Printing the Middle Ages (review)

I confess: I often use so-called "Old English" font (really Gothic) for the headings of my syllabi, paired with an illumination or two, to give the class a medieval "feel." Why a particular font or kind of illustration would present a class as "medieval" was something to which I had not given much thought. Printing the Middle Ages traces the history of the development of this medieval "feel," and demonstrates the way it is rooted in specific choices and practices of the printers of medieval texts in the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries.

In Printing the Middle Ages, Siân Echard aims to answer the question of how a book's "bibliographic code"—fonts, layout, illustrations, glosses, etc.—makes an implicit claim that the work is "authentically medieval." Firmly within the tradition of the history of the book, Echard studies the ways in which medieval works through the centuries have been created and received as physical objects, not just texts. She begins by analyzing the process by which an image of a plowman from Cambridge, Trinity College MS R.3.14 came to represent the whole plowman tradition. From Crowley onwards, she traces the print history of Piers Plowman and Pierce the Ploughman's Crede with reference to this one specific image, often copied and reproduced in facsimile. Including other facsimile copies of manuscript images in her analysis, she then considers what the minute differences between the traced facsimiles and their manuscript originals suggest about their artists' attitudes toward the Middle Ages.

In the chapter "Form and Rude Letters," probably the best chapter of the book, Echard answers the question with which I began: how has a particular font come to evoke "the medieval" in our culture? She explores the way in which the publication of Old English, from the beginning of print, was particularly and peculiarly attached to the physical form of Anglo-Saxon letterforms—in a way that Middle English was not. With numerous plates and illustrations, she shows that printing of pre-1066 texts and treatises almost always involved the reproduction of "Saxon Characters or Letters, that be most strange" (p. 30). Old English letterforms underwent a perceptual transformation during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: originally perceived to be "Gothish," barbaric, and "rude," Anglo-Saxon fonts later came to represent a claim to authenticity and authority, especially in terms of the antiquity of the English church. The prints of these books were also often accompanied by maps and images of artefacts such as coins, seals, or archaeological objects which, together with the font, formed a "visual vocabulary" testifying to the authentically medieval status of the text.

Echard then turns to the "visual vocabulary" of the romances of Sir Guy of Warwick and Sir Bevis of Hampton. She argues that there is a close link between "the visual and the textual in the postmedieval understanding of these Middle English romances" (p. 65). However, the illustrations also suggest a different history of reception for the two romances. The print history of Bevis is closely related to the medieval manuscripts from which it came, and the illustrations and woodcuts establish a recognizable identity for Bevis quite early, which does not change over the course of the work's print history. Guy, by contrast, has a visual identity that develops much later, and which is based on incidents not found in the medieval poem. Most interestingly, Echard argues that the visual depiction of Guy often "pulls against" the textual descriptions, and may have influenced the choices of later editors of the text when deciding what sections to abridge.

The following three chapters each focuses on one iconic author: Gower, Chaucer, and Froissart. Because of the extensive history of the book studies already done on these authors, especially Chaucer, Echard concentrates on one particular book or printing tradition for each. For the chapter on Gower, Echard traces the history of the Trentham manuscript and the prints based on that manuscript. Gower's reception was influenced greatly by...