Reformations: Three Medieval Authors in Manuscript and Movable Type (review)

Rebecca Schoff's book traces the transition from manuscript to print of the Canterbury Tales, the Book of Margery Kempe, and Piers Plowman. The thesis that broadly ties these three case studies together is that the transition from manuscript to print was not straightforward but involved a "subtle negotiation… by writers, readers, and the practitioners who copied or prepared texts for printing in the late medieval period" (p. x). Schoff gets at this "subtle negotiation" by positing similarities between the way writers such as Chaucer, Kempe, and Langland shaped their texts by, in a sense, rewriting other people's words and the way manuscript readers (including printers) reshaped and rewrote Chaucer, Kempe, and Langland. To readers familiar with book history, Schoff's overarching thesis is not groundbreaking: numerous books and articles have identified just how complex the relationship was between writers and their sources as well as the blurry divide between the manuscript and print eras. The real strength of Schoff's work (and one of its weaknesses as well) is in the very detailed explication of facets of each work's genesis, reception, and transmission, for it is here that she can shed new light on some specific forces involved in the survival and reshaping of these texts.

Chapter 1, "Reading, Writing, and Printing the Canterbury Tales," is a rangy 80 pages that addresses a plethora of issues. First, Schoff demonstrates what most readers of the Canterbury Tales already know, that is, that the text of the Canterbury Tales invites audience (very broadly construed) participation and challenges notions of authority on many levels. Her detailed discussions of the Monk's Tale, the Second Nun's Tale, the Wife of Bath's Tale, the Friar's Tale, the Clerk's Tale, the Pardoner's Tale, and the Man of Law's Tale show Chaucer playing "with the dynamics of reiteration, in which the context of the telling can reshape the meaning of a tale" (p. 16). Schoff's goal in this section is to show Chaucer's awareness of the "significant role that readers play in the reception of both tale and teller" (p. 34) and thereby to set up her discussion of the fifteenth-century manuscript tradition and the readerly reception of Chaucer's text. Fifteenth century readers' contributions to Chaucer's text of the Canterbury Tales is a well trodden area of study and Schoff's detailed investigation of the continuations (such as the one appended to the Cook's Tale, the Prologue to the Tale of Beryn, and Lydgate's Siege of Thebes) argues, very reasonably, that the writers of these continuations essentially walk through a gate left open by Chaucer. In the world of the Canterbury Tales, readers become writers and, in the process of claiming authorial status, diminish, to a degree, the authority of Chaucer himself. This development prepares Schoff for the final section of Chapter 1, which looks at a relatively late manifestation of the Canterbury Tales in print, Stow's 1561 edition. Schoff's argument here is that Stow's edition of Chaucer, by making clear which of the poems included were by Lydgate, ingeniously and paradoxically illustrates a continuation of fifteenth century manuscript culture's diminution of Chaucer's authority. Schoff generally succeeds in rehabilitating our opinion of Stow's "editorial" practice by offering a believable rationale for his choice and presentation of texts and showing that he was "capable of constructing books that are organized by multiple configurations of readership and authorship" (p. 86).

Chapter 2, "Editing the Books of Margery Kempe," delves into the interesting history of the Book of Margery Kempe, bits of which were published in 1501 by Wynkyn de Worde, well before the text of her entire book became available. Schoff divides this chapter into four parts. In the first, she argues that Kempe, like Chaucer, tells tales in which "She manipulates the context of her retelling in order to guide the interpretation of her...