Caxton and the Printing Press

In Our Time: Culture

BBC

History

4.6 • 978 Ratings

🗓️ 18 October 2012

⏱️ 43 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the life and influence of William Caxton, the merchant who brought the printing press to the British Isles. After spending several years working as a printer in Bruges, Caxton returned to London and in 1476 set up his first printing press in Westminster, and also imported and sold other printed books. Caxton concentrated on producing popular books that he knew would sell, such as Chaucer's 'Canterbury Tales' and small liturgical 'books of hours'. The standard of Caxton's printing may have lagged behind that on the continent, but he was a skilful businessman and unusually for printers at the time, he managed not to go bankrupt. The advent of print is now seen as one of the great revolutions in intellectual history - although many scholars believe it was a revolution that took many generations to have an effect.

With:

Richard Gameson Professor of the History of the Book at the University of Durham

Julia Boffey Professor of Medieval Studies in the English Department at Queen Mary, University of London

David Rundle Member of the History Faculty at the University of Oxford

Producer: Natalia Fernandez.

Transcript

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0:44.0	Hello, more than 500 years ago, with England still locked into the Wars of the Roses,
0:49.0	a merchant called William Caxton, set up shop not far from where I am now in the city of
0:55.0	Westminster. Although he was an experienced businessman, Caxton's trade on
0:59.3	this occasion was fairly new to him and entirely new to England. He became a printer and his
1:04.7	printing press in Westminster in 1476 was the first in the country. It was a
1:09.4	good 20 years since Johannes Gutenberg in Germany had developed a printing technology and his invention had already spread to other countries in Europe, Italy, France and Belgium.
1:19.0	But Caxton was the first to bring the phenomenon of print to these shores.
1:23.0	It was also the first to print a book in English,
1:25.0	the Canterbury Tales, work that's never been out of print since.
	...

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