THE ONE MILLIONTH VOLUME The Poet and the Poem The Printer and the Book by WILLIAM WELLS Chapel Hill THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA LIBRARY October 12, 1960 The vignette on the cover is a re- production of William Caxton's printers mark. THE ONE MILLIONTH VOLUME The Poet and the Poem The Printer and the Book by WILLIAM WELLS Chapel Hill THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA LIBRARY October 12, 1960 Digitized by the Internet i Archive in 2015 f https://archive.org/details/onemillionthvoluOwell THE ONE MILLIONTH VOLUME JOHN GOWER'S CONFESSIO AMANTIS PRINTED BY WILLIAM CAXTON IN 1483 PRESENTED TO THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA BY ROBERT MARCH HANES AND MILDRED BORDEN HANES THROUGH THE HANES FOUNDATION THE ONE MILLIONTH VOLUME The one millionth volume acquired by the Library of the University of North Carolina exemplifies per- fectly the miracle of the book. In 1483, nine years be- fore Columbus's first voyage, William Caxton finished the printing of his folio edition of John Gower's Con- fessio Amantis. Today, after 477 years, the poet, the poem, the printer and the book can claim our attention because in this one volume each illustrates and con- firms our belief in the significance of the past for the present and the future. The Poet and the Poem In the fifteenth century every Englishman who read for enjoyment and instruction knew something of the work of John Gower. For many years after his death in 1408 his fame equalled, indeed sometimes surpassed, that of his friend Geoffrey Chaucer. A resident of Lon- don, he lived during the successive reigns of Edward III, Richard II, and Henry IV. Though we cannot be sure that Gower had any profession or occupation besides poetry, apparently he had independent means, perhaps acquired in business. Certainly he praises consistently honorable merchants, and he seems to have had an espe- cially high regard for that most important of English employments, the wool trade. His poetry so clearly mir- rors the attitude of the well-established Londoner that we may assume that he was a member of the prosperous and conservative middle class. However, Gower was not overwhelmed by narrow city interests. He accepted the principle of limits and freedoms prescribed for individual members of each of 5 the three estates, Nobles, Clergy and Commons, and he used the social hierarchy as convenient lines on the map of human nature, which is a single continent to be ex- plored in an orderly way. 'In an orderly way" describes precisely Gower's own manner and, indeed, his attitude towards human action. For this reason his horror of the Peasants' Revolt in 1381 never left him. The uprising became for him a symbol of human unreason. Espe- cially in the first book of his Latin poem, the Vox Clamantis, the dread born of man-made disorder lives vividly for the reader. There the revolt, described con- ventionally as a dream-vision, most unconventionally becomes a nightmare from which one cannot awaken because it is reality. But it would be a mistake if we were to conclude from this fear that Gower in his con- servatism was blind to the evils in the existing order of society as they affect all men's lives. In fact all three of his major works — the Vox Clamantis, the Mir our de VOmme, and the Confessio Amantis — proclaim the ur- gency of human responsibility, the responsibility of every man to strive towards a perfect order. When Chaucer addressed his friend as "moral Gower," he no doubt spoke approvingly. In their age the word moral most aptly described that quality a ser- ious poet would hope to reveal in his work of teaching with delight. Gower assumes naturally the office of poet-teacher. As teacher he drew upon his own obser- vations of all levels of English life. Perhaps most re- warding to modern readers are his views of kingship. There is some probability in a recent suggestion that Gower's Anglo-French poem the Mirour de VOmme contains censure of the unkingly sloth of Edward III and the bad influence of the royal mistress Alice Perrers 6 during the last gray years of Edward's reign. Clearly the poet's sympathies lay with the citizens of London and men like the Black Prince who deplored irresponsible rule, rather than with court flatterers and a king who had forgotten his duty. Gower always avoided suicidal frankness in expressing his indignation of royal failings, but his later distinctly marked change from hope to dis- appointment in the rule of Richard II reveals his alert- ness to regal violations of the divinely appointed order. Consistency of purpose in Gower's poetry gives the clearest evidence of the power of the principles which ruled him. The censure repeated occasionally since his time, that he prematurely turned from Richard to the rising Henry Bolingbroke before the latter's accession to the throne, ignores the importance to Gower of the rule of reason in law. ''How may a king" — he asks in the seventh book of the Confessio Amantis — ''how may a king preserve his reign if he violates the law he him- self has decreed.^" The late George Raleigh Coffman, for many years Kenan Professor at the University of North Carolina, has given a judicious appraisal of Gower's chief inter- est: In kinship with Thomas Aquinas before and Milton afterwards, Gower affirms that if reason be the guide for the human race all will go well. The difference is that Gower is not interested in the abstract theological, philosophic or scientific aspects of this. He is concerned with its relation to man in contemporary society. John Gower's principal work, the Confessio Aman- tis, is a poem of 34,000 lines arranged in a prologue and eight books and containing 112 stories from many sources. Its early popularity is shown by the existence of over forty manuscript copies. The fact that Caxton in 1483 and Berthelet in 1533 undertook the printing of the complete poem despite its formidable length proves its fame was firmly established. The Confessio was praised by a roll call of fifteenth and sixteenth century English writers for its design, content, language, style and prosody. Apparently it is the first English piece of any length to be recognized abroad by translation: John Paym, or Payn, an English resident of Lisbon, made a Portuguese version, now lost; and from his work Juan de Cuenca made the Spanish translation which still exists in an early fifteenth century manuscript preserved in the Library of the Escorial. Scholars have good reason who would relate the Confessio to that great body of instructive literature known under the generic title of courtesy book. Recog- nition of the special requirements for the training of leaders is not the original discovery of enlightened twen- tieth century specialists in personnel management. At least as long ago as the early fourth century B.C., the Greek writer Xenophon demonstrated the importance of education in the development of good rulers. His Cyropaedia analyzes in detail the direction given the Per- sian prince who afterwards assumed the rule of his em- pire and at last his place in universal history as Cyrus the Great. Unlike Xenophon's essay in one respect, a later European handbook of kingly education would be written for and addressed to the royal pupil. Thus in the early sixteenth century Erasmus composes a manual for the young man who later becomes the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. S The evidence that the Confessio was originally in- tended as a book for Richard appears in the first version of the prologue. '1 plan," says Gower, ''to write a book for King Richard's sake. . . . One time when I was being rowed on the Thames beside London, I met my liege lord by chance. As my boat came near he saw me and commanded me to board his barge. In the course of our conversation he told me to compose a new book for him to read, and this poem is the result." Gower's persistence in revising the poem, as dif- ferences in text of the principal groups of extant manu- scripts prove, is in good part dependent upon his gradual loss of faith in Richard as a just and gracious king. More than once during the 1390's he reworked sections of the Confessio, especially those at the beginning and the end, which had first contained hopeful praise of his lord. The plan of the poem and most of its subject mat- ter, however, remained unaffected by revision. The voluminous subject matter of the Confessio suggests the range of Gower's reading in the ancient and contemporary classics of his age. He used Ovid ex- tensively, not only the Metamorphoses but the Heroides and Fasti as well. He borrowed from Livy's history, Servius' commentary on Vergil, and Statius' Tbebiad. He v/as thoroughly familiar with the Latin Bible of Jerome. He knew St. Augustine's City of God, the Moralia and the Commentaries on the Book of Job by Gregory the Great, the encyclopedic Etymologies of Isidore of Se- ville. He consulted the Pantheon of Godfrey of Viterbo, both the Roman de Troie of Benoit de Sainte-Maure and the Historia Troiana of Guido di Colonna, the great Speculum Historiale of Vincent de Beauvais, and the Anglo-Norman chronicle of Nicholas Trivet. He bor- 9 rowed from the Roman de la Rose of Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun. He quoted Dante and Boc- caccio. This recital does not exhaust the list of Gower's authorities. Indeed, the pelting mass of his lore would have buried him under its avalanche if he had not hit upon and followed with discipline an expert plan for its management. Gower's plan for the Confessio is implicit in the title: the confession becomes a powerful device to direct the arrangement of the many tales to be told, so as to give point to the Lover's questions and authority to the Confessor's answers. From what has been noted of Gower's general interests and his special purpose for the Confessio, we may infer correctly that he has a much broader theme than the celebration of the love between the sexes. For him as for earlier writers on courtly love like Andreas Capellanus, the tender passion is the mani- festation of the order in the universe God has bestowed upon man. The lover seeking his ideal is man striving towards order. The good lover and the good man are one. Thus, to illustrate the evil power of hypocrisy, the Confessor recounts the stratagem of the Trojan horse; to show the virtue of speaking forth courageously, he de- scribes Pygmalion boldly imploring Venus to transform the image he has made into the woman he can love; to enforce the precept that the first virtue of a ruler is Truth, he gives the question posed three wise men: which is strongest, the king, wine or woman? The most persuasive sage of the three, arguing that "woman** is the answer, summarizes the story of Alcestis who gave her life for her husband. But, he concludes, above a woman of truth stands Truth herself as the most power- ful of all earthly things. These examples of Gower*s 10 method in following his plan can do no more than hint at the ingenuity required, and found, to exploit his stories for the entertainment and instruction of his reader. We who are used to abridgment and accept con- densation as a rhetorical virtue may condemn the occa- sional digressions of the Confessor, like his discourse on the religions of the world in Book V or on sorcery in Book VI. In so roomy a work as the Confessio that there are few digressions is remarkable. Gower neither jogs nor plods; he saunters and pauses now and then to point out a favorite prospect, but he knows where he is going. The order he reveres is strongly supported by his knowing use of plain language and by a style surpris- ingly free from the artificial-flowerlike embellishments one frequently happens upon in the verse of his French and English predecessors and his fifteenth century dis- ciples. The general impression of simplicity gained from the poem is achieved in part by Gower's expert employ- ment of a verse form adapted to narrative, the unassum- ing, comfortable octosyllabic couplet. In Book VIII, when the poet reaffirms his identity with the Lover who confesses, he permits himself the rhetoric proper to his Supplication to Venus. He leaves the couplet for the formal seven-line stanza of rime royal as he describes "the woeful pain of love's malady," and prays the God- dess, now that he is old, to excuse him from her service. Finally, we must note that John Gower was fully aware of his own technical skill with language and pro- sody, just as he recognized his completed Confessio for the substantial accomplishment it is. Moreover, he had a penchant for refreshing, wry self-assessment which must not be confused with the traditional modesty 11 springing from a poet's good manners. Appropriately- near the end of the poem, as Venus took final leave of the aged Lover-Poet, she granted his supplication and hung a rosary about his neck for him to use as he prayed for his own peace. When the Goddess vanished, * 'en- closed in starred sky," Gower reports, '1 stood for a while amazed, and then I smiled to myself as I thought about the black beads that had been given me to help me pray." The Printer and the Book The career of the first English printer epitomizes the vigor and interest in English enterprise flourishing in the second half of the fifteenth century. In his early teens William Caxton came up to London from his na- tive Kent to begin his mercer's apprenticeship under Robert Large, silk merchant. After his master died in 1441 but before his full term was complete he left Lon- don to work in the cloth trade in Bruges, one of the busiest mercantile centers of the continent. By 1446 he had established himself as a full member of the Mercers' Company, perhaps the most powerful of the English trade guilds. In Bruges Caxton followed his occupation with increasing success for a quarter-century. From 1465 to 1469 he served as Governor of English merchants in the Low Countries. A special assignment as negotiator of commercial contracts with the Court of Burgundy followed in 1470. That year Caxton the merchant re- tired, very probably a wealthy man, and with the en- couragement of the Duchess of Burgundy, sister of Ed- ward IV, turned towards books and their making. Caxton's change of career as he approached the age of fifty is not astonishing when we consider the kind of 12 education he had had during his twenty-nine years in Bruges. Thriving on trade, the city was the meeting place of men of all European nations and social degrees, who, as they bought and sold goods in bales and tuns, also traded freely and in rich variety their prejudices, opinions and knowledge. The transition from energy in trade to enthusiasm for literature is not strange after we observe the parallel transition from learning what a man has for sale to understanding what he thinks and how he feels. Caxton, of course, always denied he was an edu- cated man, but even before he went off to Cologne in 1471 and became fascinated with the processes of print- ing, he had translated into English, at the request of the Duchess Margaret, a popular romance under the title of The Recuyell of the Histories of Troye. It is significant that Caxton was a translator before he became a printer. All of the details of Caxton's first printing venture in Bruges with Colard Mansion the book illuminator are not clear. He did publish at that time — ^perhaps as early as 1474 — his translation of the Recuyell. In 1476 he left Bruges permanently and set up the first printing press in England, in Westminster near the Abbey. Cax- ton may have printed some pamphlets and single sheets in 1476; certainly he finished the first printing in Eng- land of a dated book. The Dictes and Sayings of the Philosophers, on 17 November 1477. From that time until his death in 1491 he supervised his busy printing office, examined books for possible publication, made numerous translations of his own and sought those of others, and wrote prologues and epilogues to many of the volumes he printed. The variety of achievement during these thirteen years explains his attraction for the student of literature as well as the bibliophile. That 13 Caxton was the first English printer is sufficient reason for successive generations to treasure whatever he ran oflF his press. But Caxton valued his own work for its excel- lence, not its novelty of method. Early printers, we re- member, produced books closely imitative of the best work of contemporary scribes. The management of lineation and margins, the use of founts of type cut on the pattern of the book hand, and the rubrication, or the supplying by hand of important capital letters, make a folio page of Caxton resemble closely one from a pro- fessionally produced hand-copied book. Caxton's zeal for fine presswork is but part of his quest for excellence. Especially important to him was the selection of books worthy to be copied in type. His search for the best was comprehensive, unrestricted by age or by literary kind: he sought to print standard authors of his time: chronicles like Trevisa's translation of Ranulf Higden's Polychronicon, prose romance best represented by Malory's Morte d' Arthur, service books like the Sarum Ordinale, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and the Troilus, the story of Reynard the Fox, Aesop's Fables, books of etiquette, collections of proverbs, Caxton's own translation of the Golden Legend, that compendium of sacred lore compiled by Jacobus de Voragine, and scores of others. Some of Caxton's choices may puzzle us enough to question his judgment, but we may be sure that as he made his selections for the press he was consulting his profound knowledge of men who were reading five hundred years before us. His criteria seem clear enough: each book he chose was 1 ) long established in reputa- tion or very popular, 2) well- written, 3) instructive, 14 and 4) if the subject permitted, delightful. The Confes- sio Amantis was an obvious and relatively early choice. Caxton used at least three Gower manuscripts for his copy-text. We do not know when he began compo- sition, but he finished the printing of the Confessio September 2, 1483. When completed the large folio volume had some 440 pages printed in two columns of 44 or 46 lines each. The copy of the Confessio which is now the one millionth volume of the Library of the University of North Carolina has special distinction even beyond that of its Caxton imprint. Unrestored and unsophisticated the volume gives us an excellent idea of the original ap- pearance of a Caxton-printed, Caxton-bound folio. Its text is very nearly complete: only seventeen printed and three blank leaves are lacking. It is noteworthy that the first printed leaf, missing in a number of copies, is pres- ent in this. Of course a half-millenium of use has left its marks, in the form of marginalia, upon some leaves. These include a few timeless doodlings, the name John Crof ton on the first printed leaf, and two lines of Spanish on numbered leaf 185. In the margin of numbered leaf 9 is the posy, John a kynaston wrote this to you sweet hart & cossen ywis. Then on numbered leaf 37 appears a half-dozen lines memorializing the empty disappointment of love. It is pleasant to note the posy and comment are not in the same hand. Of almost unique interest is the binding, of brown calf over oak boards, ornamented with geometrical pat- terns of double-ruled lines and stamped fleurs-de-lis in 15 blind, that is, without gilding. In his Census of Caxtons, Seymour de Ricci lists 578 extant copies of Caxton's 100 books. Of the 578 only eight, including this copy of the Confessio, have been preserved in their original Caxton bindings. Four of the eight are the work of the crafts- man known as the first Caxton binder, who is thought to have followed Caxton to England from Bruges in 1476. His craftsmanship is almost as distinctive as hand- writing. Specifically, strong evidence lies in the disposi- tion of the ruled decoration and in the fact that the fleur-de-lis stampings are more nearly characteristic of Flemish than of the commoner German binders* tools. But the use of four pieces of paper for reinforcement inside the covers is the conclusive evidence that the bind- ing is an original Caxton: the pieces make up a copy of an indulgence printed by Caxton in 1481.^ In using leftover printer's paper in one of his customary opera- tions, the binder not only proved the authenticity of his own work in Caxton's shop but preserved a copy of another Caxton imprint. * This Indulgence was issued by Giovanni dei Gigli, collector of papal revenues in England, for the purpose of collecting funds for a war against the Turks. In the Indulgence Gigli says bitterly that the infidels besieged Rhodes the preceding year and then devastated the town of Otranto in the ItaHan province of Apulia. The copy of the Indulgence, which is one of four recovered from old bindings, is four-fifths complete. Unlike the other extant copies it has all of the opening lines. 16