Medieval Modes of Reading: The Circulation Culture of Late Middle English Romances from William Caxton’s Press

Abstract ­­In the late fifteenth century, the arrival of the printing press in England transformed the late medieval literary scene. In this period, William Caxton, England’s first printer, cultivated a particular taste for the genre of romance amongst his audiences and attempted to establish an interconnected body of work. A close analysis of the prologues and epilogues to his prose romances reveals not only his efforts to draw explicit connections between several of these narratives but also provides glimpses into how his audience engaged with these highly popular texts. In this article, I will look at the incipient ‘culture of circulation’ (Lee and LiPuma 2002) established around the first printed Middle English prose romances. I posit that the consumption practices surrounding medieval romance, as well as the form of the genre itself, share some characteristics with serial consumption. I argue that the ‘medieval mode of reading’, which favored intertextuality and derivation, contributed to the reproduction of the topics and conventions of the romance genre in a move that anticipates the highly successful serial literature of the nineteenth century.