Gelding Gascoigne

Abstract

A Hundreth sundrie Flowres bounde vp in one small Poesie (1573) has come to carry a lot of critical baggage.1 As readers have warmed to its playing with both manuscript and print conventions, it has been appropriated as some kind of transitional work, invoked to show the continuities of “manuscript culture” and “print culture,” but then just as surely employed to prise them apart. Often these earnest readings fail to deal with the volume’s most salient feature—its ironic, erotic humor, which is part and parcel of its strange straddling of manuscript and print. Rather than being a truly transitional work (if such a thing could exist), A Hundreth sundrie Flowres, coming almost a full century after Caxton opened his printing press, positions itself deliberately on an imagined line between manuscript and print, two contemporaneous media, playing with and mocking readers’ complacent expectations of both. With sometimes outrageous wit, it demonstrates why it is too reductive to regard manuscript transmission, as one critical tradition has it, as belonging “to a culture that valued personal intimacy, sociality, and participation, if not also intellectual and social exclusivity—all features that generally distinguished it from print transmission.”2 But it also shows how manuscript transmission is willfully projected as belonging to such a culture; how in print, manuscripts and the traffic in manuscripts come to signal intellectual and social exclusivity, secrecy, privacy, intimacy, and—as I shall argue here— a particular brand of erotic male sociality that print culture threatens to “geld.”