Regulated Satire: Caxton's Reynard and the Collapse of Interpretive Proliferation

This article argues that William Caxton's 1481 printed edition of Reynard the Fox represents not mere moralization but an ontological transformation in how literary meaning itself functions. Where the manuscript tradition sustained interpretive proliferation—allowing the fox's cunning to generate competing moral responses without resolution—Caxton's edition systematically collapses this multiplicity through paratextual framing, narratorial guidance, and textual stabilization. The work ceases to be an "ontovector" generating divergent readings and becomes instead an administered epistemic object whose significance is prepared in advance. This transition marks a decisive shift from negotiatory to administrative regimes of meaning at the threshold of print culture.