The Flowers in The Muses Garland

Prologue: Where have all the flowers gone?

In 2016 i had occasion to mention a few of the printers’ flowers used in Elizabethan London.¹ Those ‘flowers’ (or fleurons) were small ornamental blocks, mass-produced by casting in the moulds used by type-founders, and which could be set like type (or with type) into lines, columns, shapes, or compartments to decorate printed pages. To identify the three designs then under discussion I had to refer to some of the very few published studies of early-modern English printing in which such flowers have been illustrated—each of which has its own numbering system.²

But the same year saw the publication of Hendrik D. L. Vervliet’s ground-breaking book, Granjon’s Flowers: An Enquiry into Granjon’s, Giolito’s, & De Tournes’ Ornaments; 1542–86 (New Castle, Delaware: Oak Knoll Press, 2016): a volume that should be on the shelf of anyone seriously interested in early-modern printing in any part of Europe. In that volume Vervliet reproduces and discusses (and lists in three different orders) thirty-seven individual flowers, forty-seven larger ornaments, and nineteen ‘combinable’ flowers: sets of between two and twelve related flowers whose constituent units can be either used individually or combined in various ways to produce a variety of arabesque patterns. As the appendix to this paper will show, Vervliet has not yet said the last word on the subject, but his important pioneering study (hereafter Granjon’s Flowers) has paved the way for future advances.³

Fig. 1.

The six units of the combinable flower Verliet 32 and some of the ways in which they can be used.

My main concern here is what I shall call ‘Vervliet 32’, which Vervliet himself formally describes on p. 86 as ‘Granjon’s six-piece combinable flower on Great Primer^A [FLC 6] (1566)’. The ‘FLC’ identifies it as a combinable flower rather than a single item, while ‘6’ is the approximate width of each unit in millimetres.⁴ The date is ‘the presumed date of first occurrence’ in a book printed in Strasbourg. A set of matrices was acquired in June of that year by Plantin in Antwerp, and either matrices or actual cast flowers in 1567 by Johann Eichorn in Frankfurt an der Oder and by both John Day and Henry Middleton in London.⁵ In the first decade of the seventeenth century two thirds of the printing houses in London owned at least one of the pairs of Granjon flowers that make up the full set, and the other third had pairs from a fairly close copy.

In illustrating the six units in the set (each of which individually is a printers’ flower, so the terminology can sometimes be a little ambiguous) I have used the same letters as Vervliet and oriented each unit as he does (Fig. 1). Doing so not only makes it possible to identify a single flower as (for example) Vervliet 32d, but allows it to be described as upright, inverted, or rotated in one direction or the other, and those terms will be used in the following discussion. The appendix to this paper will examine a number of later copies that have frequently been mistaken for the Granjon originals. But what prompted me to write it in the first place was that while flowers are often dismissed as merely mass-produced clones, insufficiently distinctive to have any value as evidence, they can sometimes provide useful clues to what happened in the printing house, and can even sometimes help to identify a printer.

The Beinecke fragments

In early 2011, the Beinecke Library at Yale University purchased a disbound quarto quire (signed B) from an otherwise unknown book. Page B1^r is obviously the beginning of the main text, once preceded by an unknown number of preliminary leaves. At the top of that page a woodcut compartment contains what was presumably the title of the whole volume: The Muses Garland. Below it is a three-line heading (‘Beeing in a Passion, he writes a fare...