An Early Case of Impostor Syndrome

Translating the first book printed in English was quite stressful, as William Caxton made clear in his profoundly neurotic introduction to the 1473 edition of The Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye, an adaptation of the legend of Troy by Burgundian writer Raoul Lefèvre. Not knowing at all what he was doing, he “ran forward like a blind horse” with the translation. His “simpleness and underfitness” in both English and French left him panicking. Generally, medieval prologues as a genre tend to be fairly unstable: sometimes they are very straightforward; sometimes they are hundreds of lines of poetry describing an author’s crazy dream vision. Title pages were still rare and jacket copy didn’t really exist, so medieval introductions like Caxton’s usually indicated to readers what text they were about to encounter, and why or for whom it had been made. They provided, as scholar Elizabeth Dearnley puts it in Translators and Their Prologues in Medieval England, “a directional framework for the reader” — one oriented, in Caxton’s case, toward chaos.  

When I first read Caxton during my English PhD coursework, his simmering anxiety felt more like the dramatics of a fellow grad student than the debut of the first printer in English literary history. More than 500 years ago, Caxton seems to have been plagued by what we now call “impostor syndrome” — at least at first glance. The term, originally coined as “Impostor Phenomenon” by psychologists Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes in 1978, describes “an internal experience of intellectual phoniness” among high achievers, and particularly among women. Lately, impostor syndrome — or claims of it — has become a kind of “admission fee” to success, as Leslie Jamison put it in a 2023 New Yorker essay. Even those who don’t experience crippling self-doubt often perform it before succumbing to the syndrome, impersonating and then becoming impostors themselves. 

Like many impostor syndrome sufferers, Caxton spent so much time self-denigrating that he nearly failed to register his accomplishments. Print had begun centuries earlier in China before bursting onto the European scene in the middle of the 15th century. After Johannes Gutenberg produced his famous 42-line Bible in Mainz around 1454, his printing press gradually took off throughout Germany and then across Europe. Caxton, an English clothing merchant living in Bruges, had first encountered the new technology while working in Cologne in 1471. He had loads of free time, per his introduction, and so to avoid “sloth and idleness which is mother and nourisher of vices,” he explored print shops while translating the Recuyell at the encouragement of his patron, Margaret of York, the English-born Duchess of Burgundy. 

In the nascent print culture of the 1470s, publishing the first book in English was — to put it lightly — a big deal. Upon his return to Bruges, Caxton oversaw the publishing of his Recuyell translation with the help of printers Johan Veldener and Johann Schilling and a handful of assistants, as historian Lotte Hellinga recounted in her 2010 book William Caxton and Early Printing in England. By bringing print to English readers, Caxton introduced the English-speaking world to a technology that would shape the world over the next several centuries. You would not know how monumental thismilestone was from Caxton’s introduction. Only in his epilogue to the Recuyell does he acknowledge his extraordinary accomplishment: “I have practiced and learned … to ordain this said book in print … [it] is not written with pen and ink as other books [have] been.”

Very early print editions like the Recuyell, known in the rare books business as “incunables,” resembled handwritten manuscripts in some ways, featuring similar page layouts and elegant letterforms that evoked handwriting. But, as early print scholars are quick to point out, they also broke from manuscript aesthetics. Print letters, produced with lampblack ink, rather than the browner iron gall ink favored by scribes, appeared jet-black on the page. Hand painted illuminations can appear in incunables, but so can elaborate woodblocks, metalcuts, or engravings, like the presentation scene in one Recuyell copy at the Huntington Library that shows Caxton offering books to Margaret of York, who is accompanied by a monkey.

And whereas manuscripts could take months, even years, to produce, costing a small fortune, causing many hand cramps, and prompting complaints from scribes, print books could be crafted with record speed. Readers would have been dazzled by Caxton’s revelation in the epilogue that “all the books of this story … were begun in one day and also finished in one day.” The line is a wry joke: as anyone familiar with early print shops knows, hand-press books still took a long time to produce, not to mention strong arms to pull the press, nimble fingers to compose the text blocks, a sharp mind to order the type backward. But printing made the production of multiple copies a breeze, vastly outpacing the copying of books by hand, which gave the process a speedy reputation. 

Caxton went on to become a “major figure in late 15th-century culture,” as William Kuskin wrote in a 1999 article in ELH, whose work as a printer “[gave] shape to an English literary culture.” His Recuyell translation must have been popular, since Caxton’s apprentice and successor Wynkyn de Worde reprinted the work in 1502 or 1503. Eighteen copies of Caxton’s first edition still exist, most of which are carefully preserved in special collections libraries; in 2014, one sold at auction for over £1 million. In light of his legacy, Caxton’s self-deprecation is maddening but fascinating — and far from unique in medieval literature. He was just adhering to genre conventions.

In some of the most exquisite works of English poetry ever written, canonical medieval literary writers — Chaucer, Gower, Hoccleve — all insisted that they were inept, inane, and subpar thanks to a rhetorical convention in medieval introductions referred to as the modesty or humility topos. Medieval readers loved classical rhetoricians, who had invented the modesty topos, and humility was seen as hyper virtuous in a medieval Christian context, as scholar Christina Van Dyke noted in a 2022 article in Oxford Studies in Medieval Philosophy. So medieval writers humbled themselves all over: the 15th-century scribe John Shirley implored readers that they “disdain not with [his] speech” even given “the simpleness of [his] wit.” Poet John Lydgate confessed that he was “full of dread” of people listening to his “work of heartly low humbleness.” I know they are just sticking to form, but I like to imagine these culturally elite medieval men sitting at some tavern and feeding off each other’s insecurity: “John, you’re so much more than a burel clerk, you’re an amazing writer!” “No but Geoffrey, how could you write that your ‘wit is short,’ you’re like the smartest person I know!” 

Impostor syndrome is usually described as a psychological phenomenon, whereas the medieval modesty topos is normally understood as a rhetorical one. But the boundary between these two categories is evanescent; rhetoric and psychology are remarkably permeable. As Theodore Sarbin, a pioneer of the field of narrative psychology, wrote in 1986, “human beings think, perceive, imagine, and make moral choices according to narrative structures.” The stories we tell ourselves and the rhetorics we use can actually influence how our brains work: negative self-talk can disrupt self-image, just as studies show that verbal self-affirmations really do help build confidence. Distinguishing between rhetoric and psychology can be thorny; in Essays in Criticism, Ceri Sullivan has recently suggested that what seem to be instances of modesty in Renaissance writing may actually be descriptions of writer’s block.

Modesty talk tends to shape and reflect how we see the world — and that may not be a good thing. Medieval writers reinforced and sustained cultural hierarchies when they acted diffident, expressing deference to God, Patristic Church Fathers, their aristocratic readers and patrons — basically any superior they could find. Their claims to inadequacy also functioned as premodern humblebrags, allowing authors to show off their fluency in rhetoric. The contagiousness of modern impostor syndrome, meanwhile, might contribute to workplace marginalization because it frames the real, systematic discrimination that women and people of color face in professional and academic settings as an individual psychological problem. And yet the self-denigrating persists. Perhaps impostor syndrome also became a kind of genre convention. It feels bad to be an impostor — but it feels better to sound recognizably sympathetic to everyone else.

Understanding the rules of the modesty game is one thing; resisting them is another. Caxton surely knew the modesty topos well, yet his self-doubt seems so extreme in the Recuyell, even given the established trope, that it seems he may have been genuinely afflicted. He almost gave up on his translation of the Recuyell, only finishing the project at the prompting of Margaret of York — and in spite of his “simple and poor cunning.” When I think about Caxton’s worries, I feel for him and I feel like him. Then I feel like an impostor myself: a real literary historian wouldn’t be so anachronistic, sentimental, and self-interested in her subject. But maybe it’s just the pull of genre — the first-person essay bending toward introspection, the imposter topos infiltrating yet another narrative about self-esteem and work.

Over time, Caxton’s forays into printing eventually turned into a robust business and his prose became much more levelheaded. He moved back to England and set up a successful shop in Westminster, where he printed great works of medieval English literature, including Thomas Malory’s Le Morte D’arthur and Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, for the very first time. He never quite got over his tendency to berate himself, asking his patrons to pardon him for his “rude and common” English in a 1489 edition, more than a decade into his publishing career. But his confidence did seem to wax over time: in 1477, he mustered up the courage to describe his new edition of Ordinale Sarum as “well and truly correct.” His last prologue before his death in 1491 began with a nod to his illustrious career and all his “diverse works made, translated, and achieved.” 

The modesty topos loitered around English literature well past Caxton’s lifetime, bubbling up again in the 16th and 17th centuries when Edmund Spenser beseeched his muse “O help thou my weak wit, and sharpen my dull tongue” and Milton called himself “nor skilled nor studious.” For Renaissance women writers like Mary Sidney and Anne Bradstreet, though, claims to meekness were taken literally; scholars have tended to see their self-deprecation as expressions of insecurity rather than as a part of a formal literary tradition, as Patricia Pender points out in her 2012 book Early Modern Women’s Writing and the Rhetoric of Modesty. As the 18th and 19th centuries passed, the modesty topos faded somewhat as a formal conceit, becoming less obligatory in literary prologues. But as impostor syndrome shows, modesty rhetorics tend to be perennial. When it comes to being humble, rhetoric and psychology have always impersonated each other, a pair of facing mirrors whose reflections endlessly recede.