William Caxton and the English Canon: Print Production and Ideological Transformation and Ideological Transformation in the Late Fifteenth Century

My dissertation explores William Caxton's construction of the English canon. Centering around his editions of Chaucer's Boece and Canterbury Tales, Malory's Le Morte Darthur and his translation, the Boke of Eneydos compyled by Vyrgyle, my project asks how Caxton's technical and mechanical adaptations of these texts alter them intellectually, and further, how this alteration signals and produces changes in audience. I begin to answer these questions through an introductory review of Caxton's biography as a merchant, diplomat and courtier. Caxton's involvement in trade sets the terms for my first chapter where I read his Advertisement and his prologue to the Recuyell of Troye as texts in which he speaks directly to the relationship between economic production and textual reproduction. In successive chapters I read the prologues and epilogues to his editions of Chaucer against fifteenth-century writers such as John Lydgate and George Ashby to delineate his understanding of the vernacular author's authority; his version of Malory's Le Morte Darthur and the texts he prints with it--Godeffroy of Boloyne, the Ordre of Chyualry and Charles the Grete--as consolidating a disparate population of readers into a unified audience; his Eneydos and Methamorphose as formulating a classical authority by which contemporary English writing can be judged. The dissertation ends with an appendix listing Caxton's editions. I am concerned throughout to show that Caxton is specifically interested in the social application of literary authority, that he sees his press as a vehicle to abstract this intangible quality from the exclusive context of courtly manuscripts and deliver it up to the increasingly literate upper and lower landed gentry, mercantile classes and urban professionals of the fifteenth century. Thus I suggest that in order to transform the relatively exclusive manuscript into a new and obtainable token of prestige in the social economy of the late Middle Ages, Caxton theorizes authority, audience and class. As much as his texts and writings accomplish this, they operate ideologically. Ultimately, my investigation justifies what we should expect: that the man who brought print to England is one of the major intellectual figures of the late fifteenth century.