Reading for Pleasure: Caxton’s Medieval Bestsellers
By the late 15th century, a genuinely new leisure activity was quietly reshaping medieval England: reading for pleasure, made possible by William Caxton’s introduction of the printing press to the country in the 1470s.
Caxton’s own choices as a publisher give a good sense of what a literate 15th-century audience actually wanted to read. In 1481 he published a beast-fable collection about a cunning fox, intended as a moral lesson about avoiding life’s “daily deceptions” but reading, in practice, as pure comic entertainment — a medieval ancestor of the kind of trickster-versus-pursuer cartoon slapstick that would still be making audiences laugh five centuries later. For readers after something more sweeping, Caxton also printed a landmark collection of King Arthur legends, compiled by an English knight and drawing together familiar figures — Arthur, Guinevere, Merlin, Lancelot — alongside less universally remembered ones like Tristram, Isolde, and Sir Bedevere, written in English despite its French title.
For a slightly racier taste, an English translation (by Geoffrey Chaucer himself, no less) of a 13th-century French “handbook for lovers” — an allegorical dream-narrative wrapped around a genuinely bawdy core — had already been circulating in manuscript form for a century by the time printing arrived, and remained popular enough to survive in several lavishly illuminated copies. Taken together, these bestsellers make a rather charming point: for all the religious duty and gruelling manual labour that structured most of medieval daily life, by the century’s end there was a real and recognisable reading public chasing exactly the same things modern readers still chase — trickster comedy, sprawling legendary adventure, and a decent romance.
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