The Chepman and Myllar Prints: Scotland's First Printed Texts: Digitised Facsimiles with Introduction, Headnotes, and Transcription (review)

Under the auspices of the National Library of Scotland and the Scottish Text Society, this digital edition celebrates a milestone in the history of the book in Scotland: the ten prints comprising the unique volume known as the Chepman and Myllar prints include the earliest dated Scottish printed books. This little repertoire of literary works in Scots and English deserves to be known and studied more widely than it has been: it includes Robert Henryson's Orpheus and Eurydice; several pieces of alliterative verse, William Dunbar's Tretis of the Tua Mariit Wemen and the Wedo and the unjustly neglected romance Golagros and Gawane among them; and not least, the crashing finale to The Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedy. Marking the quincentenary of the original publication, this new edition achieves a milestone of its own in its initiatory collaboration between the National Library of Scotland and the Scottish Text Society. Here, with accurate transcriptions, brief headnotes, and a revelatory introduction, are digital facsimiles of the contents of the ten small quartos gathered as early as the sixteenth century into a single volume. One hopes that this edition will spur collaborative digital editions of Scottish books that afford new insights into the literary culture of late medieval and early modern Scotland.

As the first Scottish printers had to balance between the court and the burgh in selecting and presenting their texts, so the devisers of the present edition have perforce traced a compromise between the demands of specialists and students, many of whom have come to expect the electronic edition to open avenues to previously unconsidered relations. Elements that the reader of a printed edition would consider soundly and serviceably framed may now appear unnecessarily restricted, given the capacity and functionality of the format. Thus the user of this DVD may wish for links to examples of the deterioration of images and letters and may want to study unusual letter forms in their immediate context. The judicious, accurate bibliographies may strike such a user as parsimonious in their lack of evaluative comment and, most obviously, their paucity of hyperlinks: a couple of TEAMS editions are thus noted, as well as the National Library of Scotland's online revision of Aldis, A List of Books Printed in Scotland before 1700; but not the online counterpart to this edition, the National Library of Scotland's First Scottish Books, a link to which is buried on the last page of the introduction. Turning to the headnotes to individual poems, one notes inconsistencies, not least in the bibliographic notes: for instance, the early manuscripts and prints of Sir Eglamour are listed, but not those of the so-called Maying and Disport of Chaucer. Such irregularities diminish one's confidence in this edition as a productive representation of a unique literary culture.

Although the brief headnotes are distinguished intermittently by incisive comment—such as Joanna Martin's on the "experimental" printed text of Dunbar's Tretis—the great strength of this edition is its substantial introduction. The general editor Sally Mapstone critically reviews the received wisdom about the production and status of the prints. She notes that the peculiarities of several of the texts presented herein reveal as much about the inadequacies of the exemplars as about foreign compositors' unfamiliarity with Scots. Arguing persuasively that "these early prints represented a significant move to publish vernacular Scots and English literature for an appreciative audience," Mapstone amends the longstanding view that the prints are mere rehearsals for the important projects adumbrated in the royal patent. The uneven proficiency exhibited by the prints has been taken to indicate a chronology of technical and editorial progression. Inconsistencies in the typography also suggest varying priorities and readerships: the particular care devoted to the Dunbar's Ballade of Lord Barnard Stewart bespeaks the importance of this item to James IV. Meantime...