Printing Anglo-Saxon from Parker to Hickes and Wanley: With a Catalogue of Early Printed Books Containing Anglo-Saxon, 1566–1705. By Peter J. Lucas

THIS FAT VOLUME SEEKS TO DO THREE THINGS. First, it surveys the design and use of special sorts to print Anglo-Saxon (Old English) between the 1560s and the early eighteenth century. Second, it provides a detailed bibliography of books containing Anglo-Saxon in this period, whether with special sorts or not. Third, it records the sources of the printed texts. In description, detail, and analysis all three purposes are taken well beyond the existing literature.

Lucas provides the most detailed bibliography so far of books that fall under his aegis. He provides full collations and details of pagination, bibliographical references, notes on the types used (Roman and italic, as well as Anglo-Saxon), details of any special sorts, notes of copies seen (mostly in Cambridge) with notes of early provenances, and of further copies. Further, and most importantly, he provides details of the sources used, whether in print (from previous works) or in manuscript. For some books, the last can be a considerable section in itself. For Hickes’s Thesaurus (1703/5) this alone occupies almost thirty pages, while Whelock’s Bede (Cambridge, 1643) occupies seven. Lucas also reaches over the North Sea and English Channel, to record the substantial amount of relevant material from continental presses. All this is much to be welcomed, as a guide to the publication and interpretation of Anglo-Saxon by a well-defined group of people in the seventeenth century, though his omission of some imprint details (for example for the unauthorized Elzevir edition of Selden’s Mare clausum, 1636) means that full contexts can be lost. Inevitably one can offer a few addenda. The copy of Johannes Reuter’s (Reiter’s) Oratio dominica XL. linguarum (Rostock, 1675, misprinted here as 1665, Lucas 1675.3) is referred to only in facsimile, but there is a copy in Uppsala University Library (shelfmark SV.Rar.10.793(2), digitized version also available on alvin-portal). The bibliographical reference to Ben Jonson’s English grammar should now be to the Cambridge edition of his collected works, vol. 7 (2012), not to Herford and Simpson’s old edition. More generally, the many notes of early owners have the potential usefully to extend our appreciation of those curious about Anglo-Saxon. It is the more unfortunate that they are not indexed, and thus they disappear from sight save to the most determined reader. Disappointingly, members of the book trade recorded in the bibliography are generally also not indexed.

Alongside the many examples of Anglo-Saxon printed without special sorts, one of the prime purposes of this book is to present the several different designs cut between the sixteenth and early eighteenth centuries. Here Lucas is at his best, with minute analyses and comparisons of letter forms in manuscript and in print. Harry Carter (in his introduction to Edward Rowe Mores’s Dissertation, p. lxviii) was dismissive of the runes cut for the first book of all, A testimonie of antiquitie (1566), promoted by Archbishop Parker: ‘It seems quite likely that they were made in London by one of Day’s foreign journeymen.’ Lucas, with more space, goes into more detail. While the punchcutter remains unknown, he offers much further information on the place of John Joscelyn in designing this pioneering type, drawing attention particularly to two manuscripts from Worcester now in the Bodleian, MSS Junius 121 and Hatton 113. With Whelock’s Bede we can be a little more definite. Lucas finds its model chiefly in an Exeter manuscript of the eleventh century, while the most likely punchcutter was Arthur Nicholls, working in London. Here as elsewhere Lucas makes full use of surviving correspondence.

In all, Lucas describes eight basic Anglo-Saxon faces in use in England, to be used as appropriate with Roman type of the same size: the matches in weight, quite apart from the skills of the punchcutters, were not always perfect. Not surprisingly, some of the founts became mixed. One of the versions developed under John Day’s auspices and evidently much prized by its various owners, was still in use in Somner’s Antiquities of Canterbury, 1703. Besides this, Lucas has surveyed seven founts in use among continental printers, again with some variation, and the Irish type—also made at Parker’s instigation, 1571—used later in Dublin when Anglo-Saxon was needed.

It is not easy to follow all this wealth through Lucas’s pages. Apart from an over-selective index, which omits innumerable names and remarks of relevance, his decision on how to divide his book has brought repeated problems. The first part consists of a broadly chronological survey of the various type designs, English and then continental, followed by a brief chapter on the use of sources, scholarship, and the social intellectual network. The second, dominated by the descriptive bibliography, is prefaced by a list of type designs of which a partial summary has already been printed on pp. xxii–xxiv. The third provides concise lists of punchcutters, engravers, printers, and booksellers.

Thanks to the overlap in the historical chapters, where each type is discussed, and the subsequent chronological survey of designs, there is much that is repeated. There are too few links between discussions and reproductions. Whole sentences and even whole paragraphs occur twice over. Sometimes the repetitions are quite small: we are told on both pages 85 and 203 of Lucas’s visit to OUP archives in 2000 in search of matrices described by Hart in 1900. Identical sentences discussing Peter van Walpergen’s small pica for Oxford in the late 1690s occur on pages 142 and 208. Information about the Strassburg printer Georg Andreas Dolhopff is repeated word for word on pages 168 and 205. Remarks on the type used in Du Cange’s Latin dictionary (1678) appear identically on pages 170 and 206. An entire paragraph on what Lucas terms the Wittenberg type, used to print works by Selden, appears word for word on pages 172–4 and 206–7. A better conceived overall approach to the contents would have eliminated all these. Nonetheless, this is a comprehensive book on an important subject, and it will surely be much used for years to come.