Wynkyn de Worde published numerous bestselling European romances. These were the latest international literary hits: they had already appeared in several other languages before being translated into English, and the main impetus for their creation was their popularity in other parts of Europe. Although De Worde’s reputation as a key printer of romances has been well-studied, scholarship focuses predominantly on his verse romances – homegrown narratives seen as quintessentially ‘English’. His translated prose romances have a more uneasy position within the English literary canon. This paper aims to reinstate the place of these lesser-loved ugly ducklings in literary history, arguing that their status as immigrant texts is a strength. These are multicultural enterprises that give insight into attempts to align English literary activity and book production with a continental cultural capital. In his marketing of these fashionable European bestselling romances, De Worde shows an active desire to participate in a shared cultural space. The romances’ transnational nature becomes a selling point and is made visible on the page. Material evidence shows that De Worde participated in a network of literary exchanges and multilingual printing that had a centre of gravity in the Low Countries, and that several marketing innovations previously ascribed to De Worde were in fact copied from continental printers. The paper also considers how these European romances fit into a period now seen as preoccupied with the construction of ‘English’ authorial identity, and the emergence of nationalist ideas that shaped early English canon formation.

My paper is going to discuss the role and function of animals (real and imaginary) in medieval literature and art. In order to do so I’ll present not only the most widespread interpretative approaches to the Book of Nature as found, for example, in the Physiologus-tradition, but will also take a look at animals in more secular text-types such as courtly romances or beast epics. As so often in medieval culture(s), the different traditions cannot be neatly compartmentalized and separated from each other, but tend to interact with and bleed into each other, creating a complex and fascinating web of allusions and connections that exist simultaneously – a quality that is, for modern readers, both fascinating and exasperating.