Henry Pepwell

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Henry Pepwell was an English printer and bookseller working in London in the first decades of the sixteenth century, remembered less for the bulk of his output than for one small book. He died in 1540. His shop stood in St Paul’s Churchyard, the center of the early London book trade, and the surviving record of his career is the ordinary one for a tradesman of his rank: editions issued, a wardenship in the Stationers’ fellowship, an estate settled at his death. What lifts him out of that record is a slim quarto he printed in 1521.

Old St Paul’s Cathedral seen from the west; the surrounding churchyard was the working center of the early London book trade where Pepwell kept his shop. Etching by Wenceslaus Hollar, c. 1657 — Google Art Project, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).

A house in the Churchyard

The yard around the old St Paul’s was, in Pepwell’s lifetime, the working floor of English printing. Shops and stalls crowded the cathedral close; binders, sellers, and the men who imported sheets from the Continental presses kept premises within a few steps of one another, trading under painted signs in place of street numbers. Half a century after William Caxton had set up the first English press at Westminster, the trade’s commercial center had moved to the Churchyard, where the readers were and where books changed hands. A printer there was first of all a man of business: he judged what would sell, bought type and paper, hired or did the press-work, and set his shop-sign over the door so buyers could find him again. Pepwell, by tradition a Birmingham man, settled there about 1518 at the sign of the Trinity — the former house of the stationer Henry Jacobi — and took over the printer’s device that Jacobi had shared with his partner Pelgrim, the mark of two importers who brought in books from the presses of Wolfgang Hopyl in Paris. To take a predecessor’s house and his device was an ordinary act of succession in the trade, and it places Pepwell squarely inside the early-Tudor commerce of the Churchyard rather than at its inventive edge.

A printer’s device of Wynkyn de Worde, the leading commercial press of the age and Pepwell’s patron, who named him an overseer of his will. Devices like this served as a trade mark in place of a street address. Woodcut, before c. 1520 — via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).

The moment matters to what follows. The texts Pepwell would gather into his 1521 quarto had lived for a century or two in manuscript, hand-copied for the readers of a particular house or circle — a Carthusian charterhouse, an anchorhold, a devout layperson’s library — and they had traveled slowly, one expensive copy at a time. Print changed the economics of that transmission. A single setting of type could throw off hundreds of identical copies; a contemplative treatise that had been the property of the few could now be a stall-purchase for the many. The scriptorium was not yet dead — much devotional reading still passed in manuscript through the sixteenth century — but the press was beginning to overtake it as the ordinary means by which such writing reached a reader, and the men of the Churchyard were the agents of that shift. Pepwell was one of them, and the value of what he did lies less in any thought of his own than in his standing at that junction: a tradesman deciding, for the market, which of the old inward texts were worth committing to type.

William Caxton, who set up the first English press at Westminster, shows a specimen of his printing to Edward IV. The shift from manuscript to print that Caxton began was the change Pepwell’s generation carried forward in the book trade. Oil painting by Daniel Maclise, 1851 — via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).

His own work falls into two bursts with a gap between them, the first roughly 1518 to 1523, the second roughly 1531 to 1539. The opening title of his press was The Castell of Pleasure, a courtly allegorical poem by William Neville; at the close of his life he was turning out small Latin grammars for the boys of St Paul’s School next door. He stood close to the great commercial press of the age: Wynkyn de Worde, the most prolific English printer of his generation, named Pepwell one of the overseers of his will and left him a legacy, a sign of standing and trust among the men of the Churchyard. In 1525–26 Pepwell served as a warden of the Stationers’ fellowship, the brotherhood of text-writers, illuminators, binders, and booksellers that had been recognized by the City of London as far back as 1403 and that would not receive its royal charter as the Worshipful Company of Stationers until 1557, seventeen years after his death. The wardenship is the measure of a man established and trusted among his peers, not of a man with a program. He made his will on 11 September 1539, naming his wife Ursula sole executrix and the printer William Bonham among its supervisors; it was proved on 8 February 1540. That is the shape of the documentary life: a shop acquired, a device inherited, a craft practiced, an office held, an estate left in order.

The 1521 quarto

The book that carries his name forward was printed, its colophon records, “at London in Poules chyrchyarde at the sygne of the Trynyte, by Henry Pepwell. In the yere of our lorde God, M.CCCCC.XXI., the xvi. daye of Nouembre” — a small quarto gathering seven short devotional treatises drawn from the older English and Continental mystical tradition. The collection opens with a piece titled Benjamin, on the powers of the soul and the way to true contemplation, set under the name of Richard of Saint Victor, the twelfth-century Augustinian of the Paris abbey whose Benjamin Minor it loosely paraphrases; the rendering is in fact the work of a fourteenth-century English follower of the school of Richard Rolle, and on internal and external grounds it is generally laid at the door of the anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing. Then come “divers doctrines devout and fruitful” taken out of the life of Catherine of Siena, a selection drawn from the early English Lyf of saint Katherin of Senis — itself rendered not from Catherine’s own Tuscan but from the Latin life by her confessor Raymond of Capua — which Gardner collated against the printing issued by William Caxton; a short contemplative treatise under the name of Margery Kempe; the Song of Angels ascribed to Walter Hilton; and three further pieces of spiritual counsel — an Epistle of Prayer, an Epistle of Discretion in Stirrings of the Soul, and a Treatise of Discerning of Spirits — all of which belong, with the Benjamin, to the cluster of texts that circulate in manuscript alongside the Cloud.

Saint Catherine of Siena, whose “divers doctrines devout and fruitful” were among the seven treatises gathered in the 1521 quarto. Oil painting by Giambattista Tiepolo, c. 1746, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna — via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).

The ascriptions on the quarto’s title-leaves are, in the way of medieval devotional anthologies, a looser thing than a modern attribution. The Benjamin travels under the name of the great twelfth-century master of Paris because it rests on his work, not because he wrote the English; the Song of Angels travels under Hilton’s name in a corpus where, as the editors of the Cloud-group have long noted, the master’s hand cannot always be told from his followers’; the three epistles of prayer, discretion, and the discerning of spirits belong to the anonymous fourteenth-century writer whom scholarship places, in Gardner’s phrase, midway between Rolle and Hilton, and who is most likely the author of the Cloud. A buyer in 1521 was not acquiring a critical edition. He was acquiring a serviceable book of inward counsel under the warrant of revered names — the standard apparatus by which such texts were vouched for and sold.

It is the volume Edmund Gardner reissued in 1910 under the title The Cell of Self-Knowledge, the version the library holds; the modern name is Gardner’s, borrowed from a phrase of Catherine of Siena’s, not Pepwell’s. The treatises themselves are medieval, copied and recopied in manuscript long before they reached a press — the Benjamin survives in the Arundel and Harleian manuscripts, the Song of Angels and its companions in the witnesses that carry the Cloud. What Pepwell did was fix a particular selection of them in type at the moment print was beginning to replace the scriptorium as the way such texts traveled. He composed none of it. His contribution was the act of choosing: which seven of the older contemplative pieces to set, in what order, between two covers, for a London readership that could now buy a printed book of inward devotion across a stall in the Churchyard. The selection is coherent — affective, Christ-centered, practical in its counsel to beginners on the contemplative way, in the line that runs from the school of Rolle through the Cloud-author and Hilton — and read together the seven describe an architecture of the inner life rather than a method to be worked: the soul climbing through its own faculties toward contemplation, the testing of spiritual stirrings, the discernment of true consolation from false. It sits at the English end of the same broad current of late-medieval devotional compilation that produced, on the Continent, the scene-by-scene meditative life of Christ assembled by Ludolph of Saxony and the prayer-collections edited and circulated by the Carthusian Lanspergius. Those Continental compilers were, like Pepwell, men who gathered and transmitted more than they invented; the difference is that they assembled and composed, while he stood one further step back, the tradesman who chose which already-assembled English pieces to put before a buyer. Pepwell printed for that same European appetite for inward devotion, in English, across a London counter.

The thread of Margery Kempe

One item in the 1521 collection has drawn most of the later attention. Among the short pieces Pepwell printed a brief devotional extract under the name of a “devout ancress” called Margery Kempe — a handful of pious sayings on the love of God, on silence and the soul, on the disproportion between outward austerity and inward listening. The same short extract had been set in type once before, in a tiny quarto of eight pages, by Wynkyn de Worde, printed in Fleet Street and dated by Gardner to about 1501: a “shorte treatyse of contemplacyon taught by our lorde Jhesu cryste, or taken out of the boke of Margerie kempe of Lynn.” Pepwell reprinted it some twenty years on, making only small adjustments — interleaving phrases such as “Our Lord Jesus said unto her,” and adding, where de Worde had said only “of Lynn,” that she was a devout ancress. The two printings are, with a few insignificant variations, the same text.

What neither printer can have known is that the extract was a fragment of something far stranger and larger. The full Book of Margery Kempe — the long, unruly, first-person account of a married laywoman of King’s Lynn, her fourteen children, her loud weeping, her pilgrimages to Jerusalem and Rome and Santiago, her interrogations for heresy, her conversation with Julian of Norwich — survives in a single manuscript that was not identified until 1934, when the scholar Hope Emily Allen recognized it in a volume belonging to the Catholic Butler-Bowdon family, her identification announced in The Times that December. For four centuries, the printed scrap was the only trace of the book in circulation. The Pepwell and de Worde extract is, moreover, a severe abridgement: as later editors observed, it suppresses the tears, the pilgrimages, the conversations, the marriage, the civic conflicts — almost everything that makes the Book the singular document it is — and leaves a generically conventional contemplative tract, scarcely identifiable as Kempe at all. Stripped of the vivid and difficult life-story, a name and a few sentences of it nonetheless carried through the intervening centuries. The extract gives no sense of the larger work; that scrap turned out to be enough to matter.

The text, the editor, and the scholarship

For the modern reader the 1521 quarto exists chiefly through Gardner’s 1910 edition, which took Pepwell’s volume as its base but revised the text throughout, collating the Benjamin, the Epistle of Prayer, the Epistle of Discretion, and the Treatise of Discerning of Spirits against Harleian manuscripts 674 and 2373, the Katherine extracts against the Caxton-de Worde Lyf, and the Margery Kempe piece against de Worde’s “precious little volume” in the University Library at Cambridge. Gardner modernized the orthography while keeping enough of the old language, in his own phrase, to retain the flavor of mediaeval devotion. His edition is fully in the public domain and is hosted as a primary text via Project Gutenberg; it remains the standard way the seven treatises are read together. It carries a real distortion forward, though, and recent scholarship is careful to flag it: the title The Cell of Self-Knowledge and the framing of “seven early English mystical treatises” present the anthology as a unified school, whereas the texts were composed across two centuries and three languages and gathered for the devotional market of a single London printer.

The standing of the Kempe extract has, in particular, been reset by twentieth- century work on the Book itself. The first scholarly edition of the full text, prepared by Sanford Brown Meech with Hope Emily Allen, appeared from the Early English Text Society in 1940; W. Butler-Bowdon’s modernized version, with an introduction by R. W. Chambers, followed in 1936. Both remain under copyright, which is precisely why the pre-Reformation print transmission — the de Worde and Pepwell extract, recovered in Gardner’s public-domain edition — is still the only freely circulating “Kempe” text. The biographical and bibliographical scholarship on Pepwell as a tradesman descends from the early surveys of the English book trade: the Dictionary of National Biography notice of 1895, E. Gordon Duff’s A Century of the English Book Trade (1905), and Henry R. Plomer’s histories of early English printing, which between them fix the dates, the Churchyard address, the Jacobi succession, the wardenship, and the will. Behind the wider story stands Evelyn Underhill, whose editions of the Cloud and Hilton and her Mysticism of 1911 did much to reassemble the English contemplative corpus for twentieth-century readers — the curatorial labor that made a printer’s 1521 selection legible again as a chapter in the history of Christian mysticism.

What a printer preserves

Pepwell is, then, a figure of transmission rather than of doctrine. He belonged to no school and held no view that the record preserves; what he held was a press, a shop, and an eye for what a London public would read. His name survives in the histories of English mysticism and of the early book because of the work of selection — the seven treatises that survived in part because he set them, and the one short piece that survived in print for four centuries only as the extract he and de Worde had carried. The full Book of Margery Kempe waited in a single manuscript for a reader to recognize it; the printed fragment, meanwhile, did the humbler work of keeping a name and a handful of sentences in the light. A tradesman’s catalog, chosen for the market of a late medieval city, became across the long gap of years the thin line by which one of the most extraordinary voices in English devotion was not entirely lost.

→ In the library: Gardner — The Cell of Self-Knowledge (1910 reprint of Pepwell's 1521 anthology)

→ Related: Gnosis · Margery Kempe · Richard Of St Victor · Catherine Of Siena · The Cloud Of Unknowing · Julian Of Norwich · Richard Rolle De Hampole · Christian Mysticism · Mysticism · Middle Ages · Meditation · Soul · Ludolph Of Saxony · Lanspergius · Evelyn Underhill