William Caxton's Golden Legend was his largest and most elaborate production, successful enough to appear in nine further editions before the Reformation suddenly made it unpublishable. In English Readers of Catholic Saints: The Printing History of William Caxton's “Golden Legend,” Judy Ann Ford assembles and analyzes the exceptional amount of information available from this extensive publication history, though with inaccuracies at two points. Concerning the first edition, she speaks of a “1483 edition, actually released in 1484” (x), and a second issue dated from its colophon to 1487 (41). The evidence suggests that printing occurred between November 1483 and March 1484. (See now Mayumi Taguchi, John Scahill, and Satoko Tokunaga, eds., Caxton's “Golden Legend,” vol. 1, Temporale [2020], xxxviii. I thank Professor Tokunaga for advice on several points.) While more than half of the quires are extant in a second, reset form, no copy bears the date 1487. Ford reproduces (viii) the dating of the second issue to “1487?” in the Short Title Catalogue, overlooking the correction to “c. 1484” in volume 3 of the Short Title Catalogue; there is unlikely to have been any substantial interval between the printing of the original and reset quires (Taguchi, Scahill, and Tokunaga, xliv). Secondly, there are just two editions from 1507, differing only in being published by de Worde (Short Title Catalogue 24878.3) or Pynson (24878.5); 24878.8 (Taguchi, Scahill, and Tokunaga, viii) is a ghost reproduced from University Microfilms International, identified as such by the English Short Title Catalogue.

The detailed information about the separate editions might have been balanced by a more comprehensive overview, but a notable stability in contents becomes evident. The openendedness of Sanctorale collections makes accretion of legends easy, yet Erasmus (added in the reset final quire of the first edition) was the last such addition to the Golden Legend. The History of the Mass and The Twelve Articles of the Faith appear only in the first edition (their disappearance, Ford suggests, making the book less a primer for parish priests and more a work for private devotional purposes). The preliminary matter—dedication, prologue, and tables of contents—does vary, but it is a matter of dropping elements, rather than replacing or rewriting them. The least stable element is the most novel one: Caxton added a set of Old Testament legends not present in any of his known sources, placing them between the Temporale and the Sanctorale. The second edition omits them, the 1510 edition omits everything else, and in the remaining editions, they are moved to the beginning of the volume, before the prologue (if present) and the main table of contents. As Ford observes, this effectively presents them as a separate book (125).

More could be made of the extent to which the Temporale functions as an equivalent to the New Testament. Caxton chose a French source that, exceptionally, creates such a unit by separating its legends from those of the Sanctorale. The later shifting of the Old Testament to the front heightens the resemblance to a vernacular Bible.

Ford usefully presents a view of the Bible not as an autonomous revelation, but as a collection of narratives that could be paraphrased, excerpted, and combined with noncanonical stories. She instances the inclusion of Tobit, Judith, and Rehoboam as exemplifying the absence of an intention to translate a supposed original correct version of the Bible (74–75); but dismissing the first two as apocryphal is anachronistic (they were current in the Vulgate and Wycliffite Bibles), and Rehoboam comes from the uncontroversially canonical 3 Kings. The point could have been strengthened by placing the Old Testament in the matrix of its source texts. Ford reports Sarah Horrall's important discovery that Cursor mundi was used sporadically, but to it and the Vulgate must be added at least Historia scholastica, the French Bible historiale, Josephus's Antiquities, and the Wycliffite Bible (Taguchi, Scahill, and Tokunaga, xxxi–xxxii and the notes to volume 2). Ford's assumption that Caxton was very likely the translator of the Old Testament (68) misses another connection to a tradition of scriptural reworkings: there is strong linguistic evidence that in large part it originated as the work of another writer, of the mid-fifteenth century (Taguchi, Scahill, and Tokunaga, xxxiv–xxxvi).

Ford perhaps overstresses the association of vernacular scripture with Lollardry, and she does not cite H. A. Kelly's The Middle English Bible: A Reassessment (2016). Nonetheless, Caxton and England were outliers in this period in not producing a vernacular Bible (69). For all that we might like to see the Golden Legend as a quasi-Bible (followed by a Sanctorale), she notes that the Old Testament is reframed as chapters in a collection of saints’ lives (71–72), using paratextual language such as “legend” and “life,” with liturgical links that also seem intended to legitimate the presence of scripture. Yet it includes extensive stretches of close translation of the Vulgate; in particular, long before Tyndale, Caxton had printed the book of Tobit in English, complete and unaugmented apart from a handful of phrases.

Ford's discussion of the individual editions sees their illustrations as the element that best reflects changing intentions and imagined audiences. In the first edition, the choice of legends to illustrate and the size of the woodcuts, reinforcing preferences implied by the original selection of legends, indicate a scriptural inclination, concentrating on Jesus, Mary, the Old Testament, and the evangelists, though the audience was also interested in British saints. In the newly illustrated chapters of the second and later editions, she finds a predilection for popes and bishops. But the fronted and heavily illustrated Old Testament section of the third and subsequent editions confirms that an interest in vernacular scriptures did not necessarily conflict with respect for ecclesiastical authority, or indeed with the cult of the saints.

Ford's study is a valuable “glimpse of a road not taken,” setting out detailed evidence for a specifically pre-Reformation print culture in England that “flourished for more than half a century before the break from Rome” (180). It had a nationalist strand, but portrayed England as an “admired unit within the universal church” (10). Traditional hagiography and vernacular scripture—somewhat disguised—could coexist within a single volume.