Martha Driver's The Image in Print addresses a fundamental need. The black-and-white images in early printed books have not received the scholarly attention paid to colorful, unique manuscript paintings, although they are just as significant for the history of late-medieval reading. In spite of the early work of such scholars as Campbell Dodgson and Edward Hodnett, English woodcuts have been especially neglected. The oversight is surprising, if only because many manuscript images are better understood by comparison with early printed ones; the transition from illumination to woodblock was not abrupt, and neither the visual forms, nor the ideas they express, can easily be separated. Moreover, the differences can be instructive. If simple printed pictures are not the inimitable products of painterly genius, their monochrome replication in early books makes them more like the typeset letters themselves. Innovative technologies of reproduction realigned the representational capacities of word and picture, as prints in books began to reach large and diverse audiences through endlessly repeatable, combinable forms. Martha Driver's beautifully produced and generously illustrated volume explores the implications of these changes for readers of the printed image in England around the turn of the sixteenth century. Driver takes the aesthetic and cultural achievements of English woodcuts seriously, imagining the printer's fundamental task as the "reinterpretation of sources" rather than "economically using the blocks he had on hand" (27).
The first chapter, "Early Illustration in Print: Single-Leaves, Block-Books, and their Progeny," explores the printed images that exist apart from books set in movable type, and challenges the teleology that seems to lead from one to the other. Factotum printing, for example, integrates movable type into the unchanging wood-block in a way that shows the complexity of interconnection between the forms. For this reason I was surprised to read that "Picture books represented a transitional phase between hearing a story and reading it" (16)--another sort of simple teleology that this evidence would seem to undermine. For, as Driver shows, the importance of the largely pictorial block-book is not that it smoothed the transition between the single-page print and the invention of movable type (indeed, the chronology makes such a progression impossible) but rather that it organized texts and images in a distinctive way. The visual and verbal material in a block-book is organized according to mnemonic or typological structures, non-linear systems derived not from "hearing a story," but more probably from the format of popular genres such as the book of hours. Driver's idea that Continental block-books influenced English horae could be usefully expanded, especially in this study that takes the story of English printed images as its primary subject, and the story of their sources as only a secondary one.
The next two chapters focus on the second-generation English printer Wynkyn de Worde in relationship both to his predecessor William Caxton and to his Continental sources. "Woodcuts in Early English Books: Sources and Circulation" describes the "thoughtful pictorial methodology" in De Worde's practice of illustration (35), and tracks his innovative use of both factotum and composite pictures-movable images, similar in design and function to words in type. The chapter also traces the new equivalence of text and image through two woodcuts repeatedly used to signify Everyman and Everywoman-images so popular that they become "not just actors but pictographs" (75). As Driver's powerful conclusion has it: "For a short time in the sixteenth century, movable pictures illustrate books printed with movable type, and word and image have equal power to convey meaning" (75). This short period had lasting effects on the design of modern books, as Driver shows in her next chapter, "Wynkyn de Worde and the Title Page." De Worde's originality in "labeling" his work included his use of a printer's mark and his interest in the processes of binding, but it is most evident in his design of title-page woodcuts for both the start and the end of a book (a doubling probably related, in fact, to sixteenth-century binding methods). De Worde transformed the space Caxton had more often reserved for a frontispiece into a true title-page that identifies the printer and the contents of a book, as well as also sometimes its author or patron. Driver's analysis of the significance of this innovation provides one of the most exciting, because most unified, arguments of The Image in Print.
The next two chapters treat broader subjects, tracing social histories that can be read through the printed image. "Representations of Saintly Women in Late-Medieval Woodcuts" examines images of often-represented women such as the Virgin Mary, St. Catherine, and St. Bridget. The woodcuts are most intellectually and socially revealing when their subjects are represented with books, for then they illuminate directly the place of gender in late-medieval practices of reading and writing. "Reconstructing Social Histories: Reading Images as Historical Documents" is perhaps the richest but also the least satisfying chapter of the book, because (as its broad title might intimate) it is the least cohesive. The chapter concerns visual images that document historical events, such as marriages or jousts. It also concerns the representation (sometimes self-representation) of writers, teachers, and printers. Finally, it explores through printed images "attitudes to black people in the era of the opening of trade routes to Africa followed by the discovery of the New World." Representations of Africans include: the fascinating Horner in The Kalender of Shepardes; the third Magus-either Balthasar or Caspar-in images of the Adoration of the Magi; black people in diverse groups that represent a universal vision of humanity; tormentors and executioners; and (most interesting of all in context) the figures that identify the Parisian printshop of "Le Noir." These images function mainly as "exotic emblems of power and prestige" (181), reflecting an early European view of racial otherness more positive than later ones that would be shaped by the association of race with slavery. This last section provides the real substance of the chapter, and it would make a fascinating study on its own, but it fits uncomfortably here. It is too particularized a subject and too vibrant an analysis to lead only to the conclusion "that pictures can help us reconstruct social custom as well as attitudes toward history, and that images may be used, with some care, to fill out the written historical record" (182).
The last chapter, "Iconoclasm and Reform: The Survival of Late-Medieval Images and the Printed Book," charts a surprising ambivalence towards images in Protestant books. Luther, for example, "understood the value of pictures to promote Protestant ideas, just as he advocated the suppression of other kinds of pictures" (190). In England, too, reformers sometimes availed themselves of polemical images in spite of all iconoclastic principle. Driver explores complex and instructive examples such as The ymage of love, a book first printed by Wynkyn de Worde for the Prostestant reformer John Gough in 1525. The generally iconoclastic text was deemed heretical (and its printer accordingly challenged), even though it advocates the use of images under some circumstances, and even though its first printing included several illustrations. Even the 1532 second printing, which removed most of the internal woodcuts, retained the title-page image of the Trinity. In addition, although many Catholic books were defaced by Protestant hands, it seems that few were actually destroyed; at least, they and their pictures still exist in large numbers. Verbal references to the Pope, to St.Thomas Becket, and to the power of indulgences are often scratched out, even as the images that represent such threats to Protestant theology sometimes remain untouched. These unexpected survivals might reflect the economic value of even popish pictures, but they also seem to reveal a "reverence still felt for the sacred events they represent" (209)--at any rate, they complicate the record in books of early modern Protestant iconoclasm.
After so many smart and persuasive observations about so many important subjects, The Image in Print offers no concluding chapter. This omission points, I think, to the largest problem with the book: Driver's fascinating readings of early printed images are never synthesized into a strong general claim. The Image in Print presents persuasive insights about some important aspects of images in early publishing, but it does not give the broad history or the holistic survey that its title promises, or that the field needs. Because it comes to no final conclusion, the book seems more like a series of independent essays than a substantial developing argument.
In spite of this, The Image in Print takes an important and welcome step forward in serious thinking about late-medieval woodcuts. I hope that many more such studies follow in its footsteps, for tracing the history of the early printed image is bound to help us write more precisely the history of reading both words and pictures in this transitional period. Woodcuts are rarely colored, and some images turn up commonly in many different literary environments, but they are none the less interesting or meaningful for their utilitarian re-use. The image in print organizes information differently precisely because it is repeatable, for, as Driver shows, duplication creates new "networks of meaning across a variety of contexts" (3). It is these complex affiliations that this useful new book helps to trace.