The Printer & the Pardoner

Subtitled: "An Unrecorded Indulgence Printed by William Caxton for the Hospital of St Mary Rounceval, Charing Cross." Discusses and reproduces in facsimile a previously unknown Caxton printing of an indulgence, found in the form of vellum strips utilized in the binding of a nonce volume of other Caxton imprints in the Rosenwald collection. From the blurb: "In a remarkable feat of synthesis and historical imagination, Needham weaves together the stories of William Caxton, the wealthy cloth merchant who at fifty years of age mastered the newly invented art of printing and took the craft to England, of the broadside indulgence he printed, and of the institution he printed it for. The most common surviving form of early job-printing, indulgence instruments were used to raise funds for the Roman church and its institutions. The Printer & the Pardoner: An Unrecorded Indulgence Printed by William Caxton for the Hospital of St, Mary Rounceval, Charing Cross tells the story of that hospital, notorious for fund-raising activities carried on by such as Chaucer's Pardoner. Literary history, church history, printing history, and political and social history intersect in the study of the Rounceval indulgence. This newly discovered broadside from Caxton's shop becomes the forty-fourth item in a new census of Caxton imprints, published as Appendix D in The Printer & the Pardoner. This "Checklist of Caxton's Printing" includes 111 items, printed in Cologne, Bruges, Westminster, and Paris. It identifies every known piece of printing done by William Caxton and ranges them in a chronological sequence based on Needham's bibliographical researches.