Capgrave's Dedications: Reassessing an English Flunkey

John Capgrave, the fifteenth-century Augustinian friar, chronicler, hagiographer, and theologian dedicated his books to kings, dukes, bishops, his fellow clerics, and an anonymous laywoman. His large number of surviving dedications makes him an invaluable case study for the methods and functions of dedicatory writing during the mid-fifteenth century in England. This was a time of great political upheaval as Yorks and Lancastrians vied for the English throne. Capgrave addressed works to both houses and his switch of allegiance from Henry VI to Edward VI has been judged as contemptible flunkeyism by some commentators. This unduly harsh assessment shows little appreciation of the difficult networks of literary and political patronage that Capgrave so astutely negotiated and reimagined. In his dedications he adopts different modes of dedicatory address to suit each genre and audience, from panegyric biblical exegesis to the newly fashionable humanist style. Rather than banal pieces of abject flattery written in tired old forms, Capgrave's carefully crafted dedications recast literary patronage in distinctly pious terms. He reimagines patronage as a dynamic system of sacred obligations owed and repaid amongst a literary community of readers, writers, noble patrons, churchmen, and sometimes even the saints themselves.