Manuscript and Print in London c. 1475–1530 by Julia Boffey (review)

Julia Boffey begins her interesting and detailed book with questions: ‘what perceptions did people have of printed material after its introduction into England, and how did these perceptions determine their own practices in dealing with books and documents, whether as producers or consumers?’ She concentrates on the five decades after the introduction of printing and focuses on London, by far the most populous city in England, and where, if one takes in Westminster, most of the material was produced and used.

In the opening chapter she illustrates the complexity of the textual situation by contrasting two books, produced at roughly the same time. The Customs of London (c. 1502) comprises a short London chronicle for 1189 to 1501/2 and miscellaneous other documents—charters and ordinances relating to London, model letters useful to its citizens, material on the calendar and travel, and literary texts, including the poem ‘The Nut Brown Maid’. It was put together by Richard Arnold, ‘citizen and haburdasher of London’, and incorporated materials he must have had to hand for the use of his fellow citizens. But, paradoxically, this ‘local’ book was printed in Antwerp, probably by Ardriaen van Berghen. The second is Huntingdon MS HM 140, a composite manuscript, a mixture of parchment and paper, made up of two late fifteenth-century anthologies, each copied by more than one scribe: one part has poems by Chaucer and Lydgate, the other has a copy of the Libelle of English Policy, prose treatises and saints’ lives. Not all the items in this book need have been written in London, but it is a ‘London book’ because it was read and annotated by Londoners—amongst others by William Marshall ‘armourer’, and ‘Rychard Jonsan setezan & haburdashar of London’. The complexity illustrated by this contrast— involving materials, means of production, provenance of the texts, authors and readers—is further demonstrated as the chapter develops. Julia Boffey identifies ‘some London texts and authors’, but makes the equally valid point that ‘Much of what came the way of readers in London was . . . certainly not London-produced, nor in its content London-connected’.

The second chapter deals with manuscript and print in combination, and this covers, engagingly and fully, the ways in which printers used manuscripts as setting texts and how they marked them up—not always cleaning them up after use. She also has informative things to say about how printers left spaces for later manuscript enhancement—particularly for decoration and illumination—so that a printed book could be finished and personalized by hand. The way in which scribes copied printed books is also intelligently discussed and demonstrated. Perhaps the most striking example adduced is British Library MS Additional 29506, a unique account of the Earl of Surrey’s victory at Flodden in September 1513, which imitated in its layout and the use of different scripts what was evidently a carefully printed ‘news’ pamphlet (presumably by Pynson, the King’s Printer) of which all copies have been lost. One may wish to contrast, contemplating the vagaries of time and chance, the survival of Skelton’s Ballade of the Scottysshe Kynge, as the lining of one cover of the French romance Huon of Bordeaulx (Paris: Michel le Noir, 1513), hastily and inaccurately printed by Faques, while no manuscript copy of this Flodden poem survives.

In the following two chapters Boffey seeks to establish some of the ‘London-specific’ materials that were produced and what sort of reading appealed to the various categories of society in the city. Because the major law-courts and the Inns of Court were situated in London, as well as so many schools and religious houses, printed materials were produced and made available in great quantities to satisfy the needs of these institutions. So too were printed copies of sermons preached in the city, and there is a good account of the relationship between Lady Margaret Beaufort, Wynkyn de Worde, and John Fisher, bishop of...