Rachel Stenner, The Typographic Imaginary in Early Modern English Literature. London and New York: Routledge, 2019. Xii + 204pp. ISBN 9781472480422 Hardback £115.
The Typographic Imaginary is a thoroughly researched study of the ways in which medieval and early modern authors and printers invite readers to imagine the processes and the people involved in book production. In a series of case studies ranging from fifteenth-century paratexts to seventeenth-century print manuals, Rachel Stenner traces self-referential moments in early printed books that reflect contemporary attitudes towards the medium of print and argues for the emergence of what she terms the ‘typographic imaginary’: a shared toolset of imagery, terminology and tropes that evolved alongside print itself and was employed by writers to evoke not so much the reality of the printing house as the idea of print and its various connotations. While the concept of the ‘typographic imaginary’ as the book presents it is a relatively abstract one, and the precise definition of the term can occasionally seem a little hard to pin down, the central idea that fictionalised depictions of print in early modern books show that attitudes towards the medium during the period were more nuanced than traditional narratives of the emergence of print would suggest, is valid and well argued. Additionally, the book’s organisation into short chapters, each of which analyses a small number of texts in detail, is helpful in keeping the discussion concrete and focused on specific examples.
The book is divided into seven chapters, each of which is followed by its own bibliography. The first chapter prepares the ground for Stenner’s analysis of literary texts by comparing three non-fictional early modern texts (written between 1567 and 1683) that approach the topic of print from different angles, and which are used both to provide a brief overview of the history of print and to explain the processes and terminology associated with early modern book production that the texts discussed later in the book allude to. Consequently the chapter acts both as an illustration of how print professionals viewed their own roles and chose to represent their trade to readers, and as a point of reference for the later chapters, by demonstrating the connections between print terminology and the types of imagery employed by sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writers to refer to print in the context of their works.
From the second to the last chapter, The Typographic Imaginary progresses in broadly chronological order, moving from William Caxton to Thomas Nashe, before fast-forwarding to Pope’s Dunciad in the book’s conclusion. Chapter 2 proposes that the paratexts of William Caxton, the first English printer anticipate sixteenth-century discourse regarding the implications and significance of print as a medium. In comparing the ways in which Caxton frames two of the books he printed and translated – Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye (1473) and Mirrour of the World (1481) – Stenner notes that Caxton does not simply confine himself to singing the praises of the new medium in which he has a vested commercial interest by highlighting its technological advantages. She argues that while Caxton does lay the foundations for familiar (oversimplified) narratives about early print in stressing the tediousness of scribal copying and the usefulness of print for mass production and dissemination of books, he also uses his prefaces and epilogues self-consciously, to explore more complex questions. These include questions of textual authority and accuracy, as well as the implications that the availability of a book in print may have for different types of audiences and for the text itself.
Chapter 3 examines a very specific form of preface found in sixteenth-century books: dramatic dialogues between the author and his printer, which present the two figures engaged in a debate and provide a fictional pre-history for the respective book, highlighting not the author’s experience of composing his text but his attempts to persuade the printer that his manuscript deserves to be published. Focusing mainly on three examples written by Robert Copland and Thomas Blague, the chapter argues that such dialogues illustrate the growing confidence of print professionals in the sixteenth century, since they cast the author as a supplicant and the printer as an authority on the market, who critically evaluates the book’s chances of success and is potentially in a position to reject it if the author fails to convince him of its (commercial, moral or literary) value.
Chapter 4 proposes that William Baldwin’s prose satire Beware the Cat playfully subverts the subject of the authority of print by being set in the vicinity of printing houses but nevertheless framed as handwritten record that is ‘booklike’ in appearance because of the way it has been edited, but not yet an actual printed book. Stenner argues that Baldwin’s fiction of the (evidently printed) book as a manuscript in pre-publication limbo that still needs to be revised by its dedicatee had the effect of ‘undoing printing’ while simultaneously making print and the printing house central to the narrative.
Chapter 5 focuses on George Gascoigne’s use of paratexts in A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres (1573) and its revised version The Posies of George Gascoigne Esquire (1575). In the former edition, the letters of fictional personae A.B., H.W. and G.T, which frame Gascoigne’s works as a poetic miscellany, collectively establish the idea that print is a threat to manuscript circulation, because it is capable of making public what was only meant for an elite audience. The latter edition, on the other hand, is framed by other paratexts that create a narrative of Gascoigne’s admission of authorship, which on closer inspection turns out to be another fiction. Gascoigne’s playful fictions about his works’ transition into print, the chapter argues, suggests that by the 1570s, a print author could expect his readers to be sufficiently knowledgeable about the world of print to recognise them as fictions and thus to appreciate the joke.
The chapter likely to be of most interest to Spenserians is chapter 6, titled ‘Edmund Spenser’s early and mid-career: public image and machine horror’. Focusing predominantly on two texts – Familiar Letters (1580) and the description of Errour in Book I of The Faerie Queene – it argues for Spenser’s ambivalence towards the medium of print, expressed in his apparently shifting attitudes in different works. Stenner compares the self-promotional strategies of Familiar Letters’ to those of Gascoigne outlined in the preceding chapter and concludes that the later text demonstrates a similar ‘print-literacy’ on Spenser’s part, but in a manner that is less playful than Gascoigne’s and reveals underlying anxieties about print. Arguably, these echoes of Gascoigne are an indication of Gabriel Harvey’s involvement in shaping Familiar Letters in its final form. Harvey’s manuscript ‘Letter-book’ reveals him to have been intensely preoccupied with Gascoigne’s works for the best part of the 1570s and even contains a short epistolary ‘novel’ reminiscent of ‘Master F.I.’.[1] Nevertheless, Stenner’s observation that the way in which Familiar Letters is framed is a direct response to Gascoigne is a valid one, regardless of whether the reader is inclined to view Spenser or Harvey as the ‘media-savvy’ driving force behind its publication.
Central to the chapter is a close analysis of the description of Errour in Book I, which argues that the wording Spenser uses to describe Errour’s body deliberately evokes technical terminology used to denote parts of a printing press, resulting in a portrayal of Errour as a special type of hybrid monster that is part woman, part serpent and part devilish machine. The purpose of this portrayal of Errour in Book I, Stenner suggests, is to draw attention to anxieties concerning print and its disturbing potential to create and spread falsity, and to make readers of the poem in its printed form aware that the temptation of Errour is aimed not only at Redcrosse but also at them. Overall, Stenner makes a strong case for her reading of Errour in The Faerie Queene, although the subsequent point that in individual phrases from ‘Teares of the Muses’ (published shortly afterwards in the 1591 Complaints), Spenser directly references his earlier depiction of Errour is perhaps a little more speculative.
The final chapter focuses on Thomas Nashe’s depiction of St Paul’s Churchyard in Pierce Penilesse and argues that Nashe’s portrayal of the book business as unpleasant and awash with waste paper and waste products forms part of the wider discourse outlined in the preceding chapters. The chapter argues, that while Nashe’s account deliberately highlights and perhaps exaggerates the unpleasant aspects of the milieu he describes and that he himself was immersed in, he nevertheless remains an advocate of print and its potential.
One of the book’s drawbacks is that despite its impressive scope, spanning more than two centuries of print history, it is relatively short and some sections (including the Spenser chapter) can appear a little too condensed. Since the book series to which it belongs predominantly publishes short monographs, this may not have been entirely the author’s own choice, and the extensive chapter bibliographies do to some extent compensate for this brevity by pointing the reader towards additional sources. Nevertheless, there were moments in The Typographic Imaginary when I found myself wishing that Stenner had given more space to her ideas, considered some additional examples that would have chimed well with her points (such as the first edition of Astrophel and Stella, Greenes Groats-worth of Witte, or The Return from Parnassus), or discussed her examples in more detail. I also found that some of the passages concerned with extrapolating points about the ‘typographic imaginary’ from individual examples made for relatively dense reading because of an abstract terminology that occasionally tends towards jargon.
These are mainly personal niggles, however, which other readers may disagree with, and none of them detracts from the overall validity of Stenner’s observations. The greatest strength of The Typographic Imaginary lies in its readings of the texts used for the case studies, which are consistently well-chosen and persuasively analysed, and which encourage readers to explore further. Those readings help to illustrate the author’s point that early modern responses to print and its professional representatives are nuanced and go beyond tropes of print as an agent of change for the better and printers as capitalist stereotypes. As it stands, The Typographic Imaginary addresses a fascinating aspect of the history of print and will be a useful resource for scholars with an interest in early modern book history.
Elisabeth Chaghafi
Tübingen University
[1] ‘A noble mans sute to a cuntrie Maide’, fol. 71v-84r. The “Letter-book” also contains references to Gascoigne’s works, and the poems that Beneuolo / Immerito stole and handed to a publisher without Harvey’s permission – the central conceit of the letters that are of most interest to Spenserians – were supposed to have been written “immediatly uppon ye reporte of ye deathe of Mr Georg Gascoigne Esquier” (fol. 34v). Both the theft of the poems and their spontaneous composition are likely to be Harvey’s invention, however, since manuscript contains heavily revised drafts of some of those “extemporally written” verses.
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