English Readers of Catholic Saints

The Printing History of William Caxton's Golden Legend

Judy Ann Ford

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000062335
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European Medieval History
• Index: History

In 1484, William Caxton, the first publisher of English-language books, issued The Golden Legend, a translation of the most well-known collection of saints' lives in Europe. This study analyzes the molding of the Legenda aurea into a book that powerfully attracted the English market. Modifications included not only illustrations and changes in the arrangement of chapters, but also the addition of lives of British saints and translated excerpts from the Bible, showing an appetite for vernacular scripture and stories about England's past. The publication history of Caxton's Golden Legend reveals attitudes towards national identity and piety within the context of English print culture during the half century prior to the Henrician Reformation.

1 William Caxton and devotional literature

William Caxton (c.1415/24–c.1492) was the first person to print books in the English language.¹ Often remembered only as a printer, that is, as someone who sets into type materials ordered by others, Caxton also functioned as a publisher.² While his firm printed some materials to order, especially shorter tracts such as indulgences, Caxton acted as a publisher in that he selected texts to produce as books and risked his own capital in the hope that his investment would be rewarded through sales. Some texts he published in their original language and others he translated into English, implying that he thought the latter would appeal to book buyers who preferred to read in that language or who might be able to read only English. He guided the appearance of every book he produced through organization, paratext, typeface, and illustration, producing a format designed to be attractive to customers. As William Kuskin observes, a printing firm in Caxton’s day remained solvent only if its books sold in sufficiently high numbers to repay the production costs of type, labor, ink, and paper.³ Caxton was the first publisher in England whose business was financially successful.⁴ Many of the first generation of European printing firms were commercial failures: even Johannes Gutenberg (1400–1468), in the words of Andrew Pettegree, “died bankrupt and disappointed.”⁵ Caxton’s firm prospered, demonstrating that he knew his market well. An analysis of the internal logic of one of Caxton’s books to reconstruct his choices offers an outstanding opportunity to perceive in greater depth the interests and inclinations of English book buyers as imagined by a publisher whose commercial success reveals his astute understanding of his market.

Some of Caxton’s texts were reissued or produced in more than one edition, either by Caxton or other early printing firms.⁶ Reprints and subsequent editions of the same title indicate that the sales of the first edition were deemed satisfactory. Titles from Caxton’s list picked up by other early printers very likely were reliable sellers, if not exceptional ones.⁷ Every edition of every title represents the culmination of a series of judgments. In addition to modifications that might be made in the text, new editions could introduce changes in the size of pages, the division of the text into columns, and the incorporation of tables of contents and illustrations, and other paratextual elements. Changes made in subsequent editions of a text indicate refinements in the publishers’ attempt to market a product, as well as developments in the reading public’s tastes.

Caxton’s firm was located in Westminster, but the reading public served by publishers in and around London was national. As Peter Blayney explains, success for those who made their living from the printing press was largely a matter of being able to sell books as fast as they were made. Neither Caxton nor his colleagues could have sold enough books from their own retail shops to have recovered production costs. They needed to sell books to other shopkeepers, that is, to sell multiple copies of each title at discounted prices to as many booksellers as possible, who would sell them in turn to individual buyers at a higher price.⁸ So in addition to a retail bookshop, Caxton would have sold books wholesale.⁹ Latin-language books could be sold anywhere in Europe, but those in the English language would find their market almost exclusively in England. Caxton’s English-language titles would have been sold not only in his shop in Westminster but by booksellers all over England; therefore, his catalog reveals his attempts to appeal to the tastes not only of London, but of book buyers throughout the country.

Among Caxton’s titles, one was distinguished not only by a heavy initial investment in both materials and time, as it was long and required translation, but also by proving sufficiently successful to merit multiple editions issued by his shop and those of other publishers: The Golden Legend. In March of 1484, Caxton released his first edition of this massive collection of saints’ lives.¹⁰ A colossal project, this edition comprised 449 folio leaves, and was decorated throughout with woodcuts.¹¹ It was printed on paper larger than Caxton used for any other book.¹² The Golden Legend was both the largest book that Caxton translated and the largest he printed.¹³ He reissued it in 1487, and then a second edition was published in 1493, posthumously, by his assistant and successor in the business, Wynkyn de Worde (1455–1534).¹⁴ Worde published five additional editions by himself, the last in 1527, of which one was highly abbreviated.¹⁵ Worde also published an edition collaboratively with the London publisher Richard Pynson in 1507, and yet another London publisher, Julian Notary, produced his own edition in 1504.¹⁶ Altogether, there were ten issues released in forty-four years.

The printing history of Caxton’s Golden Legend tells a story about English book buyers during a pivotal period when medieval England gave way to the English Renaissance, when the Wars of the Roses resolved into the reign of the Tudor dynasty, and when new theologies introduced by Martin Luther and his followers began to percolate into English religious thought. Caxton’s initial decision to translate and publish a massive, lavishly illustrated collection of saints’ lives, a very traditional genre of popular devotional literature, argues for his expectation that affluent customers would be found to purchase copies, a group that probably included not only ecclesiastical institutions such as parish churches, but also landed gentry, government bureaucrats, members of Parliament, lawyers, and prosperous urban merchants.¹⁷ His selection of material for that edition reveals what he believed would enhance the appeal of this conventional work of popular piety, selections that include a large amount of text on British saints as well as vernacular translations of scripture. The choices made by the publishers who crafted each of the subsequent editions of Caxton’s Golden Legend over the course of nearly half a century are evidence of continuities and changes in the taste and preferences of readers in late medieval and early Tudor England.

Born in Kent in the early 1420s, William Caxton had a long career trading in fine fabrics and luxury items before reinventing himself as a publisher who used the new technology of the printing press.¹⁸ Caxton was a successful businessman who belonged to the most prosperous commercial associations of his day.¹⁹ He was a member of the Mercers, the company to which the greatest number of wealthy English merchants belonged, and which, in consequence, played a prominent role in London politics.²⁰ Mercers were merchants who traded in expensive fabrics such as silk and linen as well as small luxury goods such as manuscript books.²¹ Caxton joined the Mercers as an apprentice in London in 1438 and worked as a member of their company for much of his adulthood.²² In addition, Caxton belonged to the Merchant Adventurers who, like the Mercers, traded in luxury goods. They controlled the import/export trade between England and the Low Countries, with the exception of wool, which was under the authority of the Merchants of the Staple of Calais.²³ The Mercers and the Merchant Adventurers were closely connected: when the Merchant Adventurers of London held meetings, they did so in the Mercers’ Hall.²⁴ As a member of these organizations, Caxton exported manuscript books among other items from the Low Countries into England.²⁵ His career trained him to consider books from a commercial perspective rather than a literary one.²⁶

After his apprenticeship, Caxton lived and worked in the Low Countries from 1446 to 1476, mostly in Bruges.²⁷ Located in the Duchy of Burgundy, one the wealthiest parts of Europe, Bruges, like Paris, was a prominent center of the trade in fine manuscripts.²⁸ Bruges’s “golden age,” a period of extraordinary investment in literature and the arts, coincided with Caxton’s residence there.²⁹ Although the English trade was important to its economy, the wealth of fifteenth-century Bruges attracted merchants from other states, including those of Italy. Florence, Genoa, and Venice were active in the importation of luxury goods to Bruges to meet the market created by the growing prosperity of the area. As an exporter of fine goods, Caxton had ample opportunity to encounter the products of the Italian Renaissance. As well as the fine arts, humanist culture flourished in the fifteenth-century Italian city-states, and both scholars and merchants carried that culture into Bruges.³⁰ The municipal government of Bruges and its wealthy citizens served as patrons for the production of writing, painting, music, and architecture. The availability of patronage encouraged Italian humanist scholars as well as Renaissance artists to pursue careers there.³¹ Caxton knew clerics and ambassadors interested in humanism in Bruges, such as John Gunthorpe, John Russell, and John Morton.³²

Bruges was not only a wealthy commercial center; it was also the site of the Burgundian court during the fif...