Print Culture and the Medieval Author: Chaucer; Lydgate, and their Books 1473–1557 by Alexandra Gillespie

Abstract

524 Reviews and printed books just as he does about Latinate style in English texts, or about the complexities of William Worcester's reading practices. His work as awhole is a fine demonstration of how to use the physical features of books in the service of a study of reception and literaryhistory. Queen Mary, University of London Julia Boffey Print Culture and the Medieval Author: Chaucer, Lydgate, and theirBooks 1473 1557- By Alexandra Gillespie. (Oxford English Monographs) Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2006. xiv+281 pp. ?62. ISBN 978-0-19-926295-3. Not forAlexandra Gillespie 'the author as a by-product of the invention of print ing: the concept of the 'auctor, compiler, maker, or poet' (p. 3) was fully formed by the time of Caxton's firstproducts in 1473-74. Renaissance ideas of authorship were not so much reinvented from classical precedents as adapted from a medi eval model that is surprisingly complex. Chaucer offershis audience a notoriously mercurial author operating through amultiplicity of narrators and personae, while Lydgate in his Siege of Thebes reauthors Chaucer's Canterbury Tales to include himself as a pilgrim narrator of a new story. The commercial production of books inmanuscript, and the use of the author function within that process, were already well established by themid-fifteenth century, as the case of Lydgate's Troy Book demonstrates. Book ownership had by then become the province of bureaucrats, minor gentry, and wealthy merchants as well as of monks and members of the nobility. Booklets made by profes sional scribes added to the ease with which amateur copyists [...], moonlighting bureaucrats, and translator-poets' (p. 50) could produce texts.Caxton's innovative enterprises benefited from and were constrained by existing modes of production and marketing, such as the already flourishing trade in imported printed books. Authors were appropriated or forgotten, and texts transformed, by printers as theypromoted their commodities in response to themarket. At the end of Troilus and Criseyde Chaucer's anxiety about the reception of his composition is tempered by the knowledge thatmisreading is endemic, and that releasing his composi tion entails a loss of control over the text, its interpretation, and his authorship. His anxieties were well placed: publishers were eager to turn 'Chaucer' to their own advantage. In 1517 de Worde appended his own verse epilogue to Troilus, emphasizing Criseyde's guilt, as a means of increasing the poem's appeal to an audience with misogynist tendencies. Printers also exploited themedieval practice of collecting together lyricsby various hands under the general rubric of'Chaucer', thereby encouraging collectors and purchasers, but in the process Chaucer's canon and interpretative profile underwent significant change. Gillespie uses to good effectproblematic evidence such as that adduced from woodcuts and proverbs. Proverbs in particular?readily appropriated by worthy and unworthy alike?epitomize that textual instabilitywhich the printing press in tensified in itsheadlong pursuit of readers and profit.Editions of Lydgate's writings, from 1509 to 1534, show as much. They also reveal how private patronage, and MLR, 105.2, 2010 525 especially the developing system of royal privilege, could be exploited to promote theworth of a book and indeed its political usefulness through both word and image: cardinal Wolsey is depicted in Lydgate's 1527 Fall of Princes as a stable figureunaffected by the turning of Fortune's wheel. The Reformation press became ameans of authorizing the new dispensation?in part by giving themedieval past a new spin. The term 'Canterbury tale' comes to denote aworthless fiction thatmight imperil true piety.At the same time,Chaucer is appropriated by JohnFoxe and others as a Protestant avant la lettre.The Pilgrim's Tale, attributed to Chaucer inGrafton's 1542 Workes, is an anticlerical text pre sented as a Canterbury tale'. If such manoeuvres helped the reformist reputation of Chaucer, theywere also themeans whereby his other, authentic, 'worthless' fictions of a bygone age continued to circulate. Lydgate, too,was cherished by anti quarians as a repository of themedieval past, and one suddenly topical again when Catholicism was briefly restored inMarian England. For presenting such matters with thoroughness, scholarly acumen, and theoretical nous, Gillespie herself richly deserves that 'good utterance' sought by early publishers for their own books. University of...