Introduction to Manuscript Studies, and: Migrations: Medieval Manuscripts in New Zealand, and: Essays in Manuscript Geography: Vernacular Manuscripts of the English West Midlands from the Conquest to the Sixteenth Century, and: The Medieval Imagination: Illuminated Manuscripts from Cambridge, Australia and New Zealand (review)

'Manuscript study has always been the holy grail of medieval studies', according to Raymond Clemens and Timothy Graham. Whether you agree with this statement or not, it is undoubtedly true that manuscripts are central to our understanding of the medieval world, both as physical objects and as containers for transmitting medieval knowledge. Manuscripts continue to be a major focus of research, study and publication. These recent books are a mere selection of the numerous studies which focus on manuscripts or depend on them as evidence.

Clemens and Graham's book is aimed at students beginning the study of manuscripts. It tackles such major areas as book production, scripts, dating and provenance, as well as looking at common genres and types of manuscripts. These include the Bible, liturgical books, books of hours, charters and cartularies, maps, rolls and scrolls. The focus is on Latin manuscripts, especially of the earlier Middle Ages, with a short appendix on 'tools for the study of medieval Latin'. The extensive coloured illustrations are well-chosen and provide good examples for transcription and description. The material on the physical appearance of manuscripts is particularly thorough, clear, and logically arranged. As well as useful tables of technical terms, abbreviations and letter-forms, there is an extensive glossary and a good introductory bibliography. Though there is a short discussion of medieval libraries, and an explanation of the ways in which manuscripts were organized and described in the Middle Ages, there is almost no analysis of the post-medieval history of manuscripts or of the cataloguing practices of modern libraries. I would like to have seen some discussion of ways to find manuscripts in contemporary collections and some reference to the use of the Web for finding and examining manuscripts. Nevertheless, this volume can be recommended as an excellent guide for new students.

At the other extreme, perhaps, Wendy Scase presents some results from an advanced research project on the vernacular medieval manuscripts of the English West Midlands. This project, described as 'an experiment in manuscript geography', aims to re-think assumptions about regional approaches to medieval literature and to consider the vernacular manuscript as a product of a geographical community of producers and consumers. The essays in this volume offer a wide-ranging examination of different aspects of this broad approach. The majority of the contributors provide case studies of particular manuscripts and groups of manuscripts from specific areas in the West Midlands – Worcester, Shropshire and Warwickshire – across a lengthy chronological spread (from the Norman Conquest to the sixteenth century), covering Old English as well as Middle English. A smaller group of essays deals with research methodologies and tools needed to support further research. The main focus is on corpus-based approaches, systematically correlating data across a body of manuscripts – exemplified by Alison Wiggins' work on the characteristics of West Midlands romance manuscripts and Orietta Da Rold's innovative study of the use of paper in medieval English manuscripts. Both in its experiments with geographical analysis and in its use...