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  • Ancrene Wisse: A Corrected Edition of the Text in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 402, with Variants from Other Manuscripts
  • Robert Hasenfratz
Ancrene Wisse: A Corrected Edition of the Text in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 402, with Variants from Other Manuscripts. Edited by Bella Millett, with Glossary and Additional Notes by Richard Dance. 2 vols. Early English Text Society, o.s. 325–326. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005–6. Vol. 1: pp. lxxiv + 254. £65. Vol. 2: pp. lvii + 477. £65.

With the publication of Bella Millett's remarkable edition of Ancrene Wisse, one of the most ambitious projects of the Early English Text Society has finally come full circle. Due to the positively devilish complexity of its textual relations, Ancrene Wisse demanded special handling from the beginning. Between 1944 and 2000, the EETS produced a series of diplomatic and quasi-diplomatic editions of the various versions in Middle English, Anglo-Norman, and Latin of the Ancrene Riwle / Wisse to serve as raw material for a critical edition originally begun by E. J. Dobson, and now re-collated, thoroughly re-edited, and introduced by Millett, with a glossary and additional notes by Richard Dance.

The first volume contains an introduction to the manuscripts, an in-depth discussion of their affiliation, a laying out of editorial principles, and the actual text of Ancrene Wisse, with an apparatus criticus, while the second provides a general historical introduction (including discussions of date, localization, authorship, and institutional context), an extensive textual commentary, bibliography, and a full glossary.

Ancrene Wisse's textual tradition is gloriously messy, and volume one describes and analyzes its textual development methodically. Millett's full and meticulous collation has led her to modify Dobson's original stemma, adjusting some of the sub-groupings but confirming his main conclusion that the Corpus version represents a separate branch of development.

But genetics are not the entire story, by a very long stretch. Millett demonstrates convincingly that the textual culture in which the versions of Ancrene Wisse were copied was one that prized a high degree of adaptability and collaborative crosscomparison of manuscripts, and one in which the activities of scribes, correctors, adaptors, and author often blur together, making them next to impossible to sort out with confidence. Given this daunting web of complexity and the varieties of cross-"contamination" between branches of the stemma, she rejects the idea of a traditional critical edition, one that attempts to reconstruct the authorial text, scraping away the accretions, additions, and mistakes of scribes. Instead, the Corpus base text (siglum A) is "treated not as a separate and self-contained 'version' of Ancrene Wisse, but as a single state in a multi-layered and sometimes multi-stranded process of revision; the edited text of A is used as a point of entry to the textual history of the work as a whole" (I, lx).

The result is a text, though based on A, that weaves in elements of the other versions where they contain fuller or better versions of A's text. One might object that the resulting edition produces an Ancrene Wisse that never existed in this configuration but instead an ideal form of the work brought to life by the virtuosity of the editor. This objection, though, is relatively easy to dismiss, on four counts: 1) with the series of EETS editions readily available, any interested reader has full access to the individual versions; 2) all interventions in the text are clearly signaled with boldfacing, brackets, and different typefaces; 3) thanks to Millett's care and sound judgment, with editorial decisions laid out clearly in the apparatus and notes, the text is anything but a stitched-together monster; and 4) the Corpus version, Millett argues convincingly, cannot be viewed as the author's holograph, [End Page 126] and is itself an amalgamation of sorts. She modifies Dobson's original conclusion that A was "'the author's own final and definitive revision of the work,'" arguing instead that the "form of the work in A seems to be less a new version of Ancrene Wisse . . . in its own right, than a modified and updated form of the original version, retaining distinct and sometimes...

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