Correspondence

Sirs,

It is evident from the title of Winfried Rudolf's 'A Fragment of the Old English Version of the Gospel of Mark in the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington DC' (The Library, VII, 18 (2017), 405–17), that he is to be congratu lated on an impressive piece of detective work. He has succeeded in identifying the text of which a very small strip, cut from an Anglo-Saxon manu script, survives in one of the Folger's sixteenth-century bindings. Given that the fragment preserves evidence of only twelve lines on each side, and that only four of the twenty-four lines are now represented by as many as three letters (or parts thereof), the feat seems well-nigh miraculous. And while Rudolf acknowledges the crucial role played by 'advances in modern technology … and the most recent search engines', his account of how he used them makes it obvious that his own expertise as both palaeographer and codicologist were equally essential to the investigation.

At the very end of his article, however, he spends just over a page speculating how, when, and by whom the fragment came to be used—and here neither his own skills nor the sources he consults are quite as current or up to the same standard. In the following paragraphs the page-references in parentheses are to my recent The Stationers' Company and the Printers of London, 1501–1557, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).

At the foot of p. 415, having referred to 'John Daye's first printing of the Old English Gospels in 1571', Rudolf begins to suggest ways in which the manuscript might have found its way into the binding in which it survives, and turns to the man he calls 'Daye's colleague Thomas Berthelet'. It is true that in 1551–55, Day and Berthelet were both freemen of the Stationers' Company. Berthelet had been freed by 1524 (183–87), had spent seventeen years as King's Printer to Henry VIII, was a member of the London's Common Council and an alderman's deputy, had received a grant of arms, and had undoubtedly served the Stationers more than once as Warden. Day, by contrast, had deviously purchased the freedom of the Stringers' Company in 1546, set up as a printer instead, and having thus broken the conditions of his recognizance, was made by the City to translate to the Stationers in 1551 (pp. 501–3, 695–96). Day was 'a dedicated publisher of reformist propa ganda', and so spent part of Mary's reign in the Tower. Rudolf, however, applies that description to Berthelet, who was almost certainly replaced as King's Printer under Edward because he was patently not a cham pion of the Reformation. In describing him as Daye's 'colleague', Rudolf seems to suggest that their brief overlap as free Stationers probably implies similar goals and interests. But we cannot even be sure that Day's interest in the Old English Gospels went beyond a professional obligation to print what Archbishop Parker paid him to print.

Berthelet, claims Rudolf, 'printed the first complete Latin Bible in England in … 1535 (STC 2055)', but Sacrae bibliae tomus primus is only half a bible, and no complete Latin edition was printed in England until 1580 (pp. 352–56). Tomus primus was printed at the instigation of Henry VIII (rather than being a project of Berthelet's own), and unless collation proves otherwise it is fairly safe to assume that the printer's copy was one of the numerous Vulgate editions printed elsewhere in Europe during the previous eighty years. Nor did Berthelet print The Byble in Englyshe in 1540 (STC 2069). He published it, paying the printers Thomas Petyt and Robert Redman to print it for him (pp. 374–75), rightly supposing that a smaller and cheaper reprint of the so-called Great Bible could be profitably marketed while Grafton and Whitchurch were busy producing enough 'Great' editions to equip England's parish churches. J. F. Mozley accurately described the volume as 'following with trivial changes the text of April 1539' (Coverdale and his Bibles (1953), p. 218), and what...