SOURCE: Bowers, Terence N. “The Production and Communication of Knowledge in William Baldwin's Beware the Cat: Toward a Typographic Culture.” Criticism 33, no. 1 (winter 1991): 1-29.

[In the following essay, Bowers maintains that Beware the Cat is a “cultural object” that reflects the transition from Catholic oral culture to Protestant print culture, claiming further that the work is a kind of treatise on reading and its social function as well as an argument for widespread literacy.]

For as the first decay and ruin of the church before began of rude ignorance, and lack of knowledge in teachers; so, to restore the church … it pleased God to open to man the art of printing … Printing, being opened, incontinently ministered unto the church the instruments and tools of learning and knowledge; which were good books and authors, which before lay hid and unknown. The science of printing being found, immediately followed the grace of God; which stirred up good wits aptly to conceive the light of knowledge and judgment: by which light darkness began to be espied; and ignorance to be detected; truth from error, religion from superstition, to be discerned. …

John Foxe, Acts and Monuments¹

William Baldwin is an undeservedly obscure figure in English literature and history. Although his contemporaries held him and his work in high regard, only recently have modern scholars begun to appreciate his overall contribution as an intellectual and artist during the English Reformation.² Not only did Baldwin contribute to A Mirror for Magistrates (1559), which became one of the most widely read books in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, he also worked as a printer, editor, translator, dramatist, poet, political and moral philosopher, and satirist.³ As this great range of literary activity suggests, Baldwin had intimate knowledge of the genres of the period and the material processes of literary production. In many respects, he was a literary pioneer. No work shows this better than Beware the Cat (written 1553; published 1570).⁴ Although unknown to most readers today, this innovative and fascinating piece of fiction constitutes, arguably, the first English novel.⁵ My aim, however, is not to enter into this question, even though more concentration on genre is needed and will generate interesting insights. Instead of analyzing what kind of literary work Beware the Cat is, I wish to consider a broader and more fundamental question of what kind of cultural object it is. While the categories of genre, form, and medium are interrelated in complex ways, I believe the most fruitful way to grasp the force and originality of Beware the Cat is to focus on its status as a printed book—and thus as a relatively new kind of cultural object that embodies a distinct mode of communication and a distinct process of producing, storing, and transmitting knowledge.

Baldwin wrote Beware the Cat a little over a century after Gutenberg built his printing press (1437) and about seventy-five years after William Caxton set up his press in England (1477). In Baldwin's time printing was still in its infancy, still in the early stages of establishing itself in what was largely an oral culture. Perhaps the best testament to the orality of sixteenth-century English culture comes from the printed books themselves, many of which seem oblivious to what we (people whose thought processes are formed by typographic media) would regard as the inherent properties of print. Title pages, for example, a feature that came into use with print (but only became established by 1500), often divide or place in obscure positions key words (such as the author's name or a central word of the title itself), while highlighting relatively insignificant words (such as definite articles and sub-titles). Though the title-pages often appear visually attractive, such practices violate our sense of textuality.⁶ This disregard for the integrity of individual word units shows, as Walter J. Ong explains, that the sound of words, and not their sight, guided the makers of early printed books. Indeed, “Well after printing was developed, auditory processing continued for some time to dominate the visible, printed text.”⁷ This continued reliance on aural-oral communication becomes less surprising when we realize that manuscript culture, which initially served as the model for print, had always remained closely tied and subsidiary to oral culture. “Writing,” in manuscript culture, “served largely to recycle knowledge back into the oral world.”⁸ Manuscripts themselves preserved a feeling for the “book as a kind of utterance, an occurence in the course of conversation, rather than as an object.”⁹ As M.T. Clanchy has shown, “the traditional emphasis on the spoken word caused reading to be coupled more often with speaking aloud than with eyeing the script.” Similarly writing (in the sense of composition as opposed to copying) was usually associated with dictating, with the oral expression of one's thoughts rather than with putting pen to parchment. “Reading and writing,” in manuscript culture, “were therefore extensions of speaking,”¹⁰ and remained so in large part through the Renaissance, well after the advent of printing.¹¹

As the first group in England exposed to the printing press, the Tudors were only beginning to discover, or invent, the various formal characteristics of the printed book. At the same time, however, they became keenly aware that the widespread use of print would have profound social and cultural consequences. Many English reformers, as the epigraph above indicates, saw the printing press as a gift from God that would transform England into a Protestant country. Baldwin, in particular, with his deep experience as an editor, printer (working in Edward Whitchurch's important Protestant publishing house) and writer, was in the forefront of those who were attempting to advance and shape a Protestant culture through the medium of print. His fictional prose work Beware the Cat forms part of this project. Although readers may at first find this text, with its dizzying array of fantastic stories, to be incomprehensible and uncontrolled, we shall see just the opposite, that it is a highly wrought satire that playfully explores the psychological and social effects of textual and oral communication and the potential role of the printed book in society.

While the general satiric target of Beware the Cat is oral culture, its immediate target is Catholicism. The book is one of a number of anti-Catholic satires that appeared during Edward VI's outspokenly Protestant reign; but unlike the majority, which were crude pieces of invective, Beware the Cat makes a far more sophisticated critique. Baldwin goes beyond just ridiculing the practices of the Church of Rome to investigating foundational problems. Specifically, he exposes what he identifies as the epistemological weakness of Catholicism by satirically reproducing the modes by which it produces and communicates knowledge. Out of this negative treatment a constructive project also emerges: the very process that enables Baldwin's readers to detect the epistemological flaws of Catholicism also enables them to understand and practice the ways in which Protestantism grounds and produces knowledge.¹² In this way, the book, I shall finally suggest, attempts to show the necessity of promoting a broadly literate society founded on God's word and on the capacity of people to communicate through the printed word at a time when people were debating the fundamental and politically charged question of what it would mean to change from a culture based largely on oral and visual communication to one based on textual communication.

That epistemology is an overarching concern of the work is evident in the opening section, the “argument,” which frames the satire as an attempt to answer the question of whether animals speak. What follows is an account of the discovery and acquisition of the knowledge needed to answer both that question and a more serious one about knowledge itself. In the argument, Streamer, the main character and narrator, disagrees with the author over what constitutes authoritative knowledge: the former insists on the authority of experience (“I speak not onely what by hearsay of some Philosophers I knowe: but what I my self haue prooved” [28]), the latter on that of authors (“alledging for my proof authorite of moste grave and learned Philosophers” [28]). Embodied in this rather ridiculous question about animals, then, is an important debate concerning different notions about the ground and nature of our knowledge—one sense-based the other text-based. Streamer's ensuing story narrates the application of his sense-based epistemology. Far from enlightening him, however, his epistemology, we learn, profoundly degrades him.

The first paragraph of Streamer's “Oration” demonstrates how his intellectual quest proceeds and raises a central question concerning the origin of his knowledge. The idea of origins or beginnings is implicit here because this is the second beginning of the work. We can therefore compare how Streamer begins his story with the accurate and concise way in which the author began his (situation, time, place and participants are clearly and concretely stated by the author) Streamer's first sentence gets things off to a fairly solid start: “Beeing lodged (as I thank him I have been often) at a frends house of mine, which more rowmish within then garish without, standing at Saint Martins lane end …” (29). The unimportant parenthetic and relative clauses are distracting, but do not significantly hinder the concreteness of the first lines. But soon the sentence, and then the entire paragraph, loses its grip on any sure sense of place as we haphazardly drift from St. Martin's Lane to Aldersgate, to Bishopsgate, to Moorgate, to Newgate, and so on. Along with this displacement in space we also float in time through the conjectural histories of how these gates got their names. Streamer's problem here is that he does not know how to begin his story. No fewer than four repetitions of the phrase “or else” suggest that there are many possible ways to begin explaining his situation, but none is quite right. In this regard, the word “gate” and the wonderful play on it are not accidental: Streamer is searching for the right entrance to his story. His inability to begin his narrative indicates what we later learn, that there is no definite origin to Streamer's knowledge. Thus he roams from gate to gate searching for the non-existent beginning. His arrival at “Criplegate” at the paragraph's end is significant, for it anticipates what we eventually learn about Streamer, namely that his kind of knowledge does indeed cripple him as a reasoning being.

This opening paragraph shows Baldwin's artistic control over his material, for even before the anti-Catholic satire becomes apparent, it is already registered in Streamer's first statement. Streamer's fanciful wandering through time and space subtly parodies the intellectual foundation of Catholicism. The Church of Rome bases its authority on tradition, but as Baldwin suggests, no one knows where its traditions began and what the source of their truth is. This points up a related problem of how Christians should learn the principles of their faith. For a Protestant, knowledge of God begins in the Bible. One establishes and develops one's relationship to God through the scriptures. But what about those who do not have direct access to the Bible? They must rely on the established church, which at that time cultivated lay devotion through a vast collection of peripheral stories about saints, martyrs, miracles, relics, etc. From a Protestant perspective, these non-scriptural and thus non-authoritative tales misguide the devout.¹³ Streamer's opening paragraph anticipates this theme: not only is he unable to start his story, to find its beginning or origin, he is unable to situate himself in it. Although the first sentence begins with a past participle (“Beeing lodged”) that announces Streamer as the subject of the sentence, he never shows up in the sentence except in a parenthetic aside. In fact, with the ironic exception of the remark “I knowe,” placed in the middle of his discourse on gates and again in parentheses, he never shows up in the entire paragraph. He gets lost. His syntactic going astray is a sign of a more profound existential disorientation and waywardness.¹⁴ At the end, for example, we learn that for five years he has unsuccessfully been trying to reach Caithness: “I have been going thither these five yeeres, and never was able to performe my iourney” (61).

This first paragraph encapsulates key issues—about origins, the proliferation of stories, and spiritual disorientation—which the rest of the satire develops. In the remainder of part I, we discover that Streamer's “experience” of talking cats begins with and is based on other stories he hears about cats. The reporters of these stories, in turn, have learned them from other storytellers. As a result, between the actual event and the reader, there stand multiple intermediaries through whom information has passed. What we are presented with, then, as a basis of knowledge to answer the question before us is a group of orally transmitted stories of uncertain origin which cannot be confirmed in any substantive way. All we know is that they originate somewhere in Ireland, a country inhabited (as Tudor readers would assume) by unlearned, superstitious, and, as one storyteller emphasizes, “wilde” people. Although Streamer claims in the argument that he will not just offer “hearsay” as proof but real experience, we see that his knowledge is built entirely upon “hearsay,” upon a set of orally communicated fictions.

Baldwin's use of the “frame-within-the-frame” narrative structure is masterful for it parodically models the Catholic stress on oral tradition in knowledge production: not only does the technique illustrate, as John N. King points out, how one can never get through the endless regress of narrators to verify truth claims,¹⁵ it also demonstrates how orally communicated stories tend to give rise to more stories in an uncontrolled and, as we eventually find out, insidious way. The satire enacts the creation of a network of fictions, or a kind of mythology. Around the core story—the death of the cat Grimalkin—the characters put in place a set of other vaguely interconnected personal tales and speculations which all seem to support one another. By the end of part I, we have in place not just a few strange stories about cats, but a vast supernatural landscape inhabited by an empire of voracious cats, werewolves, and witches.

Baldwin carefully orchestrates this fiction building to give it an air of rationality. The characters try, for example, to account for improbabilities: Thomas tackles the problem of how cats could communicate between Ireland and England by suggesting that they use human communication networks (ships); and he answers the question of why cats should “labour to revenge her [Grimalkin's] death” (33) by speculating that they form a close knit society just as bees or the Church of Rome do. This analogical explanation (which is of course no explanation in any rigorous sense) gains support when he then recounts a personal experience to prove “that love and fellowship and a desire to save their kinde is among Cats” (34). The same reasoning process occurs when the characters discuss witches and werewolves: personal experience lends credence to speculative explanations. By managing to interrelate anecdotes and conjectures, the characters give their discussion a loose sense of logic and plausibility. Further, as Streamer and another of the company discuss technical matters of occult phenomena, an aura of learning begins to surround the fabulous world being constructed. When the latter relates a story “tolde while … in the Universitie, by a credible Clark of Oxford” (37-38), even the authority of that great learned institution seems to sanction the fictions. There is thus a kind of specious collaboration between the so-called learned, who supply theoretical speculations about the mysteries of the world, and the unlearned, who provide personal “experiences” to help substantiate the conjectures of the learned.¹⁶ All this is part of Baldwin's effort to show the process by which fictional networks come to be built and believed; how people readily adapt their minds to outlandish tales; how easily they relate them to personal experience, create new ones, combine them with old ones, and surround the fictional construction with an aura of erudition. In short, Baldwin demonstrates how, without any firm ground of knowledge, the human mind can adeptly build complex imaginary worlds.

Baldwin's point here seems to be that, in constructing such imaginary worlds through this process of oral report and conjectural reasoning, Christians get farther and farther away from a proper relationship to God. Instead of gaining a sound understanding of their faith, they fall into the error of superstition.¹⁷ The gloss stating that “Witch craft is kin to unwritten verites for both goe by traditions” (37) makes plain that we are to regard Catholicism, the great repository of “unwritten verites” and “traditions,” as a misleading, even demonic epistemic system. By the end we have a number of reversals that expose how debased human beings become once they ground their thinking in uncertain knowledge. First, we see in Streamer the usurpation of reason by the senses. Stimulated by the strange cat stories, he becomes preoccupied with the lowly world of animals, instead of looking up to higher, spiritual matters, which should constitute his calling as a divine.¹⁸ That Streamer at the start of part II interprets the screeching of cats outside his lodging in musical terms suggests that already the feline mythology is deluding his reason. As he becomes increasingly driven by the desire to find the physical means to understand cats, he sinks deeper and deeper into the world of the senses. He becomes obsessed with bodily functions—eating, vomiting—and thinks that by filling his ears, mouth, and nostrils with specially prepared substances he will acquire knowledge. This error in thinking that higher knowledge comes through the senses can only result in degradation and massive delusion. Thus we see that while Streamer thinks he is on the verge of making a great discovery, in truth he merely engages in voyeurism as he seedily slinks about spying into corners. Although he claims his concoction enables him to hear “the Hermony of the mooving of the Spheres,” what he actually ends up hearing is all the raw, earthy noises of life—people bickering, “barking of dogges, grunting of hoggs … rumbling of ratts …” (46). These noises become so loud that they ironically make him deaf. Baldwin's scatological touches show the crude, bare truth of Streamer's experience-based knowledge: instead of improving his understanding, it overwhelms his intellectual faculties with gross sensual experience.

With the reversal of the reason-sense hierarchy, there follows the upsetting of the man-beast hierarchy, since reason defines man. The fabulous world of beasts sketched out in part I becomes animated in part III as Streamer involves himself more deeply in the lore of cats. By the end, human beings are mute as animals take over the narrative, telling stories of human folly. These stories depict a world in which human beings are gullible (the old bawd makes the merchant's wife believe her cat is her daughter), irrational (the noise of Mouse-slayer's shoes sends an entire village into a panic), and lecherous. The story of the seduction of the merchant's wife is one instance of a whole world of rampant lechery that Mouse-slayer evokes in her introduction of the old bawd: “This woman got her living by boording yung gentlemen. for whom she kept alwaise faire wenches in store … when she had soked from yung Gentlemen all that they had: then would she cast them of except they fell to cheting. Wherfore many of them in the night time would goe abrode, and bring the next morning home with them some times money, sometime Iewels, as ringes or chaines, somtime apparel, and somtime they would come again cursing their il fortune, with nothing save per adventure drye blowes or wet wounds …” (51-52). Baldwin sketches out a widening and viciously self-perpetuating pattern of bestial activity: the bawd preys on young men unable to control their sexual desires; they, in turn, prey on others in order to continue to satisfy those desires. From stories of insatiably rapacious animals in part I, we move in part III to stories of insatiably rapacious humans. The ultimate beneficiary of this animalistic behavior, Baldwin suggests, is the Roman Church, which the bawd, the “catholik quean” and devout worshipper of Mary, represents. Through her fictions, she, like the Church, thrives by misleading people into the perpetration of base acts and by making them psychologically dependent on her.

The human debasement brought about by Streamer's misguided investigation also includes the reversal of the male-female hierarchy. Significantly, the fictitious world created in the book is closely linked to women: almost all the cats, for example, are female; witchcraft is something handed down from mother to daughter as an exclusively female kind of knowledge; the old bawd not only corrupts young gentlemen, but in gulling the merchant's wife into committing adultery, she also undermines family life; and throughout, females are depicted as devouring creatures (most strikingly in the story of how Grimalkin consumes an entire cow in one feeding). The graphic scene of the female cat castrating the man in part III serves as a culminating representation of female rapacity. That this same cat narrates the end of the story underlines the connection between physical and mental emasculation: no longer are we hearing about devouring females, they are now doing the storytelling, taking over the male function of producing and transmitting knowledge.

In depicting gender relations in this way, Baldwin suggests as one consequence of Streamer's epistemology that men surrender their intellectual authority to women. The consequence of this, in turn, is that patriarchy itself becomes threatened. Or better put perhaps, patriarchy never becomes fully established. As Lawrence Stone has argued, the rise of Protestantism in England strengthened what had been a loosely patriarchical society.¹⁹ Protestant thinkers stressed family life and saw learning obedience to one's father as a paradigm for learning obedience to God.²⁰ Fathers, for their part, were expected to care more for their inner family members, especially with respect to their moral and religious upbringing. And as Protestantism gradually succeeded in discrediting the institutional and symbolic apparatus of Catholicism—such as the power of priests to remit sins and belief in the miracle working of images and relics—fathers took over some of the chief duties of priests, becoming strict overseers of the moral and spiritual lives of their families.²¹ The growth of Protestantism, the reinforcement of patriarchy, and the strengthening of moral values were interrelated phenomena and Baldwin consciously shows their interconnection in the novel. As Streamer becomes more imbued with false knowledge, moral and family structures collapse to the point where at the end we witness a world in which sexual promiscuity is lawful, chastity criminal. Indeed, the satire shows how false knowledge leads to total breakdown—intellectual, moral, and social—in which reason gives way to the senses, females dominate males, immorality replaces morality.²²

What lies at the heart of the epistemological issue in Beware the Cat and what governs the hierarchies that are undermined—reason/sense, man/beast, male/female—is a text/speech hierarchy. The subversion of this hierarchy in Catholicism, we are given to understand, is the cause of its errors. This is not to say that Baldwin bypasses the image/word opposition which traditionally characterizes the epistemological confrontation between Catholicism and Protestantism (in part III, for example, there is the ironic story of the priest who, through sleight-of-hand in celebrating of the mass, appears able to cure blindness). Baldwin shows that the eye is susceptible to deception, but he is more concerned with showing the ear's susceptibility to deception. This focus puts his critique of Catholicism on a different plane with far-reaching implications. The book makes an extended statement on the problems that result from oral communication when it supersedes the authority of texts. The notion of hierarchy is crucial here because Baldwin is not simply attacking speech and hearing per se; rather, he is trying to show what happens in a religion and in a culture where texts function in a minor, subservient capacity. Certainly, the English Reformation was a movement that produced and was spearheaded by some great preachers and thus relied on oral communication. Such preaching, however, since it aimed to spread and explicate God's word as set forth in the Bible, placed itself in a subordinate role to textual authority. In Beware the Cat Baldwin shows what happens when oral communication is left ungoverned by textual authority.

One consequence, as we have seen, is that accounts of the past become difficult to verify and take on a fantastic aspect as historical facts become mixed with myth and legend.²³ Another consequence of an unchecked oral culture is excess. Speech and excess are close companions in the satire. Streamer's narrative, for example, is composed of many orally transmitted tales which tend to multiply uncontrollably. His own manner of speech is hyperbolic and verbose. After his humiliation in part II, the fact that he begins part III in an inflated style, propounding wild theories to explain various phenomena on earth and in the heavens, signifies that he still has no solid grasp on reality, and that his reason is not in control. Baldwin also links speech and hearing to bodily excesses, such as eating and illicit sexual behavior. For example, not only are Streamer's grotesque eating experiments devoted to improving his sense of hearing, but when he supposedly acquires the power to pick up sounds within a hundred mile radius, among the sounds he first distinguishes are those of women in bed (“Lord what a doo women made in their beds” [46]). And what particularly interests him is the voice of a wife calling “her husband Cuckolde.” Streamer's aural experiment embodies a mixture of sensual indulgence and erotic fantasy. Hearing and speech, Baldwin implies, are closely linked to the passions and the non-rational part of the mind. His gloss, that “Heer the poeticall furie came upon him” (46), makes this point clear, indicating that Streamer's imagination has taken over his mind; and it is at this moment that he slips into a kind of madness as the roaring tumult of coarse, raunchy noises bursts upon him. The scene ends with Streamer creeping “in to a corner in the chimney” to hide after hearing bells, the sound of which makes him think that “all the devils in hel had broken lose” (47). Again, the gloss makes plain that in this aural experience Streamer's imagination has run amok: “A man may dye onely by imagination of harm.” This incident repeats itself on a larger social scale in part III when an entire village panics upon hearing the noise created by Mouse-slayer's walnut shoes. The villagers, too, nearly die from “imagination of harm” as they engage in a kind of collective hallucination.

Baldwin here expresses the prevalent Reformation view that saw the imagination as a threat to reason and associated it with the demonic, with witchcraft (witches deceived people by stimulating the imaginations of their victims), and with idolatry. In contemporary theories of psychology, human understanding was thought to function through the medium of inner images or phantasms.²⁴ This theoretical perspective was an important part of a large body of knowledge in Renaissance culture—about love, the Art of Memory, white magic, and astrology—which, as Ioan P. Couliano argues, the Reformation sent underground.²⁵ Since Protestantism viewed mental images with the same suspicion as it did any image—that is, as potential idols—it had to censor the imagination and the science of the phantasmic.²⁶ Baldwin shared in this attack on the culture of the imagination; but his focus, again, on how speech and hearing affect human psychology gives this attack a new dimension,²⁷ and strengthens the idea that oral communication must be made subordinate to textual authority. He shows that oral communication, like visual communication, is easily influenced by the senses and the imagination, and is therefore inherently deceptive as a means of acquiring knowledge and facilitating good judgment.

Beware the Cat, as I have been indicating, is deeply concerned with the problem of making sound judgments. Not only is the book framed as an attempt to judge whether animals speak, but judgment-making also becomes a recurrent event in the narrative: Streamer determines as true the stories he hears; the merchant's wife has to ascertain the likelihood of the old bawd's story; the cat Mouse-slayer sits in court to be judged. With the ironic exception of Mouse-slayer's case, the judgments made, especially Streamer's crucial one, are wrong. Streamer's problem of judgment in particular stems from his inadequate appreciation of the written word—his disdain for knowledge communicated through books. Part I closes with Streamer's going home and picking up a book, which he then puts down, saying: “this former talke so troubled me that I could think of nothing els, but mused stil and as it were examined more narowely that every man had spoken” (39). This is a pivotal moment where Streamer changes from being a passive observer to an active participant in the mythology-building. Significantly, this moment is hinged between text and speech: in turning from his book to what “every man had spoken,” he takes a decisive step toward becoming lost in an imaginary world. Even though Streamer suggests that he is giving a close, critical review of the stories he has heard (“examined more narowely”), the phrase “as it were” undercuts that notion. That the last word of part I is “spoken” subtly makes clear that the shift to speech, and thus to an oral culture, precipitates the descent into physicality and delusion that occurs in part II. Even when Streamer returns to books, as he does in reading Albertus Magnus' prescriptions for “understand[ing] … the voices of birds or beasts” (41), he proves to be a very poor reader, unable to follow straightforward directions and even more incapable of making sound, rational judgments.²⁸

The solution to the problem of making sound judgments and determinations is left, finally, to Baldwin's readers. We constitute the sole exception to the perpetual inability to judge that the book thematizes. It seems to be Baldwin's point that as readers we avoid making the errors that the characters make. Not only does reading, from a Protestant perspective, allow one to gain a proper understanding of religion, Baldwin further implies that the printed word allows one to make better discriminations: to recall John Foxe, the printed word allows one “to conceive the light of knowledge and judgment” so that “ignorance” can “be detected,” and “truth from error, religion from superstition … discerned.” This is not a notion Beware the Cat makes by assertion, but is an integral part of its design and of the reading experience it provides. To see this we need to consider why Baldwin presented the book as an elaborate hoax and, more importantly, how we recognize it as one.

In announcing the book as a faithful transcript of Streamer's spoken tale (“yet have I so neerly used bothe the order and woords of him that spake them” [26]) and at the same time insisting that he has made the tale “book like,” Baldwin foregrounds the problem of what it means to encounter information transposed from one medium to another. He wants his readers to discover and reflect on the difference between hearing and reading Streamer's narrative. Although he claims (in the persona of the author) that in reading the book his readers will “think they hear M. Streamer speak” (26), we realize, sooner or later, that there is a difference. Reading enables us to understand the fictions as fictions: unlike the characters in part I who, upon hearing the first tale, turn from being passive listeners of fictions to active propagators of them, we recognize their spuriousness and thus bring the proliferation to a stop. Though obvious, this is important both as an act that the book aims to prompt and as reinforcement of the text/speech and reading/hearing hierarchies that Baldwin develops and to some degree theorizes about in the work. It is the textualization of Streamer's fantastic narrative that restores the proper hierarchy of text over speech, which in turn inhibits excess, restores the reason/sense hierarchy, and prevents the endless spewing forth of more fictions.

First of all, the formal properties of writing and the printed book facilitate the containment of Streamer's fictions. In the act of transcribing the story-telling scene (“I have penned … one of the stories which M. Streamer tolde last Christmas,” [26]), the author already imposes order onto it:²⁹ he organizes the scene into sections with a dedication, introduction, and conclusion, arranges Streamer's story into three parts, and provides the whole with a title. All this puts the fictions generated from Streamer's narrative into a framework that sets limits and boundaries. This containment of Streamer's story is further reinforced by turning writing into print. As Ong explains, “Print situates words in space more relentlessly than writing ever did. Writing moves words from the sound world to a world of visual space, but print locks words into … this space,” providing a sense of closure and completion.³⁰Beware the Cat does just this: the book freezes the process of oral transmission; it removes Streamer's narrative from its oral context and fixes it onto the calm and orderliness of the printed page. As a printed book, Beware the Cat also differs from scribal works in the status of its marginalia. One way in which manuscripts retained a sense of textual openness was in the use of glosses. Successive commentators of scribal works—particularly those containing the scriptures or Roman and canon law—would add layers of comment to the extent that the glosses tended to envelop and dominate the main text, making it difficult at times to distinguish text from gloss.³¹ In this process of accretion—which resembles the oral accretion of stories that Beware the Cat satirizes—textual purity was lost, as whatever was originally said or written became confused with the marginalia. This problem does not arise in print which clearly distinguishes hand-written additions from the original typographic text. In Beware the Cat the ability of print to “lock words into space” and set them in straight lines and in highly symmetrical patterns eliminates any possible confusion between text and gloss.

The features of print thus allow us to inspect exactly what Streamer said without distraction and with a sense of distance. Unlike speech, which is time-bound (spoken words exist fleetingly as they are uttered in sequence) print not only permanently preserves words, but also presents them to us all at once as a complex unit, which thereby enables us to analyze both parts and whole in detail.³² The close inspection of Streamer's narrative is something the book encourages, especially in the way it highlights the difference between hearing and reading it. In textualizing the narrative, the author changes from being a listener to an editor and reader of Streamer's tales, one who scrutinizes texts carefully. As a listener he is passive, since Streamer only agrees to tell his story on condition that no one interrupt him. This condition thus precludes his audience from interrogating him. And as his name suggests, Streamer's effectiveness in persuading his listeners depends on keeping his narrative going to prevent them from closely examining it.³³ Moreover, the last sentence of the argument reminds us that the speaker and listeners are all in bed, which frames Streamer's tale as a kind of bedtime story to prepare one for the undisciplined mental state of sleep. Such a context further discourages the listeners from maintaining a questioning attitude. In textual form, however, the author can and does question Streamer. Although on the surface, in a humorous deadpan way, he seems to believe in Streamer's fictions, he reveals their absurdity in his capacity as editor and skilled reader. Here his glosses are crucial—not so much because they tell us what to think, but because they are cues to critical thinking.³⁴ In contrast to the marginalia found in manuscripts, the function of Baldwin's glosses is less to explicate the text, or to provide further examples and amplifications, than to highlight the reading process. The glosses, which may at first appear to be merely topic markers, often alert the reader to another point of view. Consider his brief note on the tale of Grimalkin told by Thomas, who states that, though he learned the story from “one of Filzberies churles,” in Ireland “they call all Farmers & husband men” churls (32). Despite this qualification, Baldwin's gloss reads: “A Churles tale.” In effect, it advises that since this story comes from an uneducated person in Ireland, a “wilde” country, we should ignore the narrator's qualification and simply consider this “A Churles tale.” The following gloss reinforces this skeptical attitude. Commenting on the action of a peasant who stole money from his master's enemies and then slew them, Baldwin simply writes: “this was an Irish town” (32). These inconspicuous and seemingly innocent comments show better than the few overtly mocking ones how Baldwin's glosses help the reader engage Streamer's narrative critically.

Besides alerting the reader to different viewpoints, the glosses also make the reader slow down and thereby prevent him or her from becoming caught up in the heady excitement of the storytelling. Reading thus counterbalances the inclination to rush forward and to credit stories without carefully considering the evidence and underlying premises. The tendency to believe too readily, which is part of the problem of excess, is explicitly dramatized in the behavior of Thomas. Upon hearing the first narrator's fantastic tale, he becomes emboldened to tell his even more fantastic tale, despite his initial skepticism: “I wil tel you Maister Streamer … that which was toulde mee in Yreland and which I have til now, so litle credited that I was a shamed to reporte it, but hearing that I heare now, and calling to minde mine owne experience when it was: I doo so litle misdout it, that I think I never tolde, nor you ever heard a more likely tale (31).” What is remarkable is Thomas' transformation upon hearing the first story: his shame vanishes along with skepticism. Now convinced of the truth of his own story, he describes the anticipated event of its narration and reception in the past tense (“I … tolde,” “you … heard”). His thoughts are racing forward so fast that in his mind a future occurrence has already happened. Thomas has succumbed to immoderation. His reaction warns us against believing too readily and losing a discerning, judicious perspective on the narrative.

By not becoming too absorbed in the storytelling, we are able to see and know more than the characters, who are caught up in its sensationalism. Although the characters, who all implicitly claim Protestantism as their faith, repeatedly draw parallels between the world of cats and the Church of Rome, they fail to see that they are embracing a set of fictions that resembles Catholic doctrines and practices. In fact, they unwittingly construct their supernatural world out of stories relating to central Catholic mysteries. As King has pointed out, a number of tales about “cats eating men mock transubstantiation and the Roman mass.”³⁵ The core story of Grimalkin and the thief in the Church, in which the passing and eating of food has a sense of mystical ritual, is the fullest and most grotesque parody of the Catholic mass in the satire. In part II, Streamer's vile alimentary concoction, which he claims invests him with the power to penetrate and experience the hidden realities of the world, also parodies the eucharist and the doctrine of transubstantiation. The story of how men are turned to werewolves for seven years as a kind of “penance” mocks the belief in purgatory. In their excitement, the characters trap themselves into accepting beliefs they profess to abhor (one character, for example, accuses Streamer of behaving like a “Popish coniurer” who “would bring Christe out of Heaven to thrust him into a peece of bread” [35]). In contrast, we as readers, able to detect the irony of each story, escape entrapment and achieve a kind of triumph.

The difference between hearing and reading is what makes the difference between the characters and us. That this is the determining factor becomes even more apparent when we recall that, in the prescientific world of the sixteenth century, belief in the supernatural was deep and widespread. The idea that cats could have special powers would not have struck even learned people as outlandish. And as suggested earlier, there is an air of plausibility and rationality in the explanations offered by the characters in part I. It is only in part II, when Streamer commits himself to the mythology of cats and engages in his hilariously grotesque investigation of their world, that the tone and action of the satire becomes decisively burlesque and absurd. Until then, the tone remains relatively serious as the characters puzzle over the question of whether cats can speak. Part I is where all of us—Streamer, the other members of Streamer's party, the author, and we the readers—face a test in having to judge the evidence. Again, we judge correctly not because we are inherently smarter, but because we are readers. Reading gives us critical distance and allows us to pause and think. Reading ultimately gives us pleasure by giving us knowledge—not just knowledge of what is true or probable, but also of what is false, unwarranted, and ill-advised. Finally, Baldwin shows that reading makes us human. The satire's deepest irony might be that animals can indeed speak in some capacity—after all, it slyly answers in the affirmative and ends up proving the gloss that “some beasts are wiser then men” (38). If so, what differentiates human beings from animals is not the ability to speak, but the ability to read, for as Beware the Cat demonstrates, reading requires the exercise of one's reasoning faculties, and to reason is to be human.

We are now in a position to recognize Beware the Cat as a rich, sophisticated literary work. On the one hand, the book satirically exposes the harmful failings of what in Baldwin's mind are Catholic modes of knowledge acquisition and their rootedness in oral culture: for him, the danger of learning by “experience” only is that it risks engaging the non-rational elements of human beings. When this happens, other hierarchies also risk destabilization, which affect not only the individual, but also society as a whole. On the other hand, the book implicitly advocates a text-centered epistemology and an expanded print culture. In some respects, Beware the Cat constitutes a kind of treatise on reading and its social function. We can therefore see that for all its outrageous, earthy humor, the book is a serious work that complements Baldwin's better known and more conventional works, such as A Treatise of Morall Philosophie (1548). In fact, A Treatise (a highly popular book that went through 23 editions) does what Beware the Cat advocates: first, it declares the authority of texts by assembling in convenient form brief lives of ancient philosophers and their wisdoms; second, its overall purpose, as Stephen Gresham says, “is to lead all men to reason as a daily guide to morality. …”³⁶Beware the Cat and A Treatise share a common outlook, but address different aspects of a related project. While A Treatise as well as A Mirror for Magistrates are sophisticated didactic works aimed at ethically cultivating a broad readership, Beware the Cat aims to show the need for widespread literacy. Here we can see the political force of Baldwin's exploration into the difference between oral and textual communication.

In the sixteenth century, the issue of literacy was part of a fundamental and highly controversial debate of whether people ought to be allowed to read the Bible.³⁷ Protestants argued that one's spiritual life depended upon having direct access to the word of God, and that religious instruction learned through other forms distorted one's understanding of religion.³⁸ Catholics argued that the visible church alone must interpret scripture and determine how to communicate Christian truths, for otherwise, to allow every individual, no matter how unlearned, to read the Bible for him- or herself would result in strange constructions and heresy. These viewpoints crystallized the More-Tyndale debate earlier in the English Reformation and were still much at the center of the religious and political struggles during the reigns of Edward VI and Mary. What made the question of making the Bible directly available to all especially complex and potent was that it touched on worries about social stability: the upheavals on the continent sparked by Thomas Muntzer (1523-25) and John of Leyden (1533-35) loomed as terrible warnings of the social chaos that could result when individuals deviated from the collective wisdom and institutional framework of the established church. The conflict between the desire to spread God's word and the fear of doing so is expressed in the halting reforms that took place under Henry VIII. The legislation of 1543 pointedly illustrates this ambivalence: on the one hand, Convocation ordered that the Bible be read through in English, chapter by chapter, every Sunday; on the other hand, an Act prohibited the use of any English Bible other than the Great Bible, the official Bible (which in Henry's reign ceased to be printed after 1541, thus indicating the desire to limit access to the scriptures), and forbade unlicensed persons to read or expound it aloud.³⁹ Further, the Act specified who was allowed to read it. “In this Act,” H. S. Bennett summarizes, “the reading of the Bible in English was forbidden to women, artificers, apprentices, journeymen, serving-men of the rank of yeomen and under, husbandmen and labourers. Noblewomen and gentlewomen might read it to themselves, but not to others. Only noblemen, gentlemen and merchants might read it to their families.”⁴⁰ We see here the deep anxiety about how and to what extent the English Bible should be disseminated. That most people might hear the scriptures from authorized persons but not read them for themselves reveals that the authorities regarded reading as a potentially subversive activity, since, presumably, reading could not be monitored and controlled as preaching could. Accordingly, Bible reading was a right granted only to the privileged classes—nobles and substantial merchants. But even with respect to these groups there was concern, for the authorities sought not only to restrict their Bible reading to the inner family circle, they also sought to regulate who within the inner family might read to whom.

Although in Edward VI's reign (1547-53), Edward Seymour, duke of Somerset and Protector of the Realm, removed these and other restrictions, allowing England to experience a period of uncensored expression that was unprecedented (and remained a high point of free expression until the 1640s), there was still profound disagreement on the literacy question and publication policy. “The coming to the throne of Edward VI,” Bennett says, “did nothing to check the ardour of those wishing to control the activities of the printing press. …”⁴¹ Moreover, Seymour's liberalization of the press and reading rights was brief, ending soon after the rebellions of 1549 when he fell from power. Although his supplanter, John Dudley, duke of Northumberland, unexpectedly sided with the radical reformers, he quickly reimposed censorship.⁴² And shortly afterwards in 1553, Mary began her attempt to turn England back to the pre-reform days, taking such measures as removing all English Bibles and prayer books from churches. Her chief administrator, Stephen Gardiner, is an emblematic figure in this complex controversy involving printing, Bible reading, church reform, and social stability. An advocate of reform in the earlier Henrician period, Gardiner became a staunch supporter of Henry's later conservatism and Mary's Counter-Reformation precisely because he feared the social and political turmoil that might result from giving the people the right to read and interpret the Bible for themselves. In his letters to Seymour, Gardiner expressed views similar to those voiced earlier by More: he urged the Protector of the Realm to place tight restrictions on “the common reding of Scriptur,” defended the use of images, advocated the use of Greek and Latin in religion instead of English, which he saw as ephemeral, and fought the Royal Injunction requiring every parish church to possess the English translation of Erasmus' Paraphrases as a popular guide to the Great Bible.⁴³ Gardiner also wanted Seymour to suppress books by “Masters Bale, Joye, and other,” because they were written “without autoritie.” To permit the publication of books in which individuals spoke on matters of religion without the learned approval of the church could only, in his view, cause confusion: “every incertentie is noisom to any realme. And where every man wilbe maister, there must needes be uncertainty.”⁴⁴

Beware the Cat makes a fresh and stunning contribution to this debate, for it answers Gardiner's general fear that a typographic culture would create social chaos, and, with respect to the issue of Bible study, it makes the strong argument that it will not do to hear the scriptures in controlled situations—people must be free to read them and encouraged to read them. In tracking how oral and textual communication differently affect human beings, Baldwin builds a case that Catholic modes of knowledge production and communication actually generate confusion and excess: to depend solely on oral and visual forms of communication is to risk stimulating the imagination and the senses, and thus to promote irrational behavior; to be literate is to cultivate one's ability to make discriminations and to moderate the passions, and thus to promote rational civil behavior.⁴⁵

We can thus see Beware the Cat as an argument for widespread literacy. The social inclusiveness of the book further suggests this. First, the characters represent a broad spectrum of the social order: there is Thomas, who seems to be a laborer; Streamer represents the clergy; the author represents the intelligentsia with access to the monarch and the court (he meets Streamer while preparing entertainment for the king). Second, while much of the narrative depicts upper-class life (the young gentlemen lodgers, the gentleman seducer, the short anecdote of the knight on p. 60) the overall emphasis is on middle-class life (the long story of the merchant's wife) and lower-class life (e.g., all of part II) in both urban and village contexts. The book, in short, focuses on popular culture and depicts it as a world of teeming, uncontrolled activity. It is uncontrolled, in large part, because the people are not readers. Their knowledge of the world comes only from what they hear or experience sensorily (sight, touch, taste). The domination of the epistemology of “experience” is precisely why their world is chaotic. A stable society, Beware the Cat implies, is one composed of a literate populace whose knowledge comes not from what it hears or “experiences,” but from what it reads.

Significantly, Baldwin wrote Beware the Cat when the distribution of key Protestant texts in the vernacular had just been undertaken on a massive scale nationwide. With the Great Bible as the central text the Book of Homilies (1547), Erasmus' Paraphrases (1548, 1551, 1552) and the Book of Common Prayer (1549, 1552) were all part of a plan to mould a Protestant society through the printed word. These books written in a plain style that all people could understand, marked a new development in the use of books.⁴⁶ From Whitchurch's printing shop, where he very likely helped to produce these books, Baldwin would no doubt have paid close attention to the potentialities of this undertaking. His one piece of prose fiction, with its conviction in the reforming power of reading, along with his other works, affirms this new use of the book to shape the values and behavior of the populace.

Yet to link Beware the Cat with the Homilies, a compilation that heavily emphasizes order and obedience to authority, suggests that Baldwin's book, despite its alignment with bold reforming ideas, is conservative and even repressive. On the surface this is so. In some respects, the satire depicts popular culture as something that needs to be contained. Baldwin does not celebrate the attitudes and behaviors that Mikhail Bakhtin sees Rabelais celebrating: bodily functions—eating, sex, vomiting, defecation—do not figure positively in Baldwin as they do in Rabelais.⁴⁷ These actions, as we have seen in tracing Streamer's quest, are only degrading in Beware the Cat; the lower stratum of the body has no regenerative, life-giving force. There is also no celebration of the marketplace, with its joyously abusive language and its absence of social hierarchies. One could argue, then, that Baldwin simply wants to replace the authoritarian structures of Catholicism with those of Protestantism. This is true to some degree. Given the polemical context I have outlined, Baldwin had to imply that Protestantism would lead to more order, not less. Yet to overemphasize the book's desire for order would mask the radical implications of the book.

To begin with, we can view the issue of popular culture not simply as a problem of containment, but one of reform and even, ultimately, of liberation. Baldwin implies that reform cannot merely be imposed from above by decree; rather it must be developed from within, at all levels of society. That much of the narrative depicts an England where people still adhere to Catholic practices and beliefs, even though Protestantism has some strong support at the top, suggests that reform requires more than a few promulgations and changes in law.⁴⁸ This notion also follows from the fact that even though the characters in part I profess Protestant views, they unwittingly start believing in Catholic ones. What is required is a more thorough cultural transformation—a transformation of both high and low culture. As we saw in part I in the way the learned and unlearned collaborate to construct a fantastic set of beliefs that parallels Catholic doctrine, both official culture and popular culture are, for Baldwin, intertwined and mutually reinforcing. In this view, popular culture is not an antithesis to the long-standing official culture of Catholicism but merely a debased version of it.⁴⁹ Popular culture would then be seen to embody severely limited conceptual horizons, and lack the capacity to generate new ideologies. This continued dependency of popular culture on the old high culture is something Beware the Cat seeks to break. It does so by providing common folk with the means to move beyond their restricted field of understanding by learning how to demystify unfounded beliefs. The means are found in printing, which democratizes the tools of learning and provides the key to inducing the kind of profound change in mentality and behavior that has not taken place. This implies that some decentralization of political and ecclesiastical authority is necessary, for if reform is to succeed, Baldwin suggests, individuals will have to learn the scriptures, the principles of their faith, and their moral and civic responsibilities for themselves and cannot simply be told what to believe. Therefore, they must be intellectually equipped. In this perspective, Beware the Cat seeks to empower common folk by showing that they can and must think for themselves. Because the book is not oriented to an elite audience, it gives ordinary people access to a medium and thus to a realm of discourse hitherto reserved for the elite.⁵⁰ Unlike the Catholic books of the period that were addressed to lay audiences, Baldwin's book does not talk down to its readers.⁵¹ In fact, Baldwin wittily presents himself as a naive reader, who in truth sees through Streamer, the pretentious intellectual parading his delusions in the clothes of erudition. Through his glosses, Baldwin subtly bids us to see Streamer in the same way. The book thus empowers its readers because it puts them in a position to judge and reject Streamer's narrative. This is why Baldwin presented his novel as a hoax, as fiction masquerading as the truth: it is an illusion that one must dispel. Baldwin wants ordinary people to see through fabrications, especially moral and religious ones. Unlike Streamer, who eventually becomes entrapped in a fictitious world where he imagines himself to be under constant surveillance, the readers learn to liberate themselves from false ideas. What Beware the Cat does, then, is teach people to be intellectual iconoclasts, and it implicitly invites them to engage in an act of iconoclasm by dismissing its fictions.⁵²

In its implications, Baldwin's book is radical. We can see its kinship with other radical Protestant literature such as John Foxe's Acts and Monuments (1563; revised and enlarged 1570, 1576, 1583): while Beware the Cat encouraged individuals to think and act with independence, Acts and Monuments showed people doing just that. Foxe put common folk on the historical stage and revealed how their individual acts of conscience and disobedience constituted a powerful and positive historical force. While Baldwin's work enacts the potentialites of reading as an agent of social and cultural change, Foxe's massive book presents this idea as a crucial part of the historical process. Acts and Monuments can be read as a story of the struggle of common people for the instruments of knowledge: many of the martyrs he documented consisted of poor, humble people who were persecuted not just for theological reasons, but for reading or writing. Foxe's book honors their transgression into the realm of texts—a realm that had long been the perserve of a secular and ecclesiastical elite. Both Baldwin and Foxe also saw the printed word as the key to expanding the realm of texts and realizing a reformed society. Along with the Geneva Bible, Acts and Monuments was placed in churches throughout England, becoming in William Haller's words the new “code of reference” for the English people.⁵³ This was a textual code that replaced the oral and visual one of the old church. Foxe's book again did what Beware the Cat argued for: it helped to create a typographic culture in which people would look to the printed word for spiritual guidance, knowledge, and power.⁵⁴

Notes

1. Ed. Stephen Reed Cattley, 8 vols. (London: R. B. Seeley and W. Burnside, 1837-41), 4:252-53.

2. See William A. Ringler, Jr., “Beware the Cat and the Beginnings of English Fiction,” Novel 12 (1979): 113-26; Stephen Gresham, “William Baldwin: Literary Voice of the Reign of Edward VI,” HLQ 44 (1981): 101-16; and John N. King, English Reformation Literature: The Tudor Origins of the Protestant Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), 358-406. These studies look beyond Baldwin's involvement in A Mirror for Magistrates, for which he is best known, and discuss his other work. The appearance of Beware the Cat by William Baldwin: The First English Novel, ed. Ringler and Michael Flachman (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1988), which is a modernized edition of Baldwin's fictional work and includes useful notes, appendices, and an introduction, is the latest effort to give Baldwin the attention he deserves. Any review of the critical work on Baldwin, however, should begin with Wilbraham F. Trench, “William Baldwin,” Modern Quarterly of Language and Literature 2 (1898-99): 259-67. Trench was the first modern critic to recognize the value and originality of Baldwin's work. Although his essay failed (at that time) in its goal to rescue Baldwin from neglect and “unmerited scorn,” it makes a good case for his rescue.

3. For a summary of the biographical details, see Ringler, introduction, Beware, xiv-xx; and Eveline I. Feasey, “William Baldwin,” MLR 20 (1925): 407-18. Feasey nicely reconstructs Baldwin's intellectual and political milieu and presents some information on Baldwin's activity as a dramatist (unfortunately, none of his dramatic work has survived). Gresham also presents a thoughtful survey of Baldwin's life and literary career (“William Baldwin: Literary Voice”).

4. Scholars place the composition of Beware in 1553. The opening lines of the work refer to events of Christmas 1552, when Baldwin was “at Court with master Ferrers, then master of the Kings majesties pastimes,” and was preparing “Interludes … for the Kings recreation.” This suggests that Baldwin wrote Beware at that time or shortly afterwards and that he was subsequently unable to publish it owing to Edward VI's death in mid-1553 and the advent of Mary, whose administration would not have tolerated the work's anti-papal sentiments. The earliest recorded edition is that of 1570, although there may have been an edition in 1561. For a fuller discussion of the work's textual history, see Trench, “William Baldwin,” 263-64; William P. Holden, introduction, Beware the Cat, Connecticut College Monograph Series (New London, Conn., 1963), 11-12; and especially Ringler, Beware, xvi, xxix-xxx. I am using Holden's edition and shall provide page numbers for quotations in my text.

5. Ringler, “Beginnings of English Fiction.” After Holden's introduction to his edition, Ringler's essay was the first to examine Beware seriously and make a case for its literary merit. For a dissenting view on Beware as the first English novel, see Arthur F. Kinney, rev. of Beware the Cat: The First English Novel, MP 87 (1990): 396-99.

6. Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London: Routledge, 1982), 120-21. On the establishment of title-pages see S. H. Steinberg, Five Hundred Years of Printing (New York: Criterion books, 1959), 105-09.

7. Orality and Literacy, 120.

8. Ibid. 119.

9. Ibid. 125. M.T. Clanchy points out in From Memory to Written Record: England, 1066-1307 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press), 214-15, that “the medieval recipient prepared himself to listen to an utterance, rather than scrutinize a document visually as a modern literate would. This was due to a different habit of mind; it was not because the recipient was illiterate.”

10. Ibid. 183 and 218.

11. William Nelson, “From ‘Listen Lordings’ to ‘Dear Reader,’” UTQ 46 (1976-77): 110-24, argues that most literary works in the Renaissance were heard rather than read and were expressly written for oral presentation. Authors did not consciously write for readers and private, solitary reading “did not take place … until after the Renaissance, long after the introduction of printing” (122).

12. I am indebted to King's chapter on Beware, which makes a number of good observations. While King touches on the issue of epistemology at various points (English Reformation Literature, 392, 397-98, 400), as does Ringler somewhat in his remarks on Baldwin's satiric treatment of traditions in Catholicism (“Beginnings of English Fiction,” 117, 123), my essay makes central this issue—the entire problem of how knowledge is determined, produced, and communicated—and tries to draw out its implications.

13. See, for example, Thomas Cranmer's statement in The Book of Common Prayer (1559), ed. John E. Booty (Washington: Folger Books, 1976), 14-15: “For they so ordered the matter that all the whole Bible, or the greatest part thereof, should be read over once in the year … But these many years past this godly and decent order of the ancient fathers hath been so altered, broken, and neglected by planting in uncertain stories, legends, responds, verses, vain repetitions, commemorations, and synodals that commonly when any book of the Bible was begun, before three or four chapters were read out, all the rest are unread.”

14. This sense of wrong beginnings and getting lost has slightly less force in Ringler's modernized edition, which generally tends to smooth out Streamer's narrative and syntactic difficulties. For example, Ringler puts all of Streamer's discourse on gates within parentheses and forms it into one long sentence, thus giving the impression of containment and control, as if Streamer, instead of losing his way, were simply making for our edification an extended but well-thought-out aside. Moreover, Ringler combines the first two paragraphs of Streamer's oration (as they appear in Holden's edition), which somewhat undercuts the notion of a mis-beginning that requires Streamer to scrap his first paragraph and restart his story from scratch. Ringler's modernized edition is perfectly justified, since, as he explains (xxx), we cannot expect the known copies of the novel to preserve Baldwin's own usages of spelling, capitalization, and punctuation. At times, however, modernizing the text—imposing a system of punctuation, cleaning up orthographic inconsistencies, insisting on grammatical order—may work against what the text is doing. In the beginning of the oration, syntactic and narrative confusion are part of Streamer's problem and point up larger epistemological and existential problems. Although modernizing has the virtue of making distant, strange texts more accessible and coherent to the modern reader, the point in this instance seems to be that Streamer's opening speech is strange and incoherent—that is what we are supposed to recognize and think about.

15. King, English Reformation Literature, 397. The term “frame-within-the-frame” is Holden's (introduction, Beware, 15).

16. There is also, as Ringler points out (“Beginnings of English Fiction,” 117) the “number game played in the two accounts of Grimalkin's death” (the first deriving from a man who forty years ago heard of her death from another cat, and the second deriving from the Irish churl who thirty-three years ago heard that Patrick Apore had slain her seven years earlier) which “suggest the fantastic grounds upon which oral reports come to be credited.” I would only emphasize that the “number game” adds another bit of evidence which, though spurious, yet appears valid and genuinely corroborative in the system of knowledge production that predominates in the world of the characters.

17. This view of how human beings create fictions and thereby stray from the principles of their religion resembles Calvin's analysis of how human beings tend to succumb to superstition and idolatry in their attempts to explain natural phenomena. “Or, if by the guidance and direction of these things [the course of events in nature], we are ever driven … to the consideration of God, yet, when we have rashly conceived an idea of some deity, we soon slide into our own carnal dreams, or depraved inventions, corrupting by our vanity the purity of divine truth. … Hence that immense flood of errors, which has deluged the whole world. For every man's understanding is like a labyrinth to him; so that it is not to be wondered at, that the different nations were drawn aside into various inventions, and even that almost every individual had his own particular deity … scarcely a man could be found who did not frame to himself some idol or phantasm instead of god. … I pass over the rude and unlearned vulgar. But among the philosophers, who attempted with reason and learning to penetrate heaven, how shameful is the diversity!” (John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. and ed. John Allen, 2 vols., 6th ed. [Philadelphia: Presbyterian Board of Christian Education, 1930], 1:V, 11-12).

18. King, English Reformation Literature, 406.

19. The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500-1800 (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 135-42, 151-59.

20. See, for example, William Tyndale, The Obedience of a Christian Man, in Doctrinal Treatises and Introductions to Different Portions of The Holy Scriptures, ed. Henry Walter (Cambridge: Parker Society, 1848), 42:140-41, 168-75.

21. Stone, Family, 139-40.

22. A word needs to be said about Baldwin's apparent misogyny. There is nothing inordinately nasty about his views of women as expressed in the satire. Baldwin merely reflects the prevailing beliefs of his time. The fact that Mouse-slayer heroically defends her decision to abstain from sexual activity and deny Catch-rat's advances counterbalances the representations of woman as witch and devourer. His chief target, I suspect, in creating this rapacious and immoral society of cats is the Catholic clerical system, which claimed to uphold vows of chastity, but which in reality—or so many thought at least—institutionalized lascivious behavior. Baldwin's aim is thus not to show that women are inherently prone to vice—after all, the male characters, such as the old bawd's gentlemen boarders, the gentleman who seduces the merchant's wife, and even Streamer himself, stand out for their lewdness.

23. According to Ong, this process whereby “facts” of past events “become inextricably entangled with myth” is a general characteristic of aural-oral cultures. See The Presence of the Word (1967; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1981), 23.

24. Ioan P. Couliano, Eros and Magic, trans. Margaret Cook (1984; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).

25. Eros, 179-222; on the rejection of the Art of Memory, see also Margaret Aston, England's Iconoclasts: Laws against Images, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 1:457.

26. Eros, 193; and especially England's Iconoclasts 1:436-37, 452-66.

27. There did exist, however, a tradition of thought that emphasized the psychological and cosmic workings of sound. Some aspects of the work of the ninth century astrologer and philosopher Abū Yūsuf Yaqūb ibn Ishaq al-Kindī on the “magic of sounds” influenced Marsilio Ficino, a central figure in the science of the phantasmic. See Eros, 119-29.

28. For details of Streamer's misapplications, misreadings, and pretended readings of Albertus, see Holden, Beware 16; and Ringler, Beware, 66-67.

29. On the sense of control and order that alphabetic writing seems to impose on language, see Ong, Presence of the Word, 45. Ringler's modernized edition is an (over)extension of this use of writing to impose order (see note 14).

30. Orality and Literacy, 121, on closure and completion, 132.

31. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Word, 104, 259. Although Clanchy stresses the precise organization of many medieval manuscripts, he remarks how glosses in biblical and legal works, some of which were written between lines as well as in the margins, “surrounded,” “overlaid,” and would “swamp” the main text. Many Renaissance scholars conceived that their main task was to cut through the encrustations of the medieval glossaters in order to find and then present the original text (see Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early Modern Europe, 2 vols. [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979] 1:103-04, 339.

32. On the distancing effect that writing and print achieve and their tendency to foster analytic thought and a demand for precision and consistency, see Ong, Orality and Literacy, 38-39, 46, 103-04.

33. Ong remarks that “in an oral culture, the flow of words … tends to manage discrepancies by glossing them over—the etymology here is telling, glossa, tongue, by ‘tonguing’ them over.” Self-correction “in oral performance tend[s] to be counterproductive, to render the speaker unconvincing” (Orality and Literacy, 104).

34. Holden first remarked that Baldwin's marginal comments in part served “to control the attitude of the reader” (Beware, 17). Ringler noted Baldwin's adept use of the marginal note both as a “device of characterization” and as a way to comment on the action and “guide the responses of his readers by explaining significances they may have overlooked” (see “Beginnings of English Fiction” 123; and Beware, xxiv). My discussion of the marginalia focuses on how they call attention to the reading process and illustrate the larger issues of epistemology and communication.

35. English Reformation Literature, 396.

36. “William Baldwin: Literary Voice,” 104; King also remarks that the concern with reason is a theme common to both A Treatise and Beware the Cat (English Reformation Literature, 393).

37. For an overview and analysis of the charged issues surrounding the spread of vernacular Bibles in Europe, see Eisenstein, Printing Press 1:342-67, for England 357-58. For an overview of the issue of literacy in the sixteenth century, see Harvey J. Graff, The Legacies of Literacy: Continuities and Contradictions in Western Culture and Society (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 137-163, for England, 151-163.

38. This is why, for example, biblical drama ended in Elizabeth's reign. See Michael O'Connell, “The Idolatrous Eye: Iconoclasm, Anti-Theatricalism, and the Image of the Elizabeth Theater,” ELH 52 (1985): 279-310.

39. I am following Eisenstein's discussion, of what she calls the “tortuous policy of Henry VIII” (Printing Press, 1:357-58). Her source for the 1543 legislation is S. L. Greenslade, “English Versions of the Bible A.D. 1525-1611,” in The Cambridge History of the Bible, ed. S. L. Greenslade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963), 153.

40. English Books and Readers 1475-1557 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 27. This passage is in part cited by Eisenstein, Printing Press, 1:358.

41. English Books and Readers, 36.

42. King, “Freedom of the Press, Protestant Propaganda, and Protector Somerset,” HLQ 40 (1976-77): 1-9. This essay succinctly lays out the aims and events in Seymour's liberalization of printing regulations.

43. The Letters of Stephen Gardiner, ed. James Arthur Muller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1933). See letters 120 and 121 (written in May and June of 1547 and made public in the 1563 edition of John Foxe's Acts and Monuments). On his opposition to Paraphrases, see letters 130-36 (written in October and November of 1547 and published in Foxe, 1563). King says that Gardiner attacked even the doctrinally orthodox first volume of the translated Paraphrases, “[d]espite the prestige that Princess Mary lent to the project … because of his fundamental opposition to lay reading of the Bible in any form” (English Reformation Literature, 130-30).

44. Letters, number 120. See also letter 136. On the debate between Gardiner and Seymour concerning the concept of authority and the problem of censorship, see King, English Reformation Literature, 77-78, 83-85.

45. I wish to make clear that in stressing the connection the book makes between reading and reason I am not trying (or claiming Baldwin is trying) to turn Protestantism into a religion devoid of feeling (Tyndale spoke of “a feeling faith”), or into a purely rationalistic religion: in the matter of one's salvation, the doctrine of justification by faith requires that one let go of reason. There, reason has no place, and Protestant theology attacked man's desire to make his salvation rational. But in all other realms of life, reason is, of course, crucial to the nature and functioning of human beings.

46. On the purpose of these texts and their impact on English life, see King, English Reformation Literature, 122-38. For a sense of the immense effort required to produce these books, see E. J. Devereux, “The Publication of the English Paraphrases of Erasmus,” BJRL 51 (1969): 348-67.

47. Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (1965; Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984).

48. Topical allusions, especially the one in part III concerning the prohibition against the mass, permit us to situate most of the events in Streamer's narrative after June 1549; see Ringler, Beware, xxii and 70. Baldwin's decision to locate most of his story in a time when reform had official backing is important, because it means that he is also critiquing the Reformation. King remarks that in part III the “rational laws and norms of feline society give prominence to the contrasting failures and irrationality of Reformation England” (English Reformation Literature, 401); but his ensuing discussion does not bring out the significance of this point, namely that Beware is an exploration of why the Reformation has not taken root more deeply in England and has not more successfully achieved its goals. In addition, this aspect of self-critique complicates and tempers the satire: the subtle inclusion of Baldwin's own side within the target of his satire elevates Beware ethically, again illustrating how the book avoids the crudeness of most anti-Catholic polemical writing.

49. My aim here is to outline how Baldwin construes the relationship between official culture and the carnivalesque aspects of popular culture, and not to answer the question of whether carnival is inherently subversive, as Bakhtin suggests, or inherently conservative, as others suggest, constituting a mechanism used by authorities to release social tensions. Peter Stallybrass and Allon White make the sensible case that one should not “essentialize carnival and politics,” and that “the politics of carnival cannot be resolved outside a close historical examination” of specific instances (The Politics and Poetics of Transgression [London: Methuen, 1986], 15-16).

50. Feasey has suggested that Beware is an exclusive work, written as a witty inside joke for Baldwin's friends: it is a “humorous satire indulged in by Baldwin for the amusement of his colleagues [in drama] and against some unfortunate, presumably Roman Catholic, supporter of the unrealistic group of dramatists who would bring birds and animals on the stage to speak” (“William Baldwin,” 416). While there may be some truth to this view, it is too limiting and ultimately a mistake to see the satire simply as an indulgence or as “the outcome of some sort of professional disagreement.” Such a view points up the fact that we have never really possessed a good understanding of Beware. Consequently, we assign the work to the realm of the private; it becomes the product of a small, remote circle to which we no longer have access. As I have tried to show, the satire is not primarily concerned with matters pertaining to a select group of intellectuals, but deals with fundamental issues of the day touching all people. Understood in this way, the satire acquires a larger potential audience. Baldwin himself probably had a fairly broad audience in mind, for by all accounts the book seems to have been circulated quite well: Trench says that “[f]rom the several editions through which the book passed, we see that it had its measure of public favour” (“William Baldwin,” 264); Ringler remarks that Beware “was well known to the Elizabethans” and thinks that there were probably other editions (besides the two appearing in 1570 and those of 1584 and 1652) “that were read out of existence” (“Beginnings of English Fiction,” 113); even Feasey herself shows that Beware the Cat was well known (408).

51. Having regained access to the press in the Marian regime, Catholic writers generally ignored lay audiences or, if they did address others outside their restricted circle, they did so in a condescending manner. These were important reasons why the Marian regime, though it was initially greeted with much acceptance, failed to win popular support. See J. W. Martin, “The Marian Regime's Failure to Understand the Importance of Printing,” HLQ 44 (1981):231-247.

52. My explanation of why Baldwin presented Beware as a hoax springs from Ringler's insight that Baldwin uses “illusion to destroy illusion” (“Beginnings of English Fiction,” 123; and Beware, xxv).

53. The Elect Nation: The Meaning and Relevance of Foxe's Book of Martyrs (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), 15.

54. I would like to thank members of the Renaissance Workshop at the University of Chicago, particularly Richard Strier and Terry Martin, for their comments on an earlier version of this paper, and Diane Bowers for her thoughtful comments. I would especially like to thank Janel M. Mueller who has given me invaluable guidance at every stage of the paper's development.