Patronage, Print and the Education of the Gentry in Late Medieval England: The Case of Earl Rivers’s Dicts and Sayings of the Philosophers

Abstract:

This essay focuses on the production and circulation of Earl River’s Dicts and Sayings of the Philosophers. I argue that Rivers’s patronage of William Caxton during the printer’s early years at Westminster was part of a precise cultural plan, which entailed the dissemination of moral and educational literature outside the court. As revealed by a preliminary investigation of the ownership of incunables and manuscript witnesses, the readership of Rivers’s Dicts is to be found in the gentry – a social class interested in books as both receptacles of typically courtly literary models and material symbols of a newly-acquired power.