The Renaissance Reform of the Book and Britain: The English Quattrocento. By DAVID RUNDLE

This is a revelatory book, which urbanely questions long‐held assumptions on the vigour of fifteenth‐century humanism in England through close readings of the books that have been left behind. The challenge begins on the title‐page. The ‘English Quattrocento’ is an expressive coinage and, in its conjuring of a Renaissance aligned with the Italian mainstream, entirely to the author’s point. So too is the argument that the allure of Italy, so much an English aspiration in the sixteenth century, had deeper roots, and that such men as More and Wyatt, Spenser and Sidney were interacting with the changing cinquecento identity of Humanism just as other Englishmen had engaged with humanism in its ‘classic age’. The ‘book’ of the title is a cultural sign. Humanistic script, based on caroline minuscule, with its cursive sister known to us as italic, was a cipher, denoting a cultural awareness that was passed from a scribe to the book’s owners and readers. The script was not concocted and communicated as a fledged entity but was ‘continually in the making’, a cosmopolitan effort. From its Florentine origins around 1400 to international recognition within decades, the speed of its take‐up can hardly be explained by the usual model of cultural dissemination based on centres and peripheries. Rather, in his central thesis, Rundle seeks to describe an international enterprise, ‘a bustle of interaction which is marked by its cosmopolitanism’. His discussion brings into consideration a cast‐list of Englishmen as well as two Scotsmen and two ‘Teutons’ denizened in England, who were formed by the new intellectual tendency and who contributed in turn to its growth.

The fence was set around this field of study by Roberto Weiss, whose masterly Humanism in England in the Fifteenth Century, first published in 1941, was helped to a fourth edition by Dr Rundle in 2011. Weiss’s focus was historical, texts over books. Other scholars, such as Albinia de la Mare and Richard Hunt, Joe Trapp and Malcolm Parkes made distinguished contributions to the palaeography per se or to the work of individual scribes such as Pieter Meghen, Theoderic Werken, and Thomas Candour; but we have not before had this overview. Rundle combines the palaeographer’s patient amassing of detail with an ability to historicize his material in a way that is new, using the books to find connections to conjure a landscape, political as well as intellectual.

The first chapter is a valuable essay on the creation and propagation of the new script. Rundle’s case is that it was a cosmopolitan enterprise from the start, involving Frenchmen and Germans alongside the familiar Italian names. A specimen study shows one strain of the script threading its way from Venice, where Michele Salvatico, a Bavarian, had taught it to a young humanist from Ferrara, Tito Livio

Frulovisi, who came to England as secretary to Humfrey Duke of Gloucester at the end of the 1430s and passed the script to a Dutchman, Petrus Lomer; after his departure, an Englishman, Simon Aylward, found one of his books in the library of King’s College, Cambridge and used it as a model for his own hand. The details conjure a family tree ‘as entwined as any white vine‐stem initial’, and make a fine case for the spread of a script through a bustling interchange of personal (and remote) connection, constituting a ‘conceptual centre which was geographically diffuse’.

The following two chapters consider the plantation of the littera antiqua in England. The focus of Chapter Two is on the learned Italians around Duke Humfrey and the papal collector Pietro del Monte, examining the way in which native scribes, already used to shifting between grades of textualis, anglicana, and secretary, discovered the style and confected their own variants. The third chapter turns the table and examines the experiences of British scribes in Italy and the mechanisms by which models and prototypes were imported to England. Prince of the collectors was Andrew Holes, the king’s proctor at the curia in the 1430s and later promoted to a canonry at Wells (a humanistic haunt under Bishop Thomas Beckington). While he was in Italy his collecting was watched by his contemporaries with awe. He owned several of Coluccio Salutati’s former books, including the unique manuscript of Salutati’s unfinished magnum opus De laboribus Herculis. Holes might have wished to add an appendix to that particular text as he contemplated how to carry his library back to England. According to the ‘book‐seller and gossip’ Vespasiano da Bisticci, he had to charter a ship for the purpose. Holes is well known, other names here less so, for instance John Bateman, the copyist of two humanist texts in Italy, one dated 1458, who seems to have spent the rest of his adult life in a Cambridgeshire rectory. Significant discussion is reserved for Thomas Candour, papal chamberlain and master of three styles under varying degrees of gothic and humanist influence, used interchangeably, and for George of Kynninmonth, ‘Scotland’s first humanist’.

Chapter Four, ‘The Dutch Connexion’, traces the English careers of the scribes Theoderic Werken and Pieter Meghen, self‐described as ‘of the Teutonic nation’. Their response to the challenge of print bears comparison. Werken, the older man, was content to model his work on the 1468 edition, then ten years old, of Sweynheym and Pannartz that was his exemplar, a respect not exhibited by the younger man, whose ostentatious books, created for such patrons as Cardinal Wolsey, observed no economies of production: it was a ‘print‐influenced triumph over print, for those who could afford it’.

Chapter Five is described as an ‘interlude’, in that it focuses on a collector of the script rather than a practitioner. John Tiptoft, earl of Worcester, was a student of Guarino da Verona and patron of fashionable pioneers of italic, including the celebrated scribe Bartolomeo Sanvito. Rundle identifies Tiptoft’s as the annotating hand found frequently in his books (listed in a valuable conspectus), alongside the more assured styling of John Free, Tiptoft’s scribe and sometime Latin secretary. If the chapter is an interlude, it is a dramatic one, exploring Tiptoft’s efforts to reintroduce a sense of Romanitas to his war‐torn homeland, capped by his own Ciceronian end. The final chapters focus on the humanist cursive, first found in native, protean forms in the 1450s in a chancellor’s register of the University of Oxford and in royal diplomatic correspondence of 1460, in which the styling was

adapted from the littera antiqua rather than humanist cursives pure. For that purer strain, developed by Sanvito and friends and christened in the sixteenth century as ‘italic’, the handwriting of Edward Scot at the English Hospice of St Thomas in Rome at the century’s end counts as the first identified native brand. The scribes Pietro Carmeliano and Andrea Ammonio, working in England, take the story into the reign of Henry VIII.

Throughout, the author lifts his eyes from minute examination of the page to draw conclusions on the spread of the new script and the motives of the copyists, and to ask what that might mean for accepted narratives. The text frequently begs a question of its title and wonders whether conceptions of nationality are in fact very helpful in seeking to understand a complex, cosmopolitan Renaissance. Lorenzo Valla had asserted that Latin eloquence was a birth‐right of his countrymen. Tiptoft and his circle perceived that Britons had equal rights to the studia humanitatis and were positive about its value for the national scene, albeit they had to go to Italy to acquire mastery. There are lessons here for our own times. As Rundle writes (there is plenty of gnomic wisdom in his text), ‘the true patriot must be a cosmopolitan’.

The book is richly illustrated, with fifty‐four illustrations spread through the text and a section of sixteen colour plates, all of them well chosen. It makes the book handsome as well as wholesome, and one to be welcomed not only by palaeographers and scholars of the Renaissance but by anyone with an interest in the ‘eloquent page’. In its enjoyable prose, its passionate advocacy for the uses of palaeography, and its expert handling of the evidence, this is an exemplary contribution to a distinguished series.