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  • Essays in Manuscript Geography: Vernacular Manuscripts of the English West Midlands from the Conquest to the Sixteenth Century
  • Carrie Griffin
Essays in Manuscript Geography: Vernacular Manuscripts of the English West Midlands from the Conquest to the Sixteenth Century. Edited by Wendy Scase. Medieval Texts and Cultures of Northern Europe, 10. Turnhout: Brepols, 2007. Pp. xii + 296; 17 illustrations. EUR 60.

This volume, collecting essays by some of the most influential scholars in the new wave of manuscript studies, pioneers research in the geography of manuscript production. It is acknowledged by its editor as an "experiment" emerging from a Birmingham conference in 2003 and from the Birmingham project Manuscripts of the West Midlands Catalogue (p. 1). The introductory remarks helpfully (and importantly) align manuscript studies with increased scholarly interest in book history, a discipline largely concerned with print culture; they point out, too, that the "manuscript book is . . . the product of a unique community of producers and consumers, a community of which the book it produces will be . . . the only instantiation and record." Thus, Wendy Scase correctly argues, the manuscript book invites studies that are informed by "geographical parameters" (p. 1). There are some issues here: "geography" is never given a working definition, which is problematic when considering "communities" of book producers which may not necessarily be dependent on one physical locality. Additionally, there is an absence of a modern (or contemporary) definition of the West Midlands (that is, until Derek Pearsall offers an interpretation in the Epilogue). Nonetheless the project does not attempt to "adopt any single model of manuscript geography" (p. 3), and studies which are location-driven complement rather than collide with essays such as Thompson's that are concerned with movement, transfer, and transition.

As such, the editorial emphasis on openness and inclusivity results in a volume that is provocative and self-aware in terms of connections and intertexts, and a fine exercise in what might be termed "cultural geography" (p. 8). Both Elaine Treharne and Mary Swan, compellingly and in great detail, examine eleventh- and twelfth-century textual production: Treharne, looking at scriptoria in Worcester and Exeter, notes the tendency to "see a codex copied from earlier material as a witness to its antecedent textual genesis" rather than as "a material artefact of some significance reflecting its own intellectual and cultural milieu" (p. 14) and goes on to examine the similar impetuses and processes behind the production of cathedral books in the respective dioceses. Swan, also taking Worcester as her geographical nexus, uses manuscript examples to theorize not just on where but why Old English textual production is happening. Acknowledging that manuscript location is "rarely an exact science" (p. 33) and that scribes and texts are mobile, Swan finds that manuscripts produced in other localities made their way to Worcester and to the West Midlands where they were used, regenerated, reassembled, and annotated (by, for instance, the Tremulous Hand). She further notes that Worcester "did not exist in isolation," encouraging assessment of mobility in terms of local and regional manuscript production and use. In the third essay in this distinction, Bella Millet shares a manuscript—Lambeth 487—with Swan, demonstrating the shared material between it and Cambridge, Trinity College, MS B.14.52 and arguing that despite "chronological and geographical" distance between them, both share "a common (or at least related) pastoral context" (p. 45), concluding after a detailed, close discussion that the books were a dynamic response to "contemporary developments in preaching and pastoral care" (p. 64).

The essays on the fourteenth-century scene return to familiar ground, beginning with Susanna Fein's revision of compilation and purpose in Harley 2253. Fein nods [End Page 115] to scholarly attempts at understanding this remarkable, multi-scribal, trilingual "literary artefact," suggesting that its fascination is a function of its "formation"; she therefore attempts to understand the whole book by following "the book evidence where it leads . . . without attempting to force a pattern on it" (p. 68). Examining studies of clusters of lyrics in particular (reminding us all the while that the manuscript is greater than the sum of its parts) Fein extrapolates that we ought to read layout alongside content and, moreover, that content and...

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