Agency and Intention in English Print, 1476-1526 (Texts and Transitions)

The Common Profits of Early Print is a book about continuity and change across the Reformation -- the continuity of a moral discourse around book production that moves from the fourteenth century into the modern era, and changes to that discourse wrought by the pressures placed on both print and concepts of the common profit in the 1530s. Tonry argues that a series of early printers -- represented here by William Caxton (1475-1491), Wynkyn de Worde (1492-1535), John Rastell (1501-1536), and Thomas Berthelet (1528-1547) -- lay claim to the ideals of 'common profit' as a way of articulating the importance of the press to the polity, and specifically to a politically-legitimate commons. This argument revises current scholarship on early print, which tends to emphasize either the entrepreneurial newness of Caxton's press in the 1480s or, from the 1520s forward, the service of print to religious polemics. Lost in that gap are not only England's second and third generation printers, but also the story of early printers' activist interests and their intellectual influence upon the literature and politics of those years. Common Profits reads the material history of early print as an integral part of the literary and cultural histories that negotiate the medieval-to-Renaissance transition. This study uses the works of John Skelton, Thomas Elyot, Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower, and Walter Hilton to construct a new narrative that demonstrates a strong intellectual continuity between manuscript and print, even as it locates crucial shifts around ideas of the common profit and its constitutive terms, 'commons', and 'profit'.