Caxton's Trace is an ambitious collection of essays whose contributions extend well beyond their late fifteenth-century focus. This volume is particularly impressive for its integrity: the chapters cohere to a remarkable degree, creating sustained interventions in our ongoing study of printing, of technology and culture, of early capitalism, and of English nationalism. The book comprises clusters of essays on “The Introduction of the Press: The Culture Machine,” “Manuscript and Print Strategies,” and “Language, Book, and Politics.” These are framed by William Kuskin's significant introductory essay, which deftly moves debate about “print culture” beyond the prevailing vocabulary of revolutionary versus incremental change, and Seth Lerer's study of Caxton in the nineteenth century, which deepens the volume's demonstration of Caxton's sustained importance as a synecdoche for English letters. Throughout, the volume welcomes the broad audience it deserves with efficient yet graceful elaborations of subdisciplinary cruxes, enabling medievalists, book historians, linguistic historians, and cultural materialists to appreciate its interwoven arguments.
The volume links the impasse of the Elizabeth Eisenstein-Adrian Johns debate on the continuity of print and manuscript practices both to the historiographic impasse of hard periodization (“othering” the Middle Ages) and to the theoretical impasse of distinguishing causes from effects of technological-economic-social change. Kuskin astutely proposes that these questions have been underformulated, in ways amenable to paradoxical impasse, under ideological pressures to “justify … modernity's sense of itself as defined by historical rupture” (6). Instead, by cross-reading early English printing with its “legacy,” this volume understands medieval and modern as “an interrelated series of connections,” detectable “in the symbolic layer of early English books” (7). The essays laudably attend to nuance, heterogeneity, and uneven developments in these connections.
Especially welcome in the volume's introduction and first section is the combination of crisp redactions of post-Marxist theory with deeply sensitive, historically informed close analysis of fifteenth-century primary materials. David R. Carlson argues that we have anachronistically misunderstood the place of “literature” in Caxton's catalog: Caxton printed poetry, Carlson suggests, to occupy his presses between orders for more commercially significant ephemera. Carlson asks how printers stimulated demand for printed books, demonstrating the commercial origins of the corpus that became “literature.” Where Carlson takes up the question of new machinery on such cultural formations as literature, Mark Addison Amos explores Caxton's printing as an intervention in the shifting social formations attendant upon economic changes in the late fifteenth century. Amos presents Caxton as an experienced guildsman; like many of the strongest essays in this collection, Amos grants Caxton the agency that makes him far more interesting a figure than a panderer to patronage or a technological pawn. Amos shows how Caxton's publication The Book of the Knyght demonstrates and negotiates shifting class relations by, interestingly, figuring social difference as gender difference; Amos's attention to fine distinctions reveals that a text that at first glance appears merely to rehearse familiar late-medieval ideas about gender meditates upon, and effects, social mobility. Jennifer R. Goodman shares Amos's interest in displacing the image of Caxton simply as an Englishman who borrows Burgundian court culture for dissemination via new technology. Like Amos, Goodman draws upon Caxton's decades-long expatriation, in her case to contextualize Caxton's selection of Continental romances to translate and print in English. This activity, Goodman suggests, constitutes an intervention both in vernacularity (creating an English corpus, and also maintaining interest in French romance in the face of Latin literary ascendancy) and also in a particularly cosmopolitan notion of national identity.
A. E. B. Coldiron analyzes a series of editions of Christine de Pizan's Prouerbes moraulx, examining the constitution of Christine's moral authority to advise implied readerships of different national identity, rank, or gender. Alexandra Gillespie takes up the kinds of reframing essayed in the collection's first section by focusing on the diversity of strategies for making early printed books desirable (efforts that varied both over time and among printers) and the unpredictability of reception that makes any printer's strategy only one gambit in ongoing cultural negotiations of value. Gillespie astutely teases out the complex strands of innovation, tradition, and each masquerading as the other, as early booksellers positioned their product.
William Kuskin's essay on the English press and “vernacular community” depicts the late fifteenth century not as an awkward watershed, but as a crucial and self-aware moment in the constitution of English vernacular, English nation, and capitalist production. Kuskin insists on keeping the press's material and symbolic work in play simultaneously, bringing together scrupulous historical investigation of his major categories with shrewd ideological analysis, yielding significant correctives for the practice of book history. Kuskin demonstrates how ideological investments can produce blind spots in scholarship; the following three essays in the section each plumb one such concept rendered hardly visible by inherited wisdom. William N. West unpacks the idea of the edition as a minimal unit of identity in a book's history, showing that the notion of successive editions, invented in the late fifteenth century, depend on paradoxical impulses toward novelty (material difference being why one should purchase a new copy), and toward conservation (idealized similarity to an “original” constituting the added value of the new edition). This epitomizes larger complexities in printing's relationship to temporality: why the new technology of printing focused most of its energy on disseminating old texts; how—in analysis that dovetails with Gillespie's contribution—printing sometimes invokes the authority of tradition, other times of innovation. Related, Patricia Clare Ingham illuminates how the Tudor models of power we have taken as solid formations capable of authorizing printing were themselves constituted and mitigated in relationship to the new technology. Ingham shows that printing Henrician law, in the vernacular, creates new models of law: by distinguishing Henrician/English practice from Lancastrian/French models (thereby intertwining with the questions of deriving authority from tradition or from innovation); by casting knowledge of basic statues as a subjects’ responsibility; and by rendering subjects’ knowledge of laws important not merely as a means for subjecting them to royal authority, but also to protect them from royal abuse. Tim William Machan takes up a linguistic inflection of the section's effort to use close reading of particular texts and previously underinterrogated categories of analysis to illuminate one another. Exploring printing's relationship to the rapid linguistic change of the late fifteenth century, Machan suggests that print maintained forms of speech already going out of spoken usage, that it sought to maintain the legibility of Middle English, and that such efforts made visible the fact of historical linguistic change. Such awareness of difference produces the kind of historical imagination investigated in Seth Lerer's concluding essay, which shows how nineteenth-century ways of studying Caxton chart successive Victorian models of English literature, nation, and history.
“Literature,” “nation,” “history,” “capital”: these essays consistently turn to issues of this magnitude. But whereas all too often we credential local studies by invoking such major problems mechanically, this collection genuinely studies them in fresh, nuanced, sometime brilliant ways. Caxton's Trace persuades us that the late fifteenth century is a crucial period for students of a wide range of categories, and shows how much its sophisticated reflection upon their constitution has to teach us.
