A Companion to the Early Printed Book in Britain, 1476–1558 ed. by Vincent Gillespie, Susan Powell (review)

It might be wondered in the light of other collections on a similar topic how much a book such as A Companion to the Early Printed Book in Britain is needed. Volume three of the Cambridge History of the Book in Britain appeared in 1999. This new volume comes hot on the heels of another collection of essays, Manuscripts and Printed Books in Europe, 1350–1550, edited by Emma Cayley and Susan Powell (2013). But publishers and their customers, in their different ways, find companions helpful as a genre. Moreover, there has been a substantial amount of work done since many of the essays were written for the Cambridge history, which in any case had a larger remit. Most fundamentally, but by no means solely, we now have the catalogue of fifteenth-century English books in the British Library, and several volumes of the Corpus of British Medieval Library Catalogues.

With the companion brief in mind, this collection edited by Vincent Gillespie and Susan Powell, with its well-documented footnotes, has been constructed in two parts. The first consists of a series of essays on more or less familiar themes: three chapters on the printed book trade and three on the printed book as artifact. These are followed by five on ‘patrons, purchasers and products’—Anne Sutton on merchants, Mary Erler on the laity, Susan Powell on the secular clergy, James Clark on the regular clergy, and James Willoughby on universities, colleges, and chantries. Lastly come five gathered up under the heading ‘the cultural capital of print’—Daniel Wakelin on humanism, Brenda Hosington on women translators, Andrew Hope on the printed book trade and Luther, Thomas Betteridge on Thomas More and censorship, and Lucy Wooding on the printed book in the Marian restoration. Thus those readers who seek bibliographical background can read the first sextet before moving on to more specialist questions. On the whole, in the third and fourth sections especially the authors have been able to present original research. The book includes an index of printed books ordered and presented not simply as STC numbers (as in the Cambridge history), but by author, title and date, the entries arranged by country and town. Thus if one is interested in John Fisher, whose entry in the general index consists simply of six lines of undifferentiated page numbers, then more detail must be found under Cologne as well as Cambridge, London, Antwerp, and Alcalà. And for Erasmus (seven lines of numbers in the index), see under Cambridge, London, Antwerp, Lyon, Basel, and Louvain. It is an interesting idea, but not a time-saver.

While there are some odd exceptions, the editors have worked hard to link the chapters and address inconsistencies. A few remain. Julia Boffey and Pamela Robinson tell us (pp. 14, 65) that the Recuyell of the historyes of Troye (STC 15375) was printed in 1473. Coates (p. 53) gives 1475. The index (p. 362), following ISTC but ignoring the suggestion by Lotte Hellinga (Bulletin du Bibliophile, 2011) that it may be from Ghent rather than Bruges, gives 1473–74. The tyro, at whom this book must be at least partly aimed, may also be puzzled at Martha Driver’s admittedly slightly qualified statement that Sammelbände ‘are (usually) thematically related texts that were intended to be sold, and presumably read, as single editions by their publishers’ (p. 112). As other contributors are clearly aware, surviving evidence suggests that the overwhelming majority were mixtures made up by owners and binders, not by the first sellers.

One of the difficulties in any companion is the extent to which it can expect to be thorough. Inevitably there are omissions in this volume for anyone who is seeking to understand topics—even some major ones—that do not greatly figure. Thus, there is for example little on medicine, botany, historical writing, provision...