Print Culture and the Medieval Author: Chaucer, Lydgate, and Their Books 1473–1557 (review)

In this tidy volume, Alexandra Gillespie explores the printing of texts by medieval authors in the Tudor period, bringing together several previously published essays that have been updated and rewritten to provide a pleasing unity. The book is important for its exploration of the interstices and intersections of medieval literature and the early modern reception of it, which are often overlooked both by medievalists and early modernists. Though one of the claims made by the author about her book, that this "is the first comprehensive survey of the earliest printing of Chaucer's works" (23), is perhaps overstated — one thinks of the magisterial treatment of this subject by Alice S. Miskimin, Stanley Howard Johnston, and earlier by Eleanor Prescott Hammond, among others — Gillespie contributes substantially here to the restoration of the Renaissance reputation of the medieval poet John Lydgate, for whom, as she reminds readers in her epilogue, "there is still no collected edition (or even comprehensive, up-to-date list) of [his] works in print" (233).

This volume is full of wonderful anecdotes: the reader learns, for example, that Vtterance, a term used by the printer Richard Pynson in a bill put before Chancery, "meant the bartering or trading value of a book" (63); that John Rastell in his ca. 1525 printing of Parliament of Fowls bowdlerized Chaucer's text, clothing the naked Beaute and emending Priapus to Priamus; that edifying proverbs were plentifully inscribed "upon walls, eaves, and 'the rouf of my lorde percy [the younger's water] closett'" (158) in the household of the fifth Earl of Northumberland.

Chapter 1 considers William Caxton's publication of Lydgate's Troy Book and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales in the context of late medieval manuscript exemplars and their transmission. The second chapter meditates further on Sammelbände, or books bound together, and what these might suggest about the tastes of book makers and owners. The third chapter discusses the printed editions of Chaucer's Troilus and Parliament of Fowles from 1517 to 1532. Lost works printed by de Worde like "The Chance of Dice" and "Ragman Roll," the source for the term rigmarole (117), are described to provide further contexts, and the title-border used for Chaucer's Workes of 1532 is identified with its earlier uses in England in primarily Henrician contexts. Chapter four examines printed editions of Lydgate, focusing on Lydgate's Prouerbes, Fall of Princes, and Life of Our Lady. The final chapter opens with Reformation writer John Foxe writing approvingly of Chaucer as a proto-Protestant and then traces Chaucer's reputation through the winding alleys of Reformation rhetoric. The printer Richard Grafton qualifies Chaucer's "Parson's Tale" by adding "This is a Canterbury Tale" in the margins (see plate 31) of his edition of Chaucer's Workes, partially, Gillespie points out, to connect the prose sermon on penance to the rest of the Tales but also to indicate that this is a trifle, a fiction, not to be taken seriously, a careful measure taken to preserve an inherently orthodox text in uncertain times. The pseudo-Chaucerian Plowman's Tale and the Pilgrim's Tale are also briefly mentioned here. Though much of the Chaucerian material has been discussed by other scholars, Gillespie's work on the Renaissance reception of Lydgate in print, particularly during Mary's reign, is very compelling. After a decided drop in literary reputation during the early Reformation, Lydgate makes a comeback during the reign of Mary, copies of his Fall of Princes, The Daunce of Machabree, and Troy Book rediscovered and reprinted.

Gillespie writes readily and with great verve across the disciplines of history, book history, bibliography, and literary criticism; theory is applied deftly and sparingly but is always apt in context. She is in full command of her materials, which are wide-ranging, and she has read a wealth...