CAXTON, WILLIAM

Caxton, William: translation

(ca. 1421–1491)

   Businessman, critic, writer, translator, and printer, William Caxton is most celebrated for establishing the first printing press in England. Caxton was born in Kent sometime between 1415 and 1422, most likely in 1422. Besides the information he documents in the prologues and epilogues to his manuscripts, little is known of Caxton’s life or ancestry; however, his parents are thought to have been influential because they gained an apprenticeship for their son to Robert Large, a wealthy silk mercer who became sheriff in 1430 and lord mayor of London in 1439. After Large’s death in 1441, Caxton moved to Bruges, capital of Flanders, seat of the Burgundian government and thriving center for manufacturing and trade. In Bruges the prosperous merchant traded in textiles, particularly silk and wool, as well as luxury goods such as manuscripts, and he was appointed governor of the English Nation ofMerchant Adventurers.Here he met Margaret of York, the sister of England’s King Edward IV and the wife of Charles the Bold, duke of Burgundy. The duchess hired Caxton to become her financial adviser and to acquire and translate books for her. The first book she asked Caxton to translate was the Le Recueil des Histoires de Troyes, a popular French ROMANCE. Sometime between the years 1470 and 1474,Caxton traveled to Cologne where he met Ulrich Zell, a priest from Marinz, the town where Johann Gutenberg had established the very first printing press. Zell had established the first printing press in Cologne and is probably responsible for teaching Caxton the skill. Caxton, who by this time had translated The History of Troy and made several copies of the book, returned to Bruges and, under the duchess of Burgundy’s sponsorship, set up his own printing press and hired calligrapher, bookseller, and translator Colard Mansion. Together, in 1474, they printed copies of The History of Troy, the first book to be printed in the English language, and dedicated the book to the duchess.The next year the duo printed The Game and Play of Chess Moralized. The printer returned to England in 1476, and set up a printing press at Westminster, where, in 1477, he printed Earl Rivers’s translation of the Dictes and Sayings of the Philosophers, the first book to be printed in England.

   During his career Caxton translated many works from French, Latin, and Dutch into English; printed many small, usually religious, documents such as indulgences; and printed approximately 100 texts, most notably CHAUCER’s CANTERBURY TALES and TROILUS AND CRISEYDE, MALORY’s MORTE D’ARTHUR, Godfrey of Bouillon’s The Order of Chivalry, Ranulph HIGDEN’s Polychronicon, GOWER’s CONFESSIO AMANTIS, Virgil’s Aeneid, many poems by LYDGATE and, perhaps his most ambi-tious task, Jacobus de Voragine’s GOLDEN LEGEND. Caxton’s texts included prologues and epilogues that he wrote, which included his opinion of the work; therefore, he is not only remembered as the first printer of English literature, but also as the first critic of the same.

   Caxton’s body of work gave his peers access to contemporary literature in their own language and gives modern scholars an idea of the tastes, politics, and culture of the later medieval society he lived in. The materials Caxton printed were both a response to and an influence on the reading public, and, although Chaucer is ultimately responsible for the success of his writing, Caxton is to be credited with making Chaucer’s work more rapidly and readily available to the general reading public of the time than it would have been otherwise, thus accelerating Chaucer’s influence and eminence. Until recently, people assumed that Caxton lived a life of celibacy as a bachelor because there is no mention of any wife in his writing. However, the discovery of medical records proving that he unquestionably had a legitimate daughter, Elizabeth, has led scholars to believe that he had a wife and that his wife was most likely Maude Caxton, who was buried at St. Margaret’s in Westminster around the time William Caxton was buried there after his 1491 death, which allegedly occurred on the very day he completed the lengthy translation of the Vitas Patrum, or Lives of the Fathers. Trainees Robert Copeland and Wynkyn de Worde succeeded Caxton; the latter is responsible for printing the Lives of the Fathers after Caxton’s death. Many of Caxton’s original manuscripts are currently housed in London’s British Museum.

   Bibliography

   ■ Blake, Norman Francis. Selections from William Caxton. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973.

   ■ ———.William Caxton and English Literary Culture. London: Hambledon Press, 1991.

   ■ Painter,George D.William Caxton: A Biography. New York: Putnam, 1977.

   ■ Penninger, Frieda Elaine. William Caxton. Boston: Twayne, 1979.

   Leslie Johnston

Caxton, William: translation

(c. 1421–1491)

   Commencing operations after EDWARD IV had seemingly ended the WARS OF THE ROSES, cloth merchant William Caxton introduced printing to England in 1477. With the patronage of courtiers and members of the royal houses of YORK and TUDOR, Caxton produced English works of history, philosophy, religion, and romance.

   Born in Kent, Caxton was apprenticed to a LONDON mercer (i.e., cloth merchant) in 1438. When his apprenticeship ended in 1446, he was already engaged in trade at Bruges in BURGUNDY. In 1462, the membership of the Merchant Adventurers, an association of English merchants, appointed Caxton their governor at Bruges, thereby giving him oversight of the group’s continental operations. Because he ceased to function as governor in 1470, Caxton may have been dismissed from office by the READEPTION government of HENRY VI, which probably objected to Caxton’s close association with Edward IV’s sister, MARGARET OF YORK, duchess of Burgundy. Because the king later employed him as a commercial diplomat, Caxton may have met Edward IV when he was in exile in Burgundy over the winter of 1470. In 1471, having completed an English translation of a French History of Troy, Caxton traveled to Cologne to learn about the new printing technology. Published in Bruges in 1474, Caxton’s History of Troy was the first book ever printed in English. Returning home in 1476, Caxton established the first printing press in England near the center of royal government in Westminster. His first printed works in England—The Dictes and Sayings of the Philosophers (1477) and the Moral Proverbs of Christine de Pisan (1478)—were translations from the French by Caxton’s chief patron, Anthony WOODVILLE, Earl Rivers, the king’s brother-in-law. Although Edward IV directly commissioned none of Caxton’s works, the printer sought and probably obtained the patronage of members of the house of York. Two books printed in 1481—Tully of Old Age and Godefroy of Bologne—were dedicated to Edward IV, while the Life of Jason (1477) and The Order of Chivalry (1484) were dedicated, respectively, to Prince Edward (see Edward V, King of England) and to RICHARD III.Because Edward IV, who had an extensive library, may have preferred colorful hand-illuminated manuscripts to plainer print publications, he was probably never more than a passive patron of Caxton’s press.

   However, both Margaret BEAUFORT, countess of Richmond, and Henry BOURCHIER, earl of Essex, actively favored Caxton, while HENRY VII commanded Caxton to print his English translation of Christine de Pisan’s Feats of Arms and Chivalry in 1489. Caxton printed some eighty different titles, including twenty-one of his own translations and the first editions of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and Sir Thomas MALORY’s Le Morte d’Arthur. Caxton’s concentration on chivalric romances, histories, and religious works reflected the tastes of his aristocratic patrons and of the wealthy London merchants who purchased his books in growing numbers. By the 1480s, the government, thanks in part to Caxton, was becoming increasingly aware of the PROPAGANDA potential of the printing press. After 1485, the Crown appointed a royal printer to publish all the king’s proclamations and began to take steps to ensure that no politically or religiously subversive works issued from English presses, although real censorship did not appear until Lutheran works entered England in the 1520s. After Caxton’s death in 1491, his press continued to operate under his apprentice,Wynkyn de Worde.

   See also English Economy and the Wars of the Roses

   Further Reading: Blake,N. F., Caxton: England’s First Publisher (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1976); Blake,N. F., William Caxton and English Literary Culture (London: Hambledon Press, 1991); Hindley, Geoffrey, England in the Age of Caxton (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1979); Painter, George D., William Caxton: A Biography (New York: Putnam, 1977).

   A woodcut illustrating William Caxton's Fable of Aesop

   The trademark and initials of William Caxton

Caxton, William: translation

(ca. 1422-1491)

   The first Englishman to practice the new art of printing. A native of Kent and a member of the Mercers' Company of London, he spent many years living abroad, chiefly at Bruges in the Netherlands. In 1470 he moved to Cologne and took charge of a printing firm. After printing several books there, he returned to Bruges and founded a new printing shop. About the end of 1473, he brought out the first book printed in English, a translation of a French historical romance, Recuyell of the Histories of Troy. In 1476 Caxton moved back to England and set up shop at Westminster, near the royal court. There he printed about a hundred titles, of which the most famous is the first edition of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (1477); but his products also included works of religious edification, English translations of lives of the saints (notably the Legenda aurea of Jacobus de Voragine), a book on chess, Aesop's Fables, and Reynard the Fox. At the very end of his life, he translated into English a book of the lives of the ancient Christian Desert Fathers, published by his successor Wynkyn de Worde.

Caxton, William: translation

Caxton, William

• Born in the Weald of Kent, c. 1422; died at Westminster, 1491; the first English printer and the introducer of the art of printing into England

Catholic Encyclopedia.Kevin Knight.2006.

брит. Ви́льям Кэ́кстон (английский первопечатник)