Error and the Academic Self: The Scholarly Imagination, Medieval to Modern

Over twenty years ago, in a chapter of his Renaissance Self-Fashioning, Stephen Greenblatt addressed what he called “the word of God in an age of mechanical reproduction.”¹ Alluding to the title of Walter Benjamin’s famous essay, Greenblatt argued that the printing press made possible a new debate on scripture and power in early Renaissance England.² William Tyndale’s New Testament in English had appeared in 1526, and his Old Testament in 1530.³ Together with the many polemics these publications spawned—the responses of Thomas More, the ripostes of Tyndale, and the myriad royal proclamations seeking to control the printing, reading, and disseminating of books in the age of Henry VIII—these volumes contributed to what Greenblatt called “the magical power of the Word.” The Tyndale Bible formed, at least in part, “a turning point in human history,” not just through the availability of scripture in a printed English book (though that itself was a major accomplishment) but through Tyndale’s exposing the rhetorical quality of holy writ: its power to persuade, its place in analysis and argument, in short, its new role in what Greenblatt calls “the seizure of power” by the movement of religious reform.⁴

So much since Renaissance Self-Fashioning has been written on the early printed book, and on the nexus of print, politics, and power in the English Renaissance, that it must seem temerity to add another chapter. For all its own reformist critical rhetoric, Greenblatt’s book is as celebratory as Elizabeth Eisenstein’s contemporary study, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change.⁵ Both see the story of the book as a story of the text triumphant: the spread of literacy, the dissemination of knowledge for its own sake, the facilitation of empirical science, the spatialization of our habits of thought. But much has changed in the two decades since their publication. The celebratory model of the printing press has given way to a fragmented, materialist, and skeptical dismantling of the grand récit. The technodeterminist approach (that the very technology of printing effected social change) associated with the work of Eisenstein and her intellectual forbears is largely gone. Print is now understood to be not simply a technology but a form of social behavior located in encounters with the published word that define both a public life and a private subjectivity.⁶ Those that have practiced what in France became known as l’histoire du livre stressed the reconstruction of distinctive moments in book history. The items of booksellers’ inventories, the lists found in wills, and the acts of physically sitting down with books all have contributed to a larger, context-bound conception of the act of reading as more than the absorption of printed information.⁷

But in addition to locating the impact of the printed word, these researches have challenged just what “print” itself may mean. As Adrian Johns has put it, in his recent massive and revisionary Nature of the Book, we need to ask anew “just what printing was.”⁸ Rather than denoting a specific device or a definable social habit, “print” has been taken to have meaning only in relationship to something else. Printing is anything that differs from handwriting. It connotes any form of verbal reproduction, in Michael Warner’s words, “relieved from the pressure of the hand.”⁹ Such a relational definition has deep historical importance. Early printed books were rarely distinguished from handmade documents. The typefaces of books made in the first half-century of printing were themselves modeled on manuscript hands.¹⁰ If Johns compels us to ask what printing was, we may ask now just what a book is, when anyone can be a desktop publisher and when computer-generated fonts and laser printers can make any document look like anything from Gutenberg to Garamond. And, of course, we may ask whether all this preoccupation with the printed word remains simply a form of academic nostalgia at a time when more and more transmitted information is read off screens rather than pages. Is our interest in the history of the book conditioned by our sense of living at the end of that history?

This chapter seeks an answer to these questions in the history of error. Instead of moving, once again, to an account of print and progress, it argues for a story grounded in mistake. The history of the early book is fraught with error. Indeed, the story of the Tyndale Bible, Greenblatt’s masterplot, is a tale of accusations of inaccuracy: failures of translation, faults uncaught at the press, errata that Tyndale himself sought to correct. Behind the list of “errours committed in the prynting” that closes the 1526 New Testament lies a hitherto unwritten history of the erratum. For the errata sheet, in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, records more than slips of typesetting; it details errors in doctrine, dialect, or usage. At its most complex and self-conscious, the errata sheet stands as the site of humanist erudition and early modern subjectivity. It is the place where the past is publicly brought into line with the present, where errors of all kinds could be confessed and corrected. To explore the early history of these sheets is to explore the loci of authority and action that make academic life both a performance and a defense. Together with a set of broader editorial and literary practices that I address here—humanist textual criticism, early lexicography, epistolary friendship, and the vernacular love-lyric—these early printed texts contribute to a new account of the self-fashioning sought by modern scholars of the Renaissance.

Though I attend, in part, to individual errors of the early printers and to the techniques of collation, comparison, and critical decision that went into the production of editions, I am primarily concerned here with the rhetoric of error and editorship and with the stories told through prefaces, errata sheets, and correspondence about the making—or mismaking—of books. The humanist account of error is invariably temporal: it situates the production of the book in a specific historical moment, charts its progress across time, and then invites the reader to locate it (and the reader’s own act of reading) on a temporally defined continuum. The story of correction and the artifact of the errata sheet historicize the book, much as the humanist practice of philology historicized the text. For, by acknowledging the historical difference between text and reader, the humanist critic not only recognized linguistic change or corruption of copies but also understood that the completed work was not an autonomous object but a counter in the historical story of its making and reception. The early book is always a work in progress and in process, a text intruded upon for emendation, a text that invites the correction of the reader. There is nothing like an errata sheet to prompt the reader to seek out yet more errata—that is, nothing like the admission of some errors to provoke us to believe that the work is full of errors. Moreover, the need to narrativize the story of such errors—to offer up a personal history of detection and correction—makes the true subject of the early humanist book not so much its content but the complex relationships between textual and political fealty that write the history of its own production.¹¹

The errata sheet stands not as a static marker of uncaught mistakes but as a placeholder in the ongoing narratives of bookmaking, and book reading, themselves. Like many of the paratexts of early print—the prefaces, notes, correspondence, and occasional handwritten comments in the margins of the book—errata sheets illustrate how an early printed book was used by the first ones to see it. Such sheets were often guides to reading itself. Several early books survive with handwritten corrections drawn from those sheets: illustrations of rereading, in which owner’s pen corrected printer’s faults.¹² But, more broadly, the study of the errata sheet and of the rhetoric of error also helps us understand the ways in which the disciplines of editorial review, legal judgment, political control, and religious devotion shared an idiom and imagery. In an age when the practice of confession came under close scrutiny (especially in early Reformation England), errata sheets and their accompanying paratexts became the places where the urge to confess could still find a voice and where the seeking of forgiveness found its listener not among the booths of the church but in the stalls of the bookseller.

Before beginning with the book, it is important to recall that the history of textual correction does not begin with print. Almost as soon as there were writers, fears of error motivated the control of textual dissemination. Roman authors, in particular, were acutely aware of the failings of scribes and the foibles of booksellers. Martial, quite specifically and at great length, could praise the careful scribe but could equally lament a careless one.¹³ In later times, the copying of sacred scriptures often became the occasion for reflections on the scribal art and, as a consequence, the fear of error. Cassiodorus, in the sixth century, considered scribes the bearers of God’s word, and he thought of writing (especially the copying of the Bible) as the highest of callings.¹⁴ The twelfth-century poet Baudri of Bourgeuil, in a set of Latin poems clearly influenced by Martial, reflected on the need for accurate copies of his texts (and his invectives against faulty scribes are as vicious as anything by the earlier Roman poet).¹⁵ Petrarch’s letters, in the fourteenth century, are famous for their complaints of incorrect texts and unauthorized copies,¹⁶ while, at the close of that century, Chaucer developed what may well be called a poetics of correction in his thematic attentions to the scribal culture of his day. All his work, he fears, is “subject to correction,” not just because it may be erroneous in fact or doctrine but because it has been mangled by the hands of others. At the close of Troilus and Criseyde, he fears the mismetering and misspelling of his poetry by scribes of different dialect regions or different levels of ability. And in his famous “Words to Adam Scriveyn,” he laments, almost godlike, the errancies of his aptly named and careless copyist, whom Chaucer curses unless he “wryte more trewe”:

All this did not change overnight with print. Early printed books can be as much unique, individual artifacts as the manuscripts that had preceded them. Corrections in midpressrun, broken types, resettings and additions, changes in type and paper stock have textual-critical value, as they can reveal a book’s relationship to the copy text or to the textual traditions of a different work. A close attention to such changes, too, throws into confusion traditional distinctions between such phenomena as error and variant. When is a printed book representative of an edition or an issue? And what role do errata sheets—and readerly engagement with them—play in the definition of just what we have when we hold an early printed book in our hands?¹⁸

Print enables publicly what was done privately before. It makes possible not the fixity of the text but the participation of the reading public in the act of correction. Though errata sheets enable readers to correct their personal copies, they also make readers active players in the game of textual confession. They serve to establish authorial authority through the acknowledgment of error. In the process, they refashion the relationship of author to reader along new templates of power. The writer stands as pleading witness to a knowing judge, as humble subject to a king or patron, as appellant student to a learned master. These are the metaphorical relationships of reading, and they govern both a rhetoric and a poetics of errata in the early modern period.

From the start, errata sheets recorded more than typos. The earliest account we have of one comes from the atelier of Sweynheim and Pannarz.¹⁹ Library catalogs record, for their edition of Lactantius published on October 29, 1465, two concluding pages of the volume titled “Lactantii Firmiani errata quibus ipse deceptus est per fratrem Antonium Randesem theologicum collecta et exarata sunt” (The errata of Lactantius Firmianus, which he himself did not catch, have been gathered and written down by brother Antonio Randesi, theologian).²⁰ Other kinds of errors fill the sheets of early Italian printers. Francesco Bonaccorsi published an edition of the Laude of Jacopone da Todi in September 1490 that included not just a list of typographical mistakes but also those of dialect and historical idiom, in the words of Brian Richardson, an index that “had a threefold function as a glossary, an errata, and a kind of apparatus criticus.”²¹ Early editions of the works of Boccaccio, Sannazaro, Dante, and other Italian authors often contained, in addition to “errori de la stampa,” those of dialect and usage,²² while classical texts used the errata sheet as the occasion to review, reedit, and reprimand earlier editions or defective manuscripts. A Horace Opera printed by Antonio Miscomini in Florence in 1482 has on its last two pages the errore to be found in the edition and the commentary. Here, what is important is that these are not tipped-in extra sheets but an integral part of the foliation of the book. The errors noted are not printer’s mistakes but instead substantive emendations to the text. Errata sheets become the place where textual criticism is done—not in the body of the poetry itself or in the commentary.²³

Similarly, in the Miscellanea of Politian (1489), also published by Miscomini, the final pages of “Emendationes” offer up not only corrections to the printed text but also new readings based, apparently, on fresh consultation with the manuscripts of Politian’s sources. Comments, for example, on the Greek text of Callimachus betray Politian’s concern (voiced in his letters and in the later remarks to his readers at the close of this volume) with the proper accents in the Greek. His final, general remarks bear noting, too, as statements of the larger relationships of will and intention in the making of the book and the establishing of author-audience association:

By the beginning of the sixteenth century, errata sheets had become commonplace in European books. They are the stuff of scholarship in Latin volumes—Aldus Manutius’s famous printing of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (1499), for example, has a full page of errata—and the markers of interpretation in vernacular ones as well. Paolo Trovato has detailed the ways in which errata sheets were used in Italian language books to correct differences in dialect or even to emend the text. They show up under titles such as “Errata corrige,” “Errori de la Stampa,” “Errori notabili fatti nel stampare,” and the like. They stood, as Trovato illustrates, as invitations for the reader to correct the text. “Errori de la stampa” guided the corrections con la penna. Any other corrections could be made, in the language of one mid-sixteenth-century Italian book, a la discrezione de lettore, the equivalent of Poliziano’s invitation three-quarters of a century earlier, for readers to emend pro iudicio.²⁵

In England, the errata sheet becomes the stage for claiming authorial fidelity not just to text and type but to ruler and doctrine. There is evidence that, by the early 1520s, English printers were alert to the possibilities of typographical error. Of course, such sensitivities had been voiced half a century before by William Caxton, who had claimed that he himself had “dylygently ouerseen” (i.e., proofread) the text of the revised, new edition of the Canterbury Tales of 1484 and who had similarly invoked John Skelton as overseer of the Eneydos of 1490.²⁶ Yet, from Caxton’s shop or from that of his successor, Wynkyn de Worde, there do not appear to be anything approaching the errata sheets or lists of emendations or corrections that were coming to be commonplace at Continental printers. Only with the next generation is something like this European attention to error voiced. John Constable’s Epigrammata, printed by Berthelett in 1520, has a letter from the printer mentioning the possibility of errors being introduced.²⁷ By 1523 proofreading had become so central a part of the English press shop, that the printer Richard Pynson needed define its task in an indenture between himself and John Palsgrave.²⁸

Perhaps the earliest sustained engagement with errata in the English book, however, lies with Thomas More and the printing of a range of doctrinal texts he published in the 1520s and 1530s. The Responsio ad Lutherum (STC 18089), printed by Pynson in 1523, has an errata sheet appended to the second issue of the work.²⁹ The Supplication of Souls of 1529 (STC 18092, 18093), printed by Rastell, had added errata sheets in both of its editions.³⁰ And the 1533 Apology (STC 18078), also printed by Rastell, offers an errata sheet, followed by another four pages of errata for the second part of the Confutation of Tyndale printed with it.³¹ These texts have been explored in detail, most recently by the editors of the Yale edition of More’s works, and there is some consensus that the role of More himself in their proofreading is debatable. The errata often list simple typographical errors. On occasion, there are substantive corrections made for sense or grammar. But what is significant, especially in the case of the Supplication, is the fact that the second edition of this work leaves uncorrected “dozens of … misprints” from the first edition. Are we dealing with the author reading proof or, in the case of the second text of the 1529 printing of the Supplication, what the Yale editors call “a careless compositor [who] hastily proofread to produce the brief and inadequate list of errata”?³²

In the case of the Dialogue Concerning Heresies, however, it is clear that More himself was very much involved in reading proof and offering corrections to his work. In the editions of 1529 (STC 18084) and 1531 (STC 18085), substantive changes are made in the errata sheets, titled in both editions “The fawtys escaped in the pryntynge.” Space does not permit an extensive engagement with the myriad alterations More made to his texts (indeed, the discussion of the textual condition of this work takes up nearly forty pages in the Yale edition).³³ But what should be pointed out, especially, is that More used the “fawtys” pages to correct what he perceived to be doctrinal error in his text. For example, the phrase, “nothing faut worthy / only to enface that” is corrected in the errata sheet to “nothing blame worthy / only to deface & enfame that.” The phrase “pleasure and ellys” becomes “plesure / where wha[n] and wherfore god shal worke his myracles / and ellys.”³⁴ The Yale editors point out, as well, that More made substantive corrections from the 1529 to the 1531 edition, and, furthermore, when corrections in both editions needed to be made, More had cancel slips inserted in the texts.³⁵ What is also significant is that the 1531 edition occasionally perpetuates some of the errors, typographical and doctrinal, of the 1529 edition—errors that were noted in the errata sheet to the 1529 edition. As the Yale editors put it, “The fact that the text of the 1531 perpetuates mistakes in passages like these which deal with important matters of doctrine raises the possibility that More did not proofread the entire second edition as carefully as he did the first, in which the errors were emended on the errata sheet” (p. 571).

These corrections do more than nuance an argument. They call attention to the authority of More’s authorship itself, the need for the writer to oversee the publication of his work. But the main motive that prompted this scrupulous proofreading was the theological purpose of the Dialogue. Calibrated as a refutation of Protestant doctrine in the late 1520s, the Dialogue takes as its very theme the problem of error. In its central character, the Messenger, “More creates a composite picture of the layman who is tempted to break from the ancient oral traditions of the church and accept the Protestant idea that all doctrine and practices of the church must be based on the written word of the Bible” (p. 448). Protestant texts, he argues, are “maliciously” printed books, and his own text—submitted, as he states, to “the iudgement of other vertuouse & connynge men” before publication—seeks to avoid the problem of the wanton or corrupt book of Protestant belief. One of the central images, too, of the Dialogue is the issue of “ocular proof.” Bad words blind the eyes, and the poor benighted Messenger of the book takes what he has heard rather than what he has read. In an argument against sola scriptura in Protestant doctrine (i.e., the notion that the reading of scripture alone is enough to establish doctrine), More makes a claim for the importance of getting words right. But the larger point is that More’s Messenger is not so much a reader as a listener. Much of what he knows comes from what he has heard, and More defines this rough and unverifiable knowledge as “hearsay.” What you hear is not always what is right. “For here may a man se that mysse vnderstandynge maketh mysse reportynge” (p. 449). Thus More advocates “ocular proof,” a conception of understanding keyed to vision and, as such, correct reading. “Hearsay,” then, embraces all the misinformation conveyed through the ear: rumor, false preaching, merry tales, popular belief, and jokes. It is, in short, the mark of “heresy.” In the words of John Fisher, whose sermon of 1526 against Martin Luther has been seen as doctrinal kin to More’s Dialogue, “Heresy … is … the blyndyng of our sight.”³⁶

The point of all this doctrinaire fine-tuning, it seems to me, is that More represents himself in the actual publication of his book as his own overseer and his own corrector. Self-correction in the print shop mimes self-correction in the court or church. It represents the public acknowledgment of error. Rhetorically, such an acknowledgment can only reinforce the power of a work such as More’s Dialogue, itself concerned with problems of misrepresentation. Corrections of the press become a way of rectifying the relationship of word and deed, of sign and substance. It has long been noted that More often puns on the two terms of his argument, “heresy” and “hearsay,” and what I suggest is that this wordplay works out, in a thematic way, the very notion of the printer’s error that it is the purpose of the overseeing to correct (p. 449).³⁷ For if the logic of the Dialogue is ocular proof and careful reading, what better way to self-enact that logic than to offer up the author as his own best proofreader? And if the fear is that hearsay will lead to heresy, then what greater fear is there than that these two words might all too easily be shifted in the errors of the print shop? Correction is both moral and typographical.

Such multiple attentions to errata govern, too, the Confutation of Tyndale, first published in 1532. In the preface to the first part of the volume, More returns to the imagery of sight and blindness in the discussion of heresy. He hopes, throughout the course of his refutation, “to make euery chyld perceyue hys [i.e., Tyndale’s] wyly folyes and false craftes … wherwyth he fayne wolde & weneth to blynde in such wyse the world.” And then he states, reflecting on the great labor such correction needs: “I thynke that no man dowteth but that this worke both hath ben and wyll be some payne and labour to me / and of trouth so I fynde it. But as helpe me god I fynde all my laboure in the wrytynge not errata halfe so greuouse and paynefull to me, as the tedyouse redynge of theyr blasphemouse heresyes / that wolde god after all my labour done, so that the remembraunce of theyr pestylent errours were araced out of englysshe mennes hertes, and theyr abomynable bookes burned vppe.” More then remarks that “deuelysshe heresyes” are so strong in his time that the heretical books are being read privately by people who believe them. But, he then goes on, “it were nede as me semeth that dyuerse wyse & well lerned men sholde set thyr pennys to the boke / whych though they shall not satysfye them that wyll nedes be nought, yet shall they do good to such as fall to these folke of ouersyghte, wenyng y^t theyr new wayes were well.” I take this passage to imply that More imagines better readers coming to these heretical books and setting their pens to them—that is, correcting them personally—and that even though such corrections shall not satisfy those readers who believe the heresies, the act may be a good one for those “folke” (i.e., the good readers) who exercise their “ouersyghte” in correcting or emending the books.³⁸

This is the language of press correction applied to doctrinal debate. It takes words such as “arace” and “ouersee” and applies them to the discussion of the dissemination of heretical volumes. It also refers to a common practice among early-sixteenth-century readers themselves: the act of personally setting the pen to the book to correct its errors. In the two copies of the Confutation I have seen in the Cambridge University Library, individual readers have corrected the text in pen, following the printed errata sheet at the end of the first part of the volume. But only one of these two volumes actually has the errata sheet still in it (H.3.42). In the other volume (Selden 3.135), only a stub of paper remains where the errata sheet has obviously been cut out. Clearly what has happened is that one reader read and corrected the book early, while it still was unbound. Going back and forth from text to errata sheet would have been a simple matter. But for the other reader, the book probably came already bound (or, more likely, the correcting reader of this copy was not its first owner). Flipping back and forth in a tightly bound volume would be difficult, and so the reader simply cut the sheet out, made the corrections from it (probably keeping it at hand), and then discarded it (the sheet being no longer necessary, the errata having been corrected). Such personal corrections are perfectly in keeping with recorded practice. Indeed, Pynson’s own instructions (in an explanatory note at the end of the volume) in the second issue of the Responsio ad Lutherum of 1523 ask the reader to “correct the errata which happened during the printing.”³⁹ And, as Percy Simpson has noted in great detail, throughout the sixteenth and well into the seventeenth century, printers asked their readers to “correcte those faultes” that were itemized in the errata sheets.⁴⁰

Self-correction, then, becomes the impulse for the author and the reader, and the textual phenomenon that stood behind many of More’s protestations (and that prompted Greenblatt’s analysis, with which I began this chapter) was the publication of the New Testament in William Tyndale’s English translation. This signal moment in the history of English letters has not been without its chroniclers. From Edward Arber at the close of the nineteenth century to David Daniell at the end of the twentieth, scholars have sought to understand the making of this English Bible: the brilliance and endurance of its idiom; the complexities of its intellectual context; the details of its printing.⁴¹ Only one complete copy of the 1526 New Testament, in fact, survives, though its text has been reprinted many times.⁴² But what is lost in the reprinting is the set of errata at the end of the book; as far as I can tell, hardly anyone has noticed them.⁴³ Yet, in their form and detail, and their larger placement in the arc of Tyndale’s volume and its critical reception, these errata locate Tyndale’s work in the controlling rhetoric of scholarship for early modern England. For, like More’s own corrections, they constitute a confession. But, unlike More’s, they direct their attentions to the reader rather than the author, and they need to be reviewed in context to appreciate the larger force of Tyndale’s project in its time.

Tyndale’s errata sheets stand as the second of two closing gestures of the New Testament translation. The first is the address “To The Reader,” that appears just at the end of the scriptural text (Sigs. Tt i v–Tt ii v). “Geve diligence Reder,” it opens. Tyndale requests his reader to come to the scriptures with a “pure mynde” and a “syngle eye.” At one level, it is a plea for moral rectitude. But at another level, it is an injunction to right reading. “Diligence” is the term that signals editorial attention to the printed word. “Con ogni diligenza” is the phrase invoked by the earliest Italian printers to announce their review of their texts and the correction of their errors.⁴⁴ The term enters English printing almost from the start; Caxton announces in his 1484 revision of the Canterbury Tales that he has “dylygently ouerseen” the text. By the 1520s, diligence is almost a cliché of authorship in print. Tyndale himself, in reviewing and revising his translation for its republication in 1534, noted how his text was “dyligentyly corrected,” while the printer’s colophon to that edition announced: “Here endeth the new Testament dylygentlye ouersene and correct and printed.”⁴⁵

“Diligence” signals a very special request of the reader, and Tyndale goes on in the 1526 “To the Reader” to enjoin: “Marke the playne and manyfest places of the scriptures.” The reader is an annotator, coming to the book with pen in hand. To “mark” these places is not just to notice them but physically to mark them in the book—an idiom shared with one of this Testament’s earliest critics, Robert Ridley, who would chronicle its many errors but lament that he did not have a copy of the book at hand “to marke them owt.”⁴⁶ Tyndale’s purported reader is a marker—in effect, the English version of those Italian lettori who would emend con la penna. The Testament requires reader input. The book does not, as he says, seem to have “his full shape, but as it were borne afore hys time.” In time, “we will geve it his full shape, and putt out yf ought be added superfluusly; and adde to yff ought be oversene thorowe negligence.” “Oversene” takes the reader back to “diligence,” to the act of moral reading as an act of proofreading.

In this rhetorical environment, the errata sheets that follow “To the Reader” complete the confessional move. Titled “The errours committed in the prentynge,” they are only superficially akin to More’s errata. Notice, first, the very language of the headings. More’s sheets are “faults” pages: lists of things that “escaped” in the printing. The word “faults” is clearly borrowed from the French, where “fautes” still means errata in typography.⁴⁷ But they are errata in that they are errant, escapees from the corral of the printer. More, as his own overseer, seeks to rein them in, to collect mistakes that escaped the eyes in the print shop. But for Tyndale, error resonates with moral failings chronicled in scripture itself. And like all sins, these errors are committed.⁴⁸ The author here is not some guardian of the escaped but rather an instructor in the arts of rectitude. Tyndale not only lists the errors; he must explain to his readers how to use this list. Unlike More, whose errata sheets are self-explanatory and who clearly relies on his readers’ knowledge of their conventions in Continental books, Tyndale has to explain his abbreviations and his format: “F. with the nombre folowynge it / signyfiethe the leafe off the boke. sy / with the nombre before it / declareth the fyrst or the seconde syde of the leafe. ly. with the nomber before it noteth in what lyne the errour is / as here after apereth” (sig. Tt iii r). These are instructions for the lay reader. They are clarifications for those who may have never seen a printed book before, let alone an errata sheet, those for whom words like “folio” are new and need, in essence, a vernacular translation (thus while Tyndale uses “F.” as his abbreviation, he translates it into the English word “leaf”).⁴⁹ In short, More is concerned with protesting his own diligence; Tyndale concerns himself with educating his new readers in becoming diligent. Typography and moral purpose come together, as he effectively “translates” the idea of the errata sheet for a new English audience.⁵⁰

Tyndale’s closing gestures to the 1526 New Testament, then, do more than simply aver his humility or record lapses in typography. They invite readers to contribute and correct, and in the months that followed the book’s publication, there was no lack of respondents. Robert Ridley, chaplain to the bishop of London, wrote a letter detailing the book’s errors to his counterpart, Henry Gold (chaplain to the archbishop of Canterbury), in early 1527. This “common & vulgare translation,” he states, manifests its heresy. “As for errors, if ye haue the first prent with annotationes in Mathew and Marcus, & the preface al is mere frenesy.”⁵¹ Tyndale’s interpretations are a frenzy of mistake, an idea not unique to Ridley, for it was More himself who, in the Confutations of Tyndale, could ascribe the same level of wild folly to the translator: “Happy were Tindall, if he were as well recouered of his fransies.”⁵² For both More and Ridley, such frenzies include the highly charged translations of key Latin terms. Ridley notes that Tyndale’s English version gets rid of a host of “christian wordes” central to the doctrinal vocabulary of the Catholic Church: penance, charity, confession, grace, priest, and church. Instead of this last word, Tyndale uses “congregation.”⁵³ And More noted, specifically, that “charity” became “love,” “priest” became “senior,” and “confession” became “knowledge.”⁵⁴ The core vocabulary of Christian ecclesiastical organization is being transformed into a vernacular. “Idolotria callith he worshyppyng of images,” complains Ridley.⁵⁵ These are what More and Ridley considered the Lutheranisms of the Tyndale New Testament, and both men offer example after example of what More would call “what fautys were there in it” (p. 124).⁵⁶

One might get the impression, reading Ridley’s letter, that he had the book in front of him and that he had himself marked off all these offensive passages. But, apparently, he did not. “I have none of thies bowkes but only I remembre such thynges I redde in the prefaces & annotationes.” Later, he states to Gold: “I certefy you if ye look well, ye shal not look iij lynes withowt fawt in all the bowk, bot I have not the bowk to marke them owt, ye showd haue had lasure your selff to have doon it.”⁵⁷

Ridley’s admission avers more than forgetfulness. It affirms precisely the whole point of his polemic: here is a book so bad, so vicious, and so full of error that it is no book at all. It is a book to be burned, a book to be effaced from the reading public. Ridley does not have the book because he cannot have the book. By claiming that he does not own a copy, Ridley erases the book from the language of his letter. He has, in effect, marked it out. But, by telling Gold to go through and record all its errors, he reproduces Tyndale’s own language in the address “To the Reader” that closed the volume. “Marke the playne and manyfest places of the scriptures,” Tyndale had enjoined. Now, Ridley asks his reader similarly to mark places in the book: but not, of course, those plain and manifest but those faulty.

Here is a book, in short, that is one great erratum. No enumeration of mistakes—either by the critic or by the author himself—can excuse it. Like More, Ridley develops a language of ocular proof, or moral proofreading, to justify his claims. The “fawtes & errores” of the translation should be plain to see, and Ridley adds, in what appears to be a postscript to his letter, the injunction: “Shew ye to the people that if any be of so prowde & stuburne stomac that he will beleve ther is no fawt ne error except it be declared to hym that he may se it, latt hym cum hither to my lordes which hath profowndly examined al & he shal heir & se errors except that he be blynde & have no eys” (p. 125). More and Ridley link acts of typographical overseeing with the larger imagery of sight and proof developed in doctrinal contexts. They take the idioms of the print shop and apply them to the ideologies of argument. Together with Tyndale’s concluding “To the Reader” and his own errata sheets, these texts illustrate the ways in which the claims and counterclaims of error constitute the axes along which one read the word of God in the age of mechanical reproduction.

The acts of self-correction found in early errata offer, as I have suggested here, insight into the personal relationships of writers to their readers and, particularly in the cases of More and Tyndale, into the constructions of the author/translator as something of a self-correcting, and thus self-confessing, creature. Such acts, though, may be acts of public as well as private fealty. Perhaps the most elaborate, and most telling, of such public acts of overseeing are the “Corrections,” that appear at the beginning of Thomas Elyot’s Dictionary of 1538.⁵⁸ In the preface to the volume, Elyot notes that after the work was already at the printers, he became worried that he had neglected some aspects of its definitions. Henry VIII heard of Elyot’s anxieties and placed before him the resources of the royal library. Elyot stopped the presses and revised the entries after M, those before M having already been printed. He then had to revise the first half of the alphabet, and he did so by noting the corrections in the first part of the volume but also by publishing a list of “Additions” at the volume’s end. Here is his version of the story:

The story of the Dictionary is a story of intrusions and informancy: a story of royal power worked through minion service and Cromwellian intrigue. For Henry, the manipulations of the printed word extended through the 1530s in an arc of parliamentary acts and statutes. Writing, reading, and iconic presentation were the marks of fealty or treason. “Writyng ymprintinge [and] cypheringe” could all be seditious acts. The forging of the “kinges signe manuell signet and prevye seale” were treasonable, for which the punishment was death. And the control of the king’s signs, and the inspections of his subject’s texts, found itself relocated in the privy chamber.⁵⁹

Stephen Merriam Foley has argued that the publication of Elyot’s Dictionary, and a passage such as this one in particular, reifies these relationships between the royal body and the public word. “The king’s body ‘literally’ stands between the two incomplete alphabets of the work…. [T]he king’s intervention in the alphabetical order of the Dictionary demonstrates how the mechanical letters of the printing press and the human letters of the new learning could be reinscribed as the vehicles of a broadly nationalist and absolutist ideology.”⁶⁰ But a close reading of the passage shows us that it is not so much the king’s body as it is that of his surrogates that interrupts the progress of the Dictionary and provokes the correction of Elyot and his book.

First among such surrogates is Anthony Denny. Throughout the 1530s, Denny had risen in the king’s bodily service. From a Gentleman of the Chamber, he worked his way up through diligence, intrigue, and patronage to Chief Gentleman of the Privy Chamber (installed in this position by Cromwell in the shake-up after the Boleyn affair), and he ended his royal service by being appointed, in October 1546, as Henry’s last Groom of the Stool.⁶¹ The roles Denny would have played would have embraced the range of diplomatic and political intrigue, bodily service, and even bawdry that had been filled by such predecessors as William Compton and Henry Norris. From wiping the royal bottom to securing mistresses for the king, the Gentlemen of the Chamber and the Stool were closest to the personality of power: in the words of David Starkey, “the mere word of a Gentleman of the Privy Chamber was sufficient evidence in itself for the king’s will, without any other form of authentication whatever.” Indeed, Starkey goes on, the Gentleman bore not just word and will but something of “the indefinable charisma of monarchy” itself.⁶² Denny himself clearly bore something of this charismatic flair, so much so that John Leland wrote that “the whole court bore testimony to his ‘gratia flagrans’”—what we might translate as his blazing repute with the king.⁶³

What role, then, does Denny play in Elyot’s story, and how does his placement introduce the string of intercessors and interrogators for the king? The Dictionary is the subject of inquiry, the object of intelligence gathering that filled the Henrician court in the late 1530s and has been amply chronicled by G. R. Elton in his tellingly titled Policy and Police. The word is out, as it were, and Denny comes first as the chief spy of court and privy chamber. From Denny and the chamber, we move to Tildisley and the library, and finally to Cromwell—here identified specifically as lorde priuie seale. It is as if Elyot himself is walking through the anterooms and private apartments of power, as if he has been granted a succession of audiences, each one of which leads him closer and closer to the body of the king. Cromwell appears here as the “fauourer of honestie, and next to your highnesse chiefe patron of vertue and cunnyng.” Virtue and cunning are, indeed, the two poles of Henrician courtly life here, and the language Elyot uses is the language not so much of the scholar or the printer but the subject: “favoring,” “commending,” “affirming,” “counsel.” Elyot is himself on trial of a sort here, called before the king and his creatures to render account. The king’s words of permission and encouragement do more than stimulate the mind; they provoke a confession: “With the which wordes, I confesse, I received a new spirite, as me semed: wherby I founde forthwith an augmentation of myn understandynge.” This is the language of conversion, the accounting of a tale of turning from error to rectitude, from wandering to fealty found anew.

So just what was it that Sir Thomas Elyot felt in need of correcting? Here is his account: “And for as moche as by haste made in printyng, some letters may happen to lacke, some to be sette in wronge places, or the ortography nat to be truely obserued, I therfore haue put all those fautes in a table folowing this preface: wherby they may be easily corrected: and that done, I truste in god no manne shall fynde cause to reiect this boke” (Aiii v). Certainly, there are typos: haplographies, dittographies, and transposed letters. But occasionally there are mistakes of a different sort. Take, for example, Qui, where Elyot has felt the need to correct the translation of a Latin phrase offered in his definition. Here is the correction: “reade after the latine, wherfore was Epicurous more happy that he lyued in his owne countray, than Metrodorus whiche lyued at Athenes.” To read such a correction is to feel the need to go back to the source, to reexamine the supposedly erroneous text itself. Now, look at the actual entry for Qui, defined as “the whyche. Alsoo sometyme it sygnifyeth howe.” What follows is a string of classical quotations (with translation) illustrating not just grammatical but social and political correctness (Vii v). The extracts tell a story of identity and power, of discovery and shame (I quote his English translations of the Latin excerpts).

And then we get to a remarkable self-reference: “For he spendethe his laboure in wrytynge of Prologues, not bycause he wyll telle the argumente, but for as moche as he wolde make answere to the yuell reportes of the olde envyouse Poete.” And, finally, we get to the quotation that Elyot corrects (and the last one in the entry): “Wherefore was Epycure moore happye, that he dydde dye in his countrye, than Metrodorus that he dyed at Athenes” (emphases mine). In this correction lies, perhaps, an allegory of an Elyotic scholarly devotion, a miniature story that recaps the longer story of the preface. Happy is the man who lives in his own country, who needs not Athens—more tempting for the scholar—but who serves a king whose generosity extends to opening an Athens of the mind before him in the library. Elyot changes die to live, grants himself a reprieve after the intercessions of a king and his counselors. To read the entry Qui, now, is to see a story of the making of the man and book: a story about which, and how, from whence, wolde to God, because, wherefore. It is the single word that sums up the stories of the preface, an entry that, corrected in the “Corrections,” invites the reader to understand the making of a lexicographical subject in a world of royal words and will.

Embedded in errata is the story of correction itself: correction more than typographical or even theological but human and political. The Finis of the Dictionary closes with another appeal to correction, now hearkening back to the old manuscript appeals for readerly correction. But, now, the corrections of these readers, their “honest labours,” are described as “being benefyciall vnto this theyr countrey.” This is a dictionary of English, the king’s dictionary, the first text that, as Foley argues, “helped to establish the schoolroom as a new cultural field for instituting royal absolutism.”⁶⁴ The story that this volume tells is, in the end, the story of a man publicly happy “in his owne countray.” It is fitting, then, that at its close it should direct such nationalized ease to readers who, in finding fault, are offering not treason to a work published by Elyot the servant or Berthelett, regius impressor, but are, in fact, offering beneficence. The correction, as Elyot announced there, is “an exquisite tryall,” whether performed by author or by reader, that affirms a shared participation in the trials of public service.

This image of the corrector on trial leads to a reconception of errata sheets and, indeed, of all pages of editorial avowal as legal transcripts: as account books in the judgments of political and scholarly loyalty (I recall in passing that the structure of More’s Dialogue itself became a trial, with the author “defending the office of the priesthood and the divine right of the ecclesiastical courts to try heresy”).⁶⁵ The text becomes a piece of evidence entered into the court of judgment. Erasmus recognized this judicial framework to the editorial condition in his letter to Thomas Ruthall of March 7, 1515, published as the preface to his edition of Seneca’s Lucubrationes (Basel: Froben, August 1515). The product of his English sojourn, and addressed to one of the most powerful men in early Henrician England, the edition of Seneca begins with this epistolary meditation on the similarities between textual criticism and war. The letter begins, in fact, with an account of the Battle of Flodden Field (September 9, 1513) and moves through, by analogy, the “infinite army of corruptions” that Erasmus finds he must retake from the “enemy” in making his edition. “I had my pen for a sword,” he states, and then goes on:

And yet Erasmus appoints himself a judge not just of manuscripts and witnesses but of his author himself. Seneca’s writings are not without controversy: “there are some things in him which I would gladly change myself.” He is a bit long-winded, sometimes mean, at times “while making large claims for himself, he is sometimes an unfair judge of other men’s talents.” But, as Erasmus states, “what author was ever so perfect that no fault could be found in him at all?” And, further, “Not that I have failed [Neque vero me fugit] to notice that many errors still remain; but they are of a kind that without the aid of ancient codices could hardly be removed by Seneca himself.”⁶⁷ Notice the Latin here: literally, not “not that I have failed” but really “It has not escaped me.” Erasmus vivifies what would become the idiom of the errata sheet. The faults that would escape the printer are, now, those that escape even the most diligent of editors. Indeed, they would escape the author, Seneca himself, who would need all the help of ancient codices to restore his text.

The act of making books—for Erasmus, as well as for Elyot, and perhaps even for More and Tyndale—is thus a form of martial combat or judicial trial. Scholarship moves through wanderings and blots. Erasmus’s primary word for textual mistake is mendum, meaning literally a blot, a smudge, a bad mark on the text, and clearly a holdover from its classical, Latin uses in the manuscript tradition.⁶⁸ Such blots are now, quite literally, marks on the reputation of the scholar, and Erasmus’s reflections here would have great impact on how other scholars represent themselves as emenders of both a personal and a textual past. Lisa Jardine has made much of the rhetoric of this preface, and of the larger set of problems that Erasmus had with this edition: its misprints, poor layout, and garblings that, as Erasmus would aver in later editions, were the responsibility of his editorial assistants (his castigatores). Jardine retells the story of this edition’s fortunae as a story of mistake and emendation, but she prefers to dwell on the later version of the Seneca that Erasmus would publish. My concern is with the language of this letter itself and how it stands as a fulcrum on which both the textual and the forensic could balance. The avowal of error makes the individual his own best judge and jury.

But what happens when one submits oneself to such a judge? Elyot sought approval from the king and his mediating minions—book production as an act of political allegiance. In the case of Erasmus’s contemporary Guillaume Budé, the avowal of mistake becomes the entry point in an appeal to the master. The brilliant, long, and complex letter that Budé wrote to Erasmus in response to reading the 1515 edition of the Lucubrationes is a testimony to the ways in which the language of error contributes to the rhetoric of humanist identity.

On May 1, 1516, Guillaume Budé wrote in reply to a letter from Erasmus. That first letter, now lost, clearly praised Budé for his learning, and the recipient—so pleased to hear from someone whom he could address “O noster Erasme”—quickly replied with a remarkable missive, half in Latin, half in Greek, that inaugurated one of the great humanist correspondences of the early sixteenth century. Budé’s letter writes a story of friendship as a tale of bibliography. From its opening ventriloquized exchange, through its accounts of scholarship and reading, to its detailed philological engagements with translation, this epistle charts a personal relationship through textual fidelity. Indeed, the very idioms of humanist philology—descent, affiliation, collation—find themselves transmuted here into the terms of personal life. Let us look closely at its language. The first text to appear is Erasmus’s original letter itself: “When I got your letter and had read it two or three times, I decided then and there to take a holiday from business and devote my leisure entirely to you.” Here, Budé locates the self in the texts, and the devotion to the man becomes the reading of his writing. No one, Budé remarks, could claim Erasmus “as his private property.” And yet, he states, “I cannot express, I repeat, how wholly you have made me yours since I had your letter.”⁶⁹ All the tropes of humanist friendship are in full display here. The language of devotion, of praise, and of personal humility come together to capture the attention, benevolence, and docility of the Erasmian reader. The letter structures its exordium much like an old, forensic speech. But what is clear, too, is the way in which the individual becomes a property. A consequence of what Lisa Jardine had called “the construction of charisma in print” is the effective commodification of the charismatic writer himself. Not only is the book a thing to buy and sell, but any text the teacher generates can become property. No one can claim the man “as his private property,” but one can certainly claim the written (or the printed) products of the man.

“You have made me yours”: a new life is coming into being here, and a close look at Budé’s Latin illustrates the subtle resonances of his language: “Verum, vt dixi, exprimere nequeo quam tuum me nuper feceris, posteaquam epistolam tuam accepi.” Budé says that he cannot express. But exprimere means not only “to express” in words but, more precisely and more historically, to cast metal in a die or to hand shape a preliminary form in wax. Cicero had used it, throughout his rhetorical works, in a figurative sense: to develop the rhetor’s skills through practice and example. At times, the verb refers to forms of imitation or translation; at times, it connotes his own practice of rendering Greek thought in Latin form.⁷⁰ In this context, the verb feci resonates with forms of making. It is not simply that Budé claims that Erasmus has “made me yours” but rather that Erasmus has fashioned Budé. He has shaped him into reader, student, devotee, and humanist. Exprimere nequeo now becomes the opposite of me feceris. I cannot shape, but you can; I cannot shape my words to give you praise, but you have shaped me. Budé phrases the nascent relationship with Erasmus in these precise terms of artistic creation: a self-fashioning, as it were, made over texts.

So, in order to please Erasmus, Budé will read Seneca. But as he is engaged with his own book, a new volume arrives. This is not a new text of the classical author but a new edition of the scriptures: Erasmus’s bilingual Novum instrumentum, the first edition of his New Testament (printed by Froben in 1516). “Anyhow,” Budé writes, “while I was poring over Seneca, lo and behold, news comes that the instrument of our salvation has arrived, Erasmus’s edition, the bilingual text, that glorious work; …. The arrival of this book made me drop the Seneca that I already had in my hands.”⁷¹ Budé has limned a verbal portrait of the humanist reader, book in hand, that deeply resonates with the emerging tropes of visual portraiture that would define the scholarly and courtly subject for early-sixteenth-century readers. The scholar’s hand is central to this iconography. In portraits of the time, the hand is the focal point of illustrating personal and professional identity. As Stephen Foley puts it, summarizing these developments in manual representation, the hands “clasped, grasping a collar, playing lightly over a book or clutching it,… provide a technical vocabulary for the representation of social codes and professional traits.”⁷² And as Jardine has shown in great detail, the paintings of Erasmus, More, Gilles, and many of the other merchants, scholars, and ambassadors of the early sixteenth century all define the character of their sitter in the hands.⁷³ The figure reading, writing, or manipulating the instruments of his profession sits, for many of these portraitists, absorbed in the manual dexterities of craft. Indeed, in the portrait of Budé himself by Jean Clouet, the humanist is shown with pen in hand, annotating an open book.⁷⁴

Budé’s letter, then, makes the humanist’s hand the focus of attention, and perhaps the most arresting thing he can announce is the book dropping from the hands. But no less arresting than this action is the comparable action of a new hand producing a new book. François Deloynes—parliamentarian, scholar, friend, and dedicatee of Budé’s earlier work—appears now, in this letter, as the go-between for reader and writer. He brings Budé evidence of Erasmus’s own praise. He tells the writer of the letter that the reader is an admirer. Erasmus had praised Budé’s translation of the Greek Gospel of St. Luke, for in the Novum testamentum Erasmus had relied on Budé’s Annotations on the Pandects to clarify some problems in translating St. Luke’s Greek. Erasmus used this scholarly reference as the occasion for a eulogy of Budé in the Novum testamentum, and it is this eulogy that Deloynes reads to Budé in the letter. “So now,” Deloynes says, in Budé’s letter to Erasmus “you have this same Erasmus not merely reading your works but heralding their virtues.” And then Deloynes shows Budé the book. “He finished speaking and, while I was waiting in suspense, produced your book, still unbound and fresh from the printer, and showing me a passage in St. Luke, ‘This Erasmus of yours,’ he said, ‘now there is a real friend, with very good taste.’”⁷⁵ One book has replaced another: the Seneca Lucubrationes, which Budé had been reading and which dropped from his hands, finds itself displaced by the Novum instrumentum. And Deloynes, in the drama of his bibliographical display, reveals a text. Indeed, it is a drama of revelation here in the etymological sense: revelare, to pull the covers off, to expose.

But if the book is being newly revealed, then so is the body. The details of Budé’s Latin diction reveal something else, as well: a newborn volume, and a newborn friendship: “Promuit librum tuum solutum adhuc et recentem ab officina.” Recentem can mean “fresh” or “young”; but it connotes, too, “whelped,” or “newly foaled.” The book is newly born, not even bound, or, more precisely, not yet severed from the cords of birth. Solutum means “freed,” “loosened,” “unattached.” The idiom partus solvere means “to bear,” “to bring forth,” “to be delivered of offspring.”⁷⁶ In other words, the book is being born here, much as the friendship of Erasmus and Budé is being born. And, in both cases, Deloynes functions as something of a midwife: the deliverer of newly printed books but also the effective helper in the making of a humanist friendship.

Budé thus draws on a range of idioms and images that announce the portent of a friendship and the import of the correspondence now beginning. And yet all is not joy at this birth. Budé captures Erasmus’s attention by admitting not just success but mistake. In the course of the letter, he will find himself in error, and the force of this self-castigation is to reinforce that rhetoric of error I am exposing here: “Furthermore, I am most grateful to you, and gladly admit it, for your forgiveness in that matter of the word parhkolouqhkoti. You gave me the most gentle treatment on that point, leaving me as you did to detect and amend my own error. I was wrong, I admit; I cannot seek to avoid the blame, only the penalty and the disgrace, and it is normal to let a man off these if he owns up.”⁷⁷ Such an admission is inseparable from the act of confession. Like More and Elyot, like Tyndale and Erasmus, Budé shows himself his own best corrector. Textual correction is a moral and, to some degree, a legal action. For in his discussion of his translation of the Greek word, parhkolouqhkoti, Budé states not only that he was wrong; he implies that the confession of that wrongdoing should generate a lenient response on the part of authorities. “It is normal to let a man off these if he owns up [quae fatenti remitti solet].” Budé asks to be let off, to be set free, to be, more pointedly, “remitted” from his crimes. And yet the very subject matter of his linguistic analysis is itself thematically concerned with issues of legality and witnessing: with acts that bear directly on the idioms of textual criticism in terms that both Budé and Erasmus had developed.

Budé’s problem was that he had mistakenly translated a phrase in Luke’s Greek as “a follower of the eye-witnesses,” when it really should mean “arrived at” or “correctly understood.” Budé looks at the Greek and Latin resonances of his terms and turns to Demosthenes for support. In his De falsa legatione, Demosthenes is quoted as saying, “that I, who know this man’s misdeeds and have followed their whole course, may enjoy your full support as I accuse him.” How, Budé says, “am I to understand this?” He goes on:

Budé blends the subject matter of his own anxiety as translator with that of humanist textual criticism in the large. He seeks remittance, forgiveness in the court of Erasmian philological law. And so he focuses on a passage in Demosthenes that similarly raises problems of crime, guilt, and understanding. Demosthenes is something of a textual critic: following leads, looking for witnesses, measuring his own observation against that of others. In this role, he recalls that association of the scholar the judge made in Erasmus’s preface to Seneca’s Lucubrationes—the very text that Budé says he was reading at the beginning of the letter.

Read in tandem, then, Budé’s and Erasmus’s remarks inflect the act of textual criticism with the flavor of the law court. They make problems of witnessing—of seeing, attesting, telling the account—central to the ways in which both writers seek to legitimate themselves. For Erasmus, it is the establishment of himself as an editorial judge; for Budé, it is the modeling of himself on a classical legal scholar. “You, gentlemen of the jury, will follow the whole story more easily.” These are Demosthenes’ words, but they might as well be Budé’s—or, for that matter, More’s, Erasmus’s, Elyot’s, Tyndale’s, or any humanist’s. The reader is the jury, and the writer’s job is to present the evidence (be it philological, bibliographical, or personal) in a manner that can be easily followed.

Budé’s letter remains a brilliant essay in the tropes of humanism. It defines intellectual friendship as keyed to the exchange of texts. It makes the arts of amicitia the arts of reading, and it textures the language of those arts with terms brought from the law court and confessional. By working through a mistranslated passage, whose own subject is the status of eyewitnessing and the legal structures of review, Budé effectively responds to Erasmus’s own legalistic idiom in the preface to his Seneca. The dialogue between Budé and Erasmus becomes a set of pleas, confessions, and self-witnessing avowals. And, in its dramas of bibliographical discovery and revelation—the book falling from the hands, the new text produced like a newborn creature—Budé invests in the narratives of textual presentation that would come to characterize courtly reading politics throughout the early sixteenth century.

All this contributes to what David Greetham has called, in an evocative phrase, “textual forensics.”⁷⁸ The humanist becomes the master of his own mistake. Self-presentation as a reader and a writer works through avowals and corrections of errata. The language of the law becomes the rhetoric of scholarship. The case of Thomas Wyatt similarly interlards scholarly and legal idioms, but in precisely the opposite way. For if Budé and Erasmus would use legal discourse to make points of editorial control, Wyatt invokes the techniques of the editor to defend himself against accusations of treason. Soon after Cromwell’s fall in 1540, Wyatt was accused of treason.⁷⁹ Dr. Edmund Bonner, in particular, claimed he had slandered Henry VIII, and one of the main accusations hinged on a crude recasting of a proverb. Wyatt was said to have announced “that he feared the King should be cast out of a cart’s arse and that, by God’s blood, if he were so, he were well served, and would he were so.”⁸⁰ In his defense, Wyatt wrote two prose texts in 1541 that come to terms explicitly with these accusations but also review his ambassadorial service in the late 1530s: A Declaration … of his Innocence… and Wyatt’s Defence To the Iudges after the Indictement and the evidence.⁸¹ He goes to great lengths to affirm his habitual use of proverbs and to argue that Bonner, knowing of this habit, added one that Wyatt did not utter, in order to lend credence to a slanderous story about Wyatt himself. But at the heart of his defense is a concern with proper speaking, writing, and reading. The altering of a single syllable, Wyatt argues, “ether with penn or word,” can change the entire meaning of an utterance, an argument he marshals to claim that his statement was heard and transcribed inaccurately. Though the Declaration and Defence range widely over many issues central to the early Tudor court, they bear directly on the forms, themes, and contexts of Wyatt’s own poetry—in particular, what I would call their textual condition. Poem, book, and letter are all subject to the slippage of the pen, the intrusions of the interceptor, or the mistakes of the proof.

Much of the Declaration focuses on memory. Wyatt tries to recall, years later, “suche thynges as have passed me … by worde, wrytinge, communinge, or receauing.”⁸² This Declaration is not so much an appeal to innocence as a remembrance of letters—an accounting of all the documents that passed through his office while he was at the emperor’s court.⁸³ “[L]ettres or wrytinges,” he tries to recall, “came to my handys or thorow my handes vnopened” (p. 180). He never, he protests, knowingly communicated with a traitor. Some letters were, as he put it “ether so secretly handlede or yett not in couerture” that he could not see them (p. 181). Others never reached him (p. 183). The Declaration concludes, following Wyatt’s signature, “This withowte correctinge, sendinge, or ouerseinge” (p. 184), and in the Defence that follows it Wyatt develops the activities of correcting, sending, and overseeing into an essay on the nature of reading and writing itself. Diplomacy becomes a form of editorship. The questions Wyatt asks about himself, and those that others asked of him, stand here as kin to Erasmus’s inquiries into the status of a text. For much as any editor would collate or confer competing texts together, so Wyatt imagines such conferring as the centerpiece of political service.

How can one defend oneself against words quoted, reported, and transcribed? “And what say my accusares in thes wordes? Do theie swere I spake them trayterously or maliciously? … Rede ther depositions, theie say not so. Confer ther depositions, yf theie agre worde for worde” (p. 196). The accusations against Wyatt become texts; the texts become subject to conferral, that is, comparison. Such documents are treated here as if they were the objects of an editor: compared, collated, and reviewed for accuracy. Wyatt goes on:

Wyatt claims that his words have been mistaken. His use of the proverb “I am lefte owte of the cartes ars” (p. 198) has been taken out of context, misheard, misreported, and mistranscribed into the environment of royal offense. Instead of saying what he has been accused of saying (“ye shall see the kinge our maister cast out at the carts tail”), what Wyatt claims he said was more like, “I fere for all these menes fayer promyses the kinge shalbe lefte owte of the cartes ars.” He recalls that he may have very well said something like that and may well have invoked this proverbial sentiment on occasion. “But that I vsed it with Bonar or Haynes I neuer remembre; and yf I euer dyd I am sure neuer as thei couche the tale” (p. 198).

Wyatt’s appeal to memory and intention takes on the flavor of textual criticism. Comparison of manuscripts—signaled by the Latin verb conferre and its past participial form, collatus—was, of course, the hallmark of the humanist philological method, and Wyatt’s words recall Erasmus’s association of editorial and juridical judgment.⁸⁴ Just as the judge compares the testimony of witnesses, “none of whom,” Erasmus slyly noted, “is telling the truth,” so one conjectures a true reading out of the collation of accounts. But Erasmus is concerned with Latin texts, and his terms for editorship reach back to the classical and Continental contexts of analysis. Wyatt is writing English. In fact, he is more than simply writing English; he is seeking a vernacular expression for these learned terms. Much like Tyndale, who would translate for English readers European idioms of textual review, so Wyatt offers up an essay in translation. His two defense tracts (and especially the passages I quote at length here) now may be approached as studies in word meaning: attempts to define, precisely, just what may be meant by such terms as “intelligence” or “traitor” or what may be connoted by the idioms “fall out,” “cast out,” “left out.” His is a project, too, akin to Thomas Elyot’s—a cultural lexicography, as it were. And there are the recollections of Robert Ridley’s phrasing as well. “Mark them owt” is the phrase he uses to define the act of critical reading.

What is emerging in the 1520s and 1530s is a growing use, in England, of the terms for printing, editing, proofreading, and the like, all applied in a more figurative sense to the act of verbal understanding. In the OED, the first attested use of the word “collation” in this textual sense comes from a book of profound national, literary import: the 1532 edition of Geoffrey Chaucer, edited by William Thynne. This is the first collected volume of Chaucer’s works; indeed, it is the first single-volume publication of the whole work of any vernacular English writer. Much has been made of its importance, and we can see in the avowals of its preface (probably written by the courtier Brian Tuke) one of the earliest vernacular statements of editorial method in English: “as bokes of dyuers imprintes came unto my handes / I easely and without grete study / might and haue deprehended in them many errours / falsyties / and deprauacions / whiche euydently appered by the contrarietees and alteracions founde by collacion of the one with the other / wherby I was moued and styred to make dilygent sertch / where I might fynde or recouer any trewe copies or exemplaries of the sayd bookes” (emphasis mine).⁸⁵

The collation of manuscripts helps what Tuke calls “the restauracion” of Chaucer’s works in their authorized form, and this process, he avers, is not just a literary but a political “dewtie” growing out of his “very honesty and loue to my countrey” (Aiii r). Tuke’s preface is a statement of national fealty, an appeal to King Henry VIII as patron to exercise his “discrecyon and iugement” and accept the volume as it has been printed.⁸⁶ If Wyatt’s Defence reads as a statement of editorial principles, then Tuke’s preface may stand as something of a defense of its own: a plea before a judging king for the authentic value of an author’s works and, in turn, for a recognition of the editor’s own searching out of falsity and error through the collation of texts.

In the making of an edition, the slightest slips can change the meaning of a line: “the settinge of the wordes one in an others place may mayke greate dyfferaunce.” “I feare” or “I truste,” Wyatt offers, differ only in “one smale syllable.” But such a case is not a random call. “Fear” and “trust” are the two poles of Wyatt’s poetic emotion. I have elsewhere adduced a wide range of Wyatt’s uses of these terms, in the ballads, sonnets, and songs, where the two words scope out the literary and emotional anxieties of someone who seeks the “trust” of his beloved yet also queries “What may I do when my maister feareth, / But, in the felde, with him to lyve and dye?” (4.12–13).⁸⁷ “Fear” and “trust” play into the Petrarchan oxymora of love. In one poem, Wyatt distills the Italian lexicon of pain—sighing, hope, and desire—into a unique concatenation of his own: “An endles wynd doeth tere the sayll a pace / Of forced sightes and trusty ferefulnes” (28.7–8; emphases mine). And in another ballad, he expounds not just on the nature of his trust but on the very problems of transcription and substitution that are the subject of his Defence. Concluding the ballad, whose refrain line had been “Patiens, parforce, content thy self with wrong,” he offers:

“My word nor I shall not be variable” (11.13). In spite of this protest, Wyatt’s words were variable. The very nature of the writing and transmitting of his poetry lies in the variations of the scribe, in the self-cancellations and revisions of the poet, and in the manipulations of the printer. It is a commonplace of Wyatt criticism to remark on the unstable quality of his verse line, on the idiosyncrasies of his spelling, and on the variations generated by competing manuscript and print editions. The practice of textual criticism runs up against the intractable wall of Wyatt’s own texts. As Jonathan Crewe recognizes, modern editions of Wyatt’s poetry (as of much early-sixteenth-century verse) are in themselves modernizations, recastings of his words and lines. “In quite a fundamental sense,” Crewe notes, “to print Wyatt modernized is to censor his work.”⁸⁸

Let us examine an example of such censoring. The Penguin paperback edition of the poems of Sir Thomas Wyatt, edited by R. A. Rebholz, has, since its first publication over twenty years ago, become a standard text. It is the form in which most students, and most teachers, will encounter Wyatt (certainly most American students and teachers). Its prefatory explanations of the vexed problem of Wyatt’s meters, the status of his work in manuscript, and the complex evidence and scholarly debates about the range of Wyatt’s canon distill vast amounts of intricate material for modern readers. This is, admittedly, a modern spelling edition. Rebholz has brought orthography and punctuation into line with current practices, he argues, because “I became convinced that the sacrifices were eminently worthwhile because they make the poems genuinely available to modern readers when texts preserving old accidentals are frequently unintelligible.”⁸⁹ He acknowledges that, on occasion, modernization may ruin a rhyme or metrical pattern and that added punctuation may fix syntax that, in Wyatt’s time, would have been fluid enough to “create ambivalent meanings” (p. 14).

I have discussed in detail elsewhere some of the textual problems raised by this edition, especially in the long poem to John Poyntz, where Rebholz’s choice of base text and his selective recording of variants suppresses the controlling verbal relationship of this poem to its deep Chaucerian subtext (especially Chaucer’s ballad “Truth,” itself a widely read text of the early Tudor period).⁹⁰ Here, I develop and correct an earlier engagement with one ballad in this edition that takes as its theme the problem of error and, in particular, locates that theme in the emergent print practices I have discussed above. “I see the change” (Rebholz 215) is a refrain ballad appearing only in the Devonshire Manuscript, a collection of Tudor verse. Here is the poem in the conservative, old-spelling edition of Kenneth Muir and Patricia Thompson.

Aside from certain orthographical conventions—the double ffs, the early sixteenth-century spellings, the consistent use of se for see—the most important piece of verbal trickery in this text is the spelling of both the definite article and the second person pronoun as “the.” Wyatt’s poems are continually preoccupied with their own linguistic instability and with the inability of the poetic hand to transcribe the intentions of the heart. Even when the author’s own text is presented as a proof, he recognizes that it may never suffice. The logic of the poem hinges on the instability of “the.” Who is to say that, in the refrain lines (6, 12, 18, 24, 30), the speaker of the poem sees “the” change or sees “thee” change? Similarly, in the first lines of each successive stanza, the ambiguity is only barely resolved as the reader completes the sentence (e.g., lines 19 and 21: “I see the change” or I see “thee” change?). Following each refrain line, these first stanza lines create an unresolvable conundrum. Indeed, they reify the very problem of the text posed by the poetry itself: the act of proofreading. Proof is no liar, or, more pointedly, the proof of sight that shows the writing of the pen plainly. What should, the poem’s speaker asks, I seek further to prove? And yet proofs always lie. For Wyatt, writing in the 1530s, the word “proof” must resonate with its new meaning in the realms of bibliography. The indenture between John Palsgrave and the printer Richard Pynson from 1523 sets out the responsibilities of author and printer, including proofreading: “farder more hyt ys agreed that the saide Richard schall vse good fayth in the printing off the saide worke and suffer the said Iohn Palsgraue or hys assignes to correct the proff.”⁹¹

I have made much of this detail because, in Rebholz’s edition, these ambivalences are completely effaced:

Rebholz acknowledges, in his note in the back of the book, that lines 6, 12, 18, 24, and 30 offer a “pun on ‘the/thee’ in the refrain. The word ‘thee’ (l. 9) is spelled ‘the’ in the MS” (p. 522). But that is all he notes. The point is not just that there is a pun in the refrain nor that in one particular line “thee” is spelled “the.” The point is that the poem as a whole presents one spelling throughout for these two words and that spelling is the key to the poem’s theme. Indeed, spelling is the poem’s theme—what you write with the pen is always subject to change; and when you read, you see the change.

In other poems, such as “Me list no more to sing,” “Lament my loss,” and “Who would have ever thought,” relationships of text and reader, speaker and hearer, are similarly addressed. In the first of them, Wyatt laments—much as in his defense tracts—how his words have been mistaken: “For what I song or spake Men dede my songis mistake” (Muir and Thompson 210.4–5). “Marke well, I saye, this text,” he commands in the middle of the poem (l. 29), and his marking takes us back to Ridley and to Tyndale, to a world of reading by censorious minds. Much like the translator or the polemicist, Wyatt avers his meaning in the face of readerly misapprehension.

If an impediment to understanding lies in foolish readers, then it lies, too, in bad writers. In “Lament my loss,” error and correction are the purview of the errant pen. Taking the image of the quaking pen—one of the most familiar images of authorial excuse, from Chaucer through Lydgate—Wyatt develops a poetics of error itself.

What Wyatt, in the Defence, called “mysreportinge and mysvnderstandinge” resonates anew with the conventions of the envoy and the fears of the pen. In this ballad, however, the quaking pen has been transferred to the poet’s whole body. The sequence of lines 19 to 21 is a veritable anatomy of a Chaucerian idiom: from hand, to pen, to body, to wits, to heart, the insecurities of writer move from the extremities of writing to the inner site of feeling and desire. By the time we get to the line “I do remayne skant wotting what I wryte,” we can see that the narrator’s self-ignorance grows from this fundamental separation of the writing hand from the feeling heart.⁹² Notice the contrast between this line and the last line of “Me list no more to sing.” I wot what I do mean, but I scarcely know what I write. To grant the writer our goodwill is not, therefore, simply to share in the topoi of modesty but to recognize that those texts inscribed with quaking pens are, quite simply, textually unreliable.

This question of the unreliable text is both a condition of Wyatt’s textual transmission and a theme addressed throughout the poetry. When Wyatt concludes the short poem “Who would haue euer thought” with the lines “But note I wyll thys texte, To draw better the nexte” (191.17–18), what he implies is the possibility of endless rescription. The next poem will be better drawn; the scribal lessons of the previous will be incorporated in the next. But this will never happen. What we must see, as Wyatt’s readers, is the constantly changing nature of his verse as it is always written and, in the process, that it exposes how both the poems and their scribes bring out the insecurities of manuscript transmission. From the standpoint of editorial practice, the sacrifices to modernity do not just misrepresent a historical artifact. They censor the controlling ambiguities in the poetry. Crewe’s choice of words, then, is uncannily accurate, as Wyatt himself constructs, in the Defence, an argument for textual criticism grounded in the language of censorial politics. Repentance is a key word for both the poems I have looked at in detail here, as it is for More and Elyot in their respective meditations on error. The urge to confess remains; in “Lament my loss,” so is the urge to pray.

And so, too, is the urge to prove. Pynson’s indenture, in addition to offering what may be the earliest use of the word “proof” in textual terms in English (it predates the OED entries by nearly half a century), also deploys the rhetoric of good will, error, and correction, of responsibility and authorship, explored in all the texts I have discussed here. It reveals something of the habits of the print shop, and Percy Simpson uses this and other contemporary texts to show the ways in which the printer and his employees struggled with error and correction. In another document—a poem written in about 1530, describing the principles of selection in Robert Copland’s printing house—the exchange between printer and an anonymous customer (called “Quidam”) shows what is going on in language precisely equivalent to Wyatt’s.⁹³ When Copland asks his customer if he has “any copy” of the work he wants, Quidam replies:

What is the nature of transcription; how can the pen transcribe what the heart knows; and how can printers accurately print those words? True spelling is as much at the core of Copland’s craft as it is in Wyatt’s imagination and the modern editor’s responsibility. This versified exchange admonishes the modern editor much as it abashes the early Tudor printer: right down to the spelling of the word “the.” “For I shall tel the man” really means “For I shall tell thee, man.” Take your pen, says Quidam. “My pen, take payn a lytyll space,” says Wyatt. But what happens when “My hand doth shake, my penn skant dothe his parte”?

In the end, it is faith both in heart and hand that leads the printer and the scholar to adjudicate the error. In 1560, summing up not just the personal but the historical situation of all authors, Jasper Heywood complained about the printing of his Seneca translations by no less a hand than that of Richard Tottel.

Perhaps it is no accident that Tottel’s sign should be the hand and star. When hands shake—be they the quaking bearer of the poet’s pen or the of typesetter’s letter—all is corrupted. How can we see the stars when we are fixed on the work of errant hands? If this is a complaint about the world of print, though, it recalls complaints about the world of scribes. Tottel plays Adam Scriveyn to Heywood’s Chaucerian authority here: Chaucer’s bad scribe was charged to “write more trewe,” while the poet was faced with correcting the writing: “thy work renewe.” But Heywood, too, is summarizing all the idioms of the erratic here. The faults that escape the printer (that tag line of the early English errata sheet) are vivified in the image of Heywood’s sentences flying abroad—an image, too, that recalls Erasmus’s lament that there still remain some errors in his Seneca that, literally, flew away from him (Neque vero me fugit plurimum adhuc restitisse mendarum). Heywood’s enumerations of mistakes—greater than fourscore faults in forty leaves—recalls, too, Robert Ridley’s moral accountancy of Tyndale’s errors: “if ye look well, ye shal not look iij lynes without fawt.” His overarching narrative of bookmaking resonates with the narratives of Thomas Elyot; his avowals of personal involvement in proofreading recall More. Proof and repentance, admission and control—these are the terms not just of excuse but identity. The admission of error and the public mark of self-correction stand as the identifying gestures of the humanist subject. In its typographical, political, and lyric forms, it represents the transformation of a voice into a text, a body into a book, an artifact into a narrative.

My forays into early printed books have led me to a rhetoric of error—to a chronicle of set pieces of admission and avowals of intention. Such examples could be multiplied, perhaps, almost endlessly. Scarcely a day goes by when I do not uncover yet another case of an errata sheet, an aphorism on erroneous behavior, or another idiom for botched lines and misplaced letters. It remains hard to keep them all in mind; in fact, keeping them all in mind is precisely the problem for the writers I survey here. All these stories are, like all rhetorical accounts, really tales of remembrance. Memory is the guardian of rhetoric, whose treasure-house (thesaurus) is invention. Certainly, Wyatt recalled this phrasing (familiar from as far back as the Rhetorica ad Herennium) when he noted, in “Me list no more to sing,” “What vailith vndre kaye [i.e., key] / To kepe treasure alwaye?”⁹⁵ Wyatt is, in the end, a poet of great memory, and his defense tracts hinge, too, on just what was remembered (or misremembered) by accuser and accused. So, too, Robert Ridley remembers all the bad parts of the Tyndale New Testament, even though he has no book before him. And More, Erasmus, Budé, Elyot, and, finally, Jasper Heywood all tell stories of mistake and their correction as tales of remembrance. The temporality of bookmaking—that feature of the narratives of printing with which I began this chapter—is the temporality of all narrative. Errata sheets become the markers of our memories.

And so I return to the questions asked at the beginning of this chapter. As the age of mechanical reproduction segues into an age of digital transmission, is there any place for error? Spellcheckers and increasingly elaborate programs for grammatical and stylistic review may well make errata a thing of the past. If we are, in fact, coming to the end of (or at least to a turning point in) the history of the book, the study of errata reminds us of a time when proofreading was a labor, when skills at transcription were a valued style of scholarship, and when, in Lisa Jardine’s arrestingly evocative phrasing, charisma could be constructed in print. Our memory of scholarship, in the end, is a memory of error, and our fascinations with the early printed book may grow out of a corresponding fascination with a material culture no longer ours.