- Symbolic Caxton: Literary Culture and Print Capitalism
Most research into the works of William Caxton takes the form of bibliographical analyses and catalogues, which are the basis of all further research, or of biographical history, telling us of Caxton’s personal achievement. What William Kuskin’s monograph, Symbolic Caxton, offers instead is an analysis of Caxton’s works through literary criticism. Influenced by the historicism of the 1980s and 1990s, this book also offers ideas about the role of Caxton’s works in wider cultural history, [End Page 348] such as the formation of the Chaucerian canon, the politics of Lancastrian England (and, Kuskin wisely adds, Yorkist England), and the supposed divisions between “medieval” and “early modern.” On the way, there are often unexpected critical readings of some neglected works, such as the book of hunting and arms printed at St. Albans in 1486 (56–67), Woodville’s works (163–72), and of Godfrey of Boloyne, Charles the Grete, and Malory’s Morte d’Arthur (216–32, in a chapter that first appeared in 1999). Other recent books, by Seth Lerer and Alexandra Gillespie, for example, have also blended the history of the book and literary criticism to good effect in considering Caxton’s place in some of these stories, but Kuskin’s book is distinctive in focusing solely on Caxton.
Kuskin’s main conclusion is the sound reminder that print is not solely an innovative force but responds to, and reproduces, prior traditions (3–5), something that scholars of Chaucerian and humanist printing have also suggested. He supports that point by noting how often fifteenth-century literature is itself interested in ideas of “reproduction” (18–20, 109). Then, most important, he extends the point to the argument that Caxton and other early printers, by reproducing this earlier literature, prove that there is no divide between “medieval” and “early modern.” In my view, we cannot dismantle this divide often enough. The Epilogue, one of the best bits of the book, reminds us how often fifteenth-century literature and Caxton’s editions were reproduced in the sixteenth century (286–87) and how much fifteenth-century literature is connected to phenomena that one might consider “modern.” For example, Everyman survives as a printed book and is a play about the proliferation of commodities—and thus challenges what we think of as “medieval” drama (288–97).
Central to Kuskin’s argument about Caxton’s place in wider literary history are two phenomena of so-called early modernity: capitalism and humanism. The Introduction and chapters 1 and 2 discuss printing in relation to capitalism and finance, and they are interesting; indeed, chapter 2 was published in New Medieval Literatures in 1999 as a prizewinning essay. Kuskin offers “capital” as an alternative answer to the question whether it was patronage or commerce that dominated Caxton’s career (81), although I suppose “capital” could be part of commerce. Economic ideas shape some of the best bits of this book, about how “volume” affected what printers did (17) or how Caxton uses his printer’s mark as a badge of commodity (50–73). In fact, I would have [End Page 349] liked more discussion of the economic ideas, for the Introduction is fairly brief and allusive about the theoretical affiliations of the book (26). This book suggests how others might research further the impact of trade, finance, and consumerism in the late fifteenth century.
Chapter 6 offers an interesting discussion of Caxton’s humanist interest in antiquity. The chapter confirms an argument by Seth Lerer and the present reviewer for likenesses between humanism and early English printing, although Kuskin uses different materials, notably a good interpretation of Caxton’s Eneydos and Ovyde and the fears of classical paganism therein (243–57). The account of humanism threatens to find humanist study in cahoots with monarchy and aristocracy, as do many critics (279), but ends with a pleasingly complex—if overly complexly phrased—sense of the ambivalence in offering elite scholarship to the wider readerships of print (282–83).
Such views of...