Agency and Intention in English Print, 1476–1526 by Kathleen Tonry (review)

This careful, lucid 2016 monograph traces a meticulous thread through the first half-century of English print in order to establish the modes of agency printers and readers of this period exercised in their production and consumption of diverse books. Tonry's understanding of medieval authorship—based in part on the famous Bonaventurean distinction between scribe, compiler, commentator, and author—contributes to an intellectual history of early print that sees a blurrier distinction between author and printer than is typically acknowledged. This is a continuation in early print, of sorts, of the medieval intertwining of "material and intellectual dimensions of textual production" (2) and between "the physical and imaginative registers of writing" (2). While Caxton, for example, portrays himself as a physical laborer in the production of books as well as an intellectual agent in the printing or translation of his texts, Tonry goes on to employ the ethical language of Richard de Bury's Philobiblon (in which the accurate reproduction of texts is understood as a way to renew a world constantly at risk of undergoing degradation) in order to explore Caxton's own performance of identity. This Caxton-persona, as developed in his prefaces and prologues, is imbued with a combination of ethical agency and philological concern in the creation both of his books and his own identity as printer.

In this respect, a "language of spiritual common profit" (11) and an interest in textual accuracy emerge; this general (agential) trend is at odds with a standard narrative in which early printers are primarily, if not exclusively, concerned with technological progress and mercantile success. This is a book that is broad in scope without being unfocused in aim: Tonry admirably brings the perspectives of social theory and literary criticism to bear on a body of work that too often is passed over in literary history, subsumed in sweeping narratives of technological, historical, and religious transition. Instead, her work carefully uncovers texts that move past the simple categories of orthodoxy and heterodoxy (often imposed on literature of the period by the demands of religious history), and in general succeeds impressively in recovering the complex and variegated landscape of a half-century of literature that has all too often suffered from various forms of scholarly neglect.

Her first chapter, "The Personality of Print" (17–70), looks at printers' devices, colophons, prologues, typographical design, and other features of early books in order to reveal the modes of "personality" that printers gave to their works – pushing the conversation beyond the standard binary of the remunerative versus the non-remunerative. Instead, she argues for the centrality of the "sense of the personal" (18) in early print, beginning with a prehistory of "books beyond commerce" in the pre-print fifteenth century. She aptly demonstrates the concerns and intentions of early printers (Caxton, Rastell, de Worde) regarding the ethics of print as a commercial medium and the dissemination of their texts as a potential contribution to the "common profit" (an extension of the medieval practice of asking for prayers for the economic or scribal agent responsible for the production of a devout book). Wynkyn de Worde's 1496 edition of the Pseudo-Bernardine Medytacyons of Saynt Bernarde (STC 1916), for example, contains an anonymous translator's prologue that emphasizes repeatedly the spiritual profit of the production of the text; the colophon, in turn, emphasizes de Worde's own role in printing the text, even as it points beyond his shop to an anonymous "deuoute student of the vnyuersyte of Cambrydge" (40) who translated the text from Latin into English.

Tonry continues her consideration of the relationship between commercial and spiritual profit in chapter 2, "Usurers and Printed Books: The Mercantile Contexts of Intention in Late Medieval London" (71–107). Examining the scholastic theology which shaped late-medieval English understanding of mercantile activity, the role of intention becomes central in defining the potential for interest-bearing loans to be usurious. Looking...