118 NOTES AND QUERIES 2012 of the printer’s shop, he certainly achieved a economic distress of university library budgets, good view from a window. McKenzie, who into probably a shockingly small number of had spent several years editing the records of university libraries. If Ashgate wishes to pro- Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/nq/article/59/1/118/1153871 by Florida State University user on 22 December 2020 actual late seventeenth-century and early vide a real service to the study of Book eighteenth-century printers, pointed out that History, they will have to find some way to things did not work in the smooth and system- bring down the price of this volume and the atic way Hinman had posited. As with Pollard other volumes in this series. and the ‘bad’ and ‘good’ quartos or Bowers WILLIAM PROCTOR WILLIAMS and the ‘veil of print’, Hinman was drawing University of Akron human or social conclusions which the very doi:10.1093/notesj/gjr254 impressive physical evidence of his study did ß The Author (2012). Published by Oxford University Press. not, and could not, support. Although All rights reserved. For Permissions, McKenzie would go on to refine our under- please email: [email protected] Advance Access publication 12 January, 2012 standings of the changed nature of biblio- graphical studies in Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts, ‘Printers of the Mind’ is the essay which, in the truest sense, is seminal. ANNE E. B. COLDIRON, English Printing, Verse Section four on Selling has essays on the Translation, and the Battle of the Sexes, 1476–1557. Pp. xvi 264. Farnham and Frankfurt Fair by John L. Flood (321–62) þ the marketing of scholarly books by Ian Burlington: Ashgate, 2009. £55.00 (ISBN Maclean (363–77) and a note on survival and 978 0 7546 5608 1). loss rates from the Stationers’ Stock by John ENGLISH Printing, Verse Translation, and the Barnard (379–81). Section five, on Reading, Battle of the Sexes, 1476–1557, is a remarkable begins with Paul Saenger’s essay on the effects work of recovery. It revisits a little explored on reading of the printed page (385–449) phenomenon in the first seventy-five years of which, aside from eliminating Gothic cursive English print culture—verse translation of script and encouraging the use of certain punc- French misogamist and misogynist texts asso- tuation, had the remarkable effect of encoura- ciated with the late medieval querelle des ging the use of foliation, page numbering, and femmes—and offers a comparative account of other alpha-numeric location devices not only by printers but by authors because with print- the mediations which these texts effected ‘be- ing all copies of a particular book looked alike tween cultures, between languages, between and they had none of the internal distinctions media, and indeed between the genders’(xii). to be found in manuscripts. This is followed by From Caxton imprints through to the work Lisa Jardine and Anthony Grafton’s essay of Tudor printer John Rastell, this book (451–99) on how Gabriel Harvey read his charts largely unmapped territory, bridging Livy in which they deal with the vastly com- the period between the early fifteenth century plex and, at the same time, seemingly ordered and the English pamphlet wars on gender of way Harvey set about his Humanistic reading. the sixteenth and seventeenth century. In the The section, and the volume, concludes with process, it reveals a lively and popular culture David Cressy’s essay (501–15) on the cultural of printed translations about women, men, significance of the book, particularly the Bible, marriage, sex, and economics that will have a in seventeenth-century England and particu- significant impact on early modern studies. larly New England. Coldiron considers a heterogeneous mix of This volume is in every respect, save one, a texts in her attempt to recover this unique solid and useful collection and addition to the stage in the history of Anglo-French cultural growing literature on Book History. The one exchange. Chapters on Christine de Pizan’s reservation is the price. At £150.00 on one side early English translations and reception, and of the Atlantic and $250.00 on the other this John Heywood’s first play, A Mery Play book will find its way into the hands of very (1533), bookend three chapters on less few scholars and students and, in the current well-known interventions in the battle of the 2012 NOTES AND QUERIES 119 sexes. One of the great virtues of Coldiron’s of the anonymous Interlocucyon—a formal archival trawl is the provision of both primary gender-debate poem that gives the woman the transcriptions and interpretative gloss for a last word—shows how, despite very little number of works that are otherwise inaccess- change in content from French to English, Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/nq/article/59/1/118/1153871 by Florida State University user on 22 December 2020 ible to many scholars. The rarest of these De Worde’s paratextual additions create a pieces—the ‘Letter of Dydo to Eneas’ from new, if inconsistent, literary frame for the Pynson’s The Boke of Fame (1526); The text. The title uses woodcuts that represent Beaulte of Women (1525); the paratexts from ‘everywoman’ and a debating ‘everyman’, Wynkyn de Worde’s The Fyftene Joyes of thus signalling to the reader that the work is Maryage (1509); and Robert Copland’s mal- a male–female debate. However, the irregular- marie´ tracts: A Complaynt of them that be to ity in the appearance of speech banderoles Soone Maryed and The Complaynte of them above the male (missing) and female (left that ben to Late Maryed (1535)—are available blank) figures could signal any number of con- in appendices. For this reason alone the work flicting messages to contemporary readers. is an invaluable resource for future research. While it may be just a broken woodcut, it For those interested in the interface of could nevertheless hint at the silencing of manuscript and print in early modern women (some banderoles displayed speech), England, Coldiron’s discussion of Christine’s or it may visually suggest the woman’s long afterlife is a very useful account of the ways last speech (a catalogue of bad men) that si- in which print actively negotiated and reshaped lences the man. Additional visual and verbal manuscript sources and style. Instead of divor- paratexts, including the well-known cleric at cing the two mediums, Coldiron reveals how his desk and a framing ‘Auctor’ figure, scholarly emphases on Christine’s manuscript appear to displace the everyman and every- presence in the bilingual Tudor court ‘over- woman of the debate back into the realm of looks the large, new, English-only literary clerical misogyny or courtly chanson d’aven- system developing after Caxton’(23), a system ture, oblique references to the French literary that could not count on an audience who were origins of the debate. The lack of coherence in aware of the clerical and courtly context for these framing devices convincingly shows that her literary works on gender. Thus, while poems on gender were ‘a frequent site of ex- Pizan ends up not deauthorized but decontex- perimentation’ (81) for early printers and tualized in print, the literariness of the largely translators. manuscript querelle ‘may show up obliquely in While most of the works studied by the fact that so many of the early gender im- Coldiron transform French prose into prints are poems, not prose arguments’(23). English verse, the generic variety of the texts: However, the real strength of the work lies in proverbs, dialogue, poetry, drama, defy easy Coldiron’s palimpsestic readings of the textual categorization and narrativization, and and paratextual evidence of the ‘Englished’ Coldiron is refreshingly undogmatic about works. From translated contexts and form, to imposing either. However, her brief chapter verse, to woodcuts, to colophons, her analysis on Heywood’s farce translation, A Mery offers plausible suggestions for the many text- Play, is less successful. No doubt this is symp- ual inconsistencies she finds. Drawing on the tomatic of its idiosyncrasy in relation to work of Martha Driver, Coldiron’s attention Heywood’s oeuvre, but also likely because of to the ‘transformational arts’ and ‘aesthetic ex- generic considerations that required more com- periments’(xiii) of the print shop shows how parative analysis (it is the only play discussed). the commercial and self-promotional aims of Similarly, the lack of any concluding thoughts early English printers and translators actively lends the monograph a perfunctory air. This is reshaped the gender dialectics of the original unfortunate because this is a sensitive consid- texts. Often this had less to do with ‘gendered eration of the cultural capital of French gen- acts’ (22) than with the need to market the der dialectics in early modern England. texts for a more diverse range of readers. Her It convincingly and imaginatively shows how discussion of Wynkyn de Worde’s publication ‘Englished’ works go beyond the scholastic and 120 NOTES AND QUERIES 2012 courtly origins of the querelle and lead an English Reformation. She even splits the mid- active and demotic afterlife in English print dle of revisionist opinions at times, siding with culture. Highly recommended. Walker in assigning Anne’s fall to flirtation Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/nq/article/59/1/118/1153871 by Florida State University user on 22 December 2020 MELANIE BIGOLD and indiscrete comments (80), rather than Cardiff University with Bernard on the likelihood of her guilt. doi:10.1093/notesj/gjr249 Lipscomb more often hedges on the import- ß The Author (2012). Published by Oxford University Press. ance of court faction (as on pp. 191–2), a cru- All rights reserved. For Permissions, cial issue in these debates. But she manages please email: [email protected] Advance Access publication 12 January, 2012 throughout to reconsider these events without seeming to be encumbered by intricacies of scholarly warfare. She has indeed chosen a pivotal year. Anne SUZANNAH LIPSCOMB, 1536: The Year that Boleyn was executed in 1536, and the English Changed Henry VIII. Pp. 240. Oxford: Reformation was reconsolidated in this year Lion Hudson, 2009. by the relatively conservative doctrinal state- SPEAKING to the Royal Historical Society in ment of the Ten Articles. It was the year of 1994, Steven Gunn compared the historiog- Katherine of Aragon’s death, which Henry raphy of early Tudor politics to ‘trench war- was said to have publicly celebrated (a sugges- fare,’ noting that the ‘most spectacular impasse tion that Lipscomb refutes, claiming his col- concerns the fall of Anne Boleyn.’1 Following ourful dress as mourning clothes). Holbein’s the late Geoffrey Elton, scholars have trad- famous Whitehall mural, depicting a frontal itionally depicted Henry VIII as susceptible pose of Henry with his codpiece on display, to domination by court faction. This was may have been painted in this year. A major roughly the view of Eric Ives, whose biography rebellion broke out in Lincolnshire and of Anne remains a touchstone for historical Yorkshire that might have toppled a less scholarship. Retha Warnicke located the crafty ruler. Early in the year, Henry fell cause of Anne’s fall in her 1536 miscarriage: from his horse while jousting and lay uncon- a deformed foetus triggered fears of witchcraft. scious for two hours. This accident aggravated Revisionist scholarship has instead depicted ulcers in his legs that would plague him for the Henry as a strong king who believed in remainder of his life, ending his days of joust- Anne’s guilt, and perhaps with good reason. ing and hunting and leading to the ballooning These scholars further show Henry seeking waistline for which he is famous. The fall may the middle path between extremes in religious have ‘bruised his cerebral cortex’ (58) and per- reform. G. W. Bernard was leading this charge haps led to Anne’s miscarriage five days later. in 1994, and he continues today, most notably It may also have left the king ‘increasingly anx- in his 2005 book The King’s Reformation. His ious and irascible, easily irritated and prone to recent biography of Anne Boleyn argues that rage’ (61). This was certainly Henry’s annus she might just have been guilty of adultery. horribilis (46). Suzannah Lipscomb’s 1536 charges boldly Whether these events ‘changed’ the king into the centre of these debates. Her book is is another question, and one about which probably more indebted to the revisionist Lipscomb herself is guarded, noting that scholarship of Bernard and Greg Walker she and her publishers ‘quibbled over the than Elton and Ives. Like the revisionist Greg word ‘‘changed’’ in the title.’ She admits Walker, she sees Henry as a tyrant. Like that this year came ‘after his ‘‘divorce’’ from Bernard, she depicts him as ‘deliberate and ra- Katherine of Aragon, his marriage to Anne tional’ in religious affairs (127), a consistent Boleyn, the Acts of Supremacy and seeker of moderate religious reform and the Succession and the deaths of Thomas More principal engine and guiding force of the and Bishop John Fisher’, events which are often seen as equivalent markers of the king’s

1 decline into tyranny (13). To this caveat might Steven Gunn, ‘‘The structures of politics in early Tudor England’’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th be added others: Henry’s cruelty was arguably ser., v (1995), 59. on full display in the second year of his reign,