LOTTE HELLINGA. William Caxton and Early Printing in England.

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Former Deputy Keeper at the British Library, Lotte Hellinga is one of the world's foremost authorities on fifteenth-century books. Over the last dozen years she has produced The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, Volume III: 1400-1557 (with J. B. Trapp; Cambridge Univ. Press, 1999), the Catalogue of Books Printed in the XVth Century Now in the British Library (Hes & De Graaf, 2007), and the revised version of E. Gordon Duff's Printing in England in the Fifteenth Century (The British Library, 2009). Each of these books is definitive; each, too, is essentially collaborative. In William Caxton and Early Printing in England, Dr. Hellinga writes what she calls ‘a story of printers’ for the general reader (pp. ix–x). She comes away with a coherent, readable, and beautifully illustrated account of printing up to the year 1535 that consolidates an amazing amount of bibliographical scholarship with the current trends in Medieval and Early Modern studies to recognize Caxton as a significant thinker in the development English literature. There are a number of scholarly books and essays on Caxton of late, and of them all, William Caxton and Early English Printing is unique in that it is both an accessible summary and a provocative reassessment of early print. The result is that Dr. Hellinga's story of early printing is as confident and subtle as it is learned and alive to the recent developments in the scholarly field.