Poets, Printers, and Early English Sammelbande

Abstract

overleaf  , ,      See Julia Boffey,“Wynkyn de Worde and Misogyny in Print,” in Geoffrey Lester, ed., Chaucer in Perspective: Middle English Essays in Honour of Norman Blake (Sheffield, ), –; and Frances Lee Utley, The Crooked Rib, Contributions in Language and Literature,  (Columbus, Ohio, ) on the courtly love/anti-feminist tradition to which all these books belong.  For the contents of Thynne’s edition, see D. S. Brewer, ed., Geoffrey Chaucer: The Works with Supplementary Material from the Editions of , , , and : A Facsimile (London, ); for a discussion of the possible (and implicitly contested) pro-feminist meaning of Pynson’s edition, see Julia Boffey,“Richard Pynson’s Book of Fame and The Letter of Dido,”Viator: Medieval and Renaissance Studies  (): –.  McKenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts (Cambridge, ), . This content downloaded from 207.46.13.51 on Sun, 19 Jun 2016 06:23:34 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Abstract Modern students of early Tudor literature only rarely encounter extant Sammelbande, most of which were disbound in the nineteenth century.Yet printed editions of works by (or ascribed to) Geoffrey Chaucer, John Lydgate,Richard Rolle,Margery Kempe,Stephen Hawes, John Skelton, and writers involved in Tudor religious controversy from John Wycliffe to William Tyndale may all be traced to such composite volumes. In “Poets, Printers, and Early English Sammelbande,”Alexandra Gillespie describes material and circumstantial evidence—bindings and rebindings, soiling and annotation, court cases and poems—for a large number of English Sammelbande compiled between  and about . The composition of these volumes reveals a principle of adaptability that is a key aspect of textual production in the early Tudor period.   Modern students of early Tudor literature only rarely encounter extant Sammelbande, most of which were disbound in the nineteenth century.Yet printed editions of works by (or ascribed to) Geoffrey Chaucer, John Lydgate,Richard Rolle,Margery Kempe,Stephen Hawes, John Skelton, and writers involved in Tudor religious controversy from John Wycliffe to William Tyndale may all be traced to such composite volumes. In “Poets, Printers, and Early English Sammelbande,”Alexandra Gillespie describes material and circumstantial evidence—bindings and rebindings, soiling and annotation, court cases and poems—for a large number of English Sammelbande compiled between  and about . The composition of these volumes reveals a principle of adaptability that is a key aspect of textual production in the early Tudor period.    This content downloaded from 207.46.13.51 on Sun, 19 Jun 2016 06:23:34 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms