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This concluding chapter ‘History in Print from Caxton to 1543’ examines the various forms in which historical writing was represented in early print. It begins by considering William Caxton’s various contributions and their places in his larger publishing strategies. It examines those works that he published that reflect earlier, manuscript traditions of historical writing, including the prose Brut and the Polychronicon, and the ways in which these were modified as they developed a new print tradition. The chapter goes on to assess the emergence of new forms of history that began to be developed by print in the early sixteenth century, including the emergence of print as a means for swift response to contemporary events and finally the appearance, in 1543, the first appearance in print of John Hardyng’s fifteenth-century verse chronicle, the publication of which was combined with contemporary prose historical writings.
In 1486, the Schoolmaster Printer of St Albans produced the first folio edition of The book of hawking, hunting, and blasing of arms. Wynkyn de Worde reprinted this compilation of hunting, hawking, and heraldic treatises in folio in 1496, adding to it a treatise on angling. Hence, it can be reasonably assumed that such rapid reprinting of the work attests to an audience eager for access to works of practical writings. John Whittocksmead had access to the variety of texts preserved in his miscellany, and, given the nature of his activities, it is not surprising that many of the works should be technical manuals, practical books for a gentleman, in both Latin and English. Two major spiritual works in the Beinecke manuscript also resemble practical books: De spiritu Guidonis, a Latin work roughly contemporary with the Modus tenendi parliamentum, narrates a Dominican prior's interrogation of the soul of a southern French burgher.
To a substantial extent, devotional reading was everyone's reading. The predominance of religious literature among the books that we know to have been owned by Margaret of York, for instance, may be an indication that she was genuinely very devout, but it may also have caused her piety to be over-emphasized by modern writers. The libraries of many fifteenth-century lay people show a similar preponderance of spiritual books. The history of the book of hours in England represents only a comparatively small corner of the book's larger history. The great centres of manuscript production were France and later Flanders, and the story of the book of hours in England is at least as much about foreign books' importation and subsequent ownership as it is about the local production of books. In 1495, five new Parisian books of hours provided competition for Wynkyn de Worde's horae, while at England Pynson had brought out two.
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