This collection, the first such work on Caxton and his contemporaries, consists of ten original essays that explore early English culture, from Caxton's introduction of the press, through questions of audience, translation, politics, and genre, to the modern fascination with Caxton's books.

In the late fifteenth century, the production of print editions of Claudius Ptolemy’s second-century Geography sparked one of the most significant intellectual developments of the era—the production of mathematically-based, north-oriented maps. The production of world maps in England, however, was notably absent during this "Ptolemaic revival." As a result, the impact of Ptolemy’s text on English geographical thought has been obscured and minimalized, with scholars speculating a possible English indifference to or isolation from European geographic developments. Tracing English geographical thought through the material culture of literary and popular texts, this study provides evidence for the reception and transmission of Ptolemaic-based geography in England during a critical period of geographic innovation and synthesis, one that laid the foundation for modern geographical representation. With evidence from prose romance, book illustration, theatrical performance, cosmological ceilings, and almanacs, Mirror of the World proposes a new, interdisciplinary literary and cartographic history of the influence of Ptolemaic geography in England, one that reveals the lively integration of geographic concepts through narrative and non-cartographic visual forms.

This collection, the first such work on Caxton and his contemporaries, consists of ten original essays that explore early English culture, from Caxton's introduction of the press, through questions of audience, translation, politics, and genre, to the modern fascination with Caxton's books.

Wakelin uses new methods and theories in the history of reading to uncover fresh information about the design, ownership, and marginalia of books in a neglected period in English literary history. This is the first book to identify the origins of the humanist tradition in England in the 15th century.

How can one study the absence of knowledge, the voids, the conscious and unconscious unknowns through history? Investigations into late medieval and early modern practices of measuring, of risk calculation, of ignorance within financial administrations, of conceiving the docta ignorantia as well as the silence of the illiterate are combined with contributions regarding knowledge gaps within identification procedures and political decision-making, with the emergence of consciously delimited blanks on geographical maps, with ignorance as a factor embedded in iconographic programs, in translation processes and the semantic potentials of reading. Based on thorough archival analysis, these selected contributions from conferences at Harvard and Paris are tightly framed by new theoretical elaborations that have implications beyond these cases and epochal focus. Contributors: Giovanni Ceccarelli, Taylor Cowdery, Lucile Haguet, John T. Hamilton, Lucian Hölscher, Moritz Isenmann, Adam J. Kosto, Marie-Laure Legay, Andrew McKenzie-McHarg, Fabrice Micallef, William T. O ́Reilly, Eleonora Rohland, Mathias Schmoeckel, Daniel L. Smail, Govind P. Sreenivasan, and Cornel Zwierlein.

Despite its title, Caxton's Game and Playe of the Chesse does not, in fact, have much to say about a game or about playing it ... Instead, the work uses the chessboard and its pieces to allegorize a political community whose citizens contribute to the common good. Readers first meet the king, queen, bishops (imagined as judges), knights, and rooks, here depicted as the king's emissaries. They are then introduced to the eight different pawns, who represent trades that range from farmers to messengers ... Paired with each profession is a list of moral codes ... These pairings reinforce the idea of a kingdom organized around professional ties and associations, ties that are in turn regulated by moral law. - from the Introduction

In this book, Joseph Dane critiques the use of material evidence in studies of manuscript and printed books by delving into accepted notions about the study of print culture. He questions the institutional and ideological presuppositions that govern medieval studies, descriptive bibliography, and library science. Dane begins by asking what is the relation between material evidence and the abstract statements made about the evidence; ultimately he asks how evidence is to be defined. The goal of this book is to show that evidence from texts and written objects often becomes twisted to support pre-existing arguments; and that generations of bibliographers have created narratives of authorship, printing, reading, and editing that reflect romantic notions of identity, growth, and development. The first part of the book is dedicated to medieval texts and authorship: materials include Everyman, Chaucer's Legend of Good Women, the Anglo-Norman Le Seint Resurrection, and Adam de la Helle's Le Jeu de Robin et Marion. The second half of the book is concerned with abstract notions about books and scholarly definitions about what a book actually is: chapters include studies of basic bibliographical concepts ("Ideal Copy") and the application of such a notion in early editions of Chaucer, the combination of manuscript and printing in the books of Colard Mansion, and finally, examples of the organization of books by an early nineteenth-century book-collector Leander Van Ess. This study is an important contribution to debates about the nature of bibliography and the critical institutions that have shaped its current practice.

"William Caxton" by E. Gordon Duff. Published by Good Press. Good Press publishes a wide range of titles that encompasses every genre. From well-known classics & literary fiction and non-fiction to forgotten−or yet undiscovered gems−of world literature, we issue the books that need to be read. Each Good Press edition has been meticulously edited and formatted to boost readability for all e-readers and devices. Our goal is to produce eBooks that are user-friendly and accessible to everyone in a high-quality digital format.