The celebrity image of Margaret More
An engaging publicity ploy can be seen on the title page of a book published in 1526. It is a woodcut of Margaret More, the daughter of Thomas More, not yet Chancellor, but already a renowned Christian humanist.
The book, published in London, is a commentary on the Paternoster, the Our Father. That might not sound like a bestseller, but at the time prayer books and works of devotion in English were very popular with lay people, among whom literacy was increasing and for whom printing made books affordable.
The author of the Latin original of the little treatise was Erasmus of Rotterdam, “the most famous doctor” as the title page declares. His book, it adds, was “tourned in to englisshe by a yong vertuous and well lerned gentylwoman of xix yere of age”.
There is a preface by another humanist scholar associated with More’s circle, Richard Hyrde. He rehearses the standard objection to young women being taught Latin and Greek – that they were inclined towards vice by their own “courage” or disposition, and attracted by every novelty. Then he knocks down the objection as ignorant and motivated by a dog-in-the-manger attitude denying women the treasures enjoyed by men. Women are, he asserts, more steadfast in virtue than men.
Here, then, is a desirable product, a book of devotion in the vernacular, translated by a woman of 19, representing the progressive world of humanist learning and reformed orthodox religion, promoted by association with a celebrity layman, with publication endorsed by Wolsey, the Lord Chancellor, Cardinal and the king’s chief adviser.
There is a side story to the pictorial frontispiece. The woodcut had been used before, on four occasions, between 1504 and 1512, by the successful printer and publisher Wynykyn de Worde. It had then included a group of three smaller figures further to the right on the black-and-white squared floor. The female figure at her reading desk was first intended as a personification, as Lady Rhetoric. In 1526, the right half of the woodcut was sliced off and the remaining solitary figure centred between geometrical borders to serve as a title-page portrait of Margaret More. It’s a typical bit of publisher’s bravura.
The book features in a splendid exhibition, North Sea Crossings: The Literary Heritage of Anglo-dutch Relations 1066-1688, at the Weston Library in Broad Street, Oxford, part of the Bodleian. It is free of charge and tells the story of cultural exchanges by means of objects such as beautiful medieval manuscripts, early prints, maps, animal stories and treasures from the Bodleian’s collections. The curators are the renowned medievalists Sjoerd Levelt and Ad Putter. After 1688, the end of the period covered, Holland seemed less glorious in some ways.
Anne-louise Avery has made the exhibition more attractive to children with an online dramatised reading of part of her own retelling of the tale of Reynard the Fox, which Caxton had published in English, translated from a Dutch original. The exhibition has a trail for exploration by Key Stage 3 and 4 pupils, aged 11-16. I’d think it would boost greatly the performance of any secondary school pupil who took an interest in it.
Anyway, the North Sea was for hundreds of years more a highway than a moat. If we forget that Erasmus was a Dutchman it is partly because the lively exchange of ideas throughout Europe was conducted primarily in Latin. But his physical journeys across the sea to England changed his life, Thomas More’s and his daughter Margaret’s.