These green and printed lands

Senate House Library’s The English Print Revolution, running until 23 July, marks the 550th anniversary of William Caxton’s introduction of printing to England in 1476 with the publication of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, the first of the seventy-four works he would ultimately print in English.

His feats are, in one sense, by now well-known. The first Englishman to print, the first person to print a book in English, and the first to print in England — though, given his entanglement in the dynastic struggles of the Wars of the Roses, which entailed some rather hasty movements between London, Bruges and Cologne, these were three distinct achievements.

As these appositional formulations suggest, it is one of the inevitabilities of historiography that significance can only be assigned retrospectively through some post-hoc labelling exercise, once the longue durée has disclosed the historical forces that found expression through a particular biography or set of biographies. He was “petit-bourgeois”. She was an “early Romantic”. They were “the first Marxists”.

What is so curious about Caxton, however, is not that he somehow escaped the deeper, and at the time largely imperceptible, structural transformations reshaping early modern Europe, nor even that he simply rode them more successfully than most. It is that, in deliberately setting out to make as large a market for his printed works as possible, and in cultivating the modern English language as the means to do so, he consciously laid part of the groundwork for the very historical category through which we now understand him and are able to place him, retrospectively, as an “Englishman”.

Indeed, perhaps the chief benefit of the exhibition is that, through its attention to primary sources accumulated between the fifteenth and late eighteenth centuries, it forces us to approach “England” not as a natural inheritance but as an historical achievement: the coming together of capitalist productive relations, print technology and the emergent administrative state at a particular historical juncture.

Gutenberg’s movable-type printing, developed around 1450 and brought to England by an enterprising Caxton a little more than two decades later, entered a territory where the mongrel Middle English of the Wycliffite Bible tradition — descended from Old English and reshaped by Anglo-Norman French, Latin, and Norse contact — existed alongside a more regular administrative vernacular useful to officialdom for its own inner convenience. Around and beneath these written forms lay scattered a multiplicity of spoken, regional dialects.

As a matter of material necessity, Caxton and his contemporaries were primarily concerned to make a profit, and to sell their products to the largest possible number of readers. But how to do so? True, Latin had long operated as an elite, transnational medium of handwritten communication among clerics and scholars. Yet as a market for mechanically reproduced texts, now assuming the form of commodities, it was limited. Nor could printers simply descend into the full plurality of spoken dialects, each too local, unstable and limited to justify the enlarged print-runs on which the new technology depended.

It was the genius of humble but extraordinarily savvy, commercially minded printers like Caxton slowly to assemble a new vernacular reading public below the transnational republic of Latin and the administrative vernacular of the elites, but, crucially, above the mutually opaque world of local dialects. What emerged, over time, was not “English” as a natural tongue, but a mechanically reproducible print-language, capable of dissemination — and sale — through the largest market available to it.

In other words, moveable type and the rate of turnover of capital were not incidental to the development of “our” national identity, but helped establish the material conditions under which this possessive adjective could, over the centuries following Caxton’s publication of Chaucer, become thinkable.

The consequences were as subtle as they were profound. Once standardised, reproduced and circulated, English became a medium through which strangers who would never meet might nonetheless imagine themselves as inhabiting the same, simultaneously experienced communicative world: the same words, at the same time, seeping into guildhalls, inns, universities, households, churches and courts, cultivating a form of intimacy at a distance.

Little wonder, then, that Hegel, writing more than three centuries later, was moved to observe that newspapers serve modern man as a substitute for morning prayers.

In some ways, though, this metaphor only gets us so far, since the historically significant point is not that the nation prays to the same deity, simply that its disagreements, antagonisms and factional enthusiasms are now conducted within the same frame, in the same underlying liturgy. Contestation as well as communion; a sense of who “we” were, formed not only positively, through common identification, but negatively, through the shared recognition of who “we” were not, or did not wish to become. And as the English public became precisely that, “an English public”, a performative loop was established, with appetite for current affairs — what is happening to “us” today — expanding in turn. During the Civil War of the 1640s, for instance, newsbooks like Mercurius Civicus, which supported the Parliamentarian cause, made news a weekly, widely consumed experience. These extraordinarily partisan reports of politics and civic life combined information and gossip gleaned from parliamentary sources with illustrative woodcuts of derring-do on the Right Side of History. Replace woodcuts with photographs and the form has scarcely changed.

Early modern England was the crucible for the development of this textually inscribed power

Over time, as these diverse and distant strangers became consumers, they were also enrolled into the distinctly modern reading position of citizen — or perhaps “subject” is the more appropriately Foucauldian term. In that it was portable enough to travel, stable enough to be recognisable elsewhere, repeatable enough to be accumulated across these various sites, the printed page undoubtedly served the imperatives of profit, since larger markets required reproducible commodities. But the newly stabilised English inscribed on those pages also became a way to govern from the centre, allowing rule to operate not only through the immediate presence of force, of physical violence, but through the circulation of texts by which force could pursue its aims via standardised records, accounts, audits, statutes, amendments, regulations and contracts.

Early modern England was the crucible for the development of this textually inscribed power. It was, for instance, The Great Boke of Statutes that, in 1542, gathered parliamentary acts from the reign of Edward III to that of Henry VIII into one place, one text, helping to centralise royal authority and standardise the criminal law. Just three years earlier, The Great Bible of 1539 had become the first authorised English Bible. Did it confirm Henry’s authority as Head of the Church of England following the break with Rome? Perhaps, although despite the title-page image depicting a benevolent Henry freely distributing copies to his grateful people, an accompanying prologue warns readers against unauthorised private interpretation of scripture.

This coexistence of sovereign fantasy and sovereign anxiety in a single artefact is itself indicative of the printing press’s politically ambivalent affordances, which could hardly be said to have gone unnoticed by Europe’s rulers. For centuries, the Latin Church was able to prevail against heresy in Western Europe because it possessed better internal lines of communication than its challengers. Nevertheless, by the time Martin Luther nailed his theses to the church door in Wittenberg in 1517, they were rushed into print in German translation and, within 15 days, “had been seen in every part of the country”.

In a sense, the nation-state has never stopped grappling with this same tension, whereby the language through which it builds its authority over a particular territory — addressing, instructing and persuading citizens to imagine themselves as members of a national public — is also potentially weaponisable by rival authorities. Half a millennium later, the shadow of the most famous of Tudor monarchs — and, lest we forget, the self-styled “Defender of the Faith” — surely fell across a press conference relayed through national media at the height of the Covid pandemic, when New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, faced with a torrent of online health disinformation, told her citizens, “We will continue to be your single source of truth,” and, “Unless you hear it from us it is not the truth.”

Until very recently, it might have been said that the nation-state had succeeded in stabilising a binding sense of “national identity” — as embodied by the first-person plural pronoun “we” in Ardern’s appeal — because it had won its long battle with rival authorities for control of the means by which a population could be mapped, addressed, instructed and invited to recognise itself within a particular demarcated territory. As the exhibition continually reminds us, however, the specific historical significance of Caxton and his printing press lies not in helping to produce a Borgesian map that exactly copies the territory of “England”, but something perhaps even stranger: one that precedes the nation, performs it into being, and teaches its inhabitants to recognise themselves as part of the wider collective it describes.

Here, for instance, is the historian Benedict Anderson on the role of print-capitalism in the creation of nations as “imagined communities”, via the medium of Hegel’s morning newspaper. Although this act of reading “is performed in silent privacy, in the lair of the skull”, nevertheless “each communicant is well aware that the ceremony he performs is being replicated simultaneously by thousands (or millions) of others of whose existence he is confident, yet of whose identity he has not the slightest notion. Furthermore, this ceremony is incessantly repeated at daily or half-daily intervals throughout the calendar. What more vivid figure for the secular, historically clocked, imagined community can be envisioned?”

For the secular and historically clocked community, no doubt. But is the most vivid figure for understanding that binding power in an internet age really the newspaper, or is it in fact “the screen”? Though some of us may still sit “together” in the morning, each alone before the day’s inscriptions, how many now commune silently with those forming part of that same national imaginary, rather than with the umma, the tribe, the fandom, the gang, the congregation, the diaspora, the algorithmically assembled crowd? Where the newspaper offered yesterday’s world to a national public at more or less the same time, the screen offers the present as an endless series of simultaneous elsewheres. Not the fixed photograph, but the rolling feed; not the edition, but the breaking update; not the imagined community even in the singular, let alone the nation, but a swarm of competing, intersecting, conflicting affiliations still struggling to become any kind of collective that could operate symbiotically with the apparatuses of national government.

Rule-following is embedded in practice, custom, a “form of life”

In a much-maligned speech launching his government’s Immigration White Paper in 2025, Prime Minister Starmer invoked the imagined community of the nation while producing the now notorious soundbite that “we” risk “becoming an island of strangers”. Less noticed, however, was the proposition that preceded this. “Nations depend on rules,” he said, but “in a diverse nation like ours”, a failure to abide by them means “we” risk becoming a nation that no longer “walks forward together”.

You surely do not need to be a disciple of Wittgenstein to see that rule-following is embedded in practice, custom, a “form of life”. No doubt technocrats struggle with this idea more than others, but any rule can be interpreted in more than one way unless there is already a practice within which some applications count as going on “in the same way” and others do not. To get from rules to rules-that-bind surely requires a public, repeatable narrative of who the people following them actually are.

Is it really for lack of well-trained Starmerite bureaucrats enforcing rules, checking passports, surveilling undocumented workers and educating the next generation to tread softly and speak only in politely vacuous clichés when spoken to in a multicultural society that our national map is finally, as in Borges, starting to fray at the edges? Or is something far more profound and beyond the reach of any parliamentary democracy beginning to occur, as digitally enabled forms of life emerge that neither need, nor care for, the nation-state and its “authoritative” Bibles, newspapers, press conferences, human rights, laws, pluralism, national curriculums, rituals, traditions and customs?

Time will tell, of course, but it seems doubtful whether the 600th anniversary of Caxton’s publication of The Canterbury Tales will be held in a world where his Englishness is anything more than the provincial concern of one sub-group among many others.