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This chapter considers the use of the printing press to reproduce classical and humanist texts. It considers ideas about education in copies of Cicero, the Nova rhetorica of Lorenzo Traversagni, and Vulgaria taken from Terence by John Anwykyll. Here, humanist printing seems to offer a rudimentary education in grammar and rhetoric. By contrast, William Caxton uses the press not only to make money but to educate, in the vernacular, an imagined community of humanist readers engaged in serving the commonweal. Thus, Caxton appears as a bold humanist writer, and not the old-fashioned and mercenary dolt whom others have portrayed.

This chapter considers the role of women in the inheritance and propagation of vernacular languages. It reassesses the status of English through historical and linguistic evidence and such figures as Higden and Trevisa by setting it alongside the growing importance of French as a language required by the English in their renewed assertion of rule in France after Agincourt. Material considered includes a fifteenth‐century teaching document known as the Femina, and the dialogues or Manières de Langage. Contemporary writings about English in the shape of the rising genre of the vernacular prologue, with special attention to Usk and such charged words as ‘symple’ and ‘straunge’, are set in the context of a wider discourse about mother tongues. Finishing with Christine de Pizan, and her translator into English, William Caxton, the chapter argues that both English and French are caught up in a conflicted set of associations between the vernacular and the value of natural as against artificial languages.

This chapter offers an overview of the critical reception of Lydgate's work, tracing the decline from a tradition of medieval encomium (voiced by, among others, William Dunbar and William Caxton), which praised Lydgate's aureate style and moralistic content and placed him alongside Geoffrey Chaucer and John Gower in an English poetic triumvirate, to a mid-Tudor ambivalence, much influenced by the Reformation. Later 19th-century traditions of positivistic German scholarship saw a resurgence in interest in Lydgate: attention is paid to the findings of Emil Koeppel's 1885 Munich thesis on the Fall, and to German and French studies that followed, especially that of Friedrich Brie (1929). Although there has more recently been a critical rehabilitation of Lydgate, kick-started in 1987 by David Lawton, attention has focused more on works such as Troy Book and Siege of Thebes than on the Fall.

If birds are of the air, foxes are of the earth: earthy, associated with deceit, with a foul smell, with underground regions, and with Judas, the arch-betrayer. This chapter explores the sort of ‘body’ that is assigned to the fox, and how it is used in various imaginative constructions. It offers readings of some of Henryson's fables, such as ‘The Fox, the Wolf, and the Husbandman’ and ‘The Fox, the Wolf, and the Cadger’, and of Caxton's translation of the Roman de Renart, Reynard the Fox. In the end, the medieval fox is seen to have far more agency than his despised status might suggest. He is allowed to play across the categories, engineering a Bakhtinian process of continuous change and revivification.

The Book of the City of Ladies tapestries housed in the Lady Elizabeth's garderobe in 1547 were not the only form in which Christine de Pizan's works existed in early Renaissance England. A number of Pizan's manuscripts had been in England during the century before Elizabeth's birth. These included a magnificent manuscript of de Pizan's military treatise presented as a wedding gift to Margaret of Anjou, the queen of Henry VI, in 1445. The English printer William Caxton may have based his 1498 edition of the Book of Fayettes of Armes and of Chyualrye on this manuscript. One of these manuscripts may have belonged to Richard, the third duke of York, who served as lieutenant governor and commander of the English forces in France. This manuscript is particularly significant for being close to the English translation by Bryan Anslay, the Boke of the Cyte of Ladyes, which was printed by Henry Pepwell in 1521.

Chapter 3 focuses on the Latin versions of St Margaret’s vita, circulating in medieval England. These include the one from the Golden Legend (Legenda Aurea), which became a base for many other versions, both Latin and vernacular. Its influence is also found in some of the English breviaries, discussed in the second section of the chapter. The chapter proceeds with an overview of Latin verses and hymns to St Margaret and finally discusses the vernacular texts influenced by the Legenda Aurea: the two Middle English translations, the Gilte Legende and Caxton’s Golden Legend; Nicholas Bozon’s Anglo-Norman verse life, and St Margaret’s legend from the Scottish Legendary.

David Matthews explores how Caxton’s awareness of linguistic change informed his editing methods. Caxton’s editing of Trevisa's translation of Higden’s Polychronicon, for example, shows a distinct diachronic consciousness and a desire to forge something new out of Trevisa's ‘old’ English. This stands in contrast to his more deferential treatment of Chaucer. Matthews thus differentiates between philology as a tool for understanding another language and as an editorial practice focused on rendering texts transparent.

After noting the evidence for the public performance of poetry in Continental Europe, this chapter turns to the impact of print on English poetry: from the late fifteenth century, the printers Caxton and de Worde gave readers a new way to experience poems. At the court of Henry VIII, Skelton exploited both manuscript and print. The Devonshire manuscript, which circulated around Henry’s courtiers, is discussed, as is Tottel’s 1557 Songes and Sonettes, whose cachet lay partly in its making the private poetry of the elite available to a large public. Another popular collection was A Mirror for Magistrates, in which a gathering of poets impersonating famous tragic victims of the past was staged. Although there were signs of a suppler use of metre, the 1560s and 1570s were characterized by highly regular verse. The most skilled poet of this period, Gascoigne, was also responsible for a pathbreaking treatise on poetry.

This chapter considers the benefits of filtering medieval ideas of unnatural sex through the postmodern category transgender. It begins by engaging with conceptions of transgender time in recent historiography. This is followed by a detailed analysis of passages on cross-gendered performance and illicit sex in Hildegard of Bingen’s Scivias, which demonstrate the inextricability of concepts of gender and sexuality in the Middle Ages. The remainder of the chapter focuses on the Ovidian myth of Iphis and Ianthe, a sex change narrative mediated in the Middle Ages via a number of moralized retellings of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. These retellings, which include a translation of the prose Ovide moralisé by William Caxton, variously confront and suppress the Iphis story’s “lesbian” implications. In conclusion, the chapter explores other, alternative responses to the myth of Iphis and Ianthe, including retellings by the fifteenth-century poet and intellectual Christine de Pizan and by the contemporary British novelist Ali Smith.

This chapter considers how, as the role of the translator as writer moves increasingly to the fore, the personal statements of translators are beginning to be viewed as an integral part of literary history. It examines the history of such statements, beginning with Catullus, Cicero, Quintilian, Pliny, and Jerome in the Roman world, before moving on to prefaces and introductions to classical poetry translation in Anglo-Saxon and medieval English and Scots, from King Alfred through Gavin Douglas to William Caxton and Arthur Golding.

This chapter focuses on the role of the printing press in the standardization of the English language. A few centuries after the Norman conquest, by the end of the 1300s, English was again a written language. However, there was no agreement on the correct way to write or spell to use as a guide. Some standards started to emerge after the Court of Chancery switched to English in about 1430. This loose, emerging standard came to be known as Chancery English. Then, in 1476, a merchant named William Caxton brought an amazing new invention back to England from the continent: the printing press. This happened to take place during the middle of a major shift in English pronunciation. From the 14th century to the 17th century, the vowel system of English underwent a massive reorganization called the Great Vowel Shift. By the time the Great Vowel Shift had spread through most of the country in spoken language, the writing system, aided by the printing press, had solidified into a standard that was taught, propagated, and reinforced constantly.

This chapter turns from compendious texts to compendious paratext. It explores alphabetical thinking in medieval England through the lens of two indexes, which, it is argued, are the first two official alphabetical indexes in English: Trevisa’s index to the Polychronicon and the Concordance to the English Bible. The growth of English as a literary language temporarily wreaked havoc with the highly functional models of indexing inherited from Latin scholarship. The fits and starts of creating alphabetical indexes in English, however, challenge modern assumptions about alphabetizing and indexing, and provide new insights about medieval ones. Do indexes need always be functional, and how might so-called “dysfunctional” indexes like Trevisa’s offer new methods of navigating texts? How might vernacular finding aids activate the English vernacular as a literary language? These idiosyncratic early English indexes further query the relationship between vernacularity and modernity. Although the growth of the vernacular as a literary language seems to anticipate a post-medieval modernity, a modernity defined in part by the rational use of search tools, this chapter shows that the curious history of information technology does not map so neatly onto English literary history.

While the continental influences on Caxton’s prints have been well documented, scant attention has been paid to the English resonance of Caxton’s own translated romances; this chapter reads these romances and explores the fused chivalric and civic ideology they manifest. To address what Caxton’s prose romances were ‘doing’ in England (in terms of both provenance and work), the reading of their cultural significance pursued here is informed not only by these texts’ origins, print production, and broader readership, but also by their generic and thematic affinities with Malory’s Morte Darthur (which Caxton printed in 1485) and other recent English literature. This chapter concentrates upon Godeffroy of Boloyne (1481), Charles the Grete (1485), and The Foure Sonnes of Aymon (1488) as the three of Caxton’s prose romances most centrally concerned with treason, and also considers non-romance tracts in Caxton’s oeuvre that promulgate similar attitudes towards treason.

A series of extracts from Middle English texts of different dates and types is presented, with commentary on all of the loanwords (from French, Latin, or early Scandinavian) found in each passage. The extracts are drawn from the Final Continuation of the Peterborough Chronicle; the Ormulum; the Ancrene Wisse; John Trevisa’s translation of Ranulf Higden’s Polychronicon; and Caxton’s Prologue to The Boke of Eneydos. This is complemented by a more discursive consideration of some passages from multilingual texts and texts not in English, drawing attention to the questions they raise about some of the likely mechanisms by which words entered English, as well about how far individuals distinguished between the vocabularies of each language in a situation of functional language switching. The chapter is followed by a brief summary of the main conclusions from chapters 11, 12, and 13.

This chapter assesses the significance of the unprecedented growth in Welsh historical writing, mostly in the Welsh language, in the period from the Edwardian conquest of Wales to the Reformation and Acts of Union. This consisted mainly of curating and consolidating works produced earlier in the Middle Ages rather than the composition of new texts. For scribes and patrons, the history that mattered most concerned the Britons and their Welsh successors under the princes whose rule had ended in 1282. By contrast, accounts of the period after the Edwardian conquest were few, brief, and focused on events in England more than those in Wales. The first part of the discussion surveys the main Welsh historical texts composed from the late thirteenth to early sixteenth centuries, with particular attention to the efforts, deeply influenced by Geoffrey of Monmouth, to give the history of the Welsh canonical form in a sequence of texts which between them narrated events from the Trojan War to 1282. The second part focuses on the poet, genealogist, and scribe Gutun Owain (fl. c.1451–1499), the most prolific writer of history in medieval Wales, including his borrowings from the first printed edition of the Middle English prose Brut chronicle published by William Caxton in 1480. These borrowings reflect how, for Gutun Owain, the history of the Welsh in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries was inextricably linked to the kingdom of England and predicated on loyalty to its monarch, while nevertheless retaining a distinctively Welsh inflection.

No other poet in any language has achieved a cultural impact of the length or strength that Virgil has had in England. Virgil was the most broadly known, cited, and invoked of all classical Latin authors, remaining a fixture from Roman Britain of the first century BCE, through the transition into the Anglo-Saxon era (c.450–1066), until the Norman Conquest, and many years beyond, long after the medieval shaded into the early modern period. At the same time, many fluctuations took place in how, and how much, he was studied, interpreted, translated, and adapted, and the modulations have much to tell us about the Middle Ages. This chapter traces the cultural, learned, and literary receptions of Virgil in the British Isles, with special attention to commentaries and to literary imitation by Anglo-Latin writers, Chaucer, Lydgate, Caxton, and Douglas.

This chapter concerns the medieval reception of Ovid’s Metamorphoses and his writings on love, especially the Ars amatoria and Heroides. Through the reception of the Metamorphoses (in commentary, translation, and adaptation) we can trace developments in medieval philosophical conceptions of change, while developments in the reception of Ovid’s works on love shed light on changing attitudes toward gender and sexuality. The chapter begins with an overview of the Latin commentary tradition on Ovid’s Metamorphoses before turning to a closer examination of the vernacular circulation and adaptation of the text. The chapter then turns to the Middle English reception of Ovidian myth, especially as it was mediated through the Ovide moralisé, which was widely read in medieval England, used by both Gower and Chaucer, and finally translated and printed by William Caxton in the late fifteenth century.

A fundamental difference between the late medieval and the sixteenth-century humanist, philological translations of Virgil’s Aeneid consists of how the translator figures, or does not figure, as reader, in the newly produced text. The medieval reception of Virgil explicitly recognizes its own historicity in the process of transmission; the humanist, philological reception would efface that historicity. Comparison of four late medieval/early modern translators of Virgil substantiates this argument: Chaucer, Caxton, Douglas, and Henry Howard Earl of Surrey. Surrey’s effacement is registered in poetic form, in his innovative adoption of blank verse, and his exploitation of both syntax and perspective. Even as he effaces himself, however, the soon-to-be ruined Surrey underlines the new, imperial disciplines of poetic making.