As the fifteenth century was drawing to a close, William Caxton, England's first printer, traveled to the Flemish city of Bruges. Today the city, with its late medieval architecture and meandering cobbled streets, seems a museum piece, but then it was a lively trading center where Italians, Germans, Spaniards, and others met and exchanged goods -- and ideas. Arts and culture flourished, and new technology was everywhere. Visitors were assured of eating well thanks to the invention of drift nets, which resulted in an abundance of seafood. Followers of Jan van Eyck and Hans Memling were filling the city with paintings in a medium new to northern Europe, oils. And the printing press with movable type -- the machine on which Johannes Gutenberg had printed his 42-line Bible a couple of decades before--was changing the intellectual life of the city. (Printing on movable metal type was well established in Korea, and information about it could have traveled through the vast Mongol empire to West Asia, and from there to Europe.) There in Bruges, at a table overlooking a foggy canal, over a meal of mussels and ale, Caxton would discuss the new printed texts with scholars and artists who were arriving from all across Europe.

Among those joining him would have been Colard Mansion, a Flemish scribe who printed the first book using copper engravings, as well as the first books in English and French. Also at the table would have been Anthony Woodville, the second Earl Rivers, an English Francophile and translator, had recently completed a translation of a French text called Dits Moraulx des Philosophes. The book was a compendium of the wisdom of ancient philosophers. Would Caxton have a look at it?.