Caxton's Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye

Preface

It was in 1894 that H. Oskar Sommer published William Caxton’s Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye with a detailed description of the volume, a comprehensive introduction and the text with a full list of names and places and a glossary. It is, however, rather difficult to read for the modern reader because it has no modern punctuation. Furthermore, it is neither a diplomatic nor a critical text, but a hybrid text, containing not just a few errors. On the other hand, Norman Blake states that modern editions of Caxton’s works are necessary for ‘a proper assessment of his linguistic and literary accomplishments’. Therefore, it is worth editing a critical text with modern punctuation in order to help the modern reader have an easy access to the monumental Incunabulum that it is.

I am greatly indebted to Dr. Lotte Hellinga for her reply to my inquiries, and my warm thanks are due to Professor Emeritus Toshiyuki Takamiya at Keio University for his valuable suggestions and the variety of information he made available to me, and to Professor Emeritus Thorlac Turville-Petre at the University of Nottingham for his kindly help. I am also grateful to the British Library for permission to use Caxton’s device in Harl. 5919 as a book cover and for the digital images of MS Royal 17.E.ii, BL C.21.d.15 and BL G. 10509, and to Dr. David S. Zeidberg, director of the Huntington Library for permission to reproduce the copper engraving as a frontispiece and for the digital images of RB 62222. Also many thanks must go to the John Rylands Library for permission to use folio 253^r as a frontispiece as well as for displaying the digital images of the Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye on the internet; to Dr. Catherine Sutherland at the Pepys Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge and to Dr. James Clements at King’s College Library, Cambridge for the information of Wynkyn de Worde, and to Dr. Nicolas Bell at Trinity College Library, Cambridge for the information of William Morris; and to the Media Center of Keio University for the digital images of the Recuyell; and furthermore to the Morgan Library, the Bodleian Library, the Library of the Royal College of Physicians, the Scheide Library and the Firestone Library of Princeton University, the Harry Ransom Center of the University of Texas at Austin, the Library Company of Philadelphia, the Butler Library of Columbia University, Yale Center for British Art, Yale Beinecke Library and the New York Public Library for digital images of some folios of the copy. I am much obliged to Dr. Marc Aeschbach for his edition Le Recoeil des Histoires de Troyes, without which I could not have completed my edition, and to Dr. Renaud Adam at the Université de Liège for offering me his article; and also indebted to Gallica, Bibliothèque nationale de France for the free use of the digital images of Le Recueil des hystoires de Troyes on the internet, to the Centre National de Resources Textuelles et Lexicales for the free use of Dictionnaire de Moyen Française on the internet, to Institute de Recherche et d’Histoire des Textes for the digital images of Arras, Bibliothèques municipales MS 1075, to Bibliothèque Royale de Belgique for the digital images of MSS 9254, 9261 and 9263, and to Österreichische Nationalbibliothek for the digital images of Cod. 3439. Lastly, I would like to express my deepest gratitude to Professor A. S. G. Edwards for his advice, to Dr. Helen Spencer, editorial secretary of the EETS for her helpful criticism, to Dr. Sarah Alyn Stacy, editor of the series Court Cultures of the Middle Ages and Renaissance and Director of the Trinity Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Trinity College Dublin, Dr Gerald Morgan, Director of the Chaucer Hub and the Centre’s Editorial Board for their encouragement, and to Dr. Laurel Plapp at the Peter Lang for her patient help, to Dr. Elizabeth Morrison at J. Paul Getty Museum and to Dr. Roos Depla at KBR Museum for the information of a heraldic symbol, and to Mr. Yasuhiko Kageyama, an ardent devotee of Caxton for his earnest study and contribution to this subject.

March 2024

Hiroyuki Matsumoto

Introduction

William Caxton (c.1422–91) is well known for introducing printing into England in 1476, when he set up his presses at Westminster. The place where he led his active life as a merchant and a diplomat was Bruges, which was then the most prosperous international center of trade in northern Europe. This enabled it to increase cultural exchange between Italy and the Low Countries and gather various kinds of latest information. Therefore, the late fifteenth century was called the beginning of the Northern Renaissance. In such milieus, Caxton was born, it is said, in the Weald of Kent in c.1422, and apprenticed to a mercer (Robert Large) in London in 1438. In c.1446, he became a freeman of the Mercers’ Company and a resident of Bruges. In c.1462, he was nominated for Governor of the English Nation in Bruges. Caxton’s association with Margaret of York, sister of Edward IV, seems to have begun at the time of her marriage to Charles the Bold. The marriage festivities, including the pageantry of Hercules (the court of Burgundy fostered the legend that the dukes were descended from the ancient hero Hercules), continued for a week. Such a connection with the court of Burgundy and the Greek legend including Hercules was probably Caxton’s motivation for his first translation of the Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye (hereafter Recuyell).¹ Another motivation may be that Raoul Lefèvre’s Recueil des histoires de Troyes (hereafter Recueil) was, as George Painter mentions,² the latest Burgundian best-seller.

Painter also observes that Margaret moved to Ghent (in her palace) on 16 February and stayed there until June 25, 1471, where Caxton’s interview took place in March 1471. When he showed her the ‘five or six quires’ of translation, which he had laid aside for two years before, he was commissioned to continue the translation, so resumed in Ghent until June 1471 when she left. Then he moved to Cologne for eighteen months of residence, where he finished translating Book II on September 19, 1471, and probably Book III in the year. During his stay in Cologne in 1472, he learned printing from Johann Veldener.³

In respect of Caxton’s beginning printing, Hellinga puts forward a new theory that it may have been in Ghent rather than in Bruges that he printed the Recuyell with David Aubert in 1473. The points of her supposition are (1) in those days the strict regulations of the city [Bruges] and the guild would not allow anyone who was not a citizen of Bruges to carry out the business of any book production; (2) in 1473 and 74, the period during which the workshop that printed the Recuyell and the Game of Chess was set up from scratch, Margaret of York’s main residence was in Ghent; (3) in Ghent, Caxton came to know David Aubert, whom Margaret of York commissioned to write luxurious manuscripts; (4) Caxton obtained the services of Johann Veldener to design a font (Type 1) to represent Aubert’s script mechanically, and also engaged him to install the printer’s workshop and instruct (at least two) compositors in Ghent; (5) in 1475, in order to move to Westminster to begin printing in England, he commissioned Veldener to make another font (Type 2), which was also favored by Colard Mansion his associate. Mansion may have been beginning to plan the setting up of his own printing house in Bruges as he was allowed to do as a citizen.⁴

Against Hellinga’s above-cited new supposition, Renaud Adam disputes that ‘the absence of a colophon in Caxton’s productions is perhaps explained as an attempt to conceal the place of publication in order to circumvent the regulations of the Guild of St. John in Bruges’, and therefore that ‘Caxton’s activities were based in Bruges’.⁵ He also argues, by examining Caxton’s first type and Aubert’s script (g, d, S, C), that since they do not resemble each other, it is difficult to accept the idea of the direct intervention of a copyist in the design of Caxton’s alphabet. He concludes that Caxton’s association with Mansion will settle all the problems.⁶

Concerning the absence of a colophon, however, there are two opposite opinions: J. S. Kennard admits that Caxton’s Epilogue (395/25–396/22) with the Latin verse, is the colophon of the Recuyell,⁷ although this is obviously not an ordinary mode of colophon with ‘author, place, publisher-printer and date’. And then, William Blades states: ‘Colard Mansion, like all the first printers, issued most of his productions without date, and many even without name or place.’⁸ However, Caxton’s Own Prose edited by Blake⁹ shows that about thirty-two texts contain colophons or colophon-like descriptions in the Epilogue.

The next problem is with regard to who played a more important role in printing Caxton’s Recuyell: Colard Mansion or David Aubert? Paul Trio, by reference to the account books, observes that ‘since the dean of the Guild of St. John the Evangelist actually drew up and presented the accounts, we have a concrete example of Mansion’s writing for the years 1472 and 1473 …’¹⁰ Considering the year when Caxton finished his translation at the end of 1471, Mansion seems to have been in a better position as the dean of the Guild to help Caxton to print books than Aubert, particularly if he could have collaborated with him at Mansion’s workshop in Bruges. On the other hand, Aubert probably could not have afforded to help Caxton with printing in those days when he was engaged in producing The Visions of Tondal, and according to the colophon, finished in 1474.¹¹ Moreover, Scot McKendrick remarks that ‘as a ducal secretary, David Aubert followed his peripatetic masters’¹² (italics mine). All things considered, even if there had been the regulations of the Guild, and if the collaboration had been admitted at Mansion’s atelier, Caxton could have printed his text in Bruges. Therefore, after he left for England in 1476, Mansion started to publish his printed books one after another from 1476 onwards. In fact, the Incunabula Short Title Catalogue (ISTC) records that the number of Mansion’s incunabula amounts to twenty-six.

In respect of the date of printing the Recuyell, Blake speculates, ‘if [the printing of] History of Troy was begun at three presses in April/May 1473, it could have been finished by the end of the year, or early in 1474.’¹³ On the other hand, Painter states: ‘In the summer of 1473, Caxton was named among those commissioned to attend diets with Charles at Bruges and with the Hanse at Utrecht, at which the main articles of peace with the Hanse were drafted on 19 September, and agreed on 28 February 1474.’¹⁴ It seems, therefore, that Caxton was busy with the diplomatic negotiations in 1473. Even if the Recuyell had been printed in that year, he might not have had enough time to watch the progress of the printing on the scene in person. In fact, a large number of typographic errors in the text¹⁵ (enumerated in A List of Errors and Emendations: pp. 623–34) and some strange distribution of different emendations, such as ‘frenshe/frenche; Troian/Troians; the turned ‘of’ and its emended form’ which are found in fourteen copies of the text (described below at p. xxx) evidently disclose that he might not actually have been engaged in printing on the spot at all those times. Even so, it would be more reasonable to suppose that the date of printing might have been in 1473, considering the articles of peace with the Hanse were agreed on February 28, 1474, and the Game of Chess finished on March 31, 1474.

The next question is that although Caxton complained about ‘his dimmed eyen with ouermoche lokyng on the whit paper’ and ‘creeping old age’ in the Epilogue of Bk. III, why did Caxton persist in translating for himself, instead of commissioning the work to a specialist such as a scholar or a man of letters? As he mentioned in Eneydos, he could have entrusted translation to ‘Mayster John Skelton, late created poete laureate in the Unyversite of Oxenforde’.¹⁶ However, the ISTC indicates that all twenty-two English translations were made by Caxton alone, except for three cases made by Earl Rivers. Therefore, it may well be said that when he introduced the cutting-edge technology of printing for the first time in England, he may have had an aspiration to be a publisher-translator rather than a mere printer or mean bookseller. In fact, if we listen to his own voices or read various kinds of descriptions in Caxton’s Own Prose, we could recognize that Caxton endeavored not only to please but also to cultivate the clients (‘the redars and hierers’) in the vernacular.

Blake argues against the ordinary categorization of such titles as history, romance and satire, by dividing them into two categories: the practical and the courtly. The practical is intended for a particular client on a commercial basis or a special market. It consists of law books, religious books and some humanist writings in Latin. Books in the practical group were printed either to keep the press working or when political conditions made the publication of courtly books too precarious. On the other hand, the courtly category is meant for translations by Caxton, works of the English poets and prose works in English.¹⁷ Thus Blake’s categorization may be reasonable because his argument is based on a commercial and practical standpoint, not on a conventional and literary one. Furthermore, Blake argues Caxton’s choice of texts, which would tend to have a Burgundian bias, and concludes that he would appeal primarily to members of the aristocracy. His successor, de Worde, however, printed books which were likely to be more generally popular in the different markets.¹⁸

As Caxton translated the Dutch Die Hystorie van Reynaert die Vos as well as the French Recueil into English, he was clearly trilingual. Therefore, it is natural to suppose that he was conscious of language itself. As a matter of fact, he stated that the English language was so various that he had taken the mean between ‘rude’ and ‘curyous’ (=learned) English for his translation.¹⁹ In short, Caxton’s idea of unstable English and his principle of the mean way led to his publication functioning as the stabilization and standardization of the English language. In the seventeenth century, however, his edition was emended owing to the difficulty of some words and sentences: Oskar Sommer briefly describes the printing history of the Recuyell from the second edition by de Worde in 1503 to the modern edition by William Morris in 1892, including the eighteenth edition by Thomas Brown in Dublin in 1738. What is noteworthy is the description in the preface of the third edition by Thomas Creede in 1607: ‘And whereas before time, the translator William Caxton, being (as it seemeth) no English man, had left very many words meere French, and sundry sentences so improperly Englished, that it was hard to vnderstand, we haue caused them to bee made plainer English’ and it was ‘corrected and emended by William Fiston.’²⁰ This description evidently shows that the Recuyell contained difficult words and sentences for English people in 1607 to understand.

The undercurrent throughout the whole work of the Recuyell is an everlasting and universal theme of mankind: ‘love and war/peace’, as Diane P. Thompson argues historically about the Trojan War,²¹ As for ‘love’, take for example, a consummation of the secret love of Jupiter (85/28–86/29), an earnest monologue of love by Neptune (120/27–121/10), a psychological description of love by Hercules (252/4–27), a love-sick monologue by Queen Facua (307/16–33), a sophisticated dialogue between Hercules and Facua (308/16–309/1), or lengthy letters of complaint by Deyanira (329/3–24, 330/7–332/15). Although the setting of the story is ancient Greece, those descriptions remind us of modernity, especially a modern romance. On ‘war/peace’, the Recuyell contains the following passage: e.g. the Archadian embassy tells Saturn that ‘euery kynge ought t’entende to lyue in peas, for the most fayr thyng of the world is peas …’ (63/11–18), and the antiwar opinion is stated by King Oeneus to Hercules: ‘for warre is the eternall exyllement of the contre, perdycion and waste of the peple and of goodes.’ (251/8–9), This subject must have been shared by Lefèvre and Caxton, for both men had hardship in some wars at home and abroad: the war between England and France was resumed in 1449, whereas the War of the Roses began in 1455 in England. Actually in the Epilogue of Bk. III (474/12–14), Caxton concluded the antiwar sentiments: ‘whiche [the general destruction of Troy] may be ensample to all men duryng the world how dredefull and ieopardous it is to begynne a warre and what harmes, losses and deth foloweth.’

Another aspect of humanity may be found in the similar behaviour of some of the characters in Shakespeare’s plays: (1) Macbeth’s remorse and Dardanus’s bloody deed (23/11–12): ‘Ha! fortune vnstedfast! What is me befalle? My handes ben foule and filthid with the blood of my laufull broder.’ (2) Titus’s disgusting deed and King Licaon’s horrible conduct (26/2–9): ‘the king Licaon … there toke the body of th’Epirien, his seruaunt that he had murdrid the same nyght, and rostid and soden, brought hit in a grete plater to the feste and presented hit to th’Epiriens.’ (3) Antony’s agitating speech and Jupiter’s inflammatory speech (28/19–25): ‘… O, ye men of Pelage, that ye ... werke! This is the guerdon and reward that he hath don to hym. He hath tirannysed right euyll and hath don hym euyll for good …’ (4) The forsaken Lear and King Cacus’s lamentation (294/31–295/2): ‘Alas, now am I exiled & banysshid out of all my seignouries & lordshippis. Now haue I no socours ne comforte of persone. I dare not name me kynge, where I was wonte by my name make kynges to tremble …’ (5) Lady Macbeth’s reproof and Deyanira’s reproach (331/27–31): ‘Ye, being a child, were a man, and now whan ye haue been a man, ye are becomen a woman or a child. This is the werke of a woman to holde hym alleyway wyth a woman, or hit is the fayte of a chylde for to enamoure hym self on a woman of folye.’

The reason why the Troy legend was popular in Europe in the late Middle Ages is that the legend was regarded as the source of the founding of the European nations. Especially in the fourteenth century Guido delle Colonne’s Historia destructionis Troiae was so popular that it was translated into the vernacular of each nation including French, English, Italian, Spanish, German, Dutch and Bohemian.²²

Caxton’s mentality as a cosmopolitan is closely associated with his vernacular translation and with nationalism, and he printed not only his translations of foreign works but also English works such as Chaucer, Gower, Lydgate and Malory together with those of British history. Thus, he played a bridge-like role by connecting the past with the present and future, and his prints were, unlike the splendid manuscripts owned by the aristocracy, popularized for the common people. In short, the Recuyell itself may well be called a forerunner of the Northern Renaissance.