The introduction to Kathleen Tonry’s Agency and Intention in English Print opens, fittingly, with a consideration of William Caxton’s colophon “Caxton me fieri fecit” (“Caxton caused me to be made,” 1). “It is,” Tonry perceives, “as if the book is speaking,” and she aptly observes that “parsing this brief colophon reveals our own priorities in how and where we assume agencies emerge—from a text’s medium, out of the conditions of production, or from human actors” (1). Such concerns are central to her study, which examines both the metaphorics and materialities of late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century bookmaking. Following the lead of D. F. McKenzie and others in its sustained consideration of “the non-authorial spaces of text production” (20), Tonry’s work uses the rhetoric of agency to draw attention to the conspicuous roles played by early printers in the production of English books. Highlighting how “printing was (and is) also an act of textual creation, of engaged, deliberate, intentional making” (12), this is a work of scholarship that builds upon and complements recent studies such as Julia Boffey’s 2012 Manuscript and Print in London, A. E. B. Coldiron’s 2015 Printers without Borders, and Daniel Wakelin’s 2014 Scribal Correction and Literary Craft.

Tonry’s first chapter positions early English printed books in relation to their scribally generated antecedents and analogues. Pointing to early print culture’s meaningful continuities with late medieval discourses on manuscript book production—continuities that transcend technological distinctions—Tonry is interested in what she refers to as the “extra-economic” engagements of early printers. Her object, in other words, is to examine how noncommercial moral, political, and spiritual rhetoric (especially the trope of the “common good”) earlier used to characterize fifteenth-century manuscript books was productively redeployed by England’s first printers. Her work here offers a measured corrective to scholarship’s tendency to emphasize the profit-oriented motivations of early printers.

The remaining triad of chapters in Tonry’s monograph intentionally focus on genres underrepresented in the existing scholarship on early print culture: that is, religious and historical writings. The second chapter hinges on a reading of Caxton’s Book of Good Manners. Tonry uses this central example to show how the domain of pre-Reformation religious print provided a conduit for printers to exert cultural influence and to represent the concerns of particular social groups. The notion of “entente,” or intention, a word that has particular resonances within the much maligned mercantile sphere, is here crucial to Tonry’s observations about religious books, their anticipated audiences, and their producers. The third chapter is likewise attuned to the agency of mercantile printers and the interests of mercantile readers in this era. Here Tonry investigates a number of religious texts (a broadly conceived category) that appear to have been aimed at London merchants and “display a strategic interest in commercial morality” (109). This includes such titles as the The Golden Legend, Dives and Pauper, The Floure of the Ten Commandementes, and the Kalender of Shepherdes. Tonry’s fourth chapter addresses how “the agencies and intentions of book producers were often imaginatively bound up with the agencies of their readers” (168). Considering the historical writings (another fairly broad generic category) printed by Caxton, Rastell, and the St. Albans Printer, this chapter queries how “readerly agency” was by turns “encouraged or restricted in the histories produced by early printers” (169). The differences rather than continuities between scribal and print culture are brought to the fore in this final chapter as Tonry advances a carefully nuanced argument about how “the logic of print” (209) seems to have inflected the development of historiographical modes.

Agency and Intention in English Print draws fresh attention to a number of little-known texts and early editions. As Tonry herself puts it, it is a work that peers into “the neglected corners and crannies of early English print” (16) to offer a range of new insights. It will undoubtedly prove useful to those researching the earliest decades of English print culture, especially those scholars with interests in the production and circulation of religious books or the intersections between England’s first printers and London’s mercantile classes.