Joseph A. Dane

The Typographical Gothic: A Cautionary Note on the Title Page to Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry

The “rise of the gothic” in the late eighteenth century is a truism and would seem to require less in the way of evidentiary support than mere confi rmation. While we may not all agree on precisely what “the gothic” or “the Gothic” is any more than we might agree on precisely what we mean by “the sublime,” we presume that the lack of precision in such terms does not invalidate them. After all, our use of the term gothic is not entirely arbitrary, since we fi nd that word used in the texts of the late eighteenth century we consider central to literary study: Richard Hurd’s Letters on Chivalry and Romance and Thomas Warton’s History of English Literature. The gothic is, and there’s an end on’t. It is not the purpose of this paper to off er a new defi nition of the gothic nor to critique those that already exist. Rather we will consider how material bibliographical evidence — features of particular books — been deployed in support of these terms. Is it legitimate, or advisable, to raise to the level of a text’s meaning those bibliographical and material features of the book, namely its format, layout, and typography, that until the late twentieth century were generally considered extra-textual? 1

The Denigration of John Lydgate: Implications of Printing History

Stephen Hawes’s 1505 Pastime of Pleasure includes these verses in testimony to an earlier poet’s influence on the history of English verse. The name Chaucer should fill the blank we have left in the above transcription nicely. But although Hawes does allot Chaucer some nineteen lines of praise, Chaucer is not the lionized writer in this passage. Rather, he who ‘excelled all others’ is Lydgate. The eclipse of Lydgate in English literary history is often noted, and numerous explanations have been offered: he is too prolix, he is tedious, his verse is ‘stupid and fatiguing’; literary tastes simply changed. Most of these comments, as well as the traditional language of this critique (the word prolix), deal with abstract matters that are extremely difficult to quantify or even describe: taste, relative excitement of verse, and even metrical and literary style. A great number of such critical evaluations of Lydgate are ex post facto: they explain a decline in popularity that is itself self-evident and historical, having occurred (generally) in the distant past. The measure of Lydgate’s popularity is of course the number of Lydgate books and texts in circulation; by the sixteenth century, this is effectively a function of the investment printers were willing to make in his works. And the purpose of the present paper is to consider the traditional evaluations of Lydgate in English literary history against a background of this publication history. The clear suggestion from this evidence is that Lydgate’s popularity had nothing to do with abstractions of style or aesthetics. It rather involved matters that preceded any reading of his works: who he was (the Monk of Bury) and the consequent ‘superstitious’ (i.e., ‘papist’) beliefs that were presumed to be found in his texts.

An Early Red-Printed Correction Sheet in the Huntington Library*

T Huntington Library copy of Vulgaria uiri doctissimi Guil. Hormani Caesarisburgensis (London: Richard Pynson, 1519) is in a routine eighteenth-century binding.1 The flyleaf was originally a pastedown on the back cover of what was likely its first binding, and the recto contains contemporary manuscript notes in the same hand as on the facing page (the last page of printed text).2 The verso of this flyleaf, once pasted to the original sixteenth-century board, has text printed entirely in red (see fig. 1). This text is from a set of devotions ordinarily printed with the Sarum Book of Hours (immediately following “The XV Oes in English”) and is from an unrecorded edition, likely of the

Daniel Wakelin, Humanism, Reading, and English Literature, 1430–1530

This book is an interpretive reading of various, often little-known works of the English fifteenth century within the general framework of the word ‘‘humanism.’’ A chapter list and sketch of some of the works discussed within those chapters is as follows: chapter 2, ‘‘Duke Humfrey and Other Imaginary Readers’’; chapter 3, ‘‘Allusion, Translation, and Mistranslation’’ (includes sections on Osbern Bokenham’s Knighthode and Bataile); chapter 4, ‘‘William Worcester and the Commonweal of Readers’’; chapter 5, ‘‘Print and the Reproduction of Humanist Readers’’ (Anwykyll’s grammar, Caxton); chapter 6, ‘‘Eloquence, Reason, and Debate’’ (Henry Medwell’s Fulgens and Lucres and Nature); chapter 7, ‘‘Some Tudor Readers and Their Freedom’’ (Thomas Lupset and Thomas Elyot). Scholars who accept the legitimacy and centrality of the terms will be well rewarded by this book. Wakelin has already contributed to the scholarly debate on English humanism in a series of articles referenced in his extensive ‘‘Works Cited’’ (212–41). For those, like myself, who are not well versed in the nuances of these debates, this book is a frustrating and often exasperating read. My principal difficulty involves the central concept announced in the title: humanism. Wakelin offers neither a clear definition of this term nor any sustained critique of any other definition or application. The introductory chapter reads like an obligatory trip through the literature: Roberto Weiss (3); Denis Hay (4); the medievalists or once-medievalists David Wallace and James Simpson (5), Douglas Gray and R. W. Southern (6 –7), Tim Machan and Seth Lerer (7); Paul Kristeller (8); David Carlson (8 –9); Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine (17). If that list does not seem coherent, it is because there is no coherent argument that runs through

Note on Some Fifteenth-Century Types of Johannes Koelhoff

Johannes Koelhoff was active as a printer in Cologne from 1472 to 1492 and is generally considered central to histories of early printing techniques and book production.1 Robert Proctor, in his 1898 Index to the Early Printed Books in the British Museum, distinguished 21 distinct types for Koelhoff, many more than for contemporary Cologne printers of comparable output.2 Proctors distinctions, basic to the identification of Koelhoffs types and basic also to histories of the development of Koelhoffs press, have been accepted with slight modifications by Kon rad Haebler, the Gesellschaft fur Typenkunde (GfT), the Catalogue of Books Printed in the XVth Century now in the British Museum {BMC), and the Gesamtkatalog der Wiegendrucke (GW).3 Yet Proctor includes at

“Everlastinge to Posterytie”: Chatterton's Spirited Youth

The brief career of the “marvellous Boy” Thomas Chatterton and the genesis of the pseudomedieval poems he attributed to Thomas Rowley have the vague familiarity of Romantic myth. So far as academic literary history is concerned, however, Chatterton has usually figured as an oddball enthusiasm, as the obscure occasion of an overblown debate, or as an avatar of modern celebrity. While recent criticism has begun to regard him as an exemplary exception rather than an isolated curiosity, two modes prevail: one focuses on the psychodynamics of the Rowley story, considered as an exaggerated version of adolescent fantasy, while the other examines how Chatterton’s generic experiments and dealings with patrons illuminate conditions in the late-eighteenth-century literary market. The present essay combines elements of the psychoanalytic and the cultural-materialist approaches both to reflect on how the literary world conspired in Chatterton’s fantasy and to understand how fantasy structures empirical reception. Cowritten by a Romanticist and a medievalist, the essay itself participates formally and thematically in the discontinuous histories it describes. Our analysis, an extended meditation on the metaphor of literary “genealogy,” alternates between intensive and extensive approaches, moving freely between the eighteenth-century context and

Note on the Huntington Library and Pierpont Morgan Library Fragments of the Pseudo-Donatus, "Ars minor (Rudimenta grammatices)" GW 8995, GW 8996

ISTC and the Gesamtkatalog der Wiegendrucke list two entries for the pseudo Donatus Ars minor (Rudimenta grammatices) or Ianua assigned to Johann Zainer (Ulm, 1478-82).1 One is for a group of fragments at the Huntington Library, the other for a group at the Pierpont Morgan Library. Elementary grammar books constitute a special case for incunable catalogues: because so many have survived only in fragments, the catalogue entries for texts such as the Rudimenta, the Donatus Ars minor itself, and the Doctrinale of Alexander de Villa Dei mean something different from what they ordinarily mean; they refer not to editions, but rather to particular fragments housed in particular locations. A typical catalogue entry thus reflects not the facts of fifteenth century printing (the production of the editions represented by fragments) but rather the accidents of provenance (the history of particular groups of frag ments after printing).2 The following note examines the problems posed by