Marginalia -- The Journal of the Medieval Reading Group at Cambridge



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Alexandra Gillespie,
Print culture and the medieval author: Chaucer, Lydgate, and their books, 1473-1557
296 pages. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. £62.00 (Hardback)
ISBN: 978-0-19-926295-3


In Print Culture and the Medieval Author Alexandra Gillespie offers a fascinating bibliographical exploration of the textual transmission and reception of the works of Geoffrey Chaucer and his disciple John Lydgate. Gillespie's chosen thesis is especially complex, requiring combined analysis of theoretical concepts and material textualities, concentrated within a particularly difficult period. And yet she transcends her self-imposed constraints from the outset, challenging interdisciplinary boundaries in a study that is superbly conceived, authoritatively argued and exhaustively supported.

The book focuses on the politics of authorship and through exploring the Medieval makings and Renaissance remakings of these texts, it demonstrates how authors were exploited in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century book production. Gillespie begins her Introduction by quoting Foucault: '[t]he author is the principle of thrift in the proliferation of meaning…one impedes the free circulation, the free manipulation, the free composition, decomposition, and recomposition of fiction'. She extends this interpretation to the turbulent literary culture of early modern England, investigating the ways in which authors were used to 'assign and mediate authority for the act of producing or reproducing a text' (p. 12). Supported by detailed reference to the paratextual additions and alterations present in hundreds of 'ordered and disordered' early printed books and their late medieval analogues, Gillespie argues for the importance of authors to the arrangement and promotion of texts in the 'increasingly organized, increasingly professional, and newly productive book trade' (p. 35).

Gillespie's focus on Chaucer and Lydgate is wise, given the breadth of her study, and the wide range of issues she addresses. These two poets were crucial to the place of medieval texts in early modern printed books, and centring the study upon these twin foci sets 'very useful limits for the study of the medieval author and print culture in England up to 1557' (p. 22). Exploration of the transition of the works of Chaucer and Lydgate from manuscript production into print proceeds chronologically, eschewing as false the idea of an undisturbed 'teleological progression from a chaotic Middle Age for books to a commercialized, authorized, early modern one' (p. 29). The book opens with a pair of contextualising chapters on Caxton and fifteenth-century English printing; Gillespie then narrows the focus in her third and fourth chapters, examining first the assemblage of Chaucer's texts in print, 1517 – 1532 and then editions of Lydgate, 1509 -1534 before concluding in 'The Press, the Medieval Author and the English Reformations, 1534 to 1557', with a broader consideration of the sixteenth-century book trade. She delineates how contemporary innovative textual technologies simultaneously invoke and exploit unstable textual traditions.

Gillespie's central premise is that in early modern book production, 'the figure of the medieval writer organizes and markets textual material, assigns it value, licenses it, sanctions it, or marks it out as illicit' (p. 5). She pursues this theory with vision and great skill. She comprehensively and convincingly demonstrates how the medieval author was used to limit, mediate, and profit from the commercialisation of vernacular texts in the contemporary book trade. Furthermore she illustrates how the emergence of print culture caused existing unstable ideas about authors to become even more insecure. Gillespie's vivid scholarship analyses a literary culture in turmoil, exploring the transitional fifteenth- and sixteenth-centuries, when clear-cut boundaries between manuscript and print cultures were absent and in which authors became dynamized categories proliferating, energizing and changing textual meaning. She reveals the complicated network of interrelations inherent in textual production in this period, fraught with multiple tensions between publication and authority, and emphasizes its context as

a set of social relations – a gift economy in which the writer is supplicant, 'bounde' or seeking bondage within a system of noble patronage and reward; networks of fellowship and fraternity in which the desire of 'gentilmen' is met by the printer who can then identify them as 'frendes'; a culture of Christian devotion that sets good works against 'vices' and labour against idleness; and finally a money economy (p. 28).

The book's importance is evident from its status as the first detailed analysis of either Chaucer or Lydgate in early print. It is further distinguished by the energy and enthusiasm resonating throughout Gillespie's writing. She productively transcends 'the artificial limit set for the history of the book by the study of incunables' (p. 23) and rejects imposed and restrictive disciplinary boundaries as unproductive and imprecise. She reveals the complicated network of interrelations inherent in textual production in this period, fraught with multiple tensions between publication and authority, and based on complex social divisions. Within this unstable, fragmented community, Gillespie argues, authors 'lent a kind of dignity, all the value of the past, to books produced at moments when for various reasons – in the context of a large number of new printed books and amid political, religious and intellectual change – it was especially important to define the value of texts' (p. 232). She stresses the flexibility necessary to textual production during times when strategies of adoption and integration, and adaptability were necessary for commercial success, determining that, ultimately, authors were about definition in times of ill-defined categories.

Gillespie fits the interest in medieval authors with the wider Renaissance attention to classical inheritance, succeeding in providing a superb exploration of Renaissance book producers' exploitation of Medieval and Classical theories of authorship, offering an illuminating insight into turbulent literary times. She stresses instability, transition and uncertainty in all avenues of early modern textual production. The outstanding quality of her scholarship and the breadth of her literary perspective make this is a very necessary read not only for book historians, textual materialists and print culture scholars, but for all literary historians. Medievalists and early modernists alike will find it equally informative and instructive, complex but accessible, thorough but involving and always fascinating.

Alexander Devine, Corpus Christi College


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NOTES

1. Michel Foucault, 'What is an Author?', pp. 158-9.


© 2004 The authors and the Medieval Reading Group at the University of Cambridge
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