“In good stead of an epitaph”: Verifying History

Abstract

Early printers of books, lacking immediate standards for laying out pages, drew from the conventions of previous inscriptive practices. The most apparent precedent was of course to be found in manuscripts. During the transition to printed text, hand-written conventions influenced everything from “nearly all the type of the early period,” which was usually based on manuscript forms, to the formulation of title-page phrases (Gaskell 17). Indeed, “for fully fifteen years after the publication of the first completed book the title-page had no existence,” and generally followed the pattern of stating, bluntly, “the words Incipit, Cy commence, Incomincia or Hier begynneth… followed by the title of the work” (Pollard 4). Strikingly, the “here beginneth” opening continues even when the title has its own proper page, Chaucer’s “Here bygynneth the Book of the Tales of Caunterbury” being one of the most familiar of such openings, as Harry Levin recalls (xxvi); hear the echo of the epitaphic declaration “here” as a mode of declaring a location.