William Caxton, an English merchant and diplomat who had learned printing in Cologne, established England's first printing press at Westminster in 1476 after earlier setting up a press in Bruges. His first publications included his own translation of the Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye (printed in Bruges, 1473) and The Canterbury Tales, making Chaucer's masterwork available in printed form for the first time. Caxton's press launched English book culture and shaped which texts of the medieval English literary tradition would survive and circulate.

Caxton's decision to print Chaucer, Gower, and Lydgate established the medieval English poetic canon in its first printed form, creating the body of texts that Elizabethan poets would inherit as their vernacular inheritance. His prologues and epilogues, often discussing the difficulties of translating or selecting which variant of a text to follow, constitute some of the earliest English literary criticism and show a thoughtful editor-printer grappling with questions of language and readership. By printing works of chivalric romance as well as poetry, Caxton helped define a reading culture that would eventually produce the audience for Shakespeare.