Chapter 9

Coda: print and the canon

When William Caxton brought printing to London in 1485 from the continent where it had been flourishing for some thirty years, his choice to print in the vernaculars of England—English and French—consolidated the linguistic decisions made by many manuscript authors and compilers for hundreds of years. It was a choice based on the knowledge that this new textual tradition would thrive among the middle-class and aristocratic populace whose literacy was more assured in their own languages than in the scholarly Latin of centuries past.

As significant as language choice, though, were Caxton’s actual selections of the texts to be printed in English in England. In choosing to publish Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and Malory’s Le Morte Darthur, Caxton helped to consolidate what would go on to become fundamental works in the English literary canon. Since Malory’s manuscript of Le Morte Darthur was lost after being used by Caxton until its extraordinary rediscovery at Winchester College in 1934 (see Figure 8), Caxton’s printed edition also meant that the romance remained in circulation for the intervening centuries. In his Preface to the edition of Le Morte Darthur, Caxton reveals that he

had accomplished and finished divers histories as well of contemplation as of other historial and worldly acts of great conquerors and princes, and also certain books of ensamples and doctrine.

8. William Caxton’s Preface to his printed edition of Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur.

He recounts the other great heroes—the Nine Worthies (Hector, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar; Joshua, David, and Judas Maccabeus; Charlemagne, Godfrey of Bouillon, and Arthur), who populate the great tales of the period. But denying the accusations of fiction made against Arthur and his legends, however, Caxton recognizes Arthur as ‘first and chief of the Christian men’. He privileges the ‘Matter of Britain’, and the truth of a good story.

Like Chaucer in his Retraction, Caxton claims that ‘all is written for our doctrine’; that is, he publishes the works he prints for the education of the audience, who should ‘do after the good and leave the evil’. In choosing the good, he helped establish the excellence of early literary culture as it moved from manuscript to print and from the Middle Ages to a renaissance. The medieval in all of its manifestations has never subsequently ceased to fascinate, instruct, delight, shock, engage, move, and inspire.