Liber Ultimus is indexed separately under each fascicle. This repetitive and emphasized evocation of the Liber Ultimus becomes one of the most visible features of the printed index, present at the conclusion of every fascicle and thus underscored even more by the rubricated initials which often were added to the initial of the following fascicle. The visual effect is a dramatic, everywhere-present reminder that Caxton’s edition has finished the Polychronicon in some sense, and added not just a continuation but the last such extension to the tradition. Within the space of the index, the disruption of the Liber Ultimus works primarily at the level of layout, and it is one of two spatialized disruptions that Caxton’s index effects. The second comes in another departure from the manuscript tradition, which is Caxton’s insertion of the index between his own prologue and the rest of the Polychronicon text. Cumulative prefaces were part of the Polychronicon’s accretive tradition, and together Trevisa and Higden’s prefatory texts total five. Caxton’s index thus creates a significant break, separating his prologue from the text by the thirty-five folio leaves that constitute the index, a move that strands the prior prologues — they stand alone, with two blanks left on either side, and are not referenced by the index — and reverses the text’s traditional relationship between index and prologue. Readers of the printed edition, then, begin as narrative readers of Caxton’s own prose, moving through his prologue before encountering the multiple directions into the Polychronicon as offered by his index. Indeed, as readers finish the prologue they find in the concluding lines Caxton’s own signal to the role of the Liber Ultimus: And where the sayd auctor [Trevisa] hath alle his werke in seuen books, I have sette that whiche I have added to after a-parte and have marked it the laste booke, and have made chaptyres acordyng to the other werke.30

Caxton’s index physically reminds readers that they hold not just a newly printed edition but a book that fully encloses the Trevisan manuscript text between a new preface and a new conclusion. Caxton’s index is instrumental 30 

Caxton’s Own Prose, ed. by Blake, p. 132.

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in arresting — literally and figuratively — the forward-moving momentum of the Polychronicon tradition, registering the temporal wake of the Liber Ultimus long before the reader arrives at the finality of that book itself. At stake in the definitive end represented by the Liber Ultimus — both in its title as a ‘Final Book’, and in its conclusive presence within the Polychronicon’s structure — is the text’s diachronic momentum and the reader’s responsibility and capacity to keep inscribing and extending the history-writing process the Polychronicon initiates. Caxton’s printed edition forecloses both. Indeed, Caxton himself draws attention to the permanent historical gap between his printed edition and the present moment created by the inclusion of his Liber Ultimus. Near the end of his prologue, for example, he carefully notes that his added ‘storyes’ extend only ‘fro th’ende that the said Ranulph fynysshed his book, which was the yere of Our Lord MCCC lvii, unto the yere of the same M CCCC lx, whiche ben an honderd and thre yere’.31 The already outdated endpoint of the Liber Ultimus is made explicit, in fact, twice in the prologue, once more in the explicit Caxton composes for the ending the seventh book, and a final time in the prologue to the Liber Ultimus itself. With equal specificity, Caxton also carefully notes in his final colophon that his full edition was ended on the second day of July 1482. The obviousness of this twenty-two-year lag between the date of printing and the terminus of Caxton’s added material has tended to bring scholars of early print back to a consideration of Caxton’s marketing strategies. William West, for instance, finds here supporting evidence for Caxton’s investments in ‘making it new’ for his audience, generating an ongoing demand for bringing old books up to date in new editions; that this was the guiding principle and function of early print has been assumed elsewhere.32 Yet Caxton so pointedly underscores the past end date of his own Liber Ultimus, naming it four separate times, that his own emphasis undermines an understanding of this move as merely a shrewd business strategy. This is especially the case if we keep in mind the audience for early print. As discussed in earlier chapters, Caxton’s readers were well-informed mercantile Londoners and monastic scholars and writers at foundations like Syon Abbey and St Albans, readers who had ready access to (and were likely even authors of ) con31 

Caxton’s Own Prose, ed. by Blake, pp. 131–32. Here Caxton makes a slight mistake in dating Trevisa’s continuation, as noted by Blake in his edition (at p. 171). Caxton’s Liber Ultimus comprises a first section that draws heavily from the Brut material and covers the years 1358 to 1418, and a second part that is Caxton’s original compilation, and runs from 1419 to 1461. 32  West, ‘Old News’.

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temporary city chronicles and other historical writing. What, then, was the attraction Caxton imagined for an instantly out-of-date — literally ‘discontinued’ — universal history? And if Caxton intended to create a market for future updated editions of the Polychronicon — as he seems to gesture toward in other productions, like his 1483 Canterbury Tales — why produce an initial edition with large components that would have to be entirely and expensively reset, including the thirty-five-folio index and the preface to the Liber Ultimus, along with the Liber Ultimus itself ? The outdatedness and conclusiveness of his Polychronicon suggests that, by 1482, Caxton was ready to leave one kind of historiographical dynamic behind. His Polychronicon makes it clear that print does alienate a specific type of readerly agency that the manuscript chronicle traditions encouraged; there is no invitation to continue or add to the printed edition. Instead, Caxton’s edition pointedly expects an audience with at least two decades of additional experience and information beyond that recorded in the Liber Ultimus; however, by leaving no conceptual or material space for the inscription of that experience, Caxton bluntly closes down the dynamics of historical continuation. Foreclosed, too, is the Polychronicon’s intrinsic goal of ‘updatedness’, replaced by an embrace of print’s inevitable belatedness. In Caxton’s Polychronicon, an authentic difference emerges in the expression of a genre — the chronicle history — through the technologies of print and manuscript. Caxton acknowledges here what is disguised in his earlier edition of The Chronicles of England; that is, print begins to shift the processes of composing and extending historical writing away from the reader and into the hands of the printer or the author. While the manuscript invites the reader’s hand to become the writer’s, the printed edition cannot pretend to be as generous. As we will see, however, this does not preclude alternative expressions and constructions of readerly agency. Caxton’s edition of the Polychronicon, and with it his Liber Ultimus, generated briefly intertwined manuscript and print traditions in the years directly after its production in 1482.33 Travelling through these versions is a brief passage regarding the advent of print, recorded in Chapter 28 of Caxton’s Liber Ultimus:

33 

Matheson, ‘Printer and Scribe’, p. 596, lists the manuscripts copied from Caxton’s print edition: these are BL, Cotton Claudius A.xiii; BodL, Rawlinson poet. 32; BL, Additional 10099; BL, Harley 3730; and Cam­bridge, Peterhouse College, MS 190.

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Also about this tyme the crafte of Enprynting was first founde in magounce in Almayne / whiche crafte is multyplyed thurgh the world in many places. and bookes been had grete chepe and in grete nombre by cause of the same crafte.34

Lotte Hellinga has shown very precisely that this brief blurb about print is imported from the 1474 ther Hoernen edition of the Fasciculus Temporum.35 Although this passage first appears in Caxton’s printed edition, it is recopied into London, British Library, MS Harley 3730, which later serves as the exemplar for Cam­bridge, Peterhouse College MS 190, compiled around the year 1500, into which the passage is faithfully recopied again. However, in the Peterhouse manuscript, the scribe himself underscores the passage and writes in the margin beside it: ‘atque imprentandum’ (‘and so it should be printed’).36 The image this evokes — of a scribe arrested in the moment of copying this manuscript, and noting that it should be in print — is quite suggestive. Here the scribe is visible, briefly, in the habit of the active, engaged reader Caxton’s book anticipates, engaging with the material as well as the discursive meaning and situation of the Liber Ultimus. But in this case print emerges as the appropriate medium for the Liber Ultimus text, and the scribe’s note attests to the fact that the Polychronicon gradually stopped being copied into manuscripts, although the manuscript tradition of other chronicles remained robust for the next two decades.37

The Readerly Dynamics of Print Histories Even as Caxton closed one avenue of readerly interaction embedded in the chronicle form — the practice of continuing and adding to chronicle texts — the passage from his prologue to the Polychronicon cited at the beginning of this chapter reminds us that with this edition, he also saw himself fostering a compelling vision of history reading as an agented, independent process. The rest of this chapter turns to consider the possibilities around readers and agency that printed histories opened. Indeed, the alternative historiographical modes and sources used by printers not only reveals new ways of imagining history

34 

STC 13438, BL, G.6011, 6012, sig. 55.2r. Hellinga and Ford, ‘Deletion or Addition’. 36  Cam­bridge, Peterhouse MS 190, fol. 210r. My thanks to Daniel Wakelin for calling this annotation to my attention. 37  See Woolf, Reading History, and Given-Wilson, Chronicles: The Writing of History. 35 

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readers but demonstrates the real innovation of English printers as historians in moving beyond the diachronic chronicle tradition. Caxton himself draws attention to the originality of his sources in his prologue to the Liber Ultimus. Here, he names just two works (although scholars have shown that he drew upon a wide range of material), remarking that his sources are departures from the kind used by Higden and Trevisa: for as moche as I haue not ne can gete no bokes of auctoryte treatyng of suche cronykes, except a lytel boke named Fasciculus Temporum and another callyd Aureus de Universo, in whiche bookes I fynde ryght lytel mater syth the sayde tyme.38

As Caxton suggests, part of the complexity of the Liber Ultimus is precisely that it moves away from the familiar authorities that underwrite the Polychronicon.39 The Aureo de universo has not been identified. The Fasciculus Temporum, however, is an intriguing work that has not yet been fully explored in terms of its influence upon English history writing. As I argue in the rest of this section, it is a work that centrally informs the innovative historiographical mode of the Liber Ultimus, marking Caxton’s book as a reading experience distinct from the one offered by more familiar diachronic chronicle histories. The Fasciculus Temporum was composed in Latin between 1470 and 1472 by Werner Rolewinck, a Carthusian of the Cologne Charterhouse.40 Like the Polychronicon, it is a universal chronicle in its scope; but unlike Higden’s work, the Fasciculus refuses streams of narrative in favour of a series of events and compressed narratives arranged synchronically. This synchronic aspect is achieved through a complex graphic schema: using crossover spreads that treat each verso and recto as effectively one page, the Fasciculus represents the multiple narratives of creation, Christ, the popes, emperors, and national political histories as moving simultaneously through history. A chronological design element 38 

Caxton’s Own Prose, ed. by Blake, p. 133. Caxton never provides a full list of the sources he used in compiling his Liber Ultimus. For instance, he submerges the two sources from which he drew most of his material — the popular English Brut and the city-centric London Chronicles, as mentioned above. In addition, Matheson notes several places where Caxton draws upon the Grandes Chroniques (and cites the entry on Knolles, discussed below, as one of these); see Matheson, ‘Printer and Scribe’, 604–05. Lumby provides marginal notes in his edition of the Liber Ultimus of sections that recall the work of Thomas Walsingham (Higden, Polychronicon, ed. by Lumby, viii). 40  For a helpful overview of the Fasciculus Temporum, see Classen, ‘Werner Rolewinck’s Fasciculus Temporum’. See also Stillwell, ‘The Fasciculus Temporum’, and Hellinga and Ford, ‘Deletion or Addition’. 39 

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Figure 4.1 Bifolio page design from the first edition of the Fasciculus Temporum, from Werner Rolewinck’s Fasciculus Temporum, printed by Arnold ther Hoernen in Cologne, 1474

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(USTC 748574). Houghton Library, Harvard Uni­ver­sity, Typ Inc 935, fols. 11v–12r.

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ties the material together: two bands run horizontally across each page, with the top one recording the anno mundi, and the bottom numbering the years before Christ counting backwards (and represented upside down), and then (upright) as anno christi. Between these dual bands is the history of the church. Above and below this central chronology are woodcut illustrations of cities, events and biblical scenes; several of these also have integrated text. The bulk of the material presented by the Fasciculus, however, is arranged around roundels representing important figures; sometimes the roundels are connected by lines denoting relationships, and all the historical and biographical text is presented not as continuous prose, but within blocks adjacent to the roundels, the images, and each other. The result is a stunning interaction of woodcuts, visual images, and linear schema around which bits of text are woven (see Figure 4.1). The material form of the Fasciculus places unique demands upon the reader that Rolewinck articulates as a specific responsibility shouldered by the reader for both his text’s reception and replication. As he explains in his preface, the Fasciculus relies upon a specific mise-en-page, and so ‘in the event that he [the reader] should wish to take over something, be mindful of the timespan and the corresponding year so that it won’t be longer or shorter than in the example’.41 Not only does this authorial reminder suggest that the reader might play a role in the future textual history of the Fasciculus, but it emphasizes the material schema of the history as its most important feature. The carefully plotted timelines, the intricate relationship of blank space, text and images — Rolewinck suggests that these physical components are not supplementary features but rather are central to the historiographical mode of his work. The defining feature of that mode is parataxis, and the presentation of history as an experience that requires constant choices and interpretive decisions. For instance, although the text is intricately designed and structured, it resists imposing any real hierarchy for the reader other than the loose priority of a Christian framework. Instead, the reader is confronted with multiple paths through which to order her reading of each dual-page spread. Reading from left to right is interrupted by the arrangement of textual blocks, and reading from top to bottom is also disrupted by the central chronological bars, the roundels, and frequently by the varying placement of dominant images, which sometimes occur in the corners or bottoms of the folios. The synchronic arrangement of the Fasciculus thus anticipates an extraordinarily open reading experience, one 41 

Martens, ‘The Fasciculus Temporum of 1474’. The Latin, as cited by Martens, reads: ‘Ut si cui transcibere placuerit diligenter observet spacia et numerum correspondentem ne longius aut strictius ponat quanto exemplar habet.’

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in which each reader resituates and reorients the material in relation to her own interests. The text is also preceded by an alphabetical index, which further underscores the reader-oriented choices that the text makes available. Moreover, while the layout of the Fasciculus constructs an impossible vision of reading in which multiple events are comprehended at once, the reader’s own experience of each page — reading discrete passages of text, in whichever order — is necessarily more limited. It is a book, in other words, that models a synchronic mode of thinking that an individual reader can only replicate partially. What the Fasciculus offers is a continual reminder of the reader’s own situatedness: to move through this work is to remain mindful of the whole even as a particular reading experience is only piecemeal, to remain alert to the choices one makes as a reader, and to be always aware of the contingency of historical narratives constructed by individual reading experiences against the scope and pattern of many alternatives. Rolewinck composed the Fasciculus in manuscript, but quite soon after the text was complete, he apparently worked closely with Arnold ther Hoernen to bring the first edition into print in 1474 (USTC 748574).42 It was a remarkably successful move. At Rolewinck’s death, in 1502, the Fasciculus had been translated into multiple German, Dutch, and French versions, and had been issued in thirty-five editions from printers in Cologne, Venice, Seville, Louvain, Speiers, Paris, Basel, Augsburg, Utrecht, and Strasbourg. Many of these editions contain brief continuations added by printers or readers. A 1478 copy of the Fasciculus by the Cologne printer Nicholas Gotz (USTC 748577) was bought by the Scotsman William Foulere, who added a Scottish history to the bottom margin of the text, mimicking Rolewinck’s roundels and page design.43 Rolewinck himself added continuations to editions issued by ther Hoernen, and, further afield, Johann Pryss of Strasbourg is one example of the many printers who added brief material that both localized and updated the text to the date of his editions (1490, USTC 748587). Yet the nature of these continuations were private, local, brief, and often inconsistent; the Fasciculus never developed the kind of sustained longer continuations that accrued to the traditions of English texts like the Brut and the Polychronicon, or other examples of vernacular diachronic chronicles like the French Grande Chroniques de France. Instead, material added to Rolewinck’s work tended not to move beyond the editions of a specific printer, resulting in small variations in the endpoints of 42 

Stillwell, ‘The Fasciculus Temporum’. St Andrews, St Andrews Uni­ver­sity Library, shelfmark TypGC.A79GR. On this copy, see Given-Wilson, ‘Werner Rolewinck, Fasciculus Temporum, 1478’. 43 

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copies printed even within a decade of one another in the same city. What this strongly suggests is that the appeal of the Fasciculus was not in its ability to be updated or extended — extensions seemed to play a fairly minor role — but instead was generated out of its innovative synchronic historiography, and the potential that historiography provided for a remarkably wide range of readers and purposes. The paratactical mode of the Fasciculus, and Rolewinck’s successful support and expression of that mode through visual design and page layout, created an enormous demand for a type of history reading unavailable in the diachronic chronicle form. Oddly, the Fasciculus never saw a full printed edition from the English press. Synchronous historiographies, however, were not wholly alien to the late medieval English context. The Fasciculus was not even the first Continental import emphasizing parataxis and juxtaposition. Far older — and one of the sources upon which Rolewinck relied — was the Chronicon Pontificum et Imperatorum, composed by Martinus Polonus in 1278. As its title suggests, the Chronicon comprises brief biographies of popes and emperors from Jesus forward. Like Rolewinck, Polonus rejects the continuous narrative form, but less dramatically. The Chronicon is arranged in a facing-page sequence, so that readers alternately encounter popes and emperors, beginning at roughly the same chronological point for both perspectives. This implicitly comparative format encourages reader to draw their own points of interpretive contact between ecclesiastical and political events. The Chronicon was enormously popular, and widely circulated throughout the Continent and in England. It was translated into English circa 1330, and influenced the material design John Capgrave devised for his Abbreuiacion of Chronicles.44 The alternating layout of the Chronicon may also have influenced the innovative New Chronicles of England and France, composed by the London draper Robert Fabyan prior to his death in 1513.45 The New Chronicles similarly alternate between two historical matters, but Fabyan’s subjects are the histories of the French and English. The resulting sequence, as Hiatt notes, disrupts ‘the linear progression of the chronicle by drawing the reader back in time: history read from the perspective of one kingdom is then immediately reread from the perspective of the other’.46 44 

The modern editor of the Middle English translation is Dan Embree; see The Chronicles of Rome, ed. by Embree. See also Matthews, ‘Martinus Polonus and Some Later Chroniclers’. 45  On Robert Fabyan as a historian, see Boffey, Manuscript and Print in London, pp. 162–204. 46  Hiatt, ‘Historical Writing’, p. 191.

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Visual synchronous histories were increasingly available in England over the course of the fifteenth century as well. A number of what Hiatt terms ‘roll chronicles’, mostly dating from the mid-fifteenth century forward, represent complex pieces of English history through visual relationships that use illustrations, roundels, and the uninterrupted material format provided by the manuscript roll itself.47 Yet the English experience of the synchronous history, although relatively brief compared to the form’s circulation on the Continent, is revealing. Even a simple facing-page format expresses a crucial component of the synchronous perspective, and thus these are historical forms that rely on a precise replication of their physical design and format — a precision that often proved elusive in manuscript dissemination. For instance, Dan Embree notes that the extant manuscript copies of the English Chronicle of Popes and Emperors are muddled in their arrangement of the biographies, a result of copying onto pages of varying dimensions.48 The gorgeous, sumptuous roll chronicles, like the one produced in honour of Edward IV, were never meant to be widely copied and disseminated; all of the examples are single copies. And although it dates to the mid-sixteenth century, the Chronicle of the Grey Friars is instructive as an example of the fate that befell synchronous histories in the hands of typically skilled scribes.49 The scribe recording the Grey Friars’ history begins with a program much like that of the Fasciculus, using illustrations, roundels, connecting lines, and text blocks to create a synchronous history of ecclesiastical and political events. Yet as he reaches the midpoint his design begins to falter as he finds that his information does not continue to fit his available space on the page. He clearly found it difficult to make adjustments: the roundels begin to veer over the pages, the lines become wobbly, and the layout gradually collapses. In history writing, technology does matter, and the use of print and manuscript each enable and foreclose different possibilities around representing and reading the past. If the diachronic mode of continuation and extension is more difficult to realize in print, the graphic features representing historical synchrony and paratactical perspectives are equally difficult to maintain in manuscript. Rolewinck is perhaps deliberately disingenuous when he cautions his readers about replicating the Fasciculus; it is a directive, after all, that circulated nearly 47 

Hiatt, ‘Historical Writing’, p. 189; for an example not mentioned by Hiatt, see the Edward IV Roll, Free Library of Philadelphia. 48  The Chronicles of Rome, ed. by Embree, p. 7. 49  BL, MS Cotton Vitellius F.xii, fols 337r–364v.

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exclusively in print. It is also telling that when it did reach England, the Fasciculus Temporum had its greatest influence through the work of English printers.

What Print did to the Polychronicon: Caxton’s Liber Ultimus Although Caxton singles out the Fasciculus as one of his sources, it provides a mere twenty-five identifiable loans throughout the Liber Ultimus, and these typically come as brief references couched within much longer entries. 50 Moreover, the Fasciculus is not an obvious source for the Polychronicon’s eighth book. The Liber Ultimus is not itself either a universal or a synchronic history: its central interest is with late medieval English politics. Nor does it share any visual resonance with Rolewinck’s design; Caxton’s Polychronicon includes, in fact, no illustrative images at all. The influence of Rolewinck’s paratactical historiography, however, pervades the whole of the Liber Ultimus and thoroughly replaces the more diachronic and narrative modes of both the Brut and Trevisa’s Polychronicon. Yet the paratactic historiography of the Fasciculus is a slight but powerful influence on Caxton’s Liber Ultimus and helps create a work that is demanding for the reader at the same time that it pushes the chronicle form into an extended, unpredictable engagement with open interpretive fields. The Liber Ultimus is divided into two main parts. The first fourteen chapters cover the years 1358–1419 and integrate the Common Version of the Middle English Brut with material from the London Chronicles and Werner Rolewinck’s Fasciculus Temporum, as well as some material traceable to French chronicles and continental annals and calendars.51 The second half, running from Chapters 15 to the conclusion at Chapter 33, relies largely on sources outside of the Brut and is a near replication of the work Caxton composed for his extension of the Chronicles of England.52 The very first entry of the Liber Ultimus is worth quoting at length because it is representative of the dynamic that informs the whole of Caxton’s last book: In the yere of oure lord a Thousand thre honderd eyght and fyfty in October Robert kuolles a Capytayne of a greet companye of Englysshe men and other helde and had wonne many forttesses in Fraunce [A further twenty-five lines describes the pillage by Knolles and his troops.] In this yere of oure lorde a thonsande thre hondred sixty/ And fyue and thyrtty yere of the Regne of kynge Edward the thirde the pees was 50 

These loans are identified in Hidgen, Polychronicon, ed. by Lumby, viii. See Matheson, ‘Printer and Scribe’. 52  See Matheson, ‘Printer and Scribe’. 51 

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fynysshed and acorded bytwene bothe kynges af Fraunce and of Englonde/ as it is afore sayd/ And at al halowen tyde after bothe two kynges metten to geder at Caleys with bothe theyr counseyls/ And there were shewyd the Artycles and condicions of the pees and acorde/ to whiche both partyes agreed and promysed to obserue and kepe [A further five lines describe the accord.] Aboute this tyme saynt Brygytte an hooly wydowe of the Royamme of Swethen had many reuelacions to bee enformed vnto alle thastate of the chirche/ And Instytued and founded an ordre newe of women and of men wherof she is Patrones her feste is kepte the two and twentyest day of Juyll/ In the same yere were grete and sodayne tempests/ and strong lyghtynge and thondrynge/ by whiche howsynge beestes and trees were perysshed/ And the deuyl appered in maunys lykenesse to moche peple in dyuerse places spak to hem/ Also in dyuerse places of the worlde were erthe quaues/ in soo moche that Basyle the Cyte fylle doune with many Castels aboute hit/ That tyme men dwellyed in woodes as beestes and durste not entre in to Cytees.53

And then the passage moves on to recount events in Burgundy, before returning to England to consider Harry, duke of Lancaster and the marriage of Prince Edward, among other items, before finally ending, around 1361, with the story of a ‘grete wynde’ and the statute promulgating a turn to the practice of legal plaints in the vernacular. The chapters flit from scene to scene and require constant resituating on the part of the reader. In this initial entry, for example, the reader is forced to shift quickly in relation to political events, to city events, to Bridget of Sweden, to the weather and natural omens. Further, Caxton’s chaptering of the material itself creates several obvious disjunctures: while this entry contains information about the important Treaty of Bretigny (1360) — information which is shaped from the Brut and then rechaptered from Caxton’s own prior edition of the Chronicles — this fairly significant material is here nested within the story of Robert Knolles that begins the entry. The distinctness of Caxton’s stylistic technique here stands in sharp relief against the attention to narrative arc that prevails in the preceding chapters of the Trevisan Polychronicon. Even in the seventh book, where the chapters set out to describe extensive and often-convoluted political circumstances, the Trevisan material is shaped and tied to a central episodic trajectory or, in the case of remarkable natural events, clearly marked off as discrete but notable information. For instance, in Chapter 32 of Book vii, Trevisa knits the succession of popes and emperors skillfully back into the history of the English kings by first outlining various continental supporters and detractors of the papacy, 53 

STC 13438, BL, G.6011, sigs 50.1r–50.2r.

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and then moving this continental framework into the detailed story of Richard I’s campaign in Bretigny. That skilled and guiding authorial hand is entirely missing in the far rougher juxtapositions Caxton offers. Caxton’s highly self-conscious incorporation of material from the Fasciculus creates instead the readerly experience of a synchronous history. The notes about St Bridget and earthquakes in Basel, for instance, shape a reading experience informed by parataxis, mirroring the kind of continual resituating and independent evaluation that the Fasciculus demands of its readers. Moreover, the interpolation of this kind of material creates more than merely the effect of parataxis — it also creates a space for interpretive action. For example, in Caxton’s twenty-fourth chapter, covering the years 1446–47, a little more than half of the longish entry is given to the troubles and unrest surrounding Duke Humphrey of Gloucester. That section ends with the ominous note ‘Alle the commons of the royamme beganne for to mumure and were not content’.54 Without pause, Caxton turns at this point to the Fasciculus, from which he collates the entries under 1438–46 to tell the story of Pope Nicholas V and the diplomatic resolution of the new papal schism effected by the contentious Council of Basel. Caxton adds (and likely fabricates) a link to English involvement, but even with this tie to English interests the overall effect is of two quite disparate narratives. Each provides potential interpretive traction against the other. It is possible to read English political division and ‘murmuring’ provocatively against the second narrative of a resolved schism, but only through the active interpretive energy of an engaged reader. Caxton simply provides the juxtaposition, which remains contingent upon such a reader for its meaning. In another example, from Chapter 23, the Fasciculus Temporum provides the source information about Saint Bernardine, John of Capistrano, and the reformation of the Grey Friars. This interpolation, prefaced briefly by material from the London Chronicles, divides that chapter’s two sections about Henry’s marriage to Margaret. The initial treatment of the marriage is largely descriptive, while after the Fasciculus material the entry turns to a partisan critique of the marriage possibly drawn from the London Chronicles. Here the notes from the Fasciculus disrupt the focus on describing the royal marriage, providing a momentary glance away from England and toward examples of virtuous lives — just briefly enough so that the rougher political commentary the entry returns to is framed by a morality external to English affairs. Again, this kind of interpretative juncture relies upon links drawn by the reader around the juxtapositions Caxton shapes. Indeed, the places in which Caxton uses material 54 

STC 13438, BL, G.6011, sig. 54.5r.

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from the Fasciculus Temporum are precisely those sites which demand not only interpretive energy on the part of the reader to make sense of them but also produce a range of possible readings. This very choice and range of readings sitautes the Liber Ultimus as a quite open text, dependent upon readers to complete it in independent, unpredictable ways. As Caxton concludes the Liber Ultimus, and with it his full edition of the Polychronicon, he writes: ‘And here I make an end of this lytel werke, as nygh as I can fynde after the forme of the werk tofore made by Ranulph monk of Chestre.’55 As I have argued above, he does construct an end to the Polychronicon in a novel way, even as he initiates a new mode of engaging the English history reader. Further, the ‘forme of the werk’ Caxton chooses for his Liber Ultimus is a mode of historiography well suited to the limits and possibilities of print, and one that grants a great deal of interpretive agency to the reader.

Print’s History Readers The intertwined moral responsibility of history reading and history writing is emphasized in the English literary tradition throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, perhaps most famously by John Gower and John Lydgate, and the intellectual currents surrounding Caxton’s press express strains of humanism that frequently evoke the close ethical connections between histories and readers.56 Caxton was clearly indebted to these deeper traditions of thinking about readerships; his innovation was to realize print’s capacity to foreground anew the interpretive energies of the history reader. Caxton’s prologue to the Polychronicon is where his own agency and intentions emerge, and where he expresses most fully his relationship to the new historiographical mode his Liber Ultimus adopts. The Polychronicon is a many-prefaced text.57 Ranulph Higden attaches three prefaciones to his compilation, to which the English translator John Trevisa adds two more: the Dialogue between the Lord and the Clerk on Translation and 55 

Caxton’s Own Prose, ed. by Blake, p. 133. See Wakelin, Reading, Humanism and English Literature, pp. 93–159. 57  Although Caxton’s edition of the Polychronicon, and particularly the Liber Ultimus, has gone nearly unremarked in scholarship, Caxton’s prologue to the Polychronicon has been more frequently excerpted. For a sense of its rich application to a range of perspectives on Caxton, see Kuskin, Symbolic Caxton, pp. 47–48; Crofts, Malory’s Contemporary Audience, pp. 42–44; and Wakelin, Humanism, Reading and English Literature, pp. 126–59. 56 

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his Epistle to Thomas, Lord Berkeley, which treats more specifically the translation of the Polychronicon. This tradition of accretive prologues articulating the intentions of history writers creates a space for Caxton’s own additional, lengthy prologue. Caxton’s preface draws on yet another one — Diodorus Siculus’s prologue to the Bibliotheca historica — as a loose framework for about three quarters of its composition.58 Diodorus wrote his history in the first century bc, and although his work was used by Jerome, the whole of the Biblio­ theca remains a secular counterpoint to the ecclesiastical tradition of universal history projects like the Polychronicon.59 Diodorus’s Bibliotheca had reached England by the late fifteenth century in the form of a translation by the Italian humanist Poggio Bracciolini, who rendered the original Greek into Latin, and around the time of Caxton’s translation it also came to the attention of John Skelton, who undertook an English translation of the entire work.60 Caxton’s deliberate and astute series of omissions and additions reveal his distinct historical sense at work. Caxton’s prologue begins with a straightforward presentation of his source; he gives due praise to the writers of histories and explains that histories are meant to ‘shewe unto the reders and herers by the ensamples of thynges passyd what thynge is to be desyred, and what is to be eschewed’.61 This suggests the familiar medieval understanding of history as a cache of moral exempla. But only a few lines into this fairly traditional understanding of the uses of the past, Caxton makes an important departure from his source by omitting a lengthy passage from his source text and substituting an original composition that recasts the prologue. The omitted passage is as follows: Furthermore, it has been the aspiration of these writers to marshal all men, who, although united one to another by their kinship, are yet separated by space and time, into one and the same orderly body. And such historians have therein shown themselves to be, as it were, ministers of Divine Providence. For just as Providence, having brought the orderly arrangement of the visible stars and the natures of men 58 

See Workman, ‘Versions by Skelton, Caxton and Berners’. The Bibliotheca Historica is another universal history, and it anticipates the synchronic investments of later ecclesiastical histories — see Grafton and Williams, Christianity and the Transformation of the Book, esp. pp. 145–55, and Mortley, ‘The Hellenistic Foundations of Ecclesiastical Historiography’. 60  Wakelin usefully corrects the misapprehension that Caxton had a French intermediary text, citing persuasive evidence for his use of Bracciolini’s translation instead; see Wakelin, Humanism, Reading and English Literature, p. 149. 61  Caxton’s Own Prose, ed. by Blake, p. 128. 59 

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together into one common relationship, continually directs their courses through all eternity, apportioning to each that which falls to it by the direction of fate, so likewise the historians, in recording the common affairs of the inhabited world as though they were those of a single state, have made of their treatises a single reckoning of past events and a common clearing-house of knowledge concerning them.62

Caxton’s source text is specific, as it chooses to endow historians with moral authority: the only agents in the above passage are historians, and as the passage develops it situates historians as those men able to gather all the moral authority of Divine Providence herself. Caxton not only omits this passage; in its place, he exchanges the original emphasis on the writer for a new portrait of the reader, a reader who takes shape over the course of the lines cited at the introduction to this chapter, above. My discussion there already touches upon the agency this passage assumes of the reader; it is an agency and a type of reader emphasized precisely in Caxton’s departure from his sourcetext. From this point in the prologue, Caxton moves forward to elaborate upon the affective power of histories in relation to their readers: Hystoryes moeve and withdrawe emperours and kynges fro vycious tyrannye, fro vecordyous sleuthe unto tryumphe and vyctorye in puyssaunt battles. Historyes also have moeved right noble kynghtes to deserve eternal laude, whiche foloweth them for their vyctoryous merytes, and cause them more valyantly to entre in jeopardyes of batayles for the defence and tuicion of their countrey and publyke wele. Hystorye affrayeth cruel tyrauntys for drede of infamye and shame infynyte bycause of the detestable actes of suche cruel personnes ben oftymes plantyd and regystred in cronykes unto theyr perpetual obprobrye and dyvulgacion of theyr infamye, as th’actes of Nero and suche other.63

It is here that histories and readers begin to take on a mutually constitutive agency: histories move readers; readers judge histories. The note on Nero is an illustration of how that happens; it is another of Caxton’s own additions and displays not just the power of histories to record, but the judgement and independent knowledge of the reader at work in condemning or valorizing persons recorded in that history, Nero being the case in point. It is a history embodied in books — those ‘large, aourned volumes’ and chronicles — but these books are very much completed through the reader’s active judgement. 62  Diodorus Siculus, Biblioteca historia, ed. and trans. by Oldfather, pp. 5–7. While the above translation follows the Greek text, as edited by Oldfather, it remains fairly close to the (unedited) Latin rendering by Poggio Bracciolini. 63  Caxton’s Own Prose, ed. by Blake, pp. 129–30.

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This mutually constitutive dynamic grows more mature throughout the prologue, developing both the categories of reader and history. As the prologue continues from the example of Nero, history seems to produce its own virtuous readers, and vice versa: Caxton flatters his readers as he imagines the best among them building cities and promulgating just laws so that these virtuous deeds might be recorded in histories. And it is within this increasingly readercentred context, developed carefully through his preface, that Caxton finally offers an explicit statement on history itself: Whiche worde historye may be descryved thus. Historye is a perpetuel conservatryce of thoos thynges that have be doone before this presente tyme and also an contydyan wytnesse of beinfayttes, of malefaytes, grete actes, and tryumphal vyctoryes of all maner peple.64

This definition characterizes history as itself caught in a striking temporal position — as both a ‘perpetuel conservatryce’ of past events, as well as a ‘contydyan wytnesse’ to the present. Unusual in its retreat away from grand narratives of the past, Caxton’s sense of history’s value — and his work as an historian — emphasizes instead the witness of acts and deeds: what Caxton records as history is that which both witnesses and anticipates human agency. Throughout his prologue, and indeed throughout his edition of the Polychronicon, Caxton consistently frames his own intentions as a historian in relationship to the active agency of his readers. It is a model that continues to inform, in diverse ways, the printers that follow.

England’s Synchronic Historians: The St Albans Printer and John Rastell Early English printers seem to have been keen readers of both Caxton’s Liber Ultimus and his use of the Fasciculus Temporum. Caxton’s Polychronicon was reprinted in full twice more before the Reformation, by Wynkyn de Worde in 1494 (STC 13439) and by Peter Treveris in 1527 (STC 13340); The Chronicles of England also saw a series of reprints.65 But the influence of Caxton’s experiment in using the paratactical history of the Fasciculus Temporum moved beyond the introduction of a fresh source for English historians. Instead, the Fasciculus signalled a new mode of historiography that infused and shaped 64 

Caxton’s Own Prose, ed. by Blake, p. 130. See Kennedy, ‘Chronicles and Other Historical Writing’, pp. 2672–73. See also BMC xi, 303. 65 

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the work of England’s printers up until the Reformation. The shift in historiographical mode after Caxton’s Liber Ultimus is most evident in two histories — The St Albans Chronicle (1486?, STC 9995) and The Pastyme of People (1529, STC 20724) — compiled and printed by, respectively, the St Albans printer and John Rastell. As a piece of English history-writing, The St Albans Chronicle is deeply innovative.66 The text blends a new English translation of the Brut (based loosely on Caxton’s Chronicles) with what is the first — albeit heavily redacted — discrete English translation of the Fasciculus Temporum. The St Albans printer entitles his translated section Fructus Temporum.67 Precisely who operated the St Albans press remains a mystery. Lotte Hellinga has noted that, from the thirteenth century forward, St Albans exemplified the Benedictine tradition of book production.68 The Abbey housed a productive and well-organized scriptorium, and it was noted for its contributions to historical writing — Thomas Walsingham is the most famous of its several late medieval historians. Yet by the1480s, the Abbey was mismanaged and in disarray. Nevertheless, these were also the years that saw two quick flashes of production from a press apparently located on the grounds: four editions of Latin scholarly texts were printed from 1479 to 1481, and a further two English texts, produced with less skill than the Latin group, were printed from 1483 to 1486. These six editions comprise the only extant evidence of an early press at St Albans, suggesting that the press was a venture initiated by two different individuals or small groups of monks working from their own interests, and without a larger vision or directive from the Abbey.69 Yet these six editions are unusually interesting productions, and the two English editions are particularly bold and experimental. The Book of St Albans (1486, STC 3308) is a compilation of gentleman’s tracts on hunting, hawking, and coats of arms, printed with red, blue, black, and gold ink — a striking 66  The St Albans Chronicle was also quite popular, reprinted twice more by Wynkyn de Worde (1497, STC 9996) and (1502, STC 9997); and once by Julian Notary (1504, STC 9998). 67  The continuing English interest in Rolewinck’s universal history can also be seen in Julian Notary’s edition of a slightly different version of the Fructus Temporum in 1515 with an attached edition of Caxton’s The Description of Britain (STC 10000); Notary’s edition was followed quickly by a reprinting that same year from de Worde’s shop (STC 10000.5). 68  For a full and suggestive discussion of the Abbey’s press and connections to Caxton, see Hellinga, William Caxton and Early Printing in England, pp. 90–99. 69  Although it is equally likely that a small group of monks or others were in charge of the press, for simplicity I will refer in this section to the printer as an individual monk.

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choice for a monastic production. The St Albans Chronicle, our focus here, was composed in 1483 and printed sometime before 1486. Like its sister edition, it is printed in colour using black, red, blue, and gold ink. As Hellinga has persuasively suggested, its production also reveals some degree of collaboration and perhaps support from Caxton’s press, a connection perhaps unsurprising given that Caxton’s press was located on the grounds of the Benedictine Westminster Abbey, which had its own strong association with St Albans.70 The evidence for collaboration is both physical and discursive: the type used for the Chronicle was cast from matrices used by Caxton, and large sections of historical material were derived from Caxton’s Chronicles of England. But the St Albans Chronicle is divergent enough to be its own compilation, and it is distinguished from Caxton’s Chronicle by the uses it makes of the Brut material, as well as by the way the compiler uses the paratactical mode of the Fasciculus. The compiler’s prologue — a tight redaction of Rolewinck’s — is followed by an abbreviated translation of the Fasciculus from the creation through to the story of Saul. The compiler then switches abruptly, mid-entry, to material from Homer and the Brut. From there forward, the text alternates between the Brut, and historical information derived from the Fasciculus and the Chronicon, using narrative headings for chapters concerning English history, and dates for those drawing on Rolewinck and Polonus. The overall effect is very like that of the Liber Ultimus: The St Albans Chronicle also offers a series of spectacular shifts in perspective and topic, and a dizzying array of information. Because the overall focus of The St Albans Chronicle is tighter, though, the juxtapositions are posed in sharper relief. For example, the Chronicle presents as one extended narrative the vaguely located history of Arthur followed by the Saxon incursions; this narrative is bracketed by brief, more historically specific entries about the papacy of Pope Leo of Tuscany and Emperor Zeno, entries that draw a sharp contrast between a papacy defined by pronounced personal holiness and chastity, and a Roman rule openly hostile to Christianity. In making sense of this compiler’s use of parataxis, the reader might recall the remarks in his prologue. History is valuable to a very broad range of readers, the St Albans printer insists, of criston religyon. or of fals religyon os gentyles and machomytes to knaw theer prince or prynces that regne a pon them. and theem to obey. So it is commodyus to knaw theer nobull actis or dedys. and the circumstans of theer lyues.71 70  71 

Hellinga, William Caxton and Early Printing in England, pp. 95–97. STC 9995, BL, C.11.b.1, sig. a2a.

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As the St Albans compiler understands his work, interpretation and obedience are the dual dynamics central to reading historical writing. The implications of that understanding are already present in the disingenuous fantasy that the compiler offers, which is that he has written his history as a book open to readers ‘of fals religyon’ — even ‘machomytes’. While this vision imagines a radically diverse readership, in practical ways it subtly urges the real historical readers of The St Albans Chronicle to adopt a single interpretive posture — to reaffirm their identity as those ‘of criston religyon’, and to find that identity continually reflected in the ‘nobull actis or dedys’ of their rulers. In other words, the St Albans printer encourages his readers not only to locate themselves as good Christian readers but to find in the history of their British rulers a mirror of their faith. We can see this guided interpretation at work in the bracketed Arthurian narrative mentioned above, which becomes a story of British Christian rulers struggling against a tide of heresy and paganism, analogous if not parallel to the same plot motivating popes and emperors on the larger stage of world history. It is one example of the ways that the St Albans printer used parataxis to direct his audience toward an interpretation of English history and political rule as part of a larger narrative about the defense of Christianity and orthodoxy. Indeed, this use of history writing extends the ambitions of St Albans as an institution, and the kinds of English-oriented history writing it produced throughout its own past. My point here is that an emphasis on readerly agency and interpretation need not necessarily be a celebration of autonomy or complete interpretive openness; the St Albans printer certainly demonstrates a directive stance toward his audience, even though he relies upon the kind of self-recognition and interpretive engagement that paratactical historical modes provoke. The St Albans printer never names the Fasciculus or Rolewinck as a source, although he presents a series of other authorities — Augustine, Bede, Polonus — that Rolewinck’s own prologue names. However, the illustrative program he adopts for his work is unambiguously that of the Fasciculus, and further reveals the aims of his text. For example, even though the St Albans printer does not use the complex graphic system of the Fasciculus, he incorporates a program of woodcuts throughout his work which closely match the iconic images of its source: The St Albans Chronicle, too, represents the Tower of Babel, the Cross, and cities that play a key role in its narrative. However, the St Albans printer stays true to his British bias by representing only London and Rome, both with the same woodcut, rather than Rome, Jerusalem, and the selection of Continental cities that the printed Fasciculus editions depict. Scholars have also noted that the St Albans printer uses square diagrams throughout the text to denote important historical figures, and that with the

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Figure 4.2 Page design of the printer Peter Drach for the Fasciculus Temporum, from Werner Rolewinck’s Fasciculus Temporum, printed by Peter Drach in Speyer, 1477 (USTC 748576). Houghton Library, Harvard Uni­ver­sity, Typ Inc 2329, fol. 2v.

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exception of their square shape, these allude to the Rolewinck’s roundels. Yet I suggest that the relationship is stronger than allusion and reveals a more interesting program. While the first printer of the Fasciculus, Arnold ther Hoernen, used only roundels, the printers that followed him used more varied forms. For instance, Peter Drach, working in Speyers, uses a combination of roundels and square diagrams that looks very like the one in The St Albans Chronicle (see Figures 4.2 and 4.3). Moreover, like the Drach edition, the St Albans printer incorporates bits of text that change orientation around each side of the square. Yet while Drach’s edition as well as others uses a few sentences of Latin text to forecast the duration of the moment being marked, the St Albans printer simplifies, translates, and reduces those phrases into a short line of English. As The St Albans Chronicle moves chronologically forward, he uses the square diagrams to denote specifically English figures, a move that begins with his use of the diagram for Albion to mark the beginning of the Brut. The visual program reinforces the discursive one: the St Albans Chronicle is an English text, situating and finding a place for British history within a larger Christian world vision. The visual program established by the St Albans printer remained a consistent part of The St Albans Chronicle tradition throughout the six later editions issued by Julian Notary and Wynkyn de Worde, noted above. Notary and de Worde changed only the quality of the woodcuts (for the better), and shifted the layout to a two-column format. The closely related editions of 1515 by Notary and de Worde merit brief further remarks. Added to the end of both is the entirety of Caxton’s Description of Britain (1480, STC 13440a), Caxton’s own redaction of the topographical descriptions of England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland contained in Book i of the Polychronicon. Read against The St Albans Chronicle, the Description creates its own paratactical resonance: extended through this text, the full compilation of the 1515 editions moves from the synchrony of the Fructus Temporum, though the hybrid Brut, and then into the perspectival and geographical history offered by the Description. The edition exaggerates the sense of shifting perspective, asking the reader to constantly resituate himself in relation to overlapping histories of Britain. Julian Notary’s edition expresses this dynamic one further time, in the fullpage array of woodcuts he places directly after the index. Here, Notary situates on one page six different woodcuts with no obvious connection to one another; they depict nonspecific secular scenes, and include courtiers and kings, an emperor, a queenly prisoner, armies, horseman, and cities (see Figure 4.3).72 72 

These woodcuts are, from top to bottom, Hodnett 2271, 2272, 2273, 1125, 1126, and 932.

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Figure 4.3 Collage of woodcut images making up the frontispiece to the section of text entitled Fructus Temporum, from the edition of English chronicles printed by Julian Notary in 1515 (STC 10000). Bodleian Library, Wood 480, sig. a5v. Reproduced by permission of the Bodleian Library.

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These are likely references to events described in the Brut material. However, rather than being integrated with the text, the generic nature of these woodcuts and the non-narrative juxtaposition of their arrangement create a visual parallel to the paratactical mode of the synchronous history. In other words, the very randomness of the images on the single page invites readers to create a sense of order for themselves, to imagine narratives that pull together the images of a king greeting a dignitary with the imprisoned queen, or charging knights with besieged cities. Although English printers alluded to the visual iconography of the universal synchronic history, no incunable English printer produced one with the complexity and sophistication of the Fasciculus; instead, the influence of the synchronic historiographical mode in England was expressed primarily through discursive innovations, like the use of parataxis. Certainly, the English press faced material limits in its ability to reproduce the graphic schemas. For one, English printers lagged behind their Continental counterparts in technical skill; productions like the Fasciculus relied on precision presswork, refined woodcuts, and technologies such as printing with factotums. Secondly, the Fasciculus was an enormously popular book and one that was produced in multiple editions across the Continent. English readers would have been easily able to obtain copies from abroad, which would have made the capital investment required on the part of an English printer an all-risk venture. Yet by 1529, there was one English printer ready to try it — the bold, inventive, and energetic John Rastell. While The Pastyme of People (1529, STC 20724) is not quite a universal history, its form and graphic schema mark Rastell’s accomplishment as the only example of a visual synchronous history in England, and in English. John Rastell crafted his history with the same humanistic idealism he demonstrated in his productions of the legal translations and playing cards discussed in the first chapter; for Rastell, the press was a tool for cultivating and enabling civic engagement and agency. In The Pastyme of People that faith in political agency is everywhere evident but expressly articulated by Rastell only slightly.73 Instead, Rastell uses the synchronous historiographical mode to demand his reader’s full interpretive engagement. Indeed, cultivating and encouraging an independent readerly agency is Rastell’s central concern here, and the route through which political agency is enabled — a dynamic that emerges through Rastell’s very visible self-situating in relation to his own sources. 73 

For an illuminating reading of how Rastell uses chronicle history to foster political agency, see Herman, ‘Rastell’s Pastyme of People’.

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The Pastyme cobbles together material from a wide variety of historical sources.74 Rastell relies extensively on Robert Fabyan’s New Chronicles of England and France, but he also draws upon, and at points quibbles with, the Brut, the Polychronicon, Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae, William of Malmesbury’s Gesta regum Anglorum, and Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum, among others. The source Rastell never mentions — and that has been neglected among modern scholars of the Pastyme — is the Fasciculus, which provides not only the synchronous mode but the edition’s striking mise-en-page (see Figure 4.4).75 Like Rolewinck, Rastell moves across the divide between recto and verso page spreads to tie together columns that are horizontally parallel. His history is an idiosyncratic fit with the universal history genre at best, however, due to its emphasis on the secular history of Britain. Rastell begins with material from the Brut’s Troy story, and his narrative begins to divide along geographical lines to follow the multiplying nations. The narrative briefly pauses at the birth of Christ and then maintains a new chronology for popes, but it is a decidedly political, not religious, chronology. As the history moves forward, popes occupy a slender column at the top, the Roman emperors follow, and British history occupies the largest swath of space in the middle; the histories of the French, Flemish, German, and sometimes Norman rulers move along the bottom of the page. It is a complex design and, at least for the first half of the edition, not altogether successful: Rastell has uneven material for each of these narratives, and so they move inconsistently across the pages and in relationship to one another. However, at the Pastyme’s major dividing point — located not at the birth of Christ as in the Fasciculus but with the arrival of William the Conqueror — the other histories occupy increasingly narrower bands, full page woodcuts depict each ruler, and space is increasingly devoted to the histories of the English sovereigns. Rastell concludes in 1485 with a narrative of Richard III’s reign, by which point only the English history appears on the page. Throughout this oddly secular synchronic history there are plenty of moments, as Peter Herman has argued, that present a strong sense of history used as ‘a vehicle for dissent’.76 The necessity of consent to be ruled, the spectre of tyranny, and the primacy of law for both sovereign and subject are consistent themes that become only more pronounced as the Pastyme turns fully to 74 

See the introduction provided for Rastell, The Pastyme of People, ed. by Geritz, pp. 15–32. The exception is Takako Harashima, who notes for a different purpose the influence of Rolewincks’ work in ‘The Narrative Functions of John Rastell’s Printing’. 76  Herman, ‘Rastell’s Pastyme of People, p. 276. 75 

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Britain’s post-Conquest history. Yet I suggest that this political agency is the outgrowth of another value that Rastell himself cultivates assiduously throughout the edition: the autonomy and agency of the reader. By ‘readerly agency’, I mean the capacity — and responsibility — to interpret a text, to use the printed edition as a prompt for strategic readings at the service of an individual reader’s political or cultural goals. The value Rastell places upon the independent agency of his readers is, as demonstrated in Chapter 1, an extension of his own agency as a printer: in his deliberate uses of print to establish a sense of civic agency is the encouragement of his readers to do the same — that is, to use the printed book as part of a cultural strategy. The availability of the Pastyme for precisely this kind of unprescribed, open, and strategic reading is evident from the in the curious and revealing prologue. Rastell begins his prologue in media res, with no introductory remarks but instead a long and sceptical argument of the veracity about the Brut narrative. He compares accounts, scoffs at the legend of Albion as the eldest of twentythree daughters (‘a man hauyng reason may well juge that the thyng is not only vnlyke to be trew but almost impossible’),77 and appeals over and again to ‘naturell reason’ as the arbiter of what a person should trust in histories. Indeed, the whole of the prologue is taken up with Rastell’s own account of his struggle with the veracity of his sources, and in this he departs most dramatically from the historiographical tradition: unlike Caxton and the St Albans printer, or the historians he cites and evokes, Rastell provides his readers with no discourse on the uses of history, no broad overview of his purpose in compiling and printing the Pastyme, no preparation for the scope of the edition or didactic reference to the ethical value of producing or reading historical material. He does briefly justify his decision to include the Brut narrative, and professes his neutrality regarding French history. But readers are not guided. Instead, Rastell simply models his own robust scepticism and exercise of reason, noting that ‘for the more playn explanacion of this present work they that lyst to rede herin’ must note the order of the page layout.78 Rastell demonstrates how a reasonable reader should read, and then steps away. This aloof posture informs the whole of the Pastyme. At every turn — and especially throughout the early Brut portions — Rastell cites his sources, sometimes appeals to his own reason and scepticism, but offers no further interpretive guidance. As the chronicle reaches the post-Conquest kings, readers 77  78 

STC 20724, BL, C.15.c.6, sig. A2r. STC 20724, BL, C.15.c.6, sig. F6v.

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Figure 4.4 John Rastell’s bifolio page design for his universal history, The Pastyme of People, printed by John Rastell in 1529 (STC 20724). Bodleian Library, Douce adds. C. 2, sigs D3v–D4r.

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Reproduced by permission of the Bodleian Library.

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are well prepared to foster their own interpretations of a complex British history coming increasingly into focus. The relation of readerly agency to political agency that the Pastyme suggests is encapsulated in its very last line. As Richard III’s biography begins, the remaining histories fall away to leave only the story of usurpation, violence, and unrest. The last line reads: ‘And thus this prynce ended with mysery whiche the most part of hys lyfe lyued and reyned by rygour and tyrrannye.’79 Richard III was so widely considered a tyrant that Rastell’s concurrence hardly constitutes his own judgement. More telling is Rastell’s choice to conclude the Pastyme with that word, ‘tyrrannye’, and no further remark. The political potential of the term for Rastell’s contemporary readers begins not in the word itself and certainly not in its use in relationship to Richard III. Instead, any political valence lies in the reader’s willingness to extend that term (or not) into his own historical circumstance. The paratactical and independent style of reading promoted by Rastell — and reinforced by the synchronous historiographical mode for the Pastyme — is precisely the kind of reading practice that might be translated into the kind of political agency Rastell promotes so readily in many of his other productions.

Conclusion Estimates suggest that a hundred thousand copies of the Fasciculus were circulating by the first decade of the sixteenth century.80 Yet by 1535, it was produced only as part of a compilation by a single press (USTC 437754), and then it was not produced again until 1580, when it was part of another compilation (USTC 428789); other universal synchronic chronicles fared similarly. The rapid extinction of the synchronic chronicle on the Continent was mirrored by the fate of the more discursive English versions: none were printed after the 1520s, and Rastell’s Pastyme saw only the single edition. Not all paratactical printed histories disappeared — Fabyan’s New Chronicle continued into the post-Reformation era, influencing later compilations like Holinshed’s Chronicles. But Daniel Woolf is certainly right to observe that the nature of history writing, and the chronicle form itself, was irrevocably changed in the transition that took place over the course of the Reformation. In this chapter, however, I have argued against locating print qua print as the cause of that shift. Instead, I have offered an account of technology’s role 79 

STC 20724, BL, C.15.c.6, sig. F6v. 80  See Stillwell, ‘The Fasciculus Temporum’.

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by thinking specifically about how different historiographical modes might be enabled or limited by the different capacities of print and manuscript production. This shift is perhaps subtle, but crucial in what it invites back in — that is, the agency of individual printers and scribes. It is a model that views the borders between historiographical modes and technologies as porous, crossed, or maintained by book producers. In the examples here, Caxton, the St Albans printer, and Rastell all modify the chronicle form to fit the logic of print, but they also use a new historiographical mode to sustain — and even expand — quite traditional medieval investments in the ethical aims of reading and writing history. Different historiographical modes certainly did emerge in the post-Reformation era, but these might also be productively viewed through their relationship to the agencies of readers and writers. One very brief example lies in the rise of chorography. From the manuscript itineraries of John Leland, to the mixed manuscript and print forms of William Lambarde’s Perambulation of Kent, and the magnificent printed work of John Stow’s Survey of London, the rise of chorography is most sharply differentiated from the histories discussed here not because of any intrinsic relationship to a modality of production, but rather through the absence of any ethical demands upon the reader. To read a chorography is learn, to know, and to perhaps recognize one’s history and geography as known; the chorography does not demand more from its readers and certainly does not prioritize the kinds of ethical responses or interpretive investments that mark the expectations of earlier chroniclers. The engagement with the chronicle form by early printers hints at an intriguingly reader-centric openness in the print culture of the late fifteenth century. Historicizing and exploring that culture through the terms of agency make visible the traces of an alternate history of the early press — and in this case, an alternate model of historiography that opens rather than forecloses the imaginative relationship between readers and books.

Conclusion

Intentions

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t may seem curious to conclude a book on early print just before the historical moment that is so often conflated with print technology: the Reformation. Yet the first half-century of England’s early press has been too frequently read forward into a politico-historical context that could not have been anticipated even ten years before it began; indeed, the idea of a cultural turn as violent and radical as the turn from Rome would have seemed a far-fetched (and dangerous) fantasy to printers like Caxton and the operators of the press at St Albans. What emerges through the key terms of this book — ‘agency’ and ‘intention’ — is an insistence on the lively and crucial formation of early English print in ways that were disrupted, as were other cultural forms, by the events and pressures of the later 1520s and forward. The failure, within contemporary critical conversations, to see early print as both a medieval formation and a distinctly pre-Reformation cultural expression is partly due to the modern conventions of bibliography. The bibliographical category of incunabula — ‘things of the cradle’ — ends at the arbitrary chronological marker of 1500. The terminology and the boundaries of this category has not only characterized the first generation of English print as relatively unsophisticated and immature, but has had distorting effects upon the archives. Incunables have long attracted the interests of collectors, who in turn have driven interest and work on these editions at the cost of attention to editions produced only a year or so after 1500. Further, the category’s defined boundaries have artificially divided the field between rich bibliographical resources (pre-1500) and bare lists of editions, between books preciously preserved and ones mined for supplemental pages, and between curatorial and reading room conventions that disperse the work of century-straddling printers like de Worde and Pynson.

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But the divisions created by the category of the incunable persist, I suggest, because they are underwritten by a powerful narrative that constructs and polices the gap between medieval and post-Reformation cultures, and between manuscript and print. We can see this narrative emerge just as the Reformation was taking historiographical shape in the hand of the reformers, and it is presented most famously by John Foxe in his celebration of the press as part of his Acts and Monumentes: This art and science, how profitable it hath beene vnto all the whole worlde, theese oure dayes doo suffyciently declare, if that we dilygentlye waye and consyder, howe that thereby ignoraunce is vtterly banyshed, and truthe manifested and declared, and finally the poope and Antichriste there by vtterlye subuerted, whiche coulde neuer haue come to passe, if this mooste worthye science hadde not beene founde oute. For so much as otherwise, bokes were so skarse, and there wyth all of suche excessyue price, that fewe menne coulde there by attayne to knowledge or vnderstandynge, whiche now by this meanes, is made easy vnto all men.1

In this passage, the technological and economic qualities residing in the press itself are capable of driving deep cultural and epochal change. The human actors here are either enabled or subverted by the overwhelming capacity of print and the market to control their desires — the pope is frustrated, the waiting and eager readers fulfilled. This is the pattern in the rest of Foxe’s work as well: in the Acts, human agency is always in thrall to far larger powers, and kings, popes, writers, theologians, and martyrs alike are agents whose acts take place upon a stage and within scripts already shaped by divine foresight and inexorable forces. The tide of history, in other words, not only turns but must turn. The role of print in this historiography is subtle but central. Print provides, on the one hand, a way of submerging a past culture under the sign of technological difference; on the other hand, portrayed as an inexorable, agential force in its own right, print also erases the histories of its diverse uses, as well as the human agencies that used print to achieve a range of cultural goals. As Jesse Lander has noted, Foxe’s construction of print has been deeply instrumental, informing modern scholarship up through its rearticulation and expansion in the monumental study of Elizabeth Eisenstein.2 Eisenstein drives the claim further, arguing for print not as a tool of the Reformation, but

1 

Foxe, The Unabridged Acts and Monuments Online, bk iii, 414. My observations about Foxe and Eisenstein are indebted to Lander, Inventing Polemic, esp. pp. 6–12. See also his ‘Print Reformation or Print Revolution?’. 2 

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as its necessary precondition.3 In The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, the technology of print assumes a central causal role, a role reflected in the ‘agency’ of the title. Indeed, Eisenstein’s central argument is that print’s impact on social and cultural conditions has been dramatically under-emphasized, ‘forcing an evolutionary model on a revolutionary situation’.4 Eisenstein’s profound sense of the press as a revolutionary agent has been absorbed by literary historians negotiating the Reformation, and especially by medievalists looking toward that shift from the perspective of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century literary traditions. James Simpson, for instance, whose work otherwise roundly rejects teleological narratives, situates print as a largely market-bound phenomenon enabling a philological interest in texts that, in turn, fostered a sharp historical rupture with the medieval past.5 The determinisms that have accrued to early English print also find expression in the recent return to what Foxe long-ago celebrated as the corrective economic pressure print placed on a market where ‘bokes were so skarse, and there wyth all of suche excessyue price’. Andrew Pettegree has argued for precisely that emphasis on print’s role as a commercial innovation, claiming that ‘it is a fundamental weakness of literature on European Protestantism that the printed book is considered almost exclusively as text and far too little as an industrial process’.6 This overarching narrative of print’s effect upon history and historical transition ultimately relies on the displacement of agency, and is arrayed against the simple claim that is at the heart of this book: print is merely an instrument of agencies, and one among many. A focus on printers instead of print reveals cultural horizons far richer than the relatively narrow parameters of heterodoxy/ orthodoxy that defined books, reading and textual culture in the years after the Reformation. And finally, reading for agency emphasizes the capacity of printers and readers to use the press as a strategic cultural tool, even in the case of genres that have been understood as far more restricted and narrow — among them, religious writing and historiography. Agency has found a place in studies of textual production, but in early literature that place has been largely reserved for manuscripts, with print as a foil. The capacity of print as a form suitable for artful expressions of individuality 3 

Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, p. 37. 5  See Simpson, Burning to Read and Reform and Cultural Revolution. 6  Pettegree, ‘Printing and Reformation’, and The Book in the Renaissance. See also Raven, The Business of Books. 4 

214

Conclusion

is often dismissed, replaced by a sense that print is ‘ugly’ in comparison to the beauty and originality of the hand-produced manuscript; that the transition from manuscript to print carries with it the loss of aura, the ‘presence’ of the handwritten object; and that early print (unsuccessfully) mimics the artistic forms and abilities of medieval scribes. In this book, the agencies of print reveal themselves in political and cultural contexts, but also in aesthetic ones. Printers deliberately took up and reshaped the forms of manuscript culture in a stunning variety of ways. Caxton responded to the anonymity of the English manuscript trade by marking his own presence in his innovative prefaces; de Worde used manuscript mimicry as a deliberate aesthetic response to the demands of the Crown as he printed Hentry VII’s statutes; Rastell adopted a mode of representing history that was not quite realizable or sustainable in manuscript. Each of the chapters above has sought to challenge the determinisms that situate early print within historical and scholarly narratives, and to recover a sense of the diverse agencies at work. The intentions of England’s early printers do not always give rise to optimism; printerly agencies can be restrictive and oppressive, as is demonstrated by the example of Rastell’s turn to coercion by print, or the successful manipulation of the press by Henry VII. Agency and Intention does not present a particularly liberal view of English print’s early agents. I hope I have demonstrated, however, a range of unpredictable, surprising, and provocative uses of the early press by printers and readers, and a challenge to the narratives and methodologies that would quietly erase the capacities of the human actors who produced England’s first printed books.

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Index

Adams, Jenny: 50–51 Agency: 1–2, 18–20, 22–25, 31–34, 37–39, 48–49, 56–59, 68, 70, 72–76, 83, 91–92, 107, 115, 118, 134, 146, 166, 168–70, 208–09, 211–14 definitions of: 12–15, 22, 73, 103–04, 205 and intention: 23, 36, 73–76, 78, 110, 128–29, 148, 211 and political autonomy: 25, 50, 56–58, 85, 103–04, 117, 122–23, 138–39, 208 and readers: 57–59, 60–61, 65, 160, 168–70, 176, 181–82, 193, 195–96, 199, 203, 205, 209 Agency, lay: 60–61, 117, 129, 138–39 and spiritual autonomy: 113, 117, 122–24, 132 Albert the Great: 26, 78 Anonymity: 14, 19–21, 23, 28, 30–34, 36, 38–39, 40–44, 67 in early print: 43–44, 67 in late-medieval manuscript production: 30–34 Appleford, Amy: 87, 104, 112, 115, 157 Aquinas, Thomas: 26, 77, 78–79, 80, 81, 83, 91, 135–36 Arundel’s Constitutions: 76, 131, 139 Augustine of Hippo: 126, 135 Beaufort, Margaret: 59, 112, 144 trans. The Mirroure of Golde for the Synfull Soule: 114 Berthelet, Thomas: 16, 130–31 Dives and Pauper: 109, 148–51

Betson, Thomas: 60 Boffey, Julia: 47 n. 80, 112 Book production, medieval: 18–24 extra-economic discourses of: 8, 11, 18, 23–29, 43, 67, 79, 162 and frameworks for: 3–13, 24, 29 Bonaventure: 3, 8–9 Bryan, Elizabeth: 3–4, 45 Capgrave, John: 188 Cards, playing: 16, 54–59, 203; see also Rastell, John Carthusians: 11, 24, 58, 111, 183 Catherine of Siena: 60, 62 Caxton, William: 1–2, 4–8, 10–11, 14–16, 23–25, 40–45, 49–54, 59, 71, 76, 83, 92, 96, 100–11, 114–29, 116 n. 18, 154, 155, 163, 164, 167–71, 174–98, 201, 205, 209, 211, 214 Advertisement: 43 Boethius, Geoffrey Chaucer: 44 Book of Good Maners, Jacques Legrand: 15, 50, 71–76, 104–07, 109, 114, 154 Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer: 10, 43, 181 Caton: 52–54 The Chronicles of England: 51, 171 n. 9, 177, 191, 196–98 Court of Sapience: 116, 164 Death-bed Prayers: 116 Description of Britain: 177, 197, 201 Directorium Sacerdotum, Clement Maydeston: 1–2 Doctrinal of Sapience: 52, 154 The Game of Chesse, Jacobus de Cessolis: 49–51, 58

238

The Golden Legend, Jacobus de Voragine: 15, 104, 109, 115–21, 123–24, 127–29, 154, 174, 175 Liber Festivalis, John Mirk: 109, 113, 116–17 Life of Saint Winifred: 116 n. 18 Lyf of Oure Ladye, John Lydgate: 116 n. 18 Mirrour of the Worlde: 114 Polychronicon, Ranulph Higden: 15, 121, 145–47, 163, 167–201 The Recuyell of the Histories of Troy, Raoul le Fevre: 4–7, 43, 49 The Royal Book: 52 Tullius de senectute, trans. William Worcester: 51 Chastising of God’s Children: 113 Chaucer, Geoffrey: 2, 4, 6, 10–11, 16, 31–32, 44, 174 Canterbury Tales: 10–11 Boethius: 44 ‘Wordes unto Adam’: 31–32 Chertsey, Andrew (translator): 15, 109, 114, 154–61 Craft to Live Well and to Die Well: 114 Floure of the Ten Commandementes: 154–61 Lucydarye: 114 Ordinary of Christian Men: 114 The Passyon of Our Lorde: 114 Chronicle (Brut): 15, 170–77, 180, 183, 187, 190–91, 197–201, 203–05 Chronicle (London): 172–73 Chronicles of England: 51, 171 n. 9, 177, 191, 196–98 Chronicle of St Albans: see St Albans Printer Coldiron, Anne: 11 n. 27, 154 n. 100, 155–56 Colophons, early print: 1–2, 35, 39–49, 62, 64–66, 105, 117, 177, 180 Colophons, scribal: 36, 41–42, 141; see also Shirley, John Common profit: 7, 11, 13, 14, 23, 25–30, 34, 39, 47–48, 49–54, 60, 65, 67, 78–94, 104, 107, 123, 128, 135–37, 160; see also res publica Common profit, manuscript group: 23, 34–36, 39, 103, 111, 144, 146 Commonwealth: 58–59, 80 Copland, Robert (translator): 16–23, 67, 77, 157, 162–65

INDEX Kalender of Shepherdes: 162–65 Seuen Sorowes that women haue when theyr husbandes be deade: 16–23 Corrections: 4, 11, 45, 126, 141 Da Costa, Alexandra: 11 n. 27, 59 n. 107, 60, 75 n. 14, 114 n. 14 Diodorus Siculus, Bibliotheca historia: 194–95 Dives and Pauper: 129–51 manuscript tradition: 139–42 print tradition: 143–51 treatment of theological economics: 132–39 Driver, Martha: 44 n. 71, 59 n. 108, 60, 145, 160, 162–63 Edward III, king of England: 89 Edward IV, king of England: 49, 51 n. 86, 57, 92, 116, 140, 189, 190 Eisenstein, Elizabeth: 12 n. 28, 75 n. 12, 212–13 entente: 72–74, 76, 88, 92, 105–07, 162; see also intention Ethics, commercial: see theological economics; merchants Fabyan, Robert, New Chronicles of England and France: 188, 204, 208 Fasciculus Morum: 83, 85–87, 95 Fisher, Matthew: 3 n. 5, 4, 168 Fitzalan, William (earl of Arundel): 121–24 Floure of the Ten Commandementes, trans. Andrew Chertsey: 154–61 Foxe, John: 212–13 fraunchyse: 122–23 Gayk, Shannon: 61 George, Duke of Clarence: 49–51 Gerson, Jean: 8, 11, 77 Gillespie, Alexandra: 4, 32 n. 41, 146 n. 91 Gutenberg, Johannes: 42 Hanna, Ralph: 29–30 Henry VII, king of England: 98–104 Henry VIII, king of England: 77, 102, 148, 155–56 Higden, Ranulph, Polychronicon: 121, 146, 163, 167, 173–76, 178–83, 190–93

INDEX Hilton, Walter: 34, 91, 111–12, 146 Eight Chapters of Perfection: 140 Epistle on the Mixed Life: 34, 111 Scala perfectionis: 91, 111, 145–46 Hoccleve, Thomas, Regement of Princes: 2, 4–6 Humanism: 23, 25, 44, 53–55, 57, 193, 203 Idleness: 78, 82, 85, 87–88, 92, 95, 98, 104, 109, 115–16, 122, 146–47, 159, 161, 163–64 see also labour; otium; usury imitatio clerici: 105, 113–15 Intention: 12, 15, 18, 23–26, 34–36, 39, 44–48, 65, 67, 70, 72–76, 78, 82–87, 89, 91–92, 100, 103–04, 110, 115, 128, 131–32, 136–39, 148, 156–57, 161–62, 166, 168, 193–94, 196, 211, 214 and agency: 23, 36, 73–76, 78, 110, 128–29, 148, 211 definitions of: 72–73, 110 of printers: 44–48 see also entente Iser, Wolfgang: 110 Jacobus de Cessolis, The Game of Chesse: 49–50, 58 Jacobus de Voragine, Legenda aurea: 116–18, 121, 129, 174 Jean de Vignay, Legende doree: 118–19, 121–22 Johns, Adrian: 12 n. 29, 34, 47 Kalender of Shepherdes: 15, 109, 115, 154, 156, 161–65 Kempe, Margery, Book of Margery Kempe: 32–33 Kuskin, William: 7, 40, 97 n.72 Labour: 2–6, 8, 29, 33, 80, 85, 92, 115, 118, 122–23, 146; see also idleness; otium Langland, William: 3 Law, canon: 81, 82, 94, 135 Law, English statutes: 92–98, 99–101, 101–02 1 Richard III (1484): 92–98 3 Henry VII (1487): 99–101 11 Henry VII (1495): 101–02 Law, London ordinances: 90 Law, printed editions: 55, 93–98, 101, 102–03

239

Legrand, Jacques, The Book of Good Maners: 72 n. 3, 105, 109 Litchfield, William, Remors of Conscience: 113 London: 31, 51–54, 67, 73–77, 85–102, 106, 109, 111, 114–15, 117, 126, 128–30, 139, 140–50, 155–57, 160–61, 170–77, 199 Love, Nicholas, The Myrrour of the Blessed Lyfe of Jesu Criste: 111 Luther, Martin: 19 Lydgate, John: 6–7, 16, 32, 116 n. 18, 174, 193 Lyf of Oure Ladye: 116 n. 18 Pilgrimage of the Life of Man:16 Troy Book: 6–7 Machan, Tim William: 4, 6 n. 16, 31 Machlinia, William de: 16, 96, 97 Statutes of I Richard III: 97–98 Margaret, Duchess of Burgundy: 6, 49 Maydeston, Clement, Directorium sacerdotum: 2 McKenzie, D.F.: 12, 20 McKitterick, David: 12 n.29, 45–46 Medytacyons of Saynt Bernarde: 24, 37–41, 45–48, 68 Mercers Company: 74, 87, 100, 146 members of (mercers): 52, 73, 88, 107, 147, 148 see also merchants Merchants: 27, 35–36, 43, 74–78, 84–107 as book producers: 27, 35–36, 43, 74–78, 91–92 and morality of commerce: 76–82, 99, 110, 132–33, 136–37, 164 political autonomy: 76, 85, 98–101, 103, 115, 150 as readers: 74–75, 77 self-representation: 84–107 see also theological economics; Mercers Company Minnis, Alistair J.: 3–4 Mirk, John, Liber Festivalis; 109, 113, 116–17 More, Thomas: 54, 58 Muller, Jan-Dirk: 10 Murner, Thomas: 57 Nider, Johannes, De contractibus mercatorum: 83–85

240

Notary, Julian: 16, 41, 68, 96, 162, 197 Fructus Temporum: 201–03 Kalender of Sherpherdes: 162 Of Euyll Tongues: 68 Of Euyll Tongues: 68–69 O’Keeffe, Katherine O’Brien: 12–13 The Orcharde of Syon: 24, 48, 59–65, 61–62 otium: 21, 23, 26, 82; see also idleness; labour The Pastyme of People, John Rastell: 203–08 Pecock, Reginald: 23, 27–28, 35–38, 45, 60 Book of Faith: 27–28 Donet: 36, 38, 45 Pinkhurst, Adam: 32 Pore Caityf: 33–34 Pouzet, Jean-Pascal: 21–22, 24 28, 30 n. 35 Powell, Susan: 59 nn. 108, 109, 60 n. 112, 67 n. 127, 68, 75 n. 14, 112, 113 n. 10, 116 n. 17, 117, 148, 150 Pratt, William: 72, 76, 83, 104–07, 114 Prick of Conscience: 140, 147 Print, and extra-economic discourse: 8, 11, 18, 23, 43, 67, 162 Print, personality of: 14, 19–21, 24, 30–37, 39, 40–41, 67, 70 Printers, England: see Berthelet, Thomas; Caxton,William; Machlinia, William de; Notary, Julian; Pynson, Richard; Rastell, John; St Albans Printer; Worde, Wynkyn de Printers, Continent: 41–43, 67, 84, 102 n. 84, 154–57, 162, 187 Fust, Johann and Shoeffer, Peter (Mainz): 42 Gutenberg, Johannes (Mainz): 42 Hoernen, Arnold ther (Cologne): 184, 187, 201 Mansion, Colard (Cologne): 41 Marchant, Guy (Paris): 161 Quentell, Peter (Cologne): 67 Vérard, Antoine (Paris): 102 n. 84, 154–57, 162 Zell, Ulrich (Cologne): 43, 84 Printers’ devices: 40–41 Pynson, Richard: 41, 55, 68, 96, 102–04, 109, 114, 129–31, 133, 142, 144, 148, 150–51, 154–57, 162–64, 211

INDEX Dives and Pauper: 109, 129, 141–43 Kalender of Shepherdes: 15, 109, 115, 154, 156, 161–65 Mirroure of Gold for the Synfull Soule, trans. Margaret Beaufort: 114 Raoul Le Fevre, The Recuyell of the Histories of Troye: 4, 5–7, 43, 49 Rastell, John: 14–16, 48–49, 54–59, 168–70, 196–97, 203–09, 214 The Boke of the New Cardys: 54–59; see also cards, playing Exposiciones terminorum legum anglorum: 55–56 La Graunde Abridgment: 55 The Interlude of the Four Elements: 54 New Tenures: 55 Old Tenures: 55 The Pastyme of People: 203–08 Readers, early print: 74–77, 110–11, 167–68, 182, 193–99 Reformation: 51, 59, 67–70, 76, 169, 211–14 res publica: 25, 48, 57; see also common profit Rice, Nicole: 112–13 Richard III, king of England: 92–98 Richard de Bury, Philobiblon: 8–11, 14 Rolewinck, Werner, Fasciculus Temporum: 170, 177, 182–90, 192–92, 196–98, 200–01, 204, 208 St Albans Printer: 16, 40–41, 74 n. 10, 168–70, 180, 196–203, 105, 209, 211 St Albans Chronicle: 197–203 Scotus, John Duns: 79–81 Sewell, William: 22, 73 Sutton, Anne: 74, 85 n.42, 87, 93 Sutton, Richard: 60, 65 Shirley, John (scribe): 23, 28–30; see also colophons, scribal Simpson, James: 25, 59 n. 106, 128 Syon Abbey: 26, 59–60, 111, 116–17, 180 Theological economics: 76–78, 80, 82–83, 86–87, 98, 103, 109, 133, 135, 137, 147, 161; see also Todeschini, Giacomo Todeschini, Giacomo: 76–78, 83; see also theological economics

INDEX Trithemius, Johannes: 8. 11, 24 Tunstall, Cuthbert: 67–68 Tyndale, William: 67 Usury: 13, 78, 80–83, 85–87, 91–95, 99–107, 109, 117, 135–37, 142, 144, 150, 161, 164 see also idleness; theological economics Usury, London trials (1421): 77, 88–91 utterance: 19 Wakelin, Daniel: 3 n.5, 4, 11 n. 27, 21 n. 10, 25, 30 n. 36, 52, 53 n. 89, 54, 55, 144, 147, 177, 182 n. 36, 194 n. 60 Watson, Nicholas: 113 n. 13, 114 n. 15, 139 Whitford, Richard: 60, 68 Whittington, Richard: 87, 136 n. 87 Worcester, William: 25, 51, 53, 54 trans. Tullius de senectute: 51 Worde, Wynkyn de: 14, 16, 24, 37–41, 45–48, 55, 59–67, 75, 104, 109, 111–14, 130, 143–50, 154–61, 162–65, 201, 211, 214 Chastising of God’s Children: 113

241

The Craft to Live Well and to Die Well: 114 Dives and Pauper: 130, 143–50 Floure of the Ten Commandementes, trans. Andrew Chertsey: 154–61 Ymage of Love: 67 Kalender of Shepherdes: 162–65 Lucydarye: 114 Medytacyons of Saynt Bernarde, 37–41, 45–48 The Mirroure of Golde for the Synfull Soule, trans. Margaret Beaufort: 114 Of Euyll Tongues: 68–69 The Orcharde of Syon: 59–67 Ordinary of Christian Men: 154, 157 The Passyon of Our Lorde: 114, 157 Polychronicon, Ranulph Higden: 146 The Remors of Conscyence: 113 Rote or Myrour of Consolacyon and Conforte: 113 Scala perfectionis, Walter Hilton: 11, 111, 145–46 St Albans Chronicle: 201 Statutes, 11 Henry VII: 104 Wycliffite Bible: 27, 34

Texts and Transitions

All volumes in this series are evaluated by an Editorial Board, strictly on academic grounds, based on reports prepared by referees who have been commissioned by virtue of their specialism in the appropriate field. The Board ensures that the screening is done independently and without conflicts of interest. The definitive texts supplied by authors are also subject to review by the Board before being approved for publication. Further, the volumes are copyedited to conform to the publisher’s stylebook and to the best international academic standards in the field. Titles in Series Jane H. M. Taylor, The Making of Poetry: Late-Medieval French Poetic Anthologies (2007) Rebecca L. Schoff, Reformations: Three Medieval Authors in Manuscript and Movable Type (2008) Alexandra Barratt, Anne Bulkeley and her Book: Fashioning Female Piety in Early Tudor England (2009) Mary-Jo Arn, The Poet’s Notebook: The Personal Manuscript of Charles d’Orléans (Paris, BnF MS fr. 25458) (2009) The Making of the Vernon Manuscript: The Production and Contexts of Oxford, Bodleian, MS Eng. Poet. A. 1, ed. by Wendy Scase (2013) Probable Truth: Editing Medieval Texts from Britain in the Twenty-First Century, ed. by Vincent Gillespie and Anne Hudson (2013)

In Preparation Deborah L. Moore, Medieval Anglo-Irish Troubles: A Cultural Study of B.L. MS Harley 913 Alpo Honkapohja, Alchemy, Medicine, and Commercial Book Production: A Codicological and Linguistic Study of the Voigts-Sloane Manuscript Group Pursuing Middle English Manuscripts and their Texts: Essays in Honour of Ralph Hanna, ed. by Simon Horobin and Aditi Nafde Susan Powell, The Birgittines of Syon Abbey: Preaching and Print