Catholic (?) Printer, Catholic (?) Owners: The Robbins Library Berthelette "Confessio Amantis" (1554).
- Author/Editor
- Sáez-Hidalgo, Ana.
Yeager, R. F.
- Title
- Catholic (?) Printer, Catholic (?) Owners: The Robbins Library Berthelette "Confessio Amantis" (1554).
- Published
- Sáez-Hidalgo, Ana, and R. F. Yeager. "Catholic (?) Printer, Catholic (?) Owners: The Robbins Library Berthelette Confessio Amantis (1554)." Journal of the Early Book Society 22 (2019): 114-48; 8 b&w figs.
- Review
- Sáez-Hidalgo and Yeager identify three purposes of their essay: first, "to consider Berthelette's Gower afresh and to suggest several ways in which his two editions" of "Confessio Amantis," 1532 and 1554, "at once reflect their times and reveal Berthelette's unusual subtlety both as a designer of books and as a probable Roman Catholic opposed to Henry's break with the Roman Church"; second, to describe a copy of the 1554 edition previously "unknown to scholars," purchased from private ownership in 2017 by the Rossell Hope Robbins Library at the University of Rochester; and third, to investigate evidence of reading of the Robbins copy (signatures and bookplates, marginalia, and underlinings) that may indicate it is a "potentially 'Catholic book'" (113-14)--a fuzzy notion in this context that the authors duly acknowledge as such by enclosing the phrase in parentheses throughout the essay. What it meant to be Catholic in 1532, two years before Henry's break with Rome, differed from what it meant in 1554 after Mary had reinstated Catholicism in England, even though the small changes Berthelette made between his two editions can perhaps be seen to reflect the nuances evolving in religious discourses of the period as well as the bibliographical and historical contexts that Sáez-Hidalgo and Yeager identify. Berthelette himself may well have been Catholic in one sense or another; Sáez-Hidalgo and Yeager provide several "circumstantial clues" (130) that he was, although they then hazard circularity in their larger argument by suggesting that "the best evidence [of him being Roman Catholic] may in fact be the two editions he produced" of CA (130). Being Catholic also differed later in the sixteenth and in the seventeenth centuries when readers left their marks in the Robbins Library volume, and Sáez-Hidalgo and Yeager identify two prominent owners of the Robbins volume, Sir Martin Bowes, goldsmith, director of the London mint and Lord Mayor, and Sir Thomas Clifford, Lord High Treasurer under Charles II, as Catholic, providing brief biographies and assessing how and why the volume may have appealed to them. In short, the phrase "Catholic book" may be useful in book history only as a catch-much term, much less useful than are the more specific information and interpretations offered here. The essay provides detailed analytic data about the Robbins volume; useful perspective on Berthelette's humanist, religious, political, and financial concerns in producing his two editions; a comparison of aspects of Berthelette's 1532 edition with those of William Thynne's "Workes of Chaucer" published only months earlier (particularly their title pages and biographical information); a suggestive reading of Berthelette's account of the tablet near Gower's tomb; and an engaging account of how one book may have been planned, produced, intended, used, and treasured over several hundred years. [MA. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 39.1]
- Date
- 2019
- Gower Subjects
- Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations
Confessio Amantis