The Typographic Imaginary in Early Modern English Literature by Rachel Stenner (review)

Amid the many peculiarities of William Baldwin's anti-Catholic beast fable Beware the Cat, one that has received relatively little attention is its direct engagement with the geographies and technologies of contemporary print culture. The narrator, Streamer, tells us he is lodging at the shop of Protestant printer John Day to see his Greek alphabet through the press: his implication in humanist scholarly networks is at odds with the work's satirical presentation of humanist glossing practices (not to mention its gruesome recipes). One chapter of Rachel Stenner's exciting book traces Baldwin's depiction of printer-author as well as author-reader networks, and the proto-novel's affiliations with elite print coteries in early modern London. Alongside the satire, she also notices that Streamer emphasizes the proximity of the fictional printing-house to a grisly display of executed criminal corpses on poles on the roof of Aldgate. The symbolic associations of printing thus range widely across 'alchemical, diabolic, monstrous, violent and divine' registers (p. 51). Beware the Cat deploys the printer's shop as a self-conscious reflection on its own position in a stratified and nervous mid-century print market-place, and is exemplary in what Stenner dubs 'the typographic imaginary': the imaginative and critical engagement with the print trade in works of the long hand-press period, from Caxton to Nashe and Spenser, with a coda about Grub Street.

For some writers, this dynamic media landscape is ludic and permissive. Caxton, in a 'moment [that] is at once foundational and transitional' (p. 77), developed a conversation in his paratextual material questioning the role and value of print, preparing the imaginative space for the printer-author dialogues of early-sixteenth-century texts by Robert Copland and Thomas Blague. Discussing the paratextual material to Gascoigne's A Hundred Sundrie Flowres, Stenner identifies its investment in the progressive potential of print, drawing on Richard Tottel's strategic claim in his Miscellany that print could break the closed elite who controlled manuscript circulation. Games about authorship and faux-anonymity confirm Gascoigne's witty participation in playful possibilities of the printed text. By contrast, Spenser's monster Errour in Book 1 of The Faerie Queene draws on a more troubling vision of the printing press, revisiting and rendering grotesque familiar tropes about authorship as parenthood in a monstrous vision of Errour's textual 'parbreake'. Linking this negative version of the print world with the allusive and purposive typography of Spenser's self-presentation in The Shepheardes Calendar enables Stenner to challenge easy narratives of Spenserian laureateship in print. This is important work tracing deep ambivalences behind Immerito's apparent typographic chutzpah. In the final chapter, Nashe's own prodigious imagination, as the early modern writer most associated with the processes and particularities of print, is located within the microculture of St Paul's Churchyard. Stenner argues that his work evolves her typographic imaginary into an exploration of the extended symbolic potential of print.

Stenner's argument is firmly within the wholesale critical reappraisal of that old canard 'the stigma of print' (J. W. Saunders) and it builds on important work by Elizabeth Eisenstein, Wendy Wall, and Lisa Maruca. Her case studies demonstrate how figurative engagements with print conventions and protocols are an imaginative resource for writers addressing their readership in new typographic forms. She identifies her work within 'a second wave of book history' that is interested in 'individual historical moments' (p. 13), drawing out cultural responses to media technology via close, contextualized readings of specific texts and authors. Some of her concepts, including phrases such as media ecology and media change, have a distinctly digital buzz to them, and it might have been interesting to engage more specifically with larger historical questions about print media in a digital age.

The concluding...